It's Time to Act – A Response to Marc Andreessen
blog.coryfoy.com
blog.coryfoy.com
But it's not practically feasible.
You can autogenerate bullshit, or manually do it with complete disregard for sourcing or legitimacy, but you can do neither for refutations.
I don't have a solution for this, but the old adage "truth prevails" is looking more and more dead.
Naturally it attracts people (although not _only_ people) who want to suck up to venture capitalists, or who share the same hyper-capitalist mindset.
If I may offer a prediction, and one totally meant in a spirit of friendship: that comment will not age well.
As for the spirit of friendship, and just to be clear, I believe the US's declining significance, although having some distinctly ignoble proximate causes, will ultimately be of benefit to her own citizens also. I really meant 'everyone'.
Yet parent calls it ignorant, of what? a sibling comment is "horrified" that the article gained so much attention here, although it seems to me that with it's focus on building stuff it's 100% on topic (which is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting").
As it's a little unsettling to me that other people find it horrifying that people like me found the article interesting, any details would be appreciated.
(OT: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." ', from the HN guidelines)
The details, such as they are, are too flimsy to be worth addressing in detail. It's all too dreary - the tired conflation of the 'West' with one large outlier nation, the endless shrill calls on public provision advocates to demonstrate what's been amply demonstrated for decades, etc etc etc.
I truly make efforts to not be crudely incendiary about matters of importance. I do fail more often than I'd like because the issues matter and evoke strong reactions. But I'm not even going to try in the case of an article so flatly stupid. It merits only dismissal, and has already had more attention than it deserves. Over and out.
> We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country.
And there it is. Racism is to blame. All the deaths in NYC due to unpreparedness, lack of funding over decades, a shitty private health system, no decent leadership from both sides of politics ... they're actually because the US is just a racist country. The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Sorry. You need to do better than that.
> Or, you know, break the systemic racist, classist policies that form the backbone of repression throughout this country.
Oh look, there it is again. Not enough hospitals being built? That's because we're racist. Core infrastructure falling apart? Yeah, racism. Not enough jobs to go around? That's racist too!
This is pathetic.
They never claim there is not racism in the United States, only that they do not agree that is why the system was built.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/why-new-jerseys-ven... Lawmakers in New Jersey, which is quickly becoming the new epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, are worried new emergency triage guidelines for the state’s hospitals could push younger, whiter patients to the front of the line.
“We do know that it exists, institutional bias exists throughout all of health care,” Persichilli said Wednesday
Does racism exist? Yes. Wide scale systematic institutionalized racism? Absolutely not.
Bad luck is when you're effectively ruined by the age of 5 thanks once again to who your parents were. The only way out for someone that fits this description is to adopt a self-reliant, goal directed attitude.
Self-reliant, goal directed behavior is essentially what people not born lucky or ruined do to improve their position in life.
What society can do to help is communicate clearly that the virtues of persistence, resilency, self-reliance and goal directed behavior are "cool" or in sociological-speak, society's normative values.
Unfortunately, since Rousseau and Marx, we have birthed a counter-culture that is determined to do the opposite. It's determined to place the locus of control over one's life outside of the individual and onto a nepharious "society".
Marx personally was an unhappy, deeply defective, and cruel personality. His philosophy stems directly from this. It attracts people who share his defects- namely people filled with resentment, envy, a desire to extract revenge for perceived slights and a lust for absolute power.
The hope is that eventually, through CRISPR and other techniques, that as a side effect of improving human functioning the well-spring of such people will simply dry up.
Until then, we have to do battle with a philosophy which preaches the diametric opposite of what we know leads to human flourishing and happiness.
Poverty rates are disproportionately high among black and hispanic citizens but as a percentage of total population they are absolutely dwarfed by white poverty. What is the reason that so many white Americans are living in poverty? Is it perhaps possible that it is a similar reason that black and hispanic citizens are living in poverty?
Poverty rates are always written as a percentage of the population of that race but if you rewrite them to be a percentage of US population a different narrative starts to emerge...
~2.7% of Americans are black people in poverty. ~3.0% of Americans are hispanic people in poverty. ~6.5% of Americans are white people in poverty.
We have problems of economic opportunity in this country. Writing it off as racism is missing the elephant in the room.
Supposedly, commentors here have something of value to offer, otherwise it would just be a news headline site without commentors. I am taking whatever value I have to offer and going elsewhere. I suggest you do the same. Sure, HN will turn into a political echo-chamber but it's really that already, right? I had 10% of my karma- whatever that is and whatever it's good for- disappear in an hour when I proferred the opinion that I didn't blame Trump for the virus.
