It’s Time to Build

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.

I can't help but think that there's a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.

Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are working on.

The most logical choice would be the investor class who supports such work. After all, these regulations create legal risk (from lawsuits/fines/regulators) for the ventures they fund. It also makes employees more expensive (through higher housing/education/medical costs), thus requiring more investment just to get a venture going. Yet, why is there no real, funded, concerted effort against regulatory capture? Just essays and talk?

I suspect two potential reasons:

(1) Opening regulations would help all current and future ventures, not just an investor's own portfolio, so no single investor has an incentive to do it by them self.

(2) Such investors are typically wealthy, and spending money to tear down regulatory capture that other wealthy people already paid for would be... uncomfortable. Such spending could be seen as indirectly attacking friends, relatives, college classmates, etc... No one wants to be labeled a class traitor.

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 time on it, because they haven't been trained to build and run a company. But guess what? It's the only way to "make it" and the "American dream".

Want to be taken care of properly? Pay RN more.

Want better education for people who can't afford? Pay teachers in community colleges more.

Want more R&D? Pay "smart" people more, instead of forcing them to try and do the startup.

Want affordable housing? Force big companies to have offices outside the big cities. Also, value housepricing at 20% of what they're worth not to destroy mortgages. Tax forgein owned housing. Tax owning houses beyond the first one.

Building is not the problem. Building is easy. You talk about robots... how is that gonna help "the american dream"? It's not.

The problem is financial and ownership disitrbution. Normal people stand no chance against tax routes, against their employers, against the government. They are slaves to all of that.

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 the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Just showing up is supposed to be a sufficient condition to reaping the rewards of growth. You would have thought the 2008 financial crisis would have put an end to this mentality, but it actually made it worse because now everyone who invested in anything in 2009 is now a millionaire without having lifted a finger. Faith in the System restored. Why build anything when your survival doesn't depend on it--the System will take care of you automatically.

All you have to do is "get in"--we see this in the heavy credentialism/careerist people. We are a culture that shows up to the race and starts celebrating at the start line. We are more interested in proving status with fake competition trophies (e.g. degrees, medals, CVs) than doing that which the status was meant to predict.

None of this happens when you're actually on the frontier. In the late 1800s, America was really on the frontier. Large parts of this country had untapped natural resources. There was no shortage of mystery.

Now people believe that there are no new problems to solve. "Someone else is already working on that." This is demonstrably not true--otherwise we would all be living in post-scarcity Neptune colonies--yet everyone acts as though it is true.

People by and large do not work to fulfill their curiosity; they work to survive. They do the minimum to survive. In frontier eras like the late 1800s in America, curiosity and survival happen to align. The principal problem in all this is how to inject curiosity into a jaded populace who believes there is nothing new to discover or accomplish.

> Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served.

He argues that this is true, but then tries to make a central thesis that undercuts this declaration:

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact one of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he wants. Like it or not, America follows in the moneyed aristocratic morals of the subjective theory of value. In some sense it is the function of concentrations of capital to assign value to things in America. Therefore, folks in control of lots of capital (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz and other venture firms) and their investors have a huge input into what "we want" as a nation. And yet here he is arguing that he feels like there isn't a national desire for these things.

We don't have it because building these things requires long term investments and folks like Marc and his investors are not interested in long term investments. America's corporate leadership has pursued elastic labor forces with minimal training (and therefore minimal flexibiity), outsourced manufacturing (and therefore long lead times on domestic production) and minimal redundancy in infrastructure because these rich folks think, plan and act on a quarterly calendar. We don't build new homes because homeowners like the value of their goods protected by intense scarcity. We don't compete with China because capital sees value in redundancy only with the framework of internal corporate prognostication, not as an actual net good when considered in a system

While many Americans like to pretend "capitalism" is synonymous with free market mechanics, that's actually false. Capitalism is a dominant force in America's future and the folks with all the power to assign value have been clear: their value lies in quarterly profits. Capitalism means that market competition is reduced and capital concentrates under a small number of collaborating actors.

I agree with Marc's core tenant that "we have to want these things." But I want these things. Hell, we're building grassroots infrastructure in my radio group because our capitalist-driven infrastructure is so antiquated we can't even do a software update to existing hardware without it taking 3 years and taking an entire flood warning system offline.

Marc and his investors have to want these things. They clearly don't. These things would have "taken care of strangers," perhaps, but folks like the people who invest in Marc's funds genuinely don't seem to believe they're worthwhile values. If you'll forgive the tired metaphor, the top 0.5% doesn't see value in these things so we don't have them. We even have some in that 0.5% paying incredible sums of money to run media org's who's entire purpose is to convince people they don't actually want their lives to be better!

However, strangely, this post from him calls for building tangible assets, not software. Perhaps some of the funding directed at software can now be directed to businesses whose primary assets are tangible. What do you think.

Consider all the money and willingness to invest that has been directed toward software-based businesses. What if more of that investment capital had gone to non-software-based endeavours that America chose not to build while Silicon Valley VC like Andreeson Horowitz were busy directing focus to software.

It seems to me that his firm could be complicit in a general unwillingness in America to build tangible things. If I was someone following his philosophies over the past few decades, I would be less inclined to invest, or promote investment, in the types of "traditional" business required to build the things he calls for in this post.

This passage is followed by a long list of things we urgently need but don't have in America, from a great educational system to a great healthcare system. I agree 100% with that list of things and the urgent need for them. I'm also happy to see this on the front page of HN!

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia.

"Lack of desire" and "inertia" are surely NOT the root of the problem. All of us already want all those good things.

The root of the problem, I think, is that during normal times people and companies have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until after everyone today is dead.

For example, any company that during normal times heroically decides to make the investments necessary to survive rare events like a global pandemic or world war will quickly go out of business as more nimble competitors sidestep all those costs. Financially it makes more sense for the company "temporarily to ignore" the possibility of such rare events in the future so it can remain competitive today.

No amount of exhortation will change that.

This is like saying we need to want to end poverty more than we want to prevent ending poverty. No one is for poverty, but very few people are against it enough to give up their money, power, or time. We need to want these things enough to make sacrifices

> We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare

Most of the problems he mentions stem from government. Our government is legacy software and the author is right that lodged deep within the spaghetti code are leeches who benefit from the current system and fight against change. But they aren't the biggest problem...

Billions of dollars are spent lobbying and the % of that money that is spent pushing for causes like better healthcare or education for everyone is infinitesimally small compared to what's spent lobbying for changes that'll benefit a few at the expense of the many. But this isn't the biggest problem either...

The problem is that the infrastructure that powers our democracy -- the stuff and rules that exist to enable the people to exercise their authority -- is eroding. I asked my grandparents if people always felt like their government was incompetent. To my surprise, they said that when they were young most Americans were proud of the government.

What's the solution? The idea of democracy isn't broken, but our current implementation is. We need an upgraded democracy the way Wikipedia upgraded our old encyclopedias or Amazon upgraded commerce. These aren't new ideas, they're simply new implementations using new tools. Technology is transforming everything around us but our government is stuck in 1776.

You know what the right and left have in common? We all know things could and should be better, but they aren't. Right now we're pointing fingers at the other side, but eventually we'll realize the machine is broken. When enough people feel this way, change will come, and it will come from the bottom up. But it's not as simple as just wanting change as Marc suggests...

First, people need to get angry enough to do something. In retrospect, change seems obvious, but looking forward it's risky. People have to lose a lot in order to put their time, money, and future on the line to fight for something that might not work, and this is hardest for the people who are the worst off in society and most need change to happen.

Second, people will vote for increasingly extreme candidates to try and change the system from within. This will result in incremental change, but it won't reform the system.

Third, a new system will emerge in parallel to our current government. If history is any predictor of the future, this is almost guaranteed to happen eventually. I have no idea what the new system will look like or when it'll emerge, but this is the type of thing we need to build. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is building it already and we just haven't realized it yet.

I remember during the Theranos saga, Marc Andreessen kept defending Elizabeth Holmes over and over (he deleted most of those tweets unfortunately) - yet he was smart enough to not put any of his own or A16Z's money into Theranos. Words are cheap: let's see A16Z actually lead the way into investing in physical goods before we praise them too much.

But we build in response to demand. Once people need more of something (e.g. PPE), production ramps up. That effect has been in place and has worked quite well for thousands of years. It doesn't require any policy or government, or even a new social movement, it's just an emergent property of humans being free.

You might argue that we could be smarter, and that we should build excess PPE before the demand hits just in case. This is reasonable to an extent, but probably to less of an extent than you think. The problem is that there are dozens of possible scenarios we should prepare for, and we can't know ahead of time which one is going to strike next. We have to prepare for them all: nuclear bunkers, asteroid deflection, global warming mitigation, sea walls, military capacity, etc, etc. Giving the competition among possible future disasters, it is often wiser to KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY (in capitals, because that is my main point) so you can respond to any of them after they eventuate, not before. This requires that we have the capacity to ramp up production quickly. That's not always a given, so I'm in favor of governmental action to ensure we have "stragetic capacity" to ramp up anything we might desperately need. But I'm not in favor of just building lots of things that we might need.

