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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Yes if a government started buying trillions of vacuum tubes, companies would quickly get much more efficient at producing then and there would be a huge investment into researching alternatives.

But that brings up the question, what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster?

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Energy comes to my mind: mass battery storage, solar, wind and various other renewable fuel sources. I have a buddy who was working for the Dept of Energy until just recently and was saying that the funding for renewable energy is being wound down very quickly right now, many in that sector (working for DoE that is) will be without a job soon, probably to be scooped up by the private sector. He said it was also a huge shame because those guys were working on some amazing tech that would be hugely beneficial.

We already subsidize renewables, and that is encouraging research into them. The current projection of price per watt for solar is set to plummet in the next decade and a half. It's possible that further subsidies would encourage higher levels of production and economies of scale would reduce the price quicker.

The USA also subsidizes fossil fuel industries pretty heavily, so those renewables subsidies are (at least in part) just leveling the field.

The fossil fuels industry pays extremely high tax rates on their profits and has for decades (Exxon and Chevron typically average near 35%, among the highest corporate tax rates anywhere). They've been subsidizing the research into renewables for a very long time.

While I agree there should be zero subsidies for fossil fuels, the corporate taxes they've paid drastically outweigh the modest subsidies the fossil fuel corporations have received. The only way that isn't the case, is if one includes extremely fuzzy environmental damage estimates (in which case nearly every industry that has ever existed has been theoretically massively subsidized).

> The fossil fuels industry pays extremely high tax rates on their profits and has for decades (Exxon and Chevron typically average near 35%, among the highest corporate tax rates anywhere).

And yet they have still been doing more than fine for all these decades, they still do really good.

> modest subsidies the fossil fuel corporations have received

"Modest" is an odd word to use considering that subsidies come in more forms than straight up sending money to a company, companies can also be subsidized by taxing them less on certain behavior by weighting factors differently, like on long-term environmental impacts [0].

I've seen a way more detailed breakdown of this issue before in another study, but I just can't find it anymore.

[0] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew07...

> But that brings up the question, what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster?

As an American, I’d say internet deployment and infrastructure upgrades, but multiple government entities have tried that and the ISPs end up doing nothing.

It's worth investigating what Utah did, they have some nice internet. http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3062258&itype=CMSID (their internet has improved since that article, too). Those lucky people have multiple high speed providers.

It seems to be something that's easier to do at a local level.

Construction. The industry has low margins ,is risk averse and slow to change.

Mobile wireless - we already have theoretical innovations that can fully solve and make it practically free

Cargo transport. Hybrid airships come mind.

On-demand ride-sharing(multiple people in a minibuses). It won't even take money, just a law demanding all transport requests will be done through a single app and than share the data and create a market.

Nuclear for sure.

Microcontroller based products -so much complexity is added to the field by the games(limited ram,flash,peripherals when they cost nothing) mcu makers play to increase profit.

Industries that may look like there's planned obsolescence occuring.so we could get cars that last a million miles(Toyota had that but fixed that problem), more reliabile appliances, etc.

In the 50s, that might have worked. But today, I imagine the effect would be to jack up investment in gaming the procurement procedures so the contracts would go to the most well connected "suppliers", who would actually cut corners since they know how to game the acceptance tests, and 90% wouldn't even work.

"what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster?"

That's one of Apple's brilliant strategies: instantly commoditize new technology, paying cash for new factories that produce next-gen tech components at such high volume that prices immediately drop to commodity levels immediately.

Nuclear fusion.

If we had that then the governments would build supermassive flying submarine aircraft carriers with massive railguns and lasers and armor that is almost impervious to anything perhaps even nuclear weapons.

The US is participating in the ITER project [0], that's pretty much as good as it get's right now unless a country starts their own, very expensive, project.

[0] https://science.energy.gov/~/media/fes/pdf/DOE_US_Participat...

There can be benefits to running multiple projects in parallel. For example, there are at least two competing reactor designs (tokamak and stellarator) where we (IIRC) still don't know which one is more promising. ITER is a tokamak, whereas Germany (which also participates in ITER) has a research stellarator in Greifswald, the Wendelstein 7-X.

OT: thank you for not saying "But that begs the question." Two reasons: (1) it would have been incorrect, and (2) the correct use of the expression "beg the question" is doomed, and we should put it out of its misery.

Ha, I didn't expect anyone to notice that. I was totally going to go with "begs the question", but wasn't sure if it was correct and was to lazy to look it up.

Raises the question sounds fine and usually is what people want to say.

I prefer the "improper" usage. It makes more sense and is more commonly understood. It begs the question: why doesn't everyone just use it that way?

People don't normally use the word "beg" in that sense. "I'm begging you, please shut up" is the closest to an ordinary usage of the word -- and even that's being a little melodramatic. If they're talking about highlighting something for discussion, they'd say "you make a good point," or "you raise another issue," or "that brings up a question," or "which leads to another thing," etc.

This leaves "begs the question" as a weird, pretentious-sounding, overly emphatic expression that automatically annoys some percentage of the audience and will slightly confuse the rest (for at least the next decade or so until the purists give up as they did with "irregardless," "could care less," and "literally").

Of course, if your goal truly is to unpredictably annoy semi-arbitrary subsets of people with something as neutral as your speech, then by all means, beg away. Personally, I don't have a choice. I'm a parent, and as is the case with any parent, my kids internalize everything I do. So I can't have fun adding auto-troll expressions into my communication, because they'll do the same without realizing the consequences. I don't like that the world is full of people who both (1) have the power to decide my fate, and (2) set the bozo bit from small things like the quality of my communication, but I'm pragmatic enough to accept that those people do exist and will judge my kids' fate. That's why I speak as if it matters.

It's vacuum tubes, right?

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