You get a result like that - people telling you that that should NOT be your opinion and here's the punch in the face to teach you that lesson- and you know the forum is already a lost cause.
Gab has a browser plugin that will let you comment on any website, including this one and not be censored. Also there are scrappy alternatives to Reddit, saidit I think is one, where its not a groupthink party.
It's just a period of time we're living through and technology will catch up with it.
Historically, problems had to go on much longer than people reading about them later realize they did before corrective action was taken. This is no different.
For all the busy-beaver downvote-assassins on HN- way to waste the days and hours of the prime of your life, fighting the losing battle against freedom!
You go girl!
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/cory_foy/status/1251705040873689088
It's also quite clear he takes issue with the Trump administration and Marc's attempts to downplay their role in the current crisis and our preparedness.
> The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Cory didn't say the IRS is racist for requiring bank accounts, he's saying racist/classist policies prevented people from getting them in the first place.
You're intentionally misrepresenting his response to claim everything is about the current crisis — it is obviously not. Nor is Marc's original article.
Your point is reasonable, I think, but the scale is pretty off as it relates to VC funding vs. public spending.
The money does and can make a huge difference even if it only helps with building out a proof-of-concept? Uber took on the entrenched Taxi industry world-wide with VC money. Zenefits did the same to the insurance industry.
The problem is, one cannot compete with the incumbents head-on, for which one might need a gazillion dollars from the get-go, but I think one can definitely take on them with a humble investment to the tune of a few million dollars... Isn't that anyway the promise of nimble, innovative startups [0] -- out-manouver large corporations? I don't see VCs balking at startups competing squarely with a FAANG, say, for instance. Somehow, this rationale that the government has deeper pockets seems like a dishonest excuse.
I agree public spending does trump any amount of money private investors can conjure up, but I do not agree that they are blame-free for not moving the needle forward, because they don't really lack ambition on-paper at least [1].
And, hey, software has been eating the world without significant public spend for a long time. There's been talk of private money building the future [2] for sometime, now...
/rant
[0] https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...
What’s the point of having a plan if it’s not put into action?
Reminds me of this timeless quote:
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson
We where told we would be punched in the mouth and guidance was not enough to prevent the damage
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
The USA have alerted NATO allies and Israel in mid-November (!) about coronavirus: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-dise...
The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives. If it's any solace, us other NATO countries haven't been better, but at least our leaders were not as stubborn as to claim "corona was under control" until Feb. 24 or "[the Democrat's] new hoax" (Feb. 28) as Trump did.
The ones who did not waste any time and who actually do have a standing pandemic response team are Asian countries like Taiwan - Taiwan is directly adjacent to China, has a shitload of travel to China under normal circumstances, got sidelined from the WHO thanks to Chinese pressure, yet only 422 cases with 6 deaths IN TOTAL.
That's what happens when a competent government is in action: they locked down travels on end of december and put actual experts in charge.
What does Trump do, in contrast? Infection rates are nowhere near "under control", and he appoints his daughter and son-in-law on a "council to re-open America": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/14/21220755/t...
Yes, the US alerted allied nations of a new disease that ought to be watched. Similar warnings went out for SARS, MERS, and Ebola, as well as (for example) the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
>The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives.
"Patient Zero" arrived in Seattle from Wuhan on January 15. At that point
* The WHO was still denying that COVID19 could be spread by person-to-person contact.
* Trump was still impeached by the House of Representatives and awaiting trial in the Senate.
What would have happened if on January 1 Trump announced the only thing that would have prevented COVID19 from arriving in the US: A complete and indefinite shutdown of all land, sea, and air borders?[1] Trump would have been denounced by the entire world as a racist sexist fascistNaziKKK preparing to seize unlimited power to avoid being removed from office, using the thin pretext of a disease that seemed only China's problem.
>"[the Democrat's] new hoax"
No. Trump called the Democrats' response to what the administration was doing about COVID19 a hoax, consistent with his describing what led to his impeachment as a hoax a few sentences before the above words.
[1] And before you say that that wasn't necessary, that a 14-day quarantine would have been sufficient, a) That time period wasn't known for sure then. Very, very little was known about the disease or SARS-CoV-2, partly because China wasn't saying anything and WHO wasn't inclined to get China to talk. b) A 14-day quarantine for all visitors is effectively a shutdown of the border. Very, very few people are willing to visit any country that mandates such a thing at entrance.