This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here’s just one example:

21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prepare for an upcoming outbreak. 5 Mar - The city confirms its first case of COVID-19. 17 Mar - Shelter in place order implemented.

This was a great timeline. And it comes from the local jurisdiction so many here love to hate: San Francisco.

There are absolutely lessons we should be drawing from this pandemic. And one of them is that the political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub are putting your own lives and those of every vulnerable person you know because of that ideology. And those that want functional government aren’t.

I’m all for more radical solutions too. But if you aren’t going to learn the lessons of the present you’re in a shockingly bad place to tell anyone what’s right for the future.

Also, we need to tone down the white supremacy and learn some lessons from the Asian governments who did well here too. My search space for good ideas isn’t confined to “western governments” and neither should that confine anyone else’s.

This is simply not true. In Australia, New Zealand, and several European countries institutions did act fast enough and did manage to flatten the curve. Go take a look at Australia's epi curve [0]. It is flat. Our case load has peaked, there are less Australians in hospital with Covid19 today than a week ago. There is reason to believe at least some Australian states will be completely free of Covid19 within 2 weeks.

Some might argue that this is because of the lucky isolation of Australia. But a similar thing can be seen in South Korea, and even more impressive results in Taiwan. Institutions can solve this. Even, gasp, Western ones. If Covid19 is a test of the quality of our institutions, the USA has failed and Australasia has passed.

0. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...

I'm sitting here thinking: where can I go to help run some machines, lathes, 3D printers, CNC, etc? How can I roll up my sleeve and help build what's needed in these times? How can I help move humanity forward through this pandemic and climate change?

In these times I often turn to the wisdom of Buckminster Fuller, who was more prescient about these times 50 years ago than most contemporary leaders:

> Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

In so much of what is discussed, here, on HackerNews, and elsewhere, people express their solutions. What does it take for us to build and mobilize to bring those solutions to fruition? Why are we spending so much time spinning our wheels, our time and attention elsewhere, distracting ourselves, and putting our heads in the sand when problems need to be solved? Are the barriers political, educational, financial, etc? What systemic changes can be made if the current system is not working?

What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.

For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.

Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.

One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.

Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.

None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.

Consumers don't know what they want until the possibilities are presented to them. VCs are literally the gate keepers of much innovative possibilty at the early phases of enterprises. It's not an issue with want, it's that making a quick buck for VCs doesn't come from capital intensive, long ROI cycle businesses. Other asset classes may be better about this but they tend to participate at less innovative stages.

The sad truth is that building yet another addictive and attention-grabbing way to push ads into people's faces pays the bills. Doing the right thing does not, or at least not in America.

As a German, it took me a while to figure out how business in the US works, but basically everyone only treats things listed next to a monetary amount in the balance sheet as real. As a result, a concept like "for the good of society" does not exist for most CEOs.

There is plenty of well-educated and well-meaning young people happy to build a better future. They certainly had the desire to do that when they started working.

The real question is how to make it financially viable for them to do the building.

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 need to work on now is the incentives for talented people to take long term risks instead of joining a FAANG or a hedge fund.

2. Cynical response.

The American Dream has absolutely been crushed. We need triage in the short term, not thought leaders writing about the wonderful opportunities ahead of us in rebuilding after the COVID crisis subsides. Those sitting on large amounts of capital should make mass donations to things like food banks across the country because there is a massive risk of millions of people falling into long term poverty in the immediate future. The short term must be about helping those in desperate need. Long term planning can come later.

3. Response as a father

I hope others read this essay and get inspired about taking more risks in building a better future. As for me, I’m a sole provider for my family and must focus my career on making enough money to support those that depend on me.

I could go on, but you get the idea. A good essay is thought provoking in spite of bits and pieces being easily criticizable.

What are some companies working on these kind of fundamental building things problems? I know of the Boring Company, though haven't really heard anything from them since the flamethrowers a few years back. Sidewalk labs was doing some cool things in Toronto, but I think they've been running into big regulatory issues too and it one point it sounded like their plans were completely on hold. The YC New Cities idea sounded intriguing, but as far as I know they never talked about a single thing to come out of that program and it's now been shut down.

I really haven't heard of very many companies at all doing these kinds of things (which is Marc's whole point), and the ones that I have been casually following, I check back 5 years later and they don't seem to have made any tangible progress. Is there just no way to iterate quickly at all in the physical world?

Then of course there would be the challenge of trying to actually get a job at one of these places, I'm not sure what experience would even be required for this kind of work. Maybe a Civil or Mechanical Engineering degree? As a software developer I'm not sure how I'd even get my foot in the door.

I guess that would leave trying to start something myself, but there too I really have no clue where to even begin. It doesn't seem like you can just start tinkering on construction innovations with minimal upfront investment on your nights and weekends like you can with building an app. On this front someone like Marc Andreesen could offer a ton of advice, I'd love to see him follow up on this post with more thoughts about this. Or even announce a program to fund new companies focused on this type of fundamental building.

Anyway, I'd be really curious to hear if anyone knows of either 1. more examples of companies working these spaces to look into or 2. resources to even just learn more about the problem space and which areas might be ripe for innovation.

It really does happen. The question is how you keep on renewing a country and a people when things are going "just fine".

There is really something to the idea that strife / disaster / starting with nothing causes you to yearn to be better and invest in things that you wouldn't do when you've already made it. You raise kids in wealth and they rarely have the same drive as their up-from-bootstraps parents. And maybe nature's checks-and-balances on this is that eventually those people who struggled through adversity and built things get comfortable. They stop wanting to invest, and instead want to extract. It gets hard to get people to be willing to sacrifice like they did when they were young.

The USA has already made it. In its own mind. So most people are not desperate to have high taxes, high effort, low potential of immediate reward -- the kind of thing that builds things that last beyond your children.

Now it's either 15% returns or it's not worth it. Or vote out anyone who proposes something that costs a lot. And only when we see other countries whose people had to struggle from nothing do we realize that standing still sometimes equals going backwards in the global race. It's how you end up landing at La Guardia, trying to take a subway, and wondering how your capital of prosperity could have gotten so bad without anyone noticing.

I don't know how exactly to incentivize a contented culture to be willing to sacrifice. I am sure, though, that social media and polarization and targeted outrage of special interests against any potential idea doesn't help. It's a real puzzle how we're going to get out of this funk and not be passed on the highway by lots of others.

Until a16z starts investing seriously in lobbying to end federal corruption, establish a far more progressive tax code (that also considers wealth) and to aggressively prosecute monopolies, I have to assume they're just greenwashing.

But a lot of people aren’t so fortunate, and I don’t know if those gaps have ever been quite so apparent for our generation.

Being really sick over the past month has definitely led to a lot of reflection. There’s a burning desire to make every day count in a way I’ve never felt before. Closest thing being the birth of my kids.

I’ve posted this before, but this essay reminds me of a great West Wing exchange with Chief of Staff Leo McGary:

Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.

Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?

Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?

I can't raise the capital to start any business that could challenge these things. I work too many hours to sustain my family to do anything serious as a side project.

I can't find anywhere more progressive to work than where I am, if I could I would move. I have a set of skills which seem to match what Marc wants, yet I earn less than the sales and marketing people.

I can't vote for a political party that wants these things because they don't exist, and couldn't exist in the UK without a massive benefactor.

All I can contribute is an upvote to your article. If someone would buy me a house for my family, and enough cash to run it I would join this crusade. Until then, just an upvote.

What if building in itself isn't the answer to increasing affordability and ensuring supply of things that matter? What if incentives are the key?

Things the author says drop rapidly in price:

- computers

- TVs

Things the author says skyrocket in price:

- housing

- schools

- hospitals

The former group includes small-ticket items that are often bought with "cash." These are also items with an inherently low regulatory burden.

The latter group includes big-ticket items bought on credit, or paid for by someone else (health insurer). Often, there's a government backstop involved. And these industries have a very heavy regulatory burden.

What if the key to making necessities like housing and education more affordable was to get the federal government out of the business of guaranteeing loans and backstopping reckless investors?

Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution.

Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?

To build those fast trains, we may need to do it over people’s houses. To build safe nuclear plants, some may need to fail. Like SpaceX failures before they get it right.

We have a refactoring problem. To see the results, it could take decades. The demand is there but the power isn’t even in the hands of government. It’s by the people who own corporations and lobbyists, it’s by the private equity folks and the bankers who are over leveraged. They are very happy with current system of seeking rent from their monopolies.

Also we aren’t as organized. China can get shit done. I’m willing to make a bet that by 2030, China will have a higher GDP than US. China knows how to build.

I stopped reading here. I thought this (HN) was a discussion board of thoughts outside the political realm. But this is clearly a political statement begging for a deeply partisan response. Or, worse, a gross misunderstanding of the last century of political history which contributes gravely to an incorrect recollection of all that has unfolded. In effect establishing a deeply political conclusion to the benefit of one specific party at the cost of another.

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 of the most urgent tasks should be to understand what they did that worked so well.

I think it's the lack of political will in America to make our lives better. You let your politicians (especially at local level) confine you to essentially urban slums rather than let you build a dignified life with your hard earned money.

