Entrepreneur’s Letter to Obama: Give Americans a Great Challenge to Pursue
technori.com
technori.com
His examples are pretty flawed. A more direct example would be "Other presidents have gone to war, you should too". In addition to the war on terror and war on drugs, of course.
Here are two good/crazy government 10 year goals: 1) Eliminate the need for a legislature by using technology to collect votes. 2) Do more for less - find a way to provide today's services for 1/10th the cost. That way if you want to keep spending you can spend it on new stuff.
Oh, please, no! California's government is a mess, thanks to all the propositions that have forced it legislature to do more while tying its hands on funding.
While I agree the idiots we have right now are far from ideal, falling back to the base common denominator is not the right solution. Representative democracies allow the representatives to make hard, unpopular choices, something the average citizen won't do.
It we want to dump the legislature in favor of pure democracy, we will need a better way to qualify who can vote. And I'm sure that wouldn't be used to disenfranchise some group of people[1].
I think before we consider dumping the legislature, we could play with different options. One I would like to see is having congressional seats divided up among parties by the percentage of the vote you get. So congress represents the entire country and the senate represents each state (or vice-versa).
1. I like the Starship Troopers method of qualification, though: serve your country (military or otherwise) for a minimum time period and you can vote.
Regarding serving for voting: I went to West Point then was in the Army. I like the book Starship Troopers. I think it is a terrible idea in practice. 1) The only thing this does for sure is increase the size of the public payroll. 2) No evidence to support it actually making the country better. 3) I feel like I help my country more working in the private sector than I ever did in the Army. (Anecdotal)
1) Eliminate the need for a legislature by using technology to collect votes.
I think you have a serious misunderstanding about government and complex systems in general.
2) Do more for less - find a way to provide today's services for 1/10th the cost.
Sounds great but is a total fantasy. Wildly unrealistic goals are of no use to people that actually get things done.
In the sixties getting a man to the moon was an acceptable challenge. More than 50 years later we shouldn't waste ten years of our countries best and most brilliant minds on something like merely better millage.
How a commercially viable replacement for oil, that can be made in the US in a way that doesn't produce CO2? That would do a lot to improve the world is a worthy goal.
1) It's a big goal, but one where the first steps are already being made, just as with the moon mission.
2) It has the potential to develop a ton of derivative technology that is widely applicable.
3) It has the potential to cement American's place for decades more, just like the rocket technology developed as a by-product of the space race did. It was hard to compete militarily with the country that could bomb you from space with ICBM's, and it'll be hard to compete economically that has a source of cheap, clean energy.
It was to show the world, once and for all, that communism wasn't better than capitalism.
For that you need a big hairy audacious goal. Better millage isn't one. Cutting the arabs out of the oil deal, saving humanity as we gather the resources needed for a final jump into our future as a spacefaring species -- that is a goal worth of us.
I understand and it achieved its purpose (yay freedom) but now is different. Freedom has won, commies are laughed at, though mildly problematic, and the planet is one, sort of. The problems we face are less epic which makes them seem dull and we should be thankful for that.
China isn't going to attack us, they make far more money trading with us.
The arabs on the other hand.
But wait, bicycles are more fuel-efficient than even the best cars -- that should imply that the Chinese will want to use them instead, right? Because the problem is as simple as discovering greater fuel efficiency?
Or is this the bizarro world you mocked where higher fuel efficiency is bad?
Yes, the point I made from the beginning, except that I added that such a policy would make the contest for the supercar superfluous -- it would eliminate all the marginal uses of energy (i.e. where the benefit doesn't exceed the cost + tax) in the first place!
One step above copy-paste is analysis, and one step above that is understanding.
Love your work YodaBot!
Done; next challenge?
Careful. Around here that kind of talk will get you labeled a statist. In reality society is simple and self-governing, if only government gets out of the way! Also: ponies.
If you want to preserve "vital" functions of government, then you need to establish what those are and scrape off anything that is both an expense, and interfering with society.
Of course they are, but increasing efficiency is only loosely related to that, due to Jevons Effects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Having more efficient (and probably phallic shaped) vehicles could reduce aggregate emissions ... or, more likely, the lower cost of driving could increase how often it's done.
Unless the newer efficiency is combined with laws that make emissions directly more costly, you're ultimately just bailing from one side of the pool to the other.
But then, if you're going to put those laws in place, then you don't need to reward any one specific technology's creation; you've already incentivized (sorry) any emission-reducing change in behavior, which is a far longer list than any bureaucrat or contest-creator can come up with. Unless, of course, you think that we're going to have separate contests for "make the average distance of worker from workplace less than one mile" or "make average driving distance less than 11k miles/person-year", etc etc etc.
Projects like the "car with ultra-high gas mileage" are instances of a very unproductive mentality when it comes to responsible environmental stewardship: it's a mentality that, stripped of misdirection, says "it's okay to be wasteful, as long as you're wasteful with efficient technology".
This is an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. To a partisan all pragmatism is bad.
Pure, unadulterated feel-good-ism.
The bizarro world where nobody ever increases their fuel use in response to its greater effectiveness of use?
The bizarro world where people can feel like they've said something insightful simply because they're advocating greater fuel efficiency regardless of how poorly they understand the system in which it operates?
In 10 years? Extremely yawn-worthy. Tesla plans on building a 0 emissions, all-electric car and selling it around $20,000 in two years. Not 10 years with epic, huge pollution going everywhere.
> How out of touch are you? Do you not believe emissions are a serious problem?
How out of touch are you? Obviously emissions are a serious problem. That's why we shouldn't aspire as a country to be emitting gigantic amounts of greenhouse gasses from our cars in 10 years.
