Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, assume I'm bought into this idea - where would I even begin?

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.

In many cases, I am not sure his solutions address the real problem.

Housing is rising in price as more people pile into fewer cities. There is no housing crisis in Spartanburg, Louisville, Lethbridge or even Houston. You can build all the homes you want, but unless they are in Manhattan or San Franciso, a billion new homes won't make the condos there cheaper.

You can also build all the colleges you want, but the returns on that are starting to narrow. Hundreds of thousands of grads end up unemployed or underemployed. We could make college free, but that wouldn't create more jobs that require such a degree. Are a million extra college grads at a mass-production school really going to change anything? Employers don't accept Coursera courses as a substitute for a degree and I suspect such a school would be viewed like Coursera. It doesn't help that in America and to a lesser extent Canada, people zoom in on the school ranking and reputation. A lot of the value of the university to an individual has nothing to do with what is taught in classes there, but how competitive it was to get into.

I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out.

Is what makes Harvard special that it is doing something uniquely right or that it has the unique ability to draw the best?

I don't see your point re: housing. The current situation is where the equilibrium has naturally ended up. SF is much more expensive than small cities, but people still get enough value from it (or think that they do) to pay the higher cost and live there. If some of the people on the margin moved to a cheaper second-choice place, they'd be slightly worse off, otherwise they would have already done that. So telling them to move to Louisville doesn't make them any better off.

However, if more innovative ways of building (and getting approval to do it) could make housing twice as plentiful and half the price, that would make them much better off.

Land is expensive in SF, and it is hard to get approval to build new housing. But it's not the only problem. Just building can be insanely expensive, like this project where it's going to cost almost $900k per unit to build affordable housing [1]. It's not clear if some of that is land cost, but it seems to imply that is not the case because it sounds like this is land that is already owned and dedicated to affordable housing.

[1] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/supes-question-890k-per-unit...

> I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out.

IMO that's pretty short-sighted. This line of reasoning is that the degree is valuable _because_ its exclusive, not because the degree is evidence of particular skills gained.

If you simply took the exact same course structure and grading from a Harvard degree and put it online for thousands, the skills gained would be identical.

Obviously being admitted to Harvard signals things besides skill. Wealth and connections, for example, though I would argue maintaining those value signals is harmful to society. It's unfortunate that this dean values those things over increased access to education.

> Is what makes Harvard special that it is doing something uniquely right or that it has the unique ability to draw the best?

'Excellence' in institutions is self-fulfilling. Harvard is seen as being the best, and therefore students choose to go there because they believe it's the best. Since the best students go there, Harvard is indeed the best. At the end of the day it's just perception that drives the cycle. Oh also being ludicrously wealthy.

> IMO that's pretty short-sighted. This line of reasoning is that the degree is valuable _because_ its exclusive, not because the degree is evidence of particular skills gained.

The dean didn't disagree that this was a major aspect of its value.

> If you simply took the exact same course structure and grading from a Harvard degree and put it online for thousands, the skills gained would be identical.

And which one would find jobs the easiest?

> It's unfortunate that this dean values those things over increased access to education.

The dean realizes that in a digital society, most things rapidly become winner take all. Their university has cachet, but not Harvard level cachet. They do not think that 99% of universities would survive everyone moving to online education.

Also, here's an essay I really like written more from a tech/software engineer perspective about how to align your career towards building (with an emphasis on building our way out of the climate crisis): http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange

I've pivoted my career to working on the Julia programming language, because of its focus on science and engineering (_building things!_) rather than what I used to be doing in the software world (e.g. my past job at google), squeezing out more dollars from advertising. https://julialang.org/

From my perspective a lot of the problem is indeed about _motivation_ and _imagination_, like Marc says.

One place where I'm finally starting to see this kind of desire to build making its way into the public sphere (and not just resonating in tech circles) is with all the growing energy around a Green New Deal (https://www.sunrisemovement.org/green-new-deal).

This is the first time in at least a decade that I can remember politicians talking with the same attitude Marc was. The climate crisis is an incredible opportunity to BUILD! And to build like we haven't built in generations!

I love your desire to find companies working in this space. I am interested to see what responses you get on that front. But I also think a serious way we can help is by shifting the public consciousness towards _belief in our ability to build_, by advocating for things like the GND. So this is how I'm spending my outside-work time right now: volunteering and organizing to spread the vision of a society that BUILDS, and fighting for political candidates that share that vision. :)

(Here's an analysis of the Green New Deal published in Energy Research & Social Science): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...

