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Why We Can't Build
- generatorguy 7y agoI recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students whereas mostly i see the top students avoiding government bureaucracy in favor of private industry as it is more lucrative and there are not many prestigious positions in public service. I believe the atmosphere within these institutions isn’t conducive to action either. Put your time in and get your pension. Do nothing and nothing bad will happen, try something big and it might fail and you look worse than everyone who did nothing. So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California.
- Consultant32452 6y ago>So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California. I agree with this, but you have to accompany that with making it just as easy to fire a public servant as it is to fire a programmer.
- tempsy 6y agoI check San Francisco City worker salaries on occasion (all public) and there are plenty of people making $300K+ a year for a secure job with a pension and not super stressful.
- Consultant32452 6y agoIn my city pay rate is entirely based on tenure. People just starting out for the city have very low pay, people about to retire have insane salaries. Maybe it is more helpful to just generically say compensation and ease of removal needs to compete with the market.
- tempsy 6y agoI don’t think if you increased the pay you’d start seeing creative people at the entry level suddenly want to work for the government. The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.
- solidasparagus 6y agoI went into the private sector over the public sector solely due to pay. If you do well in the private sector in your first couple of years, your compensation will shoot up. In the public sector your compensation is tied to years of experience so when I wanted to work for the gov, they required me to take a demotion and take only 40% of what I got in the private sector.
- tempsy 6y agoPurely Extrinsically motivated people are not going to solve the build problem.
- solidasparagus 6y agoEveryone has bills and debt. Make the compensation closer and intrinsic motivation can come into play.
- xxpor 6y agoAu contraire, it's far too easy to fire people in government for issues that have systemic root causes due to the nature of politics and public pressure. So the poor schmuck who pushed the button gets fired, and that's the end of it. No deeper evaluation or reports on how to prevent the issue from occuring in the future. This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy. This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".
- stx 6y agoI see many of these same problems in large companies. Every one just tries to avoid being blamed. Those best at avoiding blame while assigning it to others rise up. Its politics.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xxpor 6y agoAnd I would guess that the companies that have "blame" cultures end up doing much worse than companies that have "fixing" cultures.
- michaelkeenan 6y agoThis sounded wrong to me so I googled and according to the first source I found, the layoff and discharge rate is 1.3% in the private sector, and 0.4% across federal, state, and local government. The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times-likely-get-fired-govt-workers/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...
- tempsy 6y agoUhm have you looked at some government salaries? It’s all posted online. In San Francisco there are plenty of government workers making well over $300K/year for a safe secure job that you can coast in. That is part of the problem.
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y agoCan you link to the data you're talking about? I did some searching and I see about 20 people making more than $300k a year and almost all of them are director level positions.
- WillPostForFood 6y agohttps://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Cities/City.aspx?entityid=410&year=2018 https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Cities/City.aspx?entityid=4... As of 2018, about 90 people making 300k or more in SF County, probably over 100 by now.
- Ancalagon 6y ago90 or 100 seems small in comparison to the number of tech workers in SF making that kind of cash
- tempsy 6y agoMost of that is equity comp for engineers. For government you have to factor in job security, generous pension and benefits, and guaranteed annual pay raises. Engineers have none of those things.
- rjpn 6y agoNot small if you consider total govt. employees in SF.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoThe link that showed the 90 employees making $300K or over is a link to a page about San Francisco city employees specifically, and says there's 40,951 total. (And it is 90 exactly according to that page.) So is 0.2% of workers earning that much a lot compared to tech companies, do you think? How about employees making $200K or over? That's 1790, or just about 4%. $100K or over? 15997 employees, or around 39%. So over 60% of SF city employees make under $100K. The median salary, in fact, is just under $86K. I could be wrong, but I suspect that's lower than Facebook's median salary.
- ar813 6y agoSingapore is similar, in that pay for top public servants is competitive with top private sector pay. And they try to attract the best and brightest.
- ardy42 6y ago> I recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students My understanding is that's not really true. They do ask a few high-achieving students to join, but those people tend to not be very active in the Party. They accept a lot more based on personal connections (first) and bribery (second).
- thundergolfer 6y agoI would highly recommend the author's new book, Why We're Polarized. The model of the USA political system that he's built reminds me of the model Ben Thompson of Stratechery built to analyse the technology sector. Just as Stratechery takes the latest happenings in tech, applies the core model, and spits out an article, Ezra Klein here has taken Andressen's blo, applied his model, and spat out an article. In my opinion, if you want to know why the USA didn't respond properly to COVID-19 and why its national infrastructure is failing, ask Ezra Klein instead of Andressen.
