9 ms·

It's Time to Act – A Response to Marc Andreessen

224 points by wglb 7y ago

rapsey 7y ago
And yet medical personnel are without required medical protections.
askafriend 7y ago
This is quality, you gotta give it that.
- DataGata 7y ago
  It literally isn't quality. It's a hate band wagoning post written by a thought influencer for the clout.
  - askafriend 7y ago
    I mean it's a quality rant. 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.
samdung 7y ago
I wonder if Marc Andreessen would have invested in any of the things he now says that are in shortage. Words are cheap. By writing his essay Marc portrays that he is interested in the greater good but when it comes to actions its all quickbucks.
- icelancer 7y ago
  This was my first reaction, but Tren Griffin pointed out something fairly reasonable; VC funding is very small ($50 billion/year or so compared to the trillions the central government spends, to say nothing of the states). Your point is reasonable, I think, but the scale is pretty off as it relates to VC funding vs. public spending.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    > VC funding is very small 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-to-kill-ebay-bb4992dc5020 https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-... [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508356
foogazi 7y ago
> Again, this is false. FEMA and the CDC produced guidance for Pandemics over 10 years ago. 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
- mjcohen 7y ago
  It is harder when the people who knew how to implement the plan were fired.
  - TMWNN 7y ago
    Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired. Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-trump-s-homeland-security-adviser-resign-n864321 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ 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 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
chrisco255 7y ago
Bail out money is a death march to insolvency. The unlimited helicopter money the Fed is promising is enabling politicians to ignore fundamental, long term consequences of the economic shutdowns. We cannot run a country or a currency on the bail out model. Our national debt is skyrocketing to higher levels than World War 2 (as percent of GDP). We've got an insolvency crisis fast approaching with boomers retiring and unfunded liabilities in the dozens of trillions. Our economy is contracting dramatically as we speak. 22 million people are unemployed and it's week 4. Millions of businesses are going to go bankrupt from the largest cash flow retraction in world history. The financial contagion is not being addressed. It's the 800 pound elephant in the room, but it will be with us much longer than the virus will.
- yokaze 7y ago
  > Our national debt is skyrocketing to higher levels than World War 2 (as percent of GDP). Funny, that you say that. What happened after WW2 with taxes and the economy?
  - icelancer 7y ago
    We subjugated multiple world powers and their economies. The reverse is potentially happening to us this time around.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    It's not 1945. First of all, we had Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 establishing dollar as world reserve currency backed by gold. That of course, went away by 1971 and modern dollar is fiat and susceptible to poor monetary policy. We had 50% of world economy coming out of WWII as we were the only major country not buried in ashes. We had a birth boom (the boomers now retiring). We had tons of assets to still borrow against and we weren't overlevereged on everything from housing to education to corporate assets, etc. We had tons of technological and economical expansion left to experience, like interstate highways, jet travel, spread of electricity, computing, world trade, integration of women in work force, etc. 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.
vijaybritto 7y ago
I wanted to disagree with Marc on twitter about some of his views but for some unknown reason he has blocked me and countless others on twitter even though we have never interacted in anyway
- loteck 7y ago
  This is weird, does anyone have more information on how this would happen?
  - hurricaneSlider 7y ago
    Twitter allows you to import blocklists I believe. Some of these lists have been widely circulated.
  - larrysalibra 7y ago
    He blocks many people for no apparent reason. There was an article written back in 2015. Some considering a pmarca twitter block a sign that you’ve made it! https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-block-twitter/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-...
- rdlecler1 7y ago
  Someone he follows may have commented on something you posted and he didn’t want the noise. I do this all the tine to clean out my feed of views I have no interest in entertaining.
- drapred7 7y ago
  Ive found proponents of the systemic racism explanation for all racial discrepencies to be extremely hostile to disagreements like yours.
Thorentis 7y ago
I was waiting for Cory to get to the main reason he had an issue with Marc's article, since most of his initial response was just quoting other random bits and pieces to try and prove him wrong. And then came this sizzler: > 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.
- ggm 7y ago
  Just so we're clear, you actually don't think there is wide scale systematic institutionalized racism? Not that there are not other contributing factors, that it doesn't exist?
  - tomcatfish 7y ago
    I do not believe the poster said that, it is more that, in the style they quoted it, the article says `p -> q`, where q = we are racist and q = we did not build this system. They never claim there is not racism in the United States, only that they do not agree that is why the system was built.
    - ggm 7y ago
      I wouldn't normally quote politico as a source, my politics don't align. That said: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/why-new-jerseys-ventilator-guidelines-may-favor-younger-whiter-patients-194094 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
norgie 7y ago
Bravo! Great response. Incredible that people like this are considered “thought leaders” outside of very narrow fields.
crispinb 7y ago