In my opinion, the deficiencies that the pandemic is unmasking in the american system need a political solution and change.

Looking for heroic activism isn’t going to fix the systemic issues.

The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model!

Look to the European democracies. They have a lot of what is missing here. They are more socially oriented, the state taking care of it’s citizens.

Look to Germany’s healthcare system. It’s regulated, but works well for everyone.

Point the second: of course a VC wants people to build. Of course a VC wants creative destruction and displacement of incumbents. But - as I see other people wondering as well - what's a VC going to do about it other than sit on the highest stock tranches and reap most of the rewards?

Step 1: fund a national campaign to challenge Citizens United and put new test cases through the courts.

Step 2: restore the federal prohibition (dropped during Obama admin) against propaganda.

Step 3: implement a modern equivalent to Glass-Steagall banking regulation, so that taxpayer capital is not backstopping high-risk investments.

Without a shared model of reality, it is difficult to collaborate on the building of new realities. If unlimited ad/PR spending can be used to manipulate media, the voices and interests of individual humans struggle to be heard, leaving us with flawed models awaiting the next crisis where reality suddenly corrects rhetoric.

If the above is not feasible at the federal level, start with one state and use every available legal/policy/finance tool to (a) pursue similar goals, and (b) encourage migration of like-minded civic leaders and builders from other states.

Because the US has too much college education now. About 45% of the people with college degrees are working in jobs that don't require them. The payoff for a college education is often negative now.[1]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-really-arent-many-ba...

If you buy it, people will build it.

I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest.

It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas today you basically the vast majority of a similar population is overweight-to-obese.

Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years? Of course not, there were huge structural changes over that time in lots of areas (design of our cities, rise of the automobile, industrialized food and agriculture, etc.) that caused the person with "average" willpower to become obese.

Similarly, it's not as though people have less "desire" than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn't address at all, such as the forces that have led to so much inequality and a hollowing out of the US manufacturing capacity.

I don't fundamentally disagree with Andreesen's goals, but "try harder" is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.

https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/kingdom-of-happiness.html

Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.

I learned how to program by watching tutorials and doing online coding classes. This is how I am used to learning. This method of learning isn't going to work when it comes to say, starting a startup that will build a new monorail. This is such a huge blockage for me and probably others with limited exposure to industries outside of software.

Has anyone ever felt this way and how did you overcome it?

I am just thinking about this irony, a country of people who have a desire to build, has all the anti-builder policies. A country with the most builder friendly policies has no desire to build. Sigh..

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

I think plenty of his points about pushing investment into broad market innovation are very true.

Simultaneously, this post made me think about how we got here. Many of the problems being experienced that are exasperated by the coronavirus are also being contributed to by private industry. I guess the notion of what the government should/should not provide or manufacture is up to personal belief... however, since “small-government” was pushed starting in the 1980s(?), there’s been a big change in the way many public services (and public service dependencies) are operated.

I like the idea of supporting home-grown innovation through startups and market disruption - however, seeing it from the other side, those are also the forces that brought upon harsh realities like experiencing PPE shortages because the manufacturing is outsourced to cheap labor overseas or millions of people relying on shit-tier digital services built by an amalgam of government contractors a decade ago and billed at a ridiculous rate.

I think there’s an opportunity to take the overall message and shift it inwards towards actually pushing government-enabled innovation and development projects. That at least seems more “by the people, for the people” than proliferating a system of voracious hunger to corner off a big pile of sweet government money.

Build too much, and you end up with depleted resources, non-environmental solutions, and outdated artefacts.

Recycling is surely an option, but it should be the fallback, not the default.

While the current crisis could’ve been handled better, it is not at all badly handled. Nature is much stronger than us, and the fact that we are not totally screwed after over four months since the outbreak is impressive.

Over building hospitals for the next pandemic sounds inefficient to me.

Because in 2020, education is credentialism. Every one of my friends who approached or was approached by a VC was asked: did you go to a good school? Do people up the chain like you? Show us references from professors and supervisors! This is not some big player hiring a manager-executive, I'm talking about investors whose job is to identify left-field potential and take risks.

You can't create Harvard 2.0 if your measure of success is having attended Harvard 1.0, and Harvard 1.0 is under no pressure to change or adapt.

Even the best VCs won't invest in socially inept dropouts anymore. The next Steve Jobs isn't building something in his parents' garage, because nobody believes in his ability to sell computers. He doesn't have an MBA from Wharton; he isn't a Stanford PhD. Thiel's "just don't fuck it up" just can't happen in 2020, except maybe by Thiel himself (or Weinstein, who is slowly waking up to this truth).

If anything, crises might force VCs to take risks again. Let the flood of easy M&As run dry and the dam dismantled!

I’d have to watch again to be sure, but I think the scene in Westworld in Singapore is actually in Singapore because Paris was destroyed. There are scenes in futuristic sf also that show Fremont street among others.

Finland seems to be a notable exception to this unfortunate rule: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/world/europe/coronavirus-...

Imagine the "City Country Fingers"[3] pattern:

> Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than one mile wide, while the farmland fingers should never be less than one mile wide.

Let the farmland be food forest[4] that also grows starch/sugar crops for local alcohol fuel production and bamboo for construction. The buildings can be designed with hyperinsulation and passive solar architecture to have really low energy requirements.

Who's in?

[1] https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm Christopher Alexander's site.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes

[3] http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening A great example in action: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance

[] US/EU moved production to China because it was/is cheaper

[] It was/is cheaper because innovation in production technologies to this date haven't narrowed the gap for US/EU companies to move production back to US/EU.

[] US/EU workers don't want to compete with Chinese workers because they are "too cheap", but can't scale their efficiency proportionally. This is the main challenge of the developed economies - find how to continue growing the efficiency

[] US strategic failure is in putting all the eggs in one basket - China. Why not to have 5 production hubs around the world is not clear (maybe other nations don't want to work as hard as chinese?)

[] Another US strategic failure is to choose offshoring over local production. This could be achieved by lowering minimum wage or if this decision is not politically feasible - import of workforce. For this you could make elaborate laws where people coming to US for work couldn't stay there and had to go back once their work is done. Arab countries are doing this a lot.

[] The conflict of interest became apparent in times of struggle: virus shown that US is not de facto in control of outsourced production overseas

[] It DOESN'T mean that US must bring back production or start wasteful BUILD projects, which no one ever will use. It means that US must start investing even more into bridging the gap between overseas labor costs and automation due to innovation. Or create even more service industries that will be in demand overseas

[] If US succeeds in this mission - it is rightfully the leader of the world, its system is superior and next development revolution will be theirs to benefit from

[] But if US fails to bring the world new development cycle or someone does it before them - US citizens shouldn't expect their living to improve significantly since financial manipulations can bring you only so far

So if robots happen - all of the above resolved. And in times like this it must be quite easy to repurpose robot, which will solve extreme capacity shocks in the system.

BTW US were building high speed trains - it is called airplane! And was winning worldwide competition to date, but decided to outsource critical development to India... So I guess another example of strategic failure.

I'm not in US but in Europe, and I feel like many countries are like a 50-year 100M LOC codebase with fragile dependencies on module boundaries. The inertia is massive and refactoring even a small part of it requires enormous effort, and there will always be people unhappy about any change and a maze of laws making stuff difficult.

You need to really think big and have that inner energy to persuade people to change anything. Most people (me including) just don't have, most of the time, enough mental energy for thinking big about the world around after doing their 8h of busywork and 2h in commute to make ends meet.

Most people at their (non-tech) works are not told to think big either; hell, they are probably discouraged to, and are told to juggle an infinite backlog of low-impact "JIRA tickets" and keep the status quo.

But, as far as education goes, if everyone got a degree, then what's the point? it would have no value at all. The whole point of awarding degrees is to separate those who have them from those that don't. How are employers supposed to know who to higher, if everyone has a degree?

Good luck generating the want. You don't have insurance nerds like computer nerds. You can't open your insurance plan, hack it to bits, and then put it back together in an interesting fashion and start your own business with it. You can't iterate and break stuff in insurance like you can with software. Even if you removed all of the regulatory capture, companies in those kinds of industries only come down to profit.

Insurance is boring. What are you going to do, make a $10/month health insurance plan that covers everything? You'll be popular, then broke. But that's what America really deserves: essentially free healthcare. The problem beyond regulatory capture is capitalism at its core because capitalism doesn't like anything given away for free.

So, what are you building?

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

The US in 2020 just invested roughly 10% of the GDP to prop up some corporations, and more or less called it a day.

This is, in fact, often a major question in game design too. When the problem space gets reduced to a score optimization problem(whether score in the context is "high score" or "maximizing some form of output" like HP damage), you often end up with degenerate solutions that involve a repetitive linear application of some technique. And when this appears in a competitive context, the game starts stagnating into a rote exercise of min-max, and other solution sets go unexplored. Competitive players often look for ways to gatekeep and declare a playstyle unacceptable so that they stay in their comfort zone and keep their status - but acceptability is ultimately a matter of what you believe the competition is or should be about. If you don't have that agreement of shared belief, the game itself falls into incoherence, and that is what we see at a broader scale in society where its systems fail.

