Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s Time to Build

a16z.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

Re: It’s Time to Build

#911

Post by dzonga »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #231

Pre crisis we had The Govt. is required to steer the economic ship to make these things happen: 1) tie state taxes to per/capita testing infrastructure and ppe reserve 2) stress test public health institutes like financial institutes 3) use the military to war game these events

having a low employment % doesn't meant everyone is adequately employed. i.e employed in productive sectors. say you shift 20% of the people who work in restaurants to manufacturing or road work. that's already a 50% improvement in quality of roads and ifra

Re: It’s Time to Build

#912

Post by bsanr2 »

xerxesaa wrote: post #890
bsanr2 wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of response that comes from, and please excuse my language, someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. There is barely a safety net. There is barely any institutional support for innovation. Accessing either is a competitive process that is purposely obfuscated to reduce costs. The downside involved in preparing for and executing on innovative ideas is potentially lethal for the in…

It's not obvious to me your comment has more truth than the one you're replying to. Either argument could be made. Why the rude animus towards the original poster?

The parent argument has been made for going on 3 decades now and is the source of the austerity and institutional divestment that has proven unworkable at best, and disastrous at worst.

It's telling that a single f-bomb is interpreted as more rude than calling the American public - which is by far the most overworked workforce in the West and among such as far as the developed world as a whole is concerned - "lazy."

Reply to him next. See what he says.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#913

Post by mattm »

Barrin92 wrote: post #212
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

The inclusive vs extractive institutions mentality makes sense but I think in the exact reverse way then you suggest. It's precisely because of the Wests (and like Marc says it really is the West) failure to respond to this crisis. It's the excess of inclusivity that leads to short term, ballot box decision making in response to crises, and it is the short term, market logic that leads to loss of autonomy and neglect…

> What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.

No, what they have in common is that they've been through this experience before with SARS, learned from it and setup procedures so they could act faster next time.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#914

Post by StandardFuture »

Curious question: how come Horowitz does not address the successes of Taiwan or Mongolia?

These countries did far better than the West. They also acted quickly. So, it is obvious that to have done better with COVID-19 we simply needed to "build" a Taiwan.

Oh, but that's right, Taiwan has zero trust in the CCP (or their WHO lapdog) and shut out the Chinese way before anyone else ... I mean that could have been the solution too.

> What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.

Great! Then let's start generating that anti-CCP propaganda sooner than later!

Re: It’s Time to Build

#915

Post by StandardFuture »

mcphilip wrote: post #695

I expect my reply to be buried in the flood of others, but I enjoyed the essay because of the various responses it provokes internally: 1. Optimistic response. Right on! More influential VCs need to beat the drum of rebuilding the American Dream and the manufacturing base in spite of there being less potential return than shoveling more money into ad tech. We clearly have the talent to build things again, what we nee…

Here Here! We need more reasonable responses from someone not living in the SV bubble putting on a front.

I swear, sometimes I feel like the VCs are stupid enough to be very Marie Antoinette about their monologuing. As if stating the obvious and doing nothing about it helps anyone or anything.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#916

Post by darawk »

gammarator wrote: post #456
darawk wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital. This leaves out the most important problem though: regulatory capture and bureaucratic gridlock. Markets would love to build more housing. But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. Markets would love to build nuclear power plants, but they're…

Blaming the "regulatory state" for the lack of housing misses the point. Andreeson lives in Atherton, CA, population 7000--not exactly Big Government. Is he pushing the city council to upzone Atherton and allow higher density housing? It would be profitable!

Property developers would be building apartments in Atherton if they were allowed to. It is regulation that prevents it. It is local property owners electing city council members that creates the regulation.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#917

Post by edmundsauto »

bigbob2 wrote: post #811
darkerside wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the gatekeepers' perspective, it was to postpone discussions on policies that would be extremely difficult to implement well. If the Republicans had done their job as well like usual, we wouldn't end up in this awkward situation of having an unpresidential president, but here we are. Freedom has a funny way of getting what it wants, like water flowing downhill.

From the non-gatekeepers' perspective, the difficulty of policy implementation does not matter when the policies themselves are ineffective and only serve to maintain status quo financial structures, which benefit the wealthy often at the expense of the most vulnerable. What specifically makes the president unpresidential as opposed to other presidents? Is it removals as a percentage of the estimated illegal immigran…

> What specifically makes the president unpresidential as opposed to other presidents?

I'd start with these:

* The scale of his well-documented aversion to the truth (18,000 lies + misleading statements, and counting)

* How he never rises above a situation and takes the high road

* The demonization of opponents, and the inability to engage meaningfully with opposition

* Removal of any oversight (even Nixon allowed oversight)

There are lots more.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#918

Post by blobbers »

vosper wrote: post #543
MattGaiser wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could call Harvard and donate a bunch of developers for a year to build that system which could educate a million 18 year olds. Harvard will certainly take his call. He couldn’t fund all the hyper efficient factories for the country, but he could build one.

Harvard could easily build that out of their own $40,000,000,000 endowment, if their first priority was actually education, rather than protecting their own prestige and the value of their credentials to the elites they mostly serve.

+1 isn't Harvard more about the name and the people you associate with than the education itself?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#919

Post by zelly »

Thorentis wrote: post #731
zelly wrote: post #487

This was one of the best posts I've ever read. Thinking about printing it out and framing it. It's more inspirational than anything I've read, and it articulates the elephant-in-the-room problem we all know but aren't talking about. No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's…

I believe we have reached a point where most people are in an equilibrium of comfort and desire, where the desire to innovate and do more, is perfectly balanced out by the present comforts we are able to enjoy. People are so doped up on Netflix, cheap takeaway, porn etc. There is relative safety, lack of disease and war for the most part. People no longer desire to improve the world. It's about maximising the small p…

It's stagnation all the way down. Not only porn, video games, and TV, but cannabis and opiates have taken the 21st century by storm. Before that, the most popular drug was cocaine (and amphetamines). It's symbolic how as Americans lost that rip-roaring innovation culture, they retreated to their couches and numbed themselves with literal opium.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#920

Post by mattm »

mattmanser wrote: post #718
3xblah wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I read the parent comment, the point is not that Andreesen could singlehandedly make a difference with his investments. The point is that his words do not match his actions. His work is fostering an industry whose competitive advantage is not having to build anything tangible for the public's benefit and, in the case of companies like Facebook, not having to pay taxes on their profits.

I always get a bit conflicted with Marc Andreessen stuff. Like this article starts out with a bold claim that's...wrong. Germany have done well. A western country has done well. Elephant in the room, massive 80 million person country, major western power, and the American claims no-one's done a good job because the US hasn't. And then he goes into talking about having pre-prepared therapies or a vaccine. Again, we al…

I also thought this as well reading the introduction. Canada has less than 1/2 the number of cases and deaths on a per capita basis than the US so they are doing twice as well as the US in handling this.
Post reply on HN