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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#971

Post by tomp »

zelly wrote: post #509
treis wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly. It's like it was written to be the perfect example of SV myopia for the rest of the world. Some examples: >Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard?…

> Because the main purpose of Harvard and other elite schools like it is to pick out the best ~18 year olds and set them on the course to be leaders in business, government, law, and other areas. Harvard isn't Harvard because they're better at education. Harvard is Harvard because they get the pick of the litter. Extending their enrollment to a million doesn't mean we get a million more elites. It doesn't even do tha…

> If all you wanted to do was prove your intelligence, an IQ test is much cheaper and quicker.

Also illegal to consider when hiring, hence why companies use educational attainment as a proxy and outsource IQ tests (SATs) to universities.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#972

Post by tomp »

KirinDave wrote: post #787
e12e wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You see it in transportation. (...) Where are the high speed trains > none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. One of those things are not like the others.

Are you seriously suggesting the trains are not economically practical? China, India, Europe and the UK all would like to have a word with you.

All of those places are much smaller and/or densely populated than the US.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#973

Post by tomp »

jbverschoor wrote: post #227

What's the goal here? The American dream? Well, you need to be able to afford a home and children. People can't. Why not? Because they aren't paid enough for the work they do. The money is being made, but it ends up at the top, and not even corporate tax is being paid with all the tax optimization routes. So what do people do? They begin startups. Most of the time they're done by people who should even waste their ti…

> Force big companies to have offices outside the big cities

Do we really want this? Personally, I love it that last time I changed jobs, I didn't need to move (the new office was literally 3 blocks away from the old one), and that I'm free to change jobs again without having to plan relocation.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#974

Post by DanBC »

thu2111 wrote: post #744
KirinDave wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way. Sure, but is this actually a high o…

We're actually not running out of ventilators anywhere. Existing installed base is sufficient and moreover, it turned out the federal government had a large stockpile anyway, which rather invalidates the central thesis of the article re: lack of preparedness. The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says: "We…

> I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill.

As I understand it FDA didn't approve Pandemrix, while EU regulators did give it fast track appeal.

Pandemrix causes narcolepsy in 1 in 60,000 people who take it. (so, for the entire US that's about 5000 with a life long debilitating illness that requires constant care.) The risk is very low, but it's there and we need to be careful about exposing a population of hundreds of millions to these risks just because we have an ideological opposition to any form of government regulation.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#975

Post by DanBC »

thu2111 wrote: post #849
KirinDave wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make sure you know that this post is full of bizarre falsehoods. New York and Seattle definitely have ventilator shortages. California had a shortage and that federal reserve of ventilators netted us a small number of broken devices that had to be repaired. Lucky us, the State had a corporate partner that could do it. I especially want to take issue with this falsehood: > All three are in plentiful supply.…

Where are you getting your information? Re: Ventilators in New York. New York doesn't have a ventilator shortage and never did. It had a predicted shortage based on bad simulations, but never a real one. In fact it's now sending ventilators elsewhere: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ve... "On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rat…

You're failing to take into account the triage onto palliative care pathways of many older people.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#976

Post by noelherrick »

bambax wrote: post #705

> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared This is absolutely untrue. What Americans mean about "the West" is the US and the UK. And indeed those two countries reacted absurdly and fared and will continue to fare bad. Many countries in Europe are in the same situation (including France, where I'm from). But one country did and still does very well: Germany. One…

A charitable read would mean that no Western country was able to contain the virus without dramatic action such as shutting the entire country down, vs. the two examples in the East, Taiwan and South Korea, who have been able to keep their countries moving.

And it's a really stark contrast: I remember reading about the Taiwanese man who was fined a bunch of money for violating quarantine. What caught my eye, however, was that he was fined for going to a nightclub. During the height of this, Taiwan hadn't even closed their nightclubs, one of the first places I would think you could and should shutdown.

Germany may have done a good job, but I would love to live in a country right now we I could eat at a restaurant and go to the gym throughout the whole crisis.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#977

Post by danimal88 »

anamexis wrote: post #887
danimal88 wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital that are second in line. flair.co is us. We have taken money from investors, those that aren't afraid of energy problems, that aren't afraid of energy efficiency, and that invest in mea…

Is this post a parody?

No

Re: It’s Time to Build

#978

Post by Eridrus »

jahaja wrote: post #899
Eridrus wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't just a big business problem, there is plenty of regulatory capture on behalf of other interest groups (eg doctors keep the supply of new doctors low). There is no enduring structural answer to this problem, it is fundamental to democracy. The only answers are to struggle for our goals in the political and cultural arenas to hope to marginally improve the situation.

While it's true that there will always be special interest groups, it's not true that the current situation is even close to "more or less the best it can get". There's too much power in far too few hands due to capital accumulation. This is not a natural law.

I was not arguing that this is the "best it can get", just that there is no structural answer to these challenges. There's no way to setup our institutions such that they cannot be influenced by interest groups, so the only thing to do is be vigilant and fight the good fight.

If you look at the whole range of regulatory capture we see, it's not just billionaires who have managed to get what they want, it's all sorts of interest groups who have succeeded in enshrining the interests of incumbents into law.

Good for you for being riled up about the concentration of capital, but addressing that is nowhere near a magic bullet for addressing regulatory capture.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#979

Post by bigbob2 »

darkerside wrote: post #933
bigbob2 wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

edmundsauto nailed it in the unpresidential comment. I wasn't complaining about the gatekeepers failing, just trying to share their perspective for those who might not understand. FWIW, I think the best outcome would have been to deny Trump at the gate, and instead find a candidate who could get those policies done without being a danger to democracy.

> FWIW, I think the best outcome would have been to deny Trump at the gate, and instead find a candidate who could get those policies done without being a danger to democracy.

The problem is that's anti-democratic because many of those gatekeepers are appointed rather than elected. At that point the gatekeepers may as well directly decide who the president is, because it has already been chosen regardless.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#980

Post by bigbob2 »

edmundsauto wrote: post #917
bigbob2 wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ov…

My point was to illustrate that previous presidents have also done things which could be considered unpresidential depending on your opinion. Unless I'm missing some official definition of presidential, these are all things that you personally believe are unpresidential. I'm not saying I disagree with you, but things like "never takes the high road" sound a bit biased.
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