Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's a valid criticism and something that ran through my mind when reading the article. But keep in mind that there's orders of magnitude difference in what they invest vs. the federal government.

According to these 2 articles, it could be around THREE orders of magnitude -- ~4 billion in for them in 2014 vs. ~4 trillion for the federal government.

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

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53624

One way to think about it is that they could plow 100% of their money into physical infrastructure, and come up with something like half an aircraft carrier ($8.5 billion according to this article):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier

-----

Looking around a bit more, all of venture capital combined is something like $100 B / year. Which is less than 20% of what's spent by the military in a year, leaving aside all the other federal programs that could produce physical infrastructure.

Apparently, all of VC is also less than half the interest that the federal govt pays on its debt...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277501/venture-capital-a...

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

> His work is fostering an industry whose competitive advantage is not having to build anything tangible for the public's benefit

His work doesn't foster this. Being able to sell a product that has nearly infinite margins will naturally be more profitable than the alternative.

> not having to pay taxes on their profits.

The government has enough tax revenue, how about they stop spending it on pointless wars and destruction.

Fine up until the last cheap shot. None of those conflicts were wanted or started by the US. Saddam invaded Kuwait, the Taliban enabled 9/11, Assad provoked a civil war in Syria.

Disengaging always makes things worse. After the ‘Surge’ in Iraq the US tried to pull out and what happened? ISIS. The US pulled out of north Syria and our (talking broadly, I’m a Brit) allies the Kurds got massacred and thousands of ISIS prisoners got loose again. Walking away doesn’t work, we tried that with Afghanistan, just leaving it to the Taliban after the Soviets pulled out, and they came after us in New York anyway. It’s a small world whether we like it or not, and we’re in it together.

I always get a bit conflicted with Marc Andreessen stuff.

Like this article starts out with a bold claim that's...wrong.

Germany have done well. A western country has done well. Elephant in the room, massive 80 million person country, major western power, and the American claims no-one's done a good job because the US hasn't.

And then he goes into talking about having pre-prepared therapies or a vaccine. Again, we already have to an extent. You can't make a vaccine before the virus exists, but you can have a way of rapidly making one. We do have pre-prepared vaccines, like this one:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-03-27-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-...

Perhaps, again, he's just talking about the US?

Perhaps the medical system works better in Germany than in the U.S., but the rest of the article's points stand:

- Rents are sky high, and the landowners and people in power have no intention of changing that. In fact, they import more people at any opportunity in order to increase the size of the industrial reserve army and push up rents.

- Germany has no substantial capacity of manufacturing simple goods like masks.

- While Germany still has manufacturing, the middle and lower classes are exploited and relatively poor.

But people get what they vote for.

This is news to me that the German middle and Lower classes are relatively poor.

Who is this in comparison to?

Could you share where you got this info?

I think its a very big mistake to attempt to quantify quality of life with the numbers below but I could see how someone could try to make the case that Germany is relatively poor vs the USA:

Germans are taxed much higher than people in the US: A tax rate of 42% on income over 57K euros, vs 22% in the US (and the US bracket tops out at 37% for 500K USD). Gross national income is lower, 54K in Germany vs vs 63K for USA (though still quite good). Other sites peg Germany as 82% the purchasing power of the US, though less cost of living. Yet many durable goods are much more expensive in Germany. Cars are ~28% more expensive, gas is more expensive, electronics are more expensive: iPad in the US costs $800 vs $950 in Germany. Utilities are 56% more expensive in Germany, clothing 40% more expensive.

Some stats: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Germany/Un...

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

Both of you make excellent points. My only comment is that it seems like the government (or at least the current administration, despite its multitude of shortcomings) wants to revitalize the American manufacturing industry. They are just failing in their approach (e.g. tariffs & trade wars). I believe with some guidance from the private sector or simply a good pitch, the feds could be quite receptive to the idea of funding programs aimed at building-up next gen manufacturing in the U.S. (particularly if project proposals can be expressed in # of manufacturing jobs that would be created).

As a side note, I haven't heard of "Elon Musk’s alien dreadnoughts — giant state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost" but I share the enthusiasm for such gigafactories. Next gen factories should certainly bake-in flexibility. Machines that act more like 3D printers than injection mold-ers(?), and have the ability to switch from making, say, car parts to ventilators and N95 masks without a massive effort (or simply switch from making product A to product B depending on consumer demand trends).

Lastly, just a thought, I'm sure VCs have been pitched hundreds of times on specific 'market disrupting' products from wearable tech, to drones, to personal jetpacks. But I wonder how many times they have been pitched an idea for funding company that could make all of these things, and aims to significantly lower the barriers to rapid prototyping of physical goods. meh?

Elon Musk’s "alien dreadnoughts" I think was just referring to future Tesla factories rather than every conceivable kind of product.

With so much money earmarked for the military, how absurd would it be to create a "health force" alongside the Space Force?

I predict this will happen when the US realizes that health of its citizens is a matter of national security. If that doesn’t happen during this pandemic, then I don’t know what can make it see that simple fact except a war happening in the country.

The name might be a bit different though: say, National Health Service.

Or maybe we could call it the US Public Health Service: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Public_Health_...

The US spends about 600 billion on the military and about a trillion on Medicare and health.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

That trillion in Medicare is due extremely overpriced supplies that in any other develop country would be exponentially cheaper.

Depends on how it is counted. If the budget was counted like other countries the defense budget would be over 1.2 trillion per year:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-ameri...

We literally have one; see #6:

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

But I agree- what if we treated it as seriously as [can't believe this is a real thing] the Space Force.

Not absurd at all. Since a billion years ago the South African (National) Defence Force has always had four equal branches:

- Army

- Navy

- Air Force

- Medical

But the USA is already mostly there: there are eight uniformed services. One is the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps that employs the surgeon general.

But you will have to stop your military's obsession with earning combat action badges. From what I can tell its creating a class-hierarchy inside the armed services.

That won't help if your aim is to create a serious non-combat uniformed service with the same prestige that mainly does nursing.

South Africa as a country is only 110 years old. come on now....

I wasn't prepared to find out when they setup the SAMHS - I have a small phone.

It turns out it was 1979. Which for HN is nearly a billion years ago :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Military_Health_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com