Maybe you are referring to clean coal technology which I am dubious of, but I think it is unlikely that tranferring cheap electric power across great distance is more efficient.
If your statement is meant to imply that electric cars are a bad idea because they're "essentially coal powered", I disagree. Imagine if doctors applied that kind of logic: "We'll, you could quit smoking, but, I mean, you're still going to die eventually anyway."
All of those examples are centered around war and/or homeland security and some of them don't have a lot to do with entrepreneurship. The beauty of the world we live in today is that we don't need a leader to supply us with a unified vision/direction; we have tons of companies simultaneously working very hard on innovating in a multitude of different areas.
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?
The ideal is to have no huge problems to solve. Humans being humans, without a common thing to scare us into working together, we'll all work on whatever we want.
That said, one might argue that we have huge problems we just haven't realized are huge problems yet. Climate change comes to mind.
The idea, I suppose, is that by focusing on a single "big problem", we could make very rapid progress (instead of making slower progress on a bigger set of problems). At its height, the US was spending almost 1% of its GDP on the Apollo program. Now imagine we could all agree on some other goal that we would spend that much money on. The hard part would be choosing a good goal, and then convincing enough people that it's the "right one".
Then create a kickstarter page and leave my paycheck alone. Just an idea.
1. The accomplishment of the goal will almost certainly not result in any great swell of national pride. Defeating an enemy makes us believe we are great. Being the first to the moon makes us feel proud of our accomplishment. Driving a somewhat more efficient car does not give us that same sense of collective pride.
2. The government should not be directly doing R&D, market research, or advertizing for private industries. We got away with the moon landing because NASA is a government organization, the same is not true of the US auto industry. The auto bailout was unpopular, why would any sort of government/auto industry project be seen as anything other than meddling?
Instead, the government should focus on areas that are more directly under its purview: infrastructure, energy, military, education, public safety, etc.
What sorts of goals might we consider? I think these are better candidates:
Cure any form of cancer in the next 10 years.
Become #1 in international measures of 4th grade student performance in the next 10 years and 1st in 8th grade performance in 15 years.
Achieve the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any developed nation within 15 years.
Considering the amount of CO2 emissions from cars, here's a simple one: avoid using the car for personal reasons whenever possible. Use a bike, public transportation, your feet.
I, for one, would be very proud of my country if that became the norm for a significant number of people.
The problem with this is that it's too broad. There are a million different ways to do it which are almost all trade offs of one thing or another, and the people who have to sacrifice for any given one will be fighting tooth and nail to make you choose a different one, so you spend all your time arguing with people and never accomplish anything.
Pick a specific goal. Build a working commercially viable fusion reactor. Take something like that and put moonshot resources behind it and it will happen.
I feel that the real killer of challenges is actually vagueness. "Improve health care" is vague because there is no well defined goal or target that we will be able to meet.
Booooooooring.
The goal has to be huge, extremely difficult to pull of, easy to measure and easy to rally around. It has to be something the tech geek and the redneck can agree would be awesome, something that screams USA is number one, something the entire country can take pride in.
A much better goal, in terms of usefulness, challenge, and well-defined-ness, would be to develop a self-driving car. This probably could have been done 20 years ago if we had started a Manhattan-style project. But I guess we'll just have to wait for Google.
[0]: http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/google-wants-to-put-wireles...
Pros: lots of disciplines to get involved, obvious ways for ordinary people to take part (monitoring and reducing home energy use), and a regulatory environment that is in need of reform (tragedy of the commons for pollution, carbon market). And obviously, a dire, human-race affecting need.
They are the head of the Executive branch. They uphold the Constitution, specifically the laws passed by Congress.
In this conversation, the President can merely suggest goals to Congress.
Also, Congress is in no position to do what you ask, either: they make laws.
It should not be illegal to NOT pursue the Great Challenge you talk about. It should also not require taxing everyone. It should require motivating people to help.
If it's to succeed, it also needs to pay for itself, or be so self-evidently worthy that people donate to it enough money to keep it going.
In short: I don't think the Government can do you what you want.
Here's where I put my hope for the future:
Face it, government rarely does something first or best except when one government wants to eradicate another.
In other areas: The transistor was invented by the research arm of a government-granted monopoly; nuclear technology was pioneered by a government weapons project; the double helix was discovered at a publicly-funded university; we're talking to each other over a network created as a department of defense program; much of the field of artificial intelligence was developed under the department of defense.
The U.S. government linked the pacific and atlantic oceans through the panama canal; the Army Corps of Engineers made the southwest habitable; the Army Corps of Engineers built and maintains the locks that makes the Mississippi easily navigable.
The 20th century is a triumph of the American model: government policy-making and funding/subsidization combined with implementation by independent public or private entities.
(1) The transistor/monopoly theory make no sense. The US government never granted AT&T a monopoly but broke it up in 1982 when they discovered it was a monopoly.
(2) I don't think the residents of New Orleans would agree that Army Corps of Engineers should be a model for anything.
I'm sure there are some truly great non-military US government accomplishments but I just can't think of any...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_ci...
Many people theorize, and I believe correctly, that it was entirely an aggressive posturing war between the US and USSR. We could just drop a nuke from space, with no launch to detect, so no way to retaliate in time - no mutually assured destruction, which was the only real defense either party had.
Don't get me wrong - I'm generally very liberal by US standards, and I think the Government should do a LOT more to "promote the general welfare". I just think that money doesn't care how you spend it, and governments can't set the kinds of goals that the OP proposes. Other than ending diseases, I suppose.
How about the 'War On Corruption'™?
Unfortunately, the energy industry is currently held hostage.