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How does this make any sense? You wrote this long, neatly articulated response, but your central premise is entirely flawed. Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Hor
by avarun 6y ago
How does this make any sense? You wrote this long, neatly articulated response, but your central premise is entirely flawed.
Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists don't have a monopoly over the future (or current) direction of our society). Hell, they don't even have a plurality of control.
The things that Marc speaks of in this article that are fundamentally broken in the US are housing, education, and healthcare. I see new startups funded in the US every single week that attempt to solve these problems. In the end, though, they are bound by the regulatory constraints that American government imposes on them, and in these three areas, there is a patchwork of laws that is impossible to navigate if you wish to build anything meaningfully transformative. It is simply impossible for Marc Andreessen to deploy capital in a way that can accelerate the pace of housing development in San Francisco, or accelerate the pace of drug development in the US, or make public American high schools have a lower student-faculty ratio. The amount of regulatory capture in these long-running, slow-moving institutions is simply too high.
- pascalxus 6y agoThis is exactly why we need innovation in politics. Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations. Then, let all the companies that want to build there, go nuts and build whatever they want. This then serves as an innovation incubator, and an example for the rest of the nation as to what can be built, when we allow it to be built. Imagine the speed of innovation when it's not regulated. Remember, in the early days of the internet, we had companies and application popping up all over the place. FB, had 100,000 apps in less than 1 year. What allowed such quick pace of innovation is the concept of permissionless innovation. We desperately need this to happen in the real world: maybe not the whole world, but at least some small region, perhaps a new city, or a square mile block.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago> Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations Any kind of pollution would be acceptable in this 1 square mile? Any kind of price manipulation? There wouldn't be any consumer protections? No worker protections? Not all regulation is bad. A lot of it exists for good reasons because the profit motive tends to lead to abuses.
- aguyfromnb 6y ago>FB, had 100,000 apps in less than 1 year. First of all, Facebook had to start "regulating" those apps in the early days, because they threatened to overrun the platform with spam. Second, there's a long, long history of corporate malfeasance in un-or-under regulated spaces; you don't have to go back very far (2008 GFC).
- GuiA 6y ago> Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations. Can you murder your competitors in this 1 square mile? Can you steal their inventory? Can you hijack their equipment? Can you threaten their employees? Can you force your employees to work overtime till they drop? Can you dump all your industrial waste wherever you want in that 1 square mile? What about animal/human testing? That was not much more than one second of thinking but that’s about what this idea deserves.
- pascalxus 6y agoI'm talking about the regulation that prevents stuff from being built. obviously all the normal laws like no murder would still be in place.
- GuiA 6y agoAh yes, that's not a subjective thing at all, all we have to do is query our database for all laws where the PREVENTS_STUFF_FROM_BEING_BUILT flag is set to TRUE, and we disable all of those. Easy.