But there are some answers. One is to enforce a broad set of all-or-nothing contractual failure modes: If you fail the minimums you don't get the maximum. At a baseline we have Maslow's hierarchy of needs setting some of these minimums. And our legal system often works in this direction of adding a minimum. Another is to add buffers, delays and noise on results: If you don't have an instant guaranteed outcome, you can't push your margins nearly as hard, and so you don't end up in a distorted min-maxing zone, but a more systematic one, which can only be manipulated through careful synchronization that "gets ahead of" or "applies leverage" to the problem. This is something we're now dealing with increasingly in an interconnected "instant society" where continuous access is the norm and many activities that were one arduous and needed a strong commitment have been reduced and repackaged into status symbols. Lastly, overt market mechanisms - pricing and bidding and ownership - help when applied appropriately. But they are premised on active participation in the process, humans in the loop who can really think through all the factors. When we automate market activities, we end up back in the scenario of min-maxing.

Lots of fun things to think about. It's not just the building that matters, but the "why" of it. If you can justify the "why" you can get a lot farther.

Housing is about the least desirable form of real-estate development for land owners. That's why low cost market housing is built in former cow pastures outside of town and in town market rate housing development tends to be built for upper income and luxury buyers. That's why affordable housing has been done with public subsidy. First as public housing. Then as tax credit financing and housing vouchers. Recently as a condition of building market rate housing.

Real-estate is where wealth is parked with long time horizons. Pension funds and life insurance reserves and intergenerational personal wealth preservation. When wealth preservation is the goal or the investment horizon is thirty years or more, sitting on under-utilized land waiting for a commercial use on a triple net lease provides higher returns than selling houses. Even better if the land is producing rent off the sunk cost...and there's always a market for used car lots. Housing competes with every other use and most uses are much more profitable and stable.

Even leaving land vacant is better than converting to housing when the goal is wealth preservation. In wealth preservation, if you sell, you have to find someplace else to put the money. When real-estate is the wealth preservation vehicle, that means finding another parcel of greater value for equal cost. E.g. a more valuable parcel than the valuable one already in hand.

Most people do absolutely nothing useful, despite skill and desire, and they know it. We all know we’re much better at creating value on our own, but much worse at capturing that value. Something seems really unproductive about this system; must be a better way.

The USA has a system that makes it easier to appropriate wealth via rentier activity (for example becoming a landlord), than to create wealth (for example building accommodation).

Until this mentality changes you are going to see your living standards continue to plummet.

Rentier activity is a zero sum game. For you to win someone else has to lose. Making this a cornerstone of your economy is a disaster.

It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

— George Carlin

You could lower the immigration rate and ignore trans-nationalist calls to perpetually increase the GDP, primarily for their benefit. The Asian Tigers + Japan (minus Singapore, with a higher rate, but it's not a true democracy), don't have this problem. You could perhaps more importantly do better to alleviate world poverty, a strong driver of population growth, consequently immigration, consequently large environmental footprints from increasingly more people adopting 1st world lifestyles, such as this American dream of the house, car, education & healthcare, flights overseas, etc.

The case of being reactive vs proactive.

1. No one is rewarded pointing out problems. Thus no one wants to be that guy. 2. Reward constructive ways to points out issues / problems. 3. Listen & Acknowledge or disregard. Rewards solutions, goals, and resources (e.g. timeline) for resolution.

Accountability — management/upper leaders fail when failing to document the decision (brush away complaints with no record of decision and does not welcome hearing the issues through the management chains). Document the decision making.

Must have positive culture that every issue/problem pointed out is welcomed so that it can be looked at. Someone should be accountable / responsible for those issues whether deferred or not.

Was it a failure to imagination? Or a failure to take action on such conceived idea, once upon a time? Leaders must lead which includes partnership/collective efforts outside their own organizations...

With all respect to Andreesen, it is unlikely any of these problems will be solved before the entire post-WWII system collapses.

Climate change, sovereign debt levels, permanent-QE...

Honestly 6 months ago, even those who see doom around every corner weren't really talking about a pandemic.

The problem is, the problems are outpacing the solutions.

This here, written 16 years ago, is still true:

"Consequently, for thousands of years, uncountable coronations, revolutions, coups, appointments, elections, assassinations, and regime changes have occurred. Kings, prime ministers, princes, presidents, secretaries-general, and dictators have found themselves in and out of power. Unexpected changes have removed even powerful rulers. (See the box “Suddenly out of Power,” on page 5.) Still, competent and enduring leadership has proved elusive."

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2004800#h=5:0-7:728

No one was prepared. This is a black swan event, they happen once in a century. If you try to get prepared to every kind of them you'll spend more than if you just absorb the consequences. Trick isn't preparedness, but rather resilience, ability to get up and move on quickly.

My thesis is that quantitative and spatial intelligences, which are required to build things, are rarer than verbal intelligence and thus more likely to regress to the mean. This makes them harder to pass on to progeny and less reliable as conduits of status.

Highly verbal careers like law and to a lesser extent finance (which is more about networking than crunching numbers at the high level) are more accessible to the average heir, because they require more common skills. If being an engineer or doctor were the pinnacle of social status, it would be harder to pass on social status because it would be less likely that your child would be able to perform those functions.

So elites decided to build societies that gave structural advantages to the so-called FIRE economy because that gave them the best chance at locking in their status. This relegated builder careers to second or third tier status.

Talking about what's best for the country is _by_its_very_nature_ s political, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not.

"Politics (Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with the governance of a country, state or area. It involves making decisions that apply to groups of members and achieving and exercising positions of governance—organized control over a human community ...

... In modern nation states, people often form political parties to represent their ideas. Members of a party often agree to take the same position on many issues and agree to support the same changes to law and the same leaders. An election is usually a competition between different parties"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics

I think there may be a paradox underlying his point: while we need to build things, we also need to maintain things. If I have limited resources (e.g., time, money, land, materials, etc.), then if I choose to build something, I may be choosing to abandon (not maintain) something, or even to destroy that thing. I think this applies to businesses, apps, bridges, skyscrapers, and even relationships. If I start something new, it often replaces the old.

I believe we may struggle with this, because, while we crave new things, we get emotionally attached to old things. We get attached to the way we're able to see the SF Bay from our house and don't want anything blocking our view. We get attached to our expertise and comfort at coding in a specific language and don't want to learn yet another new language. We get attached to the way we've made cars day after day, year after year, and also to the juicy profits and lives that it has given us.

Also, I think a lot of business models rely more on the maintaining of things than they do the building of things (unless you consider maintaining some sort of (re)building, but I don't). Facebook built a platform and for the most part, while adding users, seems to maintain it and want to prevent others from taking their users. Someone who builds a nuclear power plant will probably spend a lot of money building it and therefore wants to "milk the asset" for as much as they can. Even the construction firm who builds the power plant probably has methods that they've practiced over the years, and wants to leverage the learning of those methods more so than learn new ones.

I still agree that we need to build new things, I just believe there are strong financial and emotional reasons for why we maintain old things.

Imagine Wynn Resorts (world's largest operator of Casinos) berating the world for living large, drinking too much and indulging in non-productive activities. The biggest hits of a16z - airbnb, lyft, pinterest - are companies that are either media assets to monetize eyeballs, or software that extracts more value from existing assets while doing an end-run around existing regulation.

Yaay for a16z for being such baller investors. But to tell the rest of us it is time to build is like Pepsico trying to scare us into healthy habits.

Immensely hypocritical article.

For starters, this might not be the right time to blame the victims.

"Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building."

And yet, the people who physically build things are left destitute, while the managers are raking it in.

This ought to be a time of reflection, not action.

This is the greatest form of regulatory capture in existence today because it cuts across all industries and fields. It is a regulatory capture of the free market itself by the rich.

How do the preparations for the next big San Andreas earthquake compare to those that were (or should have been) made for Covid-19? What else do we need to build for something like that?

The impact of the two seem quite similar: at best, stuck at home on a dwindling pile of food that can be replenished sporadically every two weeks while you try to make a living online. Covid-19 didn’t take out physical infrastructure, but decimating the workforce has had a similar effect, and knock on effects are real (how do I service a broken car during lockdown?)

The two big takeaways from Covid-19 for me were: have better food security at home, and invest in a home grade wireless internet connection. I’d probably think carefully about exposure to natural disasters too, the next time I move.

For example, watch Tesla go broke and give all that beautiful capital they've built back to their creditors before this is all over. This doesn't happen in China, even though lots of companies have debts they haven't paid on in years because the government just buys the bad debts off the banks and the banks continue to lend.

... and you can't really force that. americans seem unmotivated to want the same things. cynicism drives people to politicization and polarization of everything, including chemical compounds. On the one side, half the people believe that through politics they can force the other half to do their work for them. The other side realizes that and becomes increasingly cynical, hiding their money away from them. there is no sense of common purpose despite the proclamations. maybe the issue is trust

this essay is nice and arousing and all, and hard to disagree with it, but somehow i think people will forget about it

Building more housing in the Bay area is not part of the solution. What is part of the solution is funding business activity elsewhere, where people are not packed in like sardines and breeding viruses.