- qnsi 6y agoI guess it depends who you trust more. Some people will trust vox writer, some will trust a VC
- thundergolfer 6y agoI've actually read Klein's work and Andressen's work and evaluating both against my own understanding. That's the basis on which I gave the recommendation to seek Klein's answers. I'm not just trusting a "vox writer" over a "VC".
- qnsi 6y agoTotally respect your approach to this issue. I didn't mean to imply it that way, I was talking more in a general sense. Sorry I will try to be more explicit it my further comments
- thundergolfer 6y agoNo worries, thanks for clarification.
- coffeemug 6y agoI haven't read Ezra Klein's book, but as far as I can tell Ben Thompson's articles are mostly just-so stories[1]. His model seems to be able to predict everything that happens in tech, and when your model predicts everything that usually means it isn't very powerful at all. Here's a thought experiment: can you use aggregation theory to make sufficiently powerful predictions to beat the stock market in the tech sector? Can Ben? My strong guess is that the answer is to both questions is no. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
- qnsi 6y agoIn short, author thinks US should build more liberal institutions
- Supermancho 6y agoThat is what the author thinks. Not sure this is the actual solution. Outlawing Political Parties is the first step, but that is as improbable as it sounds.
- stx 6y agoI am not sure that I agree with outlawing political parties but removing the monetary influence companies have would help. Large companies take huge risks that if they pan out for the company they keep the profit. If something happens that destroys the company they get a bail out from society.
- Supermancho 6y agoIf theres no mandated political buckets, influence will have to be individual. Collusion less robust, since proof of political clubs would be illicit and migration to a new/other group trivial. If you are out of the R/D troughs now, thats the end of your political career. This is an unfortunate and forseen end-stage two-party system.
- ausbah 6y agowell yes, the whole first part of the article before he gives opinion on how to fix it is what he believes (I think rightly so) the root cause is - institutions of power giving more say to those who wish to slow or halt change because they are afraid of what will happen if something they don't like comes to fruition. NIMBYers are probably a good example of this many people here would be familiar with his suggests reforming institutions to be more responsive to what people want, not minorities who have a vested interest in the status quo
- commandlinefan 6y ago... or remove onerous governmental regulations ...
- lazyjones 6y agoIf vetos are the reason, then enough people don't want to build what the author is suggesting. It's not a failure to simply not do what he (and not a clear majority) thinks is good.
- throwawaygh 6y ago> clear majority In the section on the federal government, he identifies the senate filibuster. The filibuster means you need a supermajority of the vote in a deliberative body that's already not representative of the majority of the population. You can argue that minority veto power is a good things, but the senate is definitively not a body that represents the "clear majority" of Americans. Even prior to a fillibuster, the senate is not even intended to be a body that represents "a clear majority".
- WillPostForFood 6y agoWhat percentage of "building" is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate, vs complications at the local level? Look at both the housing and transportation issues in the Bay Area - it is mostly a local issue. NIMBYism, environmentalism, lawsuits, poorly run city and county govt, etc...
- throwawaygh 6y agoHuh? The author isn't writing about housing prices in SFBA.
- WillPostForFood 6y agoSecond sentence of the second paragraph: The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and later in the article: You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit
- throwawaygh 6y ago
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI don't think I buy the thesis here. There are plenty of western countries without the "vetocracy" structure of the US's republic. And yet they still haven't built much infrastructure or accomplished much in public works for the last 30-40 years. The reason is simple -- there's no money. No public money. There's more private wealth than there's ever been, but public sector investment is a fraction of it. The state has lost the ability to collect reasonable tax revenues from private entities, and it's lost the ability to efficiently spend it. And in large part this is because of a protracted ideological war that one side has effectively lost and another side has effectively won. Excessive partisanship is a symptom of this ideological divide, not the cause.
- jcp2fa 6y agoI think there is an even simpler explanation: the massive bureaucratic mess that the government has become is ineffective at allocating resources.
- pwinnski 6y agoWhich is addressed in the article and doesn't explain why we also don't see large-scale projects from the private sector.