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, Cory is probably mostly right on the specifics. On the other, Andreeson's article was so vapid and ignorant it's barely worth addressing. We only talk about it because the guy's a US ubermensch (a nation & class rapidly losing significance, to everyone's benefit). Yet here I am commenting too I suppose.
- ianai 7y ago
  Not properly refuting bad ideas let’s the bad idea spread.
  - croon 7y ago
    First off, I agree. 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.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    We seem to live in an age where comprehensively refuted ideas readily gain adherents (not that I have an Age of Reason in mind to be particularly nostalgic about). There can be a fine line between useful refutation and promotion. A hard one to draw, I would accept.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - GoodJokes 7y ago
    It is not clear if properly refuting really does anything anymore. The release of the info in the first is the ball game. It was popularized on Hackernews and is now part of the guardrails of debate. Marc wins. We have a huge manufacturing consent problem.
- atmosx 7y ago
  Indeed it is so ignorant that I was amazed by the amount of upvotes the article received on HN.
xupybd 7y ago
> They have bank accounts, permanent addresses, internet access. We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country. 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?
- metabagel 7y ago
  He’s talking about people who are outside the system - who don’t have access to banks, don’t have a permanent address, internet access, or a phone. Some combination thereof, and which prevents them from fully participating in society, as well as making it difficult to receive a stimulus check.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  > 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.
  - joaomacp 7y ago
    The most common meaning of "racism" in conversation is "acting based on the race of some person / group of people". 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.
    - drapred7 7y ago
      What's your opinion on Israel only allowing ethnic jews to immigrate? That would meet your definition of racism.
      - viklove 7y ago
metabagel 7y ago
If I read this article correctly, Republicans opposed funding for more Covid-19 testing. Why would this be a partisan issue? “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-coronavirus-democrats-small-business/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/19/trump-co...
- pas 7y ago
  Because it wasn't "us" who proposed it, but "them", and bam!, it just became partisan. Or maybe someone asked for clarification, no one replied, and now it seems "they" blocked it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
kbenson 7y ago
While there are good points here, I can't help but feel the auther felt compelled to comment negatively on every aspect of what was said, even where it made little sense and they had to bring up u related or at best tangentially related issues. 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.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  It is generally true that systems like school funding are racist in outcome but not design - but there are a surprising number of instances where the design actually is created with that intent. Most commonly seen these days with a rich white suburb deciding to incorporate their own school district so they can stop having nearby black kids attend - usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/20853091/school-secession-racial-segregation-louisiana-alabama https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/20853091/school-secession-racia...
  - kbenson 7y ago
    > usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up. 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.
roenxi 7y ago
We're still mid pandemic. The error bars are tightening but there is a lot we don't know about the disease. There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs. People don't even know what the costs are yet. 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.
- vkou 7y ago
  > There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs. 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.
  - icelancer 7y ago
    >> Lockdown takes us from exponential growth to linear growth. Do you have data that supports lockdown does this better than advisories?
    - vkou 7y ago
      Only one country has successfully gotten to linear growth without lockdown. South Korea. [1] [2] [3] 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.
mwerty 7y ago
I could not figure out what the author's overall position is on the pandemic response - understandable given the format. 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?
- dbmikus 7y ago
  The author is saying that we had the tools and the plans, but the system de-incentivizes the ideal response, for a number of reasons the author claims throughout. 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 7y ago
TLDR: White males are to blame for all evils in the Universe.
pmiller2 7y ago
This was a pretty good takedown of a pretty garbage essay, but I was disappointed the author didn't spend more time talking about how capitalism has failed us here. For instance, corporations are fundamentally good at one thing: maximizing the amount of profit they can make by selling whatever it is they sell. 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. --- [0]: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0 https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430
sradman 7y ago
The criticism in the Cory Foy’s post takes two forms: 1. We were prepared, and 2. Preparedness can not overcome the systemic oppression and exploitation built into western capitalist society. 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-influenza/canadian-pandemic-influenza-preparedness-planning-guidance-health-sector/table-of-contents.html 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.
draw_down 7y ago
Wow, what a nice response!
sakoht 7y ago
Narratives that blame "greed" and other kinds of non-egalitarian behavior seem to forget that humans are animals. We should recognize that expecting organized forethought across a species, and organized ethical behavior is expecting something never, ever, ever seen before in nature. 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.