CNN on January 30: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...
We have a similar issue in Germany at the moment - while we do have Ms. Merkel as chancellor, the advisor group (Leopoldina) only has two women in it and no representatives of e.g. disabled people - leading to the problem that issues of childcare or care for disabled persons, or poor people, or people locked down in totally inadequate cramped conditions completely lacked representation in their latest recommendations.
In France, it's similar but worse - there have been violent explosions last night as people literally cannot endure the enormous stress that a really strict lockdown in cramped housing causes.
A lack of diversity in advisory groups and task forces has real, quantifiable and sometimes deadly consequences.
If existance of two people on a comittee were the only thing standing between success and failure, then the US still has some deep systemic problems.
Should the left have to prove their models? Yes! And so should the right! They both see outcome as intent[1], and that's not a useful way to comrpomise and actually achieve change.
1: School funding is different for black communities because it's poorly optimized for merit and susceptible to horrible feedback loops, not because racist people decided it. Criminal juatice/prison reform isn't about making life better for criminals, it's about making sure people have people have the chance to be productive members of society, which is better for everyone involved.
Maybe I'm missing the portion you're looking at, but all I'm seeing this says is that the plaintiffs argued it was about race, and the defendants didn't have good evidence as to their reasoning why they did it. To my eyes, and based on a lot of the information presented in the article, it is just as likely (if not more so) that it was about class. I sincerely doubt that district wanted to invite the poor white students from the full district any more than the poor black ones.
What that means is that this attempted change, which would have been racist in outcome if possibly not intent, was defeated by viewing it as racist as intent. Was that a good thing? Maybe? I guess it depends on what else they did.
How do you rectify the actual problem, when you assume it's people not liking others with different skin colors? You vilify those people and try to punish them or change them or wait for them to die or by marginalized, none of which seem to work very well. But if they weren't actually racist, and it was more a problem of class and poverty, there are other solutions, because in addition to trying to change the people you can also try to help those in poverty.
Distilled to a simple form, it's like seeing a white shop owner turn away a black homeless person. You can assume racism, and ostracize the shop owner. Or you can assume classism, and do the same but also try to help the homeless person. I think in many cases racism is used as an easy way to "resolve" a problem without addressing it at all. It exists, but it's also intimately ties with class and poverty, and one of those is much more useful to address at this point than the other, but it also much less likely to be addressed.
Yes. That solution, to the problem of rich white people trying to stop sharing their school funding with poor black people, is to not allow them to leave. That's what happened. Nobody ostracized anyone and your simple form is an invalid analogy. If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
But what about the solution to the problem of the rich people not wanting to share with the poor people? What if that's a major part of the problem? Was that addressed at all, or just swept under the rug as "racist people will be racist, just don't let them"? Preferably, something that also addressed the issue of poverty, or at least kept it acknowledged as part of the problem.
> If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
Exactly. But is that the better solution? What about the poor white person that comes in next? Do they get turned away, because they're not black? What about the fact that they're both still homeless?
When you identify the wrong problem, you're at risk of implementing a worse solution. Racism is bad, and it's sometimes the case it perfectly explains what happened, but not always, and not often entirely, but it's convenient because it means nobody else has to change or do anything. We all get to point at the bad people that make convenient scapegoats and comment about how we would never do anything like that, while nothing really changes, because the problem was only partially racism to begin with, and there's not a lot to change structurally to stop it that hasn't already happened when it is racism.
Whether proposing something new or preventing something new, the position needs to be defended with facts. The status quo gets extra points because we have experience with how it works, but equally important we have experience with how it doesn't work.
> That sort of worldview doesn't mesh well with attempts to simulate a planet inside a desktop PC.
I'm not really espousing that as much as experiments where possible or found (in the case of natural experiments), and sober consideration of the results. When's the last time you think you were presented with with a measured assessment of a major policy that wasn't blatently biased through omission of facts for one (or both!) sides from a popular public source such as a politician, activist group, or news agency (you'll get closest with the news, but they know their audiences and what keeps them coming back)?
This is less a problem of liberals and conservatives and more a problem of liberal and conservative politicians and activists warping messages because they inevitably become so tribal that their stated goals often end up taking a back-seat to the short-term gain of hurting the competing narrative at any cost.
“The agreement would include $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing, which have been major Democratic demands.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/19/trump-co...