- apsec112 6y agoI don't think you can say "there's no money" in eg. France. French tax revenue is 45% of GDP.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI actually don't know much about how well France functions as a nation. My European experience is mostly in Germany where my dad's family is from, and infrastructure there is 50x better than in North America. I'm speaking more from the Canadian perspective; we have a Westminster parliamentary system without vetoes (well there's the senate but that's mostly rubber stamp) and yet we have the same "getting things built" dysfunction that the US has.
- stx 6y agoIt has become clear during this latest crisis that if we do not have the ability to make things inside our own borders we are sitting ducks. Its not accurate to think that when we need PPE and all sorts of other medical supplies we can suddenly build factories. Its not just a matter of keeping jobs in the USA its also a matter of security. Its a matter of self sufficiency.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoAbsolutely. This article is simply another example of the fall of American exceptionalism. It has been assumed for a long time that the US could easily win any major conflict, but is that really so true anymore? NATO is as weak as it's ever been. Europe is less likely than ever to trust the US or to support it. Key allies are now looking more inward than outward. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were large scale blunders that cost trillions for little benefit. US manufacturing capability has gone down dramatically. There are not enough with trade no-how to support a large scale war-effort. Any war of attrition is likely a losing one - it will be too costly if it's possible at all. Key positions of government and diplomacy go unfilled because of the Trump administration's refusal to do so, severely limiting US soft-power across the globe. A captain of a capital ship was publicly relieved of command by acting SecNav (Trump has yet to fill the position permanently, still. The Secretary of the Navy. Still no permanent leader.) in embarrassing fashion after a COVID19 outbreak onboard. That is extremely telling. A huge portion of military-service eligible citizens are far too overweight to serve. Numbers more are disqualified for other reasons. Waging war requires smarter soldiers - which are not in abundant supply. Misinformation has been weaponized by Russia and China and the current leadership has done nothing about it because it benefits them. The polarization divides the country sharply - if one party or the other goes to war, would the rest of the country support it? There are significant cracks in the armor.
- pas 6y agoStockpiling would have worked too. But PPE supply has been a known problem, yet no one really cared. Nor does anyone really care now. (At least to my knowledge there has been no serious proposal to fund a group to solve this for the long term for a state/country.)
- greendave 6y ago"In a grotesque way, Florida’s disastrous UI system represents the successful completion of a project: They intended to build a UI system that failed those who needed it, and they very much did." This is the lens that needs to be applied more generally. Just because a system is not achieving its stated goal does not necessarily mean it is failing - it often means that the true goal is simply something different. To take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful. Andreesen's article entirely ignores this. Things are not the way they are by accident. Ignore the reasons why and you are either being disingenuous or ignorant.
- x0x0 6y agoas @wpietri would say, posiwid
- greendave 6y agoThanks. Had not seen that acronym before.
- milesokeefe 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- RobRivera 6y agoStrong concur - put simply, i think many people should recognize bad UI, in any form, as just an elaborate abstraction of hardball haggling. If a company makes it HARD to get hired, it's probably to get you to accept an undermarket rate or sweeten the deal. If a boss makes it confusing to understand how the promotion process and compensation process works, it's probably to keep you from getting promoted and keep you in your seat to do your job and not complain
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ar813 6y agoI think the points raised are reasonable and, to my mind, not particularly partisan (though I would argue one party is more responsible for the current chaos by several orders of magnitude than the other one..). The deeper issue this raises is, I suppose, a constitutional one paired with Long Now Foundation-type questions. How do we design institutions that can't themselves be changed too easily due to majoritarian whims, yet can evolve over decades and centuries as societies change. We certainly shouldn't expect the institutions and norms of today to precisely meet the needs of our descendants decades or centuries from now. For the here and now though, my observation is this: Americans in general are allergic to learning from what other countries do. But really, as a very large country, we should be studying what smaller countries do and using them as experimental points of data and testing them out here. There are plenty of implementations of better, more responsive governance out there. Nothing's perfect, but saying 'we're number one' and plugging our ears is no solution.
- Symmetry 6y agoI really liked this article looking at another of how it got to be hard to build things from the perspective of Penn Station in New York and how the reaction against Robert Moses caused so many problems. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-station-robert-caro-073564 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/29/penn-stati...
- cryoshon 6y agounfortunately this article ignored around the elephant in the room: one of the two dominant political parties has an entire platform devoted to stopping institions from expanding while also eating away at the existing capabilities of those institutions. they pursue this platform relentlessly, and have done so for roughly the last 40 years. faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs. after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only reshuffles them. imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US is in. it's untenable. there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the current situation and fund politicians accordingly. lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it. the next best time is now. in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord. i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the country to the imagination of the reader.