Note it does show that the VCs are not a master class because they can't win against bay area landlords. If the ground in the Bay area is so uniquely blessed that is a case for sky-high property taxes, right?

I want to see salesforce, Apple's and similar companies ditch the Moscone center and move their conferences to Las Vegas for one thing.

What if we're comparing apples to oranges when we say people in the past had more ambition? People would build an entire suburb in the 1950s without filing an Environmental Report to the EPA because didn't even exist. (An environmental report for those who do not know is a massive piece of legal documentation that shows how a prospective development will effect the natural landscape.)

Perhaps Singapore is building gleaming skyscrapers because they've taken the baton from us and have no "baggage" per se.

Of course money is the problem.

More specifically, the subset of money that is profits. How can you build if you don’t feel secure in you and your loved one’s futures? Whether that future is just enough to scrape by to making sure your children have a safety net. The majority of people simply do not have the luxury of ignoring money to divert their attention on building. If this current pandemic hasn’t made that abundantly clear, I don’t know what will.

(Yes, I’m aware of the outliers on both ends. I’m choosing to ignore them because to build something meaningful for the future requires the majority. And that is precisely the population that is most concerned about money.)

Regulatory capture? That’s because those in government know how quickly money can be earned and lost. So why not let this happen to secure their own future?

Startups and investors? Everyone is focused on ROI and the short term because that optimized for your wealth. Long term spreads the wealth among employees which ultimately does not help secure your future. If this hurts to hear, it’s because deep down you know it to be true.

It takes a lot of wealth and time for outliers to see that they aren’t building for the future. It’s great if Andreessen sees this issue and is trying to solve for it, but money is not so easily solved for.

> Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?

Sure. I’d love to take the time to flesh out and propose my ideas to you. Then build and iterate on them. But first, give me stable income. Promise to take care of me.

I’ve just been part of a mass layoff for the third time in my life! Every time I’ve built up some sort of financial safety net, it’s been burnt to ashes by a recession. I left teaching and returned to engineering precisely because I realized how impossible it would be to build a financially secure life for my family (parents included).

So that is my challenge to you, Mr. Horowitz and everyone who agrees. What will you do to feed the desire to build?

We don't have unlimited land, and we need much of that for agriculture to sustain the billions of people living here.

When we use energy, we must make sure it comes from renewable sources.

When we build, we must take care that we don't destroy existing ecosystems. And so on.

And since we cannot rely on everybody being responsible on their own, we need regulations. They should be as efficient and frictionless as possible, but let's not dismiss them all together in a frenzy to build, build, build.

- Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product-market fit than building what the world needs long-term.

- Hiring employees at below market salary and offsetting with equity incentives people to think short-term. You need to move towards going public and increasing valuation if you want to keep your talent.

- The funding round model forces short-term thinking by constantly forcing companies to prove their vision has a market in a short amount of time. How do you prove that a two-decade project has legs in the first 5 years? The path I've seen is people reducing their ambitions to find traction.

- The VC industry does not value positive social externalities in any appreciable way. Fast growth and revenue is all that matters and we celebrate the companies that achieve that by causing negative externalities.

There's a reason that the most impactful real-world innovation I can think of comes from people like Bezos and Musk who can afford to think in terms of decades.

Maybe VCs are not the vehicles for long-term innovation. Or maybe the leaders of the VC industry could look inwards and find changes to how they approach innovation that could help solve these long-term problems.

When you have extreme wealth and influence, there is an inherent responsibility to ask whether 'you' are doing enough.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-i...

And let's set out with a more ambitious dream than simply providing the opportunity to have a home. A nation not explicitly designed to take care of our needs, such as housing, is inefficient by design.

Myth 1: Independence. Reality: Interdependence and autonomy.

But why doesn’t it also say that $X billion of a16z money will he allocated for such investments in the next 3 years?

"""Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers."""

This is interesting. They are investors, why is he asking the government to provide the capital for this. Shouldn't they be all over these great unexplored opportunities? How many companies that build actual physical stuff have they backed compared to yet-another-SaaS plays? I'm really curious how a pitch of "we want to build/manufacture stuff in the USA" would have went pre-Pandemic at a16z. Even trying to pitch hardware instead of software seems hard enough as is.

"""The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things."""

This is also interesting. Isn't one of the first things they want "moat, moat, moat"? Sure it's nice to ask for easier entry into markets when you try to fund the disruptor. But once said disruptor is funded they also want as much protection as possible.

"""Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?"""

As a start, I would humbly suggest to rethink the model of "relocating all companies to where the capital is located" and move towards "move companies to the places where they should build most of their stuff". It's pretty mindblowing to me why software companies should be located in SV even when their customers are located elsewhere. I would also argue that building stuff should be done in a more humble way than the typical VC-ambition. Build, test, show profit, grow organically. I think that could be more healthy than pump up 20 builders and hope one goes hyperbolic.

As an aside, the cynic in me thinks that Theranos would probably go through the roof right now if it was still around and waste a lot more capital than it did. It's easy to call for action, any action in times of crisis without being careful and level headed enough.

But in a dynamic economy is really hard to sustain the cost of continuous preparedness because needs are infinite.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandem...

Trump absolutely failed and is failing at leading us through this thing.

Innovation is great, but let’s not ignore bad leadership.

Andreseen is notoriously conservative and clearly whitewashing reality.

We tried to build this thing called "medicare for all". It would have freed people up to take greater risks in their employment because our physical health would not be tied to our employment.

That idea was run into the ground by an all-hands-on-deck media ( the media that is owned by billionaires ) and DNC blitz to shut it down. Because that would cost the 1% some of their money, and the 1% are the ones WITH all the money, so they have the power to write the checks and make things happen.

Healthcare is something everyone needs at one point. We cannot take a risk because our healthcare is insanely expensive and tied to our employment.

We would love to build things. Building things costs money. Most people do not have much money. The 1% do not let us spend "their" money to build things. They take a larger and larger slice of the pie, while everyone else is fighting for crumbs. The ladder is pulled up for labor to fight back with "right to work" laws, and other anti-labor policies. So nothing ever gets built.

"I'm from the government, I'm here to help" - inspiring confidence in nobody since forever.

Regulatory capture is the biggest problem stifling innovation today. The government needs to get the hell out of our way and let us get back to work.

> The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even more investor-friendly) innovation. > > It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.

Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing regulation.

Offshoring is also something that hasn't been on the right for almost a decade.

Finally, the right typically often has absolute political support for aggressive VC investment. Our current right-leaning president has supported a ludicrously low interest rate to encourage private investment in technology as well as set up economic opportunity zones to encourage investment in underserved communities.

Like, it's not as if "the left" wouldn't love to make over institutions like the VA, but has such a thing been politically realistic in ~the last 2 decades?

A quality education does not have to cost more than $10-20k to produce (per student). So why are current prices in the $100-200k range?

They are out of business as they are not economically optimal for the market. I see where you're going though.

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.

> And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

This is an accusation for lack of motivation. An accusation without any specific substantiation. Hindsight is not a fair substantiation for such accusation.

Motivation is the preference for getting into the most favourable thinkable outcome from the available starting conditions. The current situation was beyond most people's thinkable outcomes, so most of us were caught off guard.

> Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination.

Agree on this. Perhaps I'd say it's a failure of being informed on this possibility. But that's it.

> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?

Welcome to the USSR.

If Harvard isn't incentivised, demanding that they build will not make anybody better off.

> Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?

I think Marc Andreessen should manually manufacture surgical masks in his bedroom 8 hours a day 7 days a week and supply Department of Health & Human Services free of charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

Yeah, let's not do that.

I'm not familiar with Nicholas Stern, and will look him up, but does anyone here want to elaborate as if you were talking to a five-year-old?

There are lots of dense cities, with beautiful buildings and streets, 5 story high.

However, build what exactly? I don’t disagree with building hospitals and important public infrastructure. However:

1) More exponential growth isn’t by definition for the better 2) We need to ask ourselves, brutally and honestly, what actually needs building, and what doesn’t?

Aside from the obvious tangible tech and infrastructure we can build, there are also many tacit things we should be building and investing in, but that are difficult to measure: International cooperation, resilience, creativity.

There’s no point in building more infrastructure (Andreessen) or trying to populate other planets (Musk), if we continue having paralyzing social inequality and international conflict, which destroy what we build. ️

The things we need to build will probably require deep involvement of the government, or at least the exit of cronyism and political wave bending on the part of the government. And the vision of a 20, 50 and 100 year plan.

Not sure I see that in our immediate future, here in the US.

That is the core issue - we know what the problems are, the rich are just are unwilling to fund it with tax dollars.

Boomers did build a lot because they needed a way to store this workforce, and building is the way. Capital was short and workforce abundant.

Now it's changing, we have lots of goods and savings to invest, but nobody to take them and actually DO something. Now is time to make sure that people that can create something actually do it. Interest rates are super low, and the economies are flooded with money.

What's the problem here. ZOMBIES! ZOMBIE companies that just drag resources and never die. If you don't let them fall and you never restructure the system gets sick. And that's what happens now, saving everyone ass is not clever, but printed money is going to those holes.

Western consumers have been voting with their wallets for decades - they want lots of cheap products.