I don't know if this is true. Withholding aid to migrants that don't have legal immigration status might not be the right thing to do right now. However it need not have any racist motive. Yes it will have a strong racial bias in it's outcome but does that make it racist?
Functionally, yes absolutely?
If racially biased outcomes just somehow keep happening, "racist" is absolutely a correct English word for that phenomenon.
Immigration policies can (should) be discussed without taking into account people's race, and still lead to racially-biased outcomes, simply because the majority of immigration-seekers have a race that's different from the majority of people in the target country.
I don't think this is the case. I don't think the US bases immigration policy even partially on race.
Some nations leaders are a threat and their people are going to have a harder time but that is not a race issue. For example a North Korean would have a harder time than a South Korean yet they are the same race.
To me it seems similar to the difference between murder and manslaughter. Intent seems to make the crime more morally wrong. Neither are good but they are seen as very different things.
Perhaps my understanding of the word is wrong but if it is I feel that English is missing the ability to express an important nuance if that's the case.
That's why this is a class issue.
And then look at the racial make-up of those on the lower rungs of the class system.
That's why this is a race issue.
Is the author saying we had all the tools ("ability") but we did not have the people in positions of power that the author approves of?
People in "power that the author approves of" seems like subtext that one would have to see on their own reading of the article. To me it seems like the author was arguing against some aspects of capitalism and how incentives for profit can misalign with benefits for society.
https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-...
There are no animals, besides us, that ideate about anything except benefit to themselves and their offspring. However "bad" we are, we are the sole species that has spent a full single second of its existence trying to be "good" instead of just eating and fing and killing our way to the next day, possibly feeding the animal next-to us to our lovely offspring. For every other animal, killing an adjacent creature to take what they have is exactly is routine, and they are unapologetic.
It is great to see humanity become more impact-aware, and I have high hopes for an even more enlightened future, but it is somewhat absurd to presume that honesty, kindness, and altruistic thinking are somehow the baseline because that is the way we would like it. We imagine that something is "wrong" when they aren't happening. These are the default conditions. Every time a human departs from "hand-to-mouth", and from rationalizing deaths of the weak is a valiant leap from natural instincts.
By these measures, humanity's response has been unprecedented. The coordination, however flawed, has never been seen like this in the history of this world or any other that we have seen. It is only the grandiosity of our fantasies about what we are that lets us tell these alternate stories.
Marc Andreessen's diagnosis was a knee-jerk guess at where the problems are and is probably wrong. Cory does a good job of pointing that out. However, if anything makes Americans wake up to the looming strategic threat of China that has been around for at least a decade then that is probably for the best. The CCP are the same type of 'friend' as the Saudis.
The US hasn't been making sensible strategic decisions since at least '08. There is a lot of spending on wars that don't suppress rivals and a lot of debt that isn't making the economy robust. The research advantage that America once had is being chipped away; Huawei won't be the last time China achieves technical dominance over US tech companies.
Lockdown takes us from exponential growth to linear growth. This has played out so many times, in so many different regions, that I think it's pretty clear as to what the response accomplished on the plus side.
You can quibble over what lockdown should look like, and which of the measures are not necessary to stop the exponential, but it's pretty clear that the form of it adopted in every country that has tried it... Works.
Do you have data that supports lockdown does this better than advisories?
Every other place has had exponential growth, that goes linear a week or two after lockdown is in place.
That's more than enough evidence for me. We know that lockdown works. We know that wishful thinking doesn't. All we can do is tweak the parameters of what lockdown looks like.
[1] Except it does have a lockdown! Whoops! It banned gatherings, shut down parks, closed borders, closed daycares, schools, sporting events, closed public spaces, etc, etc, etc. It's a lockdown by another name.
[2] Sweeden also closed its borders, and banned large gatherings. It didn't do most of the other things. It's currently in the exponential growth stage.
[3] Singapore is also on an exponential trajectory. Which is why it is also shutting down.
If we leave the country we have to go into 14 days quarantine.
Our death rate per unit population (3) is a lot lower than, say the UK (23), even though we are free to move about and they are not. So lockdown is not always as effective as might be hoped and also not always necessary. Local conditions mean a lot, not all populations are willing to behave responsibly even when the law demands it, while some merely need to be told what is necessary.
To be clear, I think the original post by Andreessen and this response are both silly in their own ways.
I just find the public discourse around this very entertaining.
I have little patience for the second point which is core to social justice activism. I have little patience for MAGA protectionism either so I’ll address the first point on preparedness.