224 points by wglb 7y ago

rapsey 7y ago

And yet medical personnel are without required medical protections.

askafriend 7y ago

This is quality, you gotta give it that.

DataGata 7y ago
It literally isn't quality. It's a hate band wagoning post written by a thought influencer for the clout.
- askafriend 7y ago
  I mean it's a quality rant. 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.

samdung 7y ago

I wonder if Marc Andreessen would have invested in any of the things he now says that are in shortage. Words are cheap. By writing his essay Marc portrays that he is interested in the greater good but when it comes to actions its all quickbucks.

icelancer 7y ago
This was my first reaction, but Tren Griffin pointed out something fairly reasonable; VC funding is very small ($50 billion/year or so compared to the trillions the central government spends, to say nothing of the states). Your point is reasonable, I think, but the scale is pretty off as it relates to VC funding vs. public spending.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > VC funding is very small 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-to-kill-ebay-bb4992dc5020 https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-... [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508356

foogazi 7y ago

> Again, this is false. FEMA and the CDC produced guidance for Pandemics over 10 years ago. 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

mjcohen 7y ago
It is harder when the people who knew how to implement the plan were fired.
- TMWNN 7y ago
  Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired. Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-trump-s-homeland-security-adviser-resign-n864321 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/ 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 https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

chrisco255 7y ago

Bail out money is a death march to insolvency. The unlimited helicopter money the Fed is promising is enabling politicians to ignore fundamental, long term consequences of the economic shutdowns. We cannot run a country or a currency on the bail out model. Our national debt is skyrocketing to higher levels than World War 2 (as percent of GDP). We've got an insolvency crisis fast approaching with boomers retiring and unfunded liabilities in the dozens of trillions. Our economy is contracting dramatically as we speak. 22 million people are unemployed and it's week 4. Millions of businesses are going to go bankrupt from the largest cash flow retraction in world history. The financial contagion is not being addressed. It's the 800 pound elephant in the room, but it will be with us much longer than the virus will.

yokaze 7y ago
> Our national debt is skyrocketing to higher levels than World War 2 (as percent of GDP). Funny, that you say that. What happened after WW2 with taxes and the economy?
- icelancer 7y ago
  We subjugated multiple world powers and their economies. The reverse is potentially happening to us this time around.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  It's not 1945. First of all, we had Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 establishing dollar as world reserve currency backed by gold. That of course, went away by 1971 and modern dollar is fiat and susceptible to poor monetary policy. We had 50% of world economy coming out of WWII as we were the only major country not buried in ashes. We had a birth boom (the boomers now retiring). We had tons of assets to still borrow against and we weren't overlevereged on everything from housing to education to corporate assets, etc. We had tons of technological and economical expansion left to experience, like interstate highways, jet travel, spread of electricity, computing, world trade, integration of women in work force, etc. 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.

vijaybritto 7y ago

I wanted to disagree with Marc on twitter about some of his views but for some unknown reason he has blocked me and countless others on twitter even though we have never interacted in anyway

loteck 7y ago
This is weird, does anyone have more information on how this would happen?
- hurricaneSlider 7y ago
  Twitter allows you to import blocklists I believe. Some of these lists have been widely circulated.
- larrysalibra 7y ago
  He blocks many people for no apparent reason. There was an article written back in 2015. Some considering a pmarca twitter block a sign that you’ve made it! https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-block-twitter/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-...
rdlecler1 7y ago
Someone he follows may have commented on something you posted and he didn’t want the noise. I do this all the tine to clean out my feed of views I have no interest in entertaining.
drapred7 7y ago
Ive found proponents of the systemic racism explanation for all racial discrepencies to be extremely hostile to disagreements like yours.

Thorentis 7y ago

I was waiting for Cory to get to the main reason he had an issue with Marc's article, since most of his initial response was just quoting other random bits and pieces to try and prove him wrong. And then came this sizzler: > 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.

ggm 7y ago
Just so we're clear, you actually don't think there is wide scale systematic institutionalized racism? Not that there are not other contributing factors, that it doesn't exist?
- tomcatfish 7y ago
  I do not believe the poster said that, it is more that, in the style they quoted it, the article says `p -> q`, where q = we are racist and q = we did not build this system. They never claim there is not racism in the United States, only that they do not agree that is why the system was built.
  - ggm 7y ago
    I wouldn't normally quote politico as a source, my politics don't align. That said: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/why-new-jerseys-ventilator-guidelines-may-favor-younger-whiter-patients-194094 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

norgie 7y ago

Bravo! Great response. Incredible that people like this are considered “thought leaders” outside of very narrow fields.