I'm in exactly the same boat as you. I want to help build the city of the future, but as a data scientist, I have no idea where to start.

This is advice I haven't followed myself, but might start following: talk with people who are working on building megastructures--not necessarily in your city--and ask how they got started. There aren't any online bootcamps for how to build a monorail, so "tribal knowledge" is probably the only way to go.

I'll let you know if this methodology works for me!

I think it starts with the financial system. The current system incentivizes bureaucracy, regulation and stagnation in part due to the cantillion effect but also indirectly because it destroys capital, increases debt and prevents a savings / capital asset accumulation desire in the populace. Say what you want about the gold standard but it did lead to the great industrial revolution in such a short period of time providing a -somewhat- playing level field for inventors and technologists to push forward while Kings and courtier, Parlamentarians and Senators had a very difficult time ‘controlling the markets’. I see the return to a non inflationary reserve currency as the first order problem to be solved.

Another benefit of a hard-money system (bitcoin would be better than gold nowadays) is that governments can only wage war by spending hard money. And they can only get hard money by extracting it from citizens. It puts a very strong limitation on the government’s ability to wage war, when they need to convince us all to pay for it rather than printing money.

Another common trope is that deflation limits the economy. News flash - you can have a single dollar as long as it can be split to 10000 zeroes. We had a successful global economy for years before fiat took over.

Exactly. As it stands wealth is drained away from the people with skills to the people with quills. Thus we end up with mountains of strangulating regs and no bullet trains or hyperloops. I remember Germany, early 2000s, same story: they had their beautiful maglev train on a test track run in a circle for 11 years. They couldn’t build it anywhere. Environmental, political, regulatory ‘uncertainty’. Finally the Chinese invited Siemens on a joint project to build a real track for Shanghai. There is still no maglev train in Germany but several in China...

I generally agree with your viewpoint, but the argument against deflation isn't from needing to clerically split currency units, but rather that having currency itself appreciate delays purchases and causes the economy to stall.

But deflation doesn't seem to have held computing back much. And when someone wants a loaf of bread, they're going to buy it regardless of being able to save if they wait a week. I do agree that it will generally slow the economy, and this is a good thing for sustainability and conserving natural resources.

A good indicator that we're well past prudent investing into basically gambling is the SV bubble where equity is paying to flood cities with inexpensive e-scooters, hoping to create a culture of renting them so they can gain a future income stream. The physical goods are so meaningless to the financials that many end up destroyed or discarded. That's the kind of "investing" that the past two decades of artificially low interest rates have caused.

It makes people prefer to buy what they truly need. And over time, things cost less. It incentivizes saving over consumption. And with private money, there can be alternatives to a single currency. The hardest money is saved, and the softer money is spent first.

If you're actually set on the ideas laid out there, don't join a pre-existing company. Find a domain you're passionate about advancing, learn what you need to validate your hypothesis on improvement, then do what you need to do to advance it. If you don't have any passion about whatever you'd be doing, there's not really any point; the world doesn't advance because of people who don't care about what they're doing. Those people make a whole bunch of money, though.

This answer is a shame though. It would be more efficient for a lot of passionate people to join companies with an existing head start instead of starting a bunch of small efforts. More wood behind fewer arrows. A big part of this problem is that our society glorifies entrepreneurship more so than coming together in large cohesive groups to collectively do something big. For example, much of what this article discusses are political problems. Those problems need large political movements and institutions, not startups.

The answer is a shame, but until collective ownership becomes more common, it's the right one.

Put more simply: Quit your job, learn to be an expert in a new field, raise capital, start a company, change the world. Simple.

You don't need to be an expert in a field to raise capital or start a company. Most of the most valuable companies in the world weren't started by experts, and most of the most influential ones as well. Venture capitalists will throw money at just about anything.

The parent comment is asking for tractable ways for a person to help improve things. Starting a company is not tractable for almost anyone. If you have kids, are poor, etc, you need some form of income. If you don't fit the right mold, you're unlikely to get VCs to invest in you.

Starting a company is not a feasible option for most people, and the average company fails and ends up causing nothing but harm for all involved (in the form of lost years of their life they could be doing something that didn't fail so).

Your answer amounts to "you can't do anything. It's impossible unless you're so privileged or already independently wealthy that you can start a company".

Your answer sounds like "Well, Bill Gates made the Bill Gates foundation, just make your own research institution".

A software engineer is privileged. You're acting as if he or she was a fast-food worker. If you want to actually change things, you've got to use what privilege you have to advance things.

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