We, across the globe, had varying degrees of strategic preparedness but utterly failed with respect to the tactics and execution required to make those strategies a reality. A good example is the CPIP: Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness guide:
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/flu-influenz...
This strategy is almost perfect with a few tweaks but Canada dropped the ball on three fronts: 1. Data Sharing, 2. Process Scaling, and 3. Communication. The failures started with an inability to integrate Border Services data into the plan and the system failed to anticipate the scale of isolating the peak number of Snow Birds and March Break travellers returning back to Canada.
Strategy is a starting point but it is not the full story with respect to COVID-19 preparedness.
This is precisely why we were scrambling for ventilators a few weeks ago: it wouldn't have been profitable to build them a year ago, because hospitals wouldn't buy them, because they didn't have the ability to use, store, or maintain them.
Another example is the current situation with toilet paper. What's happening here is not that people are pooping more than they were a few months ago. It's just that they're doing it more at home, rather than at work. TP for home use and TP for commercial use are different products (anyone who's pooped at work or in a public bathroom knows this), made by different companies and using different supply chains.
While we have enough capacity to make and ship all the TP we need right now, what's happening is that commercial TP makers are (rightly!) not switching to making TP for home use, because that would be really expensive for them to do. They don't have the proper supply chain (contracts, logistics, etc.) to support it, either. End result: no TP in the stores. [0]
I saw a shower thought on Reddit that said something to the effect of "the economy is in a bad state right now because people are only buying what they need." While this vastly oversimplifies the issue, there is a good amount of merit to it. Right now, most of my spending on stuff that is not rent is literally food for myself and my dog, and the occasional item to make this lockdown a bit more bearable. There's no way I'm spending money on anything that isn't immediately useful or will become necessary in the near to medium term future. And, I'm one of the lucky ones who still has their job, because I can WFH.
OTOH, there are a number of things I hope we can learn from this lockdown. I've already written about how I hope people can realize Keynes was right, and we don't really have to work so damn much. [1] More importantly, though, I hope people can realize that most of our elected representatives simply do not have our interests in mind (e.g. Trump wanting to "reopen the economy" by Easter, in spite of all the deaths that would have caused), and start voting in people who actually do represent them.
It's an absolute crying shame that the US doesn't have even the most basic levels of worker protections that every country in Europe offers. So many people are suffering right now through no fault of their own, simply because we can't afford to let people who have lost their jobs have more than a pittance of unemployment benefits, and a pathetic $1200 check they had to wait to get because someone wanted their signature on them.
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[0]: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about...
Funny, that you say that. What happened after WW2 with taxes and the economy?
It's 2020. We don't have the deck stacked in our favor like we did in 1945. We've got massive obligations and a populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts, loan forgiveness, UBI, etc which are all untenable given that our existing social programs are already approaching insolvency. The government is on pace to spend half or more of GDP this year alone. Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
US Social Security is effectively funded by US Treasuries. There is no "locked box" that somehow the US government "saves" contributions into. The national debt is debt generated now to be paid in the future, perhaps. The question about what that borrowing is spent on now is the question. Right now, spending it on social programs will aid the individuals that otherwise would be in dire poverty. Spending it on infrastructure (and the US infrastructure is woeful) is useful investment that will generate returns in the future.
So the answer is to do both.
>populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts
Its corporations that setup that system and those are sole beneficiary of the system. Now days you cannot default on student debt even if you are working in completely different area.
Corpos eat up all profits in times of prosperity, and in times of crisis all they do is cry for bailout money. Which they will promptly get, award the ceo for their cunning skills and move on.
That is the problem, the business model of too big to fail. That is straight out rent seeking.
And that is the problem. Bloated 'too big to fails' copros are holding nations as hostages. Allowing them to act like they are 'too big to fails'.
> Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
This is another clear example of current insanity. Building infrastructure was the solution, it worked. It gave money to the bottom guy, who spend it locally allowing small business to stay afloat further propping up confidence in spending.
But now only solution is to shower fire with money in hopes that eventually it will die down.
It should do it as long as the rest of the economy (consumers / businesses) are not. However, the money should be going to Main St, not Wall St.
Equity and Debt holders can and should be taking haircuts and losses in recognition of the risk of their investments. Bailing out Wall Street just leads to continuing asset bubbles as investors seek returns independent of risk.
The problem will be when does the government withdraw that support? And how? As business and consumption returns, the government should reduce its addition to the money supply proportionally.
The government should be helicoptering money into the system, it can print endless amounts of it.