If you want to get a new product produced today you'll likely be able to produce it much cheaper abroad, where there's a more efficient supply chain and cheap labour and with much less initial overhead.

Make your product more expensive you'll likely be out of business before the next global pandemic.

It's interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon?

Reworded in a way that doesn't generalize quite so intensely and that doesn't use such an ineffective tone, this 'essay' (I don't really think it counts as one; it's more what you'd expect to hear in a speech) might have actually had legs.

This doesn’t seem like a fair criticism. How do you create a vaccine for a disease you’ve never encountered? We have a hard enough time guessing the right flu strain to vaccinate against let alone a virus like Covid.

And people seem to ignore the flip side of this - spending money to prepare for something that never happens. I’ve seen plenty of people criticizing the government for buying tens of millions of doses of Tamiflu and Cipro that just expire unused.

You should publish high fidelity ideas that keep you up at night.

Make a list of "n" things you'd do if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912293

Maybe because investors think that every company will be a fintech company in the future? (https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech-...).

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things.

> What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for.

The top tier in the U.S. is enjoying a rather good living. They have houses, cars, cheap imported stuff, groceries delivered, accountants and good health insurance. They will also travel to some place in Europe or Asia for a nice vacation to avoid the bad and expensive service in the U.S.

The bottom tier (which is getting larger) surely wants these things. But they are hopeless and both the top tier and the government has given up on them. On other countries (i.e.: Singapore) the government think about the larger population. So they build some public transportation. In the U.S., there is a strong police force, so these things are under control.

This is a complex question, and the answer is not “we are a weak and lazy civilisation, if only we’d build build build instead”.

We’ve put the world’s mask factories where it made the most economic sense, and anyone willing to go out on a limb and move production to where it makes the least economic sense will be crushed by fellow capitalists.

I sometimes wonder if nerds are subconsciously benchmarking our technological and economic progress against science fiction staples, which are great for firing the imagination but are a monumentally poor benchmark of actual progress. It’s very easy to utter the words “let’s colonise the galaxy”, but the logistical and technical barriers are formidable: in reality this undertaking is impossible for our civilisation, because we lack the knowledge that might allow us to do it (assuming that it is possible).

Commercial innovation is a very thin crust on top of a large body of fundamental research, which is required to make things like economic supersonic flight a reality for millions. So before we can “build build build”, we must invest in fundamental research.

> Where are the supersonic aircraft?

From an interview[1] with Sarah Lacy in 2018, Marc Andreessen already had the answers:

Q: Is there a way Andreessen Horowitz could stop backing more apps and throw some of the money towards the next SpaceX?

Andreessen:

The capital efficiency of having a small group of software programmers that build amazing software, who then go in and do something in an industry that’s 100 billion or trillion-dollar industry, existing venture capital structure and framework is very good at doing that.

It works very well when it works, and I think that’s very valuable. I always accuse Peter of dismissing all that stuff out of hand, which is probably an overstatement.

The part that I struggle with, and I’m on the verge of agreeing with, it’s SpaceX, it’s Tesla. The trenchant critique comes from Larry Page, Elon, and Peter. It’s like, “OK, software. Got it. What about electric cars? What about the Hyperloop? What about the SpaceX private rocketry?”

What about these bigger, more transformational things? In particular, what about the things that operate more in the real world? What about the things that are really going to affect natural resources, pollution, livability of cities, and all the things that are outside of whatever’s running on the screen?

I think that there’s a validity. Google is doing the self-driving car. The self-driving car is going to work. By the time it works, it will have cost hundreds of millions, and possibly billions of dollars to make work. The self-driving car is not a lean startup. Not in any way.

SpaceX and Tesla were not lean startups. They were very big, ambitious. They raised a lot of money. The big question, the question I’m noodling around, is what about the efforts where you have to say, “This thing is going to take $300 million?” It just is. There’s no shortcut and there’s no minimum viable product. It is going to take $300 million, and that $300 million has to be reserved ahead of time.

Those companies have to be run completely differently because the stakes are so much higher.

What kind of entrepreneur can do that? Elon has proven he can do it. There are not a lot of other people in the Valley today who have done things at that level of scale.

There’s a different kind of entrepreneur. There’s a different kind of idea. There’s a different kind of financing method. I think we’ll all collectively figure it out, but we don’t actually have it today.

What you get is you have a very special entrepreneur like Elon, and then he can do it. What I always say is, “OK, who is the next Elon? And then we’ll talk.”

---

We need more VCs to bet on these ambitious ideas. No more Tiktok, please.

---

[1]Original source: https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/marc-andreess...

[1]Snippet: https://allenleein.github.io/2020/03/11/pmarca-flying-car.ht...

[Some] government regulations are bad. How do we fix them? Answer: rich people should manipulate the government even more! Clearly, that must be the answer.

But isn't that how we got here in the first place?

Believe me, I know [our] democracy sucks. I've been to planning meetings in San Francisco. I've seen democracy sucking first-hand.

Our democracy systematically rewards the people who have the means, time and incentive to participate much more often than the average citizen. Anyone who visits enough town halls can tell: you see the same people over and over again, speaking louder than anyone else.

When you have a system that repeatedly gives bad outcomes in a variety of different situations, it's not enough to try to force new particular outcomes. You have to change the way the system works. That doesn't mean you try [and fail] again to get disengaged people involved in politics. Those people aren't involved in politics for a reason. They're busy; they're not rich or charismatic; they don't have strong motivations.

What you can do is change the situation around the disengaged people. The easiest facet is money. Most people do not spend money on politics. Only a small fraction do.

Andrew Yang had a proposal to give citizens a hundred dollars each that could only be spent on political campaigns. It wasn't near the top of his list of proposals, but I thought it was the best idea he had offered. Most people don't have the time or the desire to participate the way that social theorists imagine that they should. But what's great about money is that it is very easy to pool together.

The other thing that's great about money is that you have a lot of bandwidth for your signals. In an election, even a ranked-choice election, you submit maybe a few dozen bits of entropy to the great machine that rules the world and it tries to make something useful out of it. The advice bits are few; the world bits are many. The machine struggles. As the world becomes larger, the machine struggles more. Money is different; money can be spend in many, many different ways. The bandwidth becomes much larger; the machine can at least in principle function better.

In order to actually make sure that money is used in a positive way, though, you need to have a model of the people as they relate to the system of government. Economists like to talk about how the market aggregates information. So too should a democracy. But where a market aggregates information about people's activities, a democracy aggregates information about their opinions.

In other words, in order to fix democracy, you need to find the best way to aggregate people's opinions.

My theory here is simple: most people have a fair understanding of a few things and a poor understanding of most things. If the system could be organized so as to encourage people to spend money on issues they understand better than the norm, the information quality will be higher.

Some of this will have to depend on goodwill. The most clearly lucrative way to spend your money on politics will probably still be to lower your own taxes. But if we give people the opportunity to choose to spend their money on issues that relate to them, specifically, they might feel more included and more inclined to participate honestly.

There is a crisis of institutional trust in America.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/22/key-finding...

Improving democracy seems, to me, to be one of the best opportunities to rebuild this trust. People won't spend money -- "democracy dollars" -- in a positive and conscientious way if they don't actually believe it will work.

How do other large organizations build trust across diverse populations? They fragment. The Catholic Church wields its immense cross-cultural power through a network where most end-users are much more concerned with their local clergy than with the goings-on at the top. This isn't necessarily a model to be copied in its entirety. What's important is to understand how the architecture brings people in.

People are less frightened by small organizations than large ones. What's needed is a mechanism to connect people to those small organizations so that their unique personal knowledge can be propagated through the system.

When Silicon Valley embraced Wall Street, you signed your own death warrant, and basically said F* disrupting the status quo.

You can't possibly try to make this message politically agnostic and sound genuine (or informed).

It smells like an utopia. Chasing utopias already ended very bad.

One of the most important points of the communism was that everyone should have all goods and services he needs.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" said Karl Marx

>Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own!

My proposal would to let people, society and humanity live according to their natural rules and cycles. Trying to coerce people to do something "for the greater good" would never end up well.

Capitalism has it's problems, but we don't know any better system. And capitalism has the great advantage that it's a natural system, fitting society in an organic way.

To be sure that capitalism won't do much harm, we just have to make sure it is fair: no monopolies, fair competition and so on.

Wow I never thought I'd see this on a blog of Andreessen Horowitz. I was starting to think that nobody cared about value creation anymore.

We gave the lazy guys, good story tellers, all the power, and thereby the power how money flows and works.

Money is such a story: There exists some artificial thing, that can be turned into anything we want. What in reality doesn't exist, unless people work for it. Its seams more a trust relation turned into a fetish.

Obviously the stories turned everything in to giant circus pyramid game to generate more magic stuff, and everybody can have it. Well the poor without power, we keep stupid and poor, we can outsource to them, to do all the work and we all become story tellers.

Technology developed by curious nerdy scientists (also bad story telleres btw), could be used that a few are enough to feed and build for many many story tellers. Looks like magic, money can work for itself, hey more magic.