crispinb 7y ago

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, Cory is probably mostly right on the specifics. On the other, Andreeson's article was so vapid and ignorant it's barely worth addressing. We only talk about it because the guy's a US ubermensch (a nation & class rapidly losing significance, to everyone's benefit). Yet here I am commenting too I suppose.

ianai 7y ago
Not properly refuting bad ideas let’s the bad idea spread.
- croon 7y ago
  First off, I agree. 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.
- crispinb 7y ago
  We seem to live in an age where comprehensively refuted ideas readily gain adherents (not that I have an Age of Reason in mind to be particularly nostalgic about). There can be a fine line between useful refutation and promotion. A hard one to draw, I would accept.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- GoodJokes 7y ago
  It is not clear if properly refuting really does anything anymore. The release of the info in the first is the ball game. It was popularized on Hackernews and is now part of the guardrails of debate. Marc wins. We have a huge manufacturing consent problem.
atmosx 7y ago
Indeed it is so ignorant that I was amazed by the amount of upvotes the article received on HN.

xupybd 7y ago

> They have bank accounts, permanent addresses, internet access. We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country. 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?

metabagel 7y ago
He’s talking about people who are outside the system - who don’t have access to banks, don’t have a permanent address, internet access, or a phone. Some combination thereof, and which prevents them from fully participating in society, as well as making it difficult to receive a stimulus check.
davidgerard 7y ago
> 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.
- joaomacp 7y ago
  The most common meaning of "racism" in conversation is "acting based on the race of some person / group of people". 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.
  - drapred7 7y ago
    What's your opinion on Israel only allowing ethnic jews to immigrate? That would meet your definition of racism.
    - viklove 7y ago

metabagel 7y ago

If I read this article correctly, Republicans opposed funding for more Covid-19 testing. Why would this be a partisan issue? “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-coronavirus-democrats-small-business/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/19/trump-co...

pas 7y ago
Because it wasn't "us" who proposed it, but "them", and bam!, it just became partisan. Or maybe someone asked for clarification, no one replied, and now it seems "they" blocked it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

kbenson 7y ago

While there are good points here, I can't help but feel the auther felt compelled to comment negatively on every aspect of what was said, even where it made little sense and they had to bring up u related or at best tangentially related issues. 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.

lazyasciiart 7y ago
It is generally true that systems like school funding are racist in outcome but not design - but there are a surprising number of instances where the design actually is created with that intent. Most commonly seen these days with a rich white suburb deciding to incorporate their own school district so they can stop having nearby black kids attend - usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/20853091/school-secession-racial-segregation-louisiana-alabama https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/20853091/school-secession-racia...
- kbenson 7y ago
  > usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up. 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.

roenxi 7y ago

We're still mid pandemic. The error bars are tightening but there is a lot we don't know about the disease. There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs. People don't even know what the costs are yet. 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.

vkou 7y ago
> There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs. 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.
- icelancer 7y ago
  >> Lockdown takes us from exponential growth to linear growth. Do you have data that supports lockdown does this better than advisories?
  - vkou 7y ago
    Only one country has successfully gotten to linear growth without lockdown. South Korea. [1] [2] [3] 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.

mwerty 7y ago

I could not figure out what the author's overall position is on the pandemic response - understandable given the format. 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?

dbmikus 7y ago
The author is saying that we had the tools and the plans, but the system de-incentivizes the ideal response, for a number of reasons the author claims throughout. 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

DeathArrow 7y ago

TLDR: White males are to blame for all evils in the Universe.

pmiller2 7y ago

This was a pretty good takedown of a pretty garbage essay, but I was disappointed the author didn't spend more time talking about how capitalism has failed us here. For instance, corporations are fundamentally good at one thing: maximizing the amount of profit they can make by selling whatever it is they sell. 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. --- [0]: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0 https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430

sradman 7y ago

The criticism in the Cory Foy’s post takes two forms: 1. We were prepared, and 2. Preparedness can not overcome the systemic oppression and exploitation built into western capitalist society. 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-influenza/canadian-pandemic-influenza-preparedness-planning-guidance-health-sector/table-of-contents.html 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.

draw_down 7y ago

Wow, what a nice response!

sakoht 7y ago

Narratives that blame "greed" and other kinds of non-egalitarian behavior seem to forget that humans are animals. We should recognize that expecting organized forethought across a species, and organized ethical behavior is expecting something never, ever, ever seen before in nature. 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.