Hacker News Reader

Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor

I don’t find this to be true

The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.

Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.

View on HN

State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape. E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with Falcon-9.

Sounds like a false dichotomy. NASA got all these different subcontractors to feed, in all these different states and they explicitly gutted MOL and dynasoar and all the air force projects that needed weird orbits and reentry trajectories so the space shuttle became a huge compromise. Perverse incentives and all that. It's not state organizations per se but rather non-profits that need to have a clear goal that creates capabilities, tools and utilities that act as multipliers for everyone. A pretty big cooperative. Like, I dunno , what societies are supposed to exist for.

But DoD with its weird requirements, and the Congress with its power to finance the project and the desire to bring jobs from it to every state, and the rules of contracting that NASA must follow, are all also part of the state, the way the state ultimately works.

Development contracts for early SpaceX is also an example of NASA contracting rules in action though.

VC has failure as well as successes. State funding is no different.

The space shuttle was a symbol of hope for a future while I was growing up, and now it’s a symbol of our political and societal cowardice.

That we had to give up societal control over our space program to billionaires is deeply shameful. We’re quickly reaching the end of the end of history.

Yeah, our use of our military force provides some of the most obvious cases of "bad investment". Vietnam, Iraq, etc

And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.

I would argue that those bad investments (such an understatement!) were clearly lobbied for by the military-industrial complex. So yes, the state dropped the ball, big, on those. But that was because the private sector pushed for it, probably also in a big way. I would say that, even though the politicians were ultimately responsible for those calamities, the CEOs who greatly enritched themselves from them are absolutely to be blamed, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com