People who actually do something like women and artist and builders are continiously undervalued in this pyramid system as they are not 'usefull'. The working slaves all produced a lot of useless stuff. And as the majority became lazy guys, hey why change anything that is the way the world 'works'.

No, a little virus shows all was big story. In fact there is no magic stuff. Money is no value in it self. Now the few able to build are somewhere far away and take care of themselves.

Now the undervalued, who do the work are suddenly in high demand. Oh we clap and say thank you, thank you, but giving them power, mmmm do we really have to? Can we not just move on, go back to slavery fast.. Suddenly doing became interesting but hey please help can't do any more. I can generate trillions of magic paper if you want, eh trust me, please help. Lets get back fast to the time when the pyramid system worked, and we have to keep dreaming and move on.

It is likely that, we want to keep going on. Allthough it was just fun for a few. Humans love to continue to follow the path they are used to go.

Money is an invention and the way it flows is an expression of power but without trust it is useless. It doesn't do anything.

We all need food, a shelter, health, love, relations and a lot curious people solving hard problems, learning what makes a virus go around and how to stop it.

We should start to transform the rules and redefine how money works. For some this idea is so strange as this is a well known constant from heaven. It is not.

What if we give everybody some of this fuel. As long as you live you get money=trust every week just by existing you don't have to earn it and otherwise starve to death and die on the street. Then you can use your power, your vote to tell who you trust to send you a product or service. Oh but it becomes worthless over time. If you don't spend it, it becomes just paper. So no interest rates, no accumulation not inheriting wealth. Only one will have to pay for it, the earth we all together. What if...

What if we all share our knowlege for free..

Mmm now we have time to think. Some people don't like that. ..The long we think the more they yell to go back back...

A nice little story to good to be true.

An extremely wealthy person making an imperative to less wealthy people to "ignore partisan politics and focus on results!"

To this person I would ask... who had the capacity, the agency, the capital, the resources, (and given this article, presumably according to them, THE VISION) this entire time? You did. So rather than make an imperative to everyone with less to "get back on the horse" and "put aside petty differences"– why don't you examine the decisions you made, and examine the systems you were party to, which led to this colossal failure.

"I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know"... Uhhhhh people you don't know are dying everywhere meanwhile speculative finance i.e. markets i.e. your entire business is doing great. Fuck off

Here, in summary, my Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/heyMartinAdams/status/125166810880624230...

1/ Naturally, many entrepreneurs tend to believe that the insufficient supply of housing is either due to lack of willpower, insufficient belief in progress (see article below), high building costs, or due to restrictive zoning regulations.

2/ I hurt a little every time I read an article like that coming from well-meaning and intelligent people since these analyses are based on a core assumption: that if only those aforementioned constraints were removed, the supply of housing would increase in proportion to demand.

3/ This assumption, though, is incorrect, even though it’s wide-spread and relatable, especially with entrepreneurs, who solve problems by building new things! (I love solving problems by building new things too!) However, the housing market works differently.

4/ Notice the open-air parking lots in most urban areas: they’re hardly developed, used only for a few cars — even though (and this is crucial) there is an exceptional demand for housing in those areas.

5/ It’s not that these lots are not zoned for housing, or that it’s too expensive to build any kind of housing on those open-air parking lots. None of these things are true. The reason these parking lots exist is because property ownership incentives are flawed.

6/ A person who owns an open-air parking lot often makes more money over time through property appreciation (even minus property taxes), and is therefore not incentivized to put this property to its optimal use, i.e. to use it to provide more housing.

7/ The core problem is that the land market (and therefore the real estate market) is, in actuality, an entry monopoly; an entry monopoly occurs whenever a market is closed to new participants because supply (i.e. land in prime locations) can’t be increased.

8/ See, the market for automobiles (or software, etc.) is different: if there is a greater demand for cars, more cars can, and will, be created.

9/ New land in good locations, however, cannot be made; so if property developers want to build more housing in a good location, they have to buy land from someone who already owns land in that location (if they choose to sell, that is!).

10/ This artificially increases cost, artificially diminishes supply, and drastically limits the supply of affordable housing across the board. Unlike software, the housing market is not a free market. It is a monopoly. Like the game.

11/ There’s a lot more to this topic, but I’ve done my best to summarize a small part of it here in this thread. As you can tell, it’s a topic of great concern to me (to the extent that I wrote a book on it: http://unitism.com).

12/ I hope that what I was able to share has given you some pause; I feel a bit of a pang every time I read an entrepreneur saying “we can solve the affordable housing crisis by simply building more things with more effort.” This hurts. And it’s also uninformed in my view.

Let’s spend the next ten years building a system that can produce a vaccine in three months. Maybe have a national reserve of people standing by to participate in vaccine trials during a crisis.

Don’t have some of the technology? Invent it! Rules don’t allow it? Change the rules!

So, how many of the things you list are you building?

Did you even notice the Republican party in Wisconsin so desperate to stay in power they demanded that voters risk infection in order to vote? Have you not noticed the divisiveness that is overwhelming our social and political institutions? Did you notice that we have a generation of young people saddled with debt, while large corporations now line up for the dole? "The problem is desire"?

Sorry, but the condescension is unconscionable.

With good reason: in the midst of a global crisis, Andreessen launches himself into the billionaire-splaining hall of fame by enumerating a litany of critical projects he thinks others ought be taking seriously, while notably refusing to commit any of his own wealth and influence toward these causes, nor interrogating how his investing record over the last 20 years squares with any of these apparently deeply held principles.

If you think that's cruel, cover up the name on the essay and read it again. It sounds like an op-ed published by an undergraduate in the campus newspaper — anodyne generalizations set against the straw man of "Western life".

Net difference made in the world: zero

>The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

No Mark the problem is that American labor is overvalued and the Government does not subsidize it like it does for Agriculture. Why, you ask? Because manufacturing does not get you swing states.

American Manufacturing can rise again if there are no expectations of profit. Which is only possible with Government money. Or if you are Elon Musk, and can convince private investors to lose money for no reason.

"We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?"

NO thank you, we are not part of your ultra neoliberal project.

China is the place with the 'most skyscrapers' and it's a craphole for most citizens.

There is absolutely no reason to 'massively build' other than cram more people in and line the pockets of the investor class.

"We have top-end universities, yes, ... Why not educate every 18 year old?"

Marc, with all due respect, do you remotely grasp the notion of 'class' and what's going on with our schools? (Edit - I'm not saying I agree with it, but it exists for certain reasons)

First - the US sends a huge percentage of it's youth to College - far more than other places.

Second - many of them do not qualify and more and more are having to attend remedial classes. LA County kids were graduating at 55% rate, then 'poof' they lowered the standards to get a 77% rate.

US students are largely NOT ready for elite education. The issue is not 'getting everyone to harvard' - the issue is 'getting everyone who deserves to go to a decent school - into one'. This actually isn't a huge problem in the US.

Third - we DONT need more college! College was a legit mark of the elite (legitimately) but it's not anymore. We are failing huge cohorts of kids that do not go to college! The 'problem' is that we provide no path for non-college educated kids to get into the system. We also like to most college kids who think they get a free job. Nope.

Fourth - Education will always be at least somewhat elite. There will always be 5% who are considerably more spectacular, and they deserve a place to go. The US system is not perfect, but it's not bad either.

And this Thiel-esque bit: " Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?"

No - this post WW2 vector is the wrong kind of 'brute' Engineering. You know what matters more than 'supersonic flight'? Getting a much cheaper and safer flight. And guess what, that has been happening. The market pushes innovation in a specific direction and sorry, it's not 'to the moon' it's to 'LA to NY' for 1/2 the price.

Finally his bit about factories. I share his concern, but at the same time, he writes as though he completely ignores market realities again. We don't build more factories in the US because we've * externalized human rights* to another nation. If Chinese factories can pay pennies, fire people for going to the bathroom, spy on everyone 24/7, pollute up the yang, have the government back national players with money from the central bank and force international competitors out of business ... when then you see why there are 'few factories' in the US.

The 'answer' to 'more physical building' is something he is unwilling to say and that is a nationalist cause with trade barriers, something that neoliberals absolutely hate.

With issues such as lack of PPE, ventilators and chems. for testing it becomes much more clear obviously.

What would happen if the government literally said 'We declar this, that and this sector to be 'strategically imperartive' and therefore all production must happen within the country'. Well guess what? Those 'fancy factories' would get built. It would still be more expensive than China - but - the huge benefit from that is that this would entail a huge transfer of wealth to the poor and less educated for their doing actual, meaningful work. Which is always better than welfare or UBI.

Now - combine this 'factory' problem with the 'what do we do with all these no-college people' and you start to see how these issues resonate.

So yes we need to be 'building' but we need to be building 'up' not 'out'.

'Building out' is a 19th and 20th century strategy. More more more, bigger bigger bigger. Sorry - we are at least for now more advanced than China et. al. and the plan should be 'better'.

We do not need large scale migration or even construction. What we need is a way to make our system fair, accessible, to make sure that 'everyone gets a spot' in the system that has dignity. All of our institutions to work at a higher level - for example, government IT is a complete mess - our services could be improved dramatically with smart policies. US University Systems could expand in the 5 Billion-person developing world, for example. The US is going to help fare more people in the world by being better on all fronts than just having a bigger body count.

I think we can all kind of agree with the impetus of Marc's rant, but I think this is not particularly well thought out, he could take this one as a first draft.

When faced with an existential crisis, we tend to jump into fix it mode. But fix what? The symptoms or ourselves?

Let’s start with ourselves: we have failed miserably at being stewards to this earth. We have failed (not completely but in some very dramatic ways) at building a better future for our children and their children.

We should fix us, first, before we move on to fixing the symptoms of our flawed way of being in the world.

Don’t you think?

And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent altruism.

He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources available in the private sector to accomplish these things.

And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.

It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is a dead end.

1) If non-college educated kids had a legit path into the market (like they do in Germany) then surpluses would be more evenly distributed and housing wouldn't be such a problem.

But they don't have path because a) industry won't train and b) the US is an economically liberal place - there is no communitarian impetus (like Japan/Germany) to structure. The US doesn't really care that much about citizen v. non-citizen - the economic benefit in the short term is outsource/insource - there is no consideration for the population.

US Citizens are an externality to the business world.

2) On the college side, the US has already financialized the college race, arguably to a nearly corrupt degree. There are tons of kids going to Uni in the US, many of them ill-prepared, and then will be over-indebted.

3) Silicon Valley VC does not want longer-term risky bets, they want to make short term bits with big near term payouts, with long term outcomes again, irrelevant.

It makes much more sense to invest in something like Twitter/TikTok/SnapChat than most other things in this context.

4) And who exactly built those supersonic planes? Was it VC's? No! It was generally the government, with the impetus of war, specifically WW2 and the Cold War! Literally ARPANET.

5) 'Building here' would entail a coordinated national strategy that is anemic to free-market types they usually can't even contemplate it. It would take something like an economy-destroying epidemic (!) to realize the consequences of their lack of strategic investment at very least in things like specific manufacturing (medical, medicinal) and food production. All of a sudden those farming subsidies start to look a little different!

6) So what issue ties all of Marc's seemingly disparate points together? Why didn't he look deeper at Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore as examples? What's actually going on there at a more fundamental level that's different from the USA?

I'm not necessarily advocating for some big 'state-managed' anything or huge governmental intervention. But I am certainly advocating for rational and specific nationalist intervention, with a communitarian attitude - or at very least the contemplation of it.

The fact someone so enormously intelligent and influential 'didn't even go there' I feel is because the language is literally lost in North America. They have no idea what it even means. Much like entrepreneurialism, especially 'creative destruction' is a really hard concept for many business circles in Europe to get. It's like a foreign language.

What the fuck Andreessen? Are you so out of touch with reality that you think if the working class just worked a little harder, a little smarter, then we’d have flying cars?

To quote Mencius directly -- " One pathology of our age is a childlike credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don’t complain, build. We have done well at complaining; so what? What have we built?", which is basically tl;dr of Marc's article.

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!

It Takes Time To Build (With Skit) 2004-01-01 - Beastie Boys

https://youtu.be/fGv2VqE3xbY

https://open.spotify.com/track/0JXd86ImsreGIfgQoVsrYt

https://www.last.fm/music/Beastie+Boys/To+the+5+Boroughs/It+...

Even before the Lockdown commenced, we were testing all travelers as early as January and isolating those who were showing any signs of sickness. The Western countries did not do any of it. These two things alone helped slowdown the spread of the virus. There was no need for large amounts of ventilators, masks or PPE. Just common sense.

What the West got wrong was not "lack of ability" to build things. It was "lack of agility" to respond to the emerging crisis. The West should have gone in for a complete lockdown. The West should have tested (no contact thermal testing would have been sufficient) all travelers at the entry point. This slackness cost so many lives!

I remember having a discussion [1] about this almost a month ago when the first major destructive potential of this pandemic was still unravelling in the West. Many were skeptical about how India would respond and that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But no such disaster happened because of how proactive the Government of India had been since January. This proactiveness has allowed India to have really low number of positive cases compared to the West. This also doesn't put pressure on the medical system.

The lesson to learn here is that you should use common sense. A lot of it. First control the spread of the virus and then work on a cure. You can't let the virus wreak havoc and then expect a vaccine or a cure be available immediately to tackle it. It puts unnecessary pressure on scientists who need crucial time to figure out a cure. But I guess it is too late now and the West will just have to ride the wave. Unfortunately a lot of lives will be lost in the process. Very sad.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609604

Oh now we need imagination when companies with potential solutions for these problems over the past few decades couldn't get these investors attention, who would much rather throw more money to the same set of well-connected entrepreneurs than ignore the innovation happening all around the world in small cities and mid-sized towns, coming out of universities that aren't in the Silicon Valley / SF are or NYC or Boston.

So, the chickens are coming home to roost. We have societal problems that Silicon Valley VCs haven't done anything to solve. Am I surprised? Hell no. Do I believe this woah-is-us "let's build" BS from the same VCs that have built what we have so far. Hell no.

We need new imagination for investors too. The same class of investors will give us the same class of solutions to the same class of problems. Let's look elsewhere for ideas and inspiration. The solution is not Silicon Valley VC. The solution is not the same profit-driven health care institutions. The solution lies elsewhere. And that's what we really need imagination for.

Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome does not magically self-assemble, it starts with one person that takes action. You actually need hyper competent, hard charging, ambitious, skilled people of all sorts to go after the extreme challenges represented by such a huge re-industrialization. These people and their talents no longer exist in such high numbers among the population as they did prior to the gutting of the US industrial age. They are now rare and the capital that desires to fund them is equally rare.

If you want to produce them, you need to completely alter the incentive structures we arrange our economy around.

We should have 0% corporate tax rates for all domestic manufacturing concerns, to get started. Tax individual income at a higher rate.

Implement a robust system of income tax credits and abandon the minimum wage as it exists today. This is not my idea of course, Warren Buffett is probably its loudest supporter and he is absolutely right. Set the income tax credit system such that it guarantees a higher minimum wage of at least $12. By removing the strict front-facing minimum wage we have today (which blocks labor from the market), all businesses would immediately aggressively seek to hire anyone and everyone they can get their hands on. The workers would be guaranteed a minimum wage by the redistribution income tax credit system and there would be no labor-value blocker (aka the minimum wage) keeping businesses from hiring people.

If a state has a $12 minimum wage, and your labor is only worth $9, you're screwed. This solves that.

It's about absorbing max lower skill labor (where the unemployment problems tend to be over time) into the workforce. You make labor artificially cheaper, while simultaneously paying that labor a fair wage: we subsidize the outcome we want. They produce, they earn a good wage, they build savings and can start to become asset owners. They also start learning new skills (and later might start production of their own based on the accumulating of experience at making goods; an important catalyst in re-industrialization). The combination would unleash epic common-goods manufacturing output the likes of which the US hasn't seen in half a century.

It would make it economical to manufacture low-margin, lower value goods in the US again. It becomes a de facto subsidization for employment and manufacturing.

This would instantly change the US economy for the better.

Absolutely nothing would need to be built to achieve this.

Regulation is always presented as a tool to 'protect the public' but usually just serves to protect the wealth of the leading players.

Anything that is regulated moves into a state of deadlock and now most industries and our society as a whole are in this state. Most don't dare to do anything entrepreneurial, because there are legal percussions waiting for almost any meaningful economic activity you could initiate.

A highly mobile free market capitalistic system is a threat to those in power. They don't want more bold entrepreneurs who could compete and potentially endanger them. They want people who do their jobs 9-5 and then go home and watch TV.

If we want to move out of this society-wide paralysis, we need grassroots political movements who systemically disassemble the regulatory walls that have been built over decades and centuries.

People need to wake up to the fact that regulation isn't meant to serve them but is intended to keep them at the bottom. Because when the current market leaders of an industry rose to power, there was no regulation yet, which made their success possible in the first place.

If you argue that this is how things should be, namely that industries should only be unregulated in the beginning and then become regulated once you have a few dominant market players, it creates a big problem: It means that we carry a long tail of highly inefficient industries with us, because regulation makes new competition so much harder in these 'older industries'.

I think we can see that today with industries like mobile carriers for example. Basically an oligopoly which dictates prices and creates huge shareholder profits year after year.

Each industry is a pillar of society and we need to break open these 'older industries' which were heavily regulated and have them catch up to the status quo through new competition. That means going head to head against a lot of people who have a lot of capital at their disposal to prevent that from happening.

Yeah, NY also put out a "desperate call" for "40000 ventilators" in spite of needing only 6000. So that's really not a good indicator of anything.

Not to disagree with the core premise of the article, of course. We must be able to manufacture all critical equipment and supplies on US soil, with significant surge capacity.

> In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it.

False. Our family of 3 received $2900 because my wife and I took 2018 off so to the IRS it looks as though we need help. From which I conclude that everyone who made below cutoff threshold (which is unusually high for this) got money directly into their checking account, even though most people haven't been laid off yet.

And small businesses so far got $350B, with more blocked by austere scholars of pork in Congress.

> We should have gleaming skyscrapers

The utter devastation high density living is causing in NY would suggest otherwise. We need to spread the fuck out.