- apsec112 6y agoThe article discusses projects that fail despite large budgets. Eg. "Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding. Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who simply didn’t want the building to happen."
- narak 6y agoI suspect the most practical way to reform our institutions is through increased competition in governance, just like we "fix" stagnant institutions in the private sector. We already have this baked into our constitution: States rights and their ability to pass amendments. There's a movement happening around this. [0] Justice Brandeis said it best: "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." [1] Imagine if States could try different healthcare systems, or basic income, etc. Citizens would be able to vote with their feet and move to the best systems. This should be a bipartisan movement. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
- justin66 6y ago> Imagine if States could try different healthcare systems, or basic income, etc. Citizens would be able to vote with their feet and move to the best systems. This should be a bipartisan movement. Health care and basic income are... interesting... examples of what you're talking about. Government should certainly take better care of people at the bottom of the income ladder who need health care or money but if people who need that stuff "vote with their feet" and move to a few states that experiment with providing that stuff, the result might not be very positive for those states. There's already an economic race to the bottom dynamic among states in a lot of ways. Delegating things the federal government should provide for everyone to the states is going to make that a lot worse.
- xkcd-sucks 6y ago"Polarization makes America ungovernable" is an interesting thesis -- It was a concern of the USA's founding fathers; it was how the American Civil War was considered inevitable from 1800s-1860s; it was thought for a time to have been resolved by the Civil War; and now here we are. Maybe governments are best scoped to groups of people who mostly agree, and "union at all costs" is a dangerous fantasy.
- malandrew 6y agoHave a union around those things upon which you agree. For those things upon which you don't agree, every state is a laboratory for trying out those ideas.
- kn0where 6y agoOne problem is that states-as-laboratories are not closed-loop systems. We have free trade and freedom of movement across state borders. If state A starts using its own tax revenue to house the homeless population, nothing stops states B through Z from then deciding to bus their homeless populations to state A. The other states then don’t have to pay for homeless services, and suddenly state A has a far larger homeless population to house (while its tax revenue hasn’t increased at all).
- bhupy 6y ago> One problem is that states-as-laboratories are not closed-loop systems. We have free trade and freedom of movement across state borders. Both of these are true in Switzerland, as well as the European Union, and yet they are both body politics that are fully capable of effective decentralization.
- Karrot_Kream 6y agoBecause the European Union was formed much after the development of European states, and so each state had its own concept of borders, immigration, and social welfare _before_ creation of the EU. And the EU has constantly tussled over the rights of migrant workers from one EU state to the other.
- jimhefferon 6y agoSince 1980 the consistent message in the US from one party is that its objective is to shrink government until it can be drowned in the bathtub. Because of this we are unable to act in common, since government is the closest thing we have to common action.
- apsec112 6y agoThis doesn't explain problems on the state and local level, even in liberal cities: "If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t. To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through the ceiling?"
- michaelt 6y agoIf the average voter prioritises roads/schools/caring for the disabled above high speed rail; and the federal government contributes a smaller portion towards that, the state has to spend more on it, leaving less money for high speed rail.
- grumple 6y agoCities are relatively broke. See the NYC budget: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget.pdf https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget.... I know some would zoom in on those pensions, but those are basically social safety net / 401k investment replacements. And the 18% wouldn't make or break large projects. Building is more expensive than ever for many reasons, which include permits and lawsuits, but also labor cost. Efforts to raise taxes are usually thwarted by threats of business and wealthy citizens fleeing.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y agoThe simplest measure of the size of federal government is the budget. Spending has grown wonderfully since 1980, so frankly if their objective is to “shrink government” they’ve done a horrible job.
- troughway 6y agoNot being facetious - why should Vox be taken seriously? What are some lucid articles/arguments they have written to make them a good candidate for discussing this big of a matter?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agos/Vox/Ezra Klein/ Now go googling. Edit: ok, so some downvoter probably thought I was being too snarky. The article is written by Ezra Klein, not by "Vox", which is a publication not an author. Vox itself has published numerous "serious" article by (relatively) well-informed pundits, authors and others. Klein himself is an author and pundit with more than a decade of writing and thinking about the sorts of issues raised by Andreesen's article.
- ThomPete 6y agoSo close to being an amazing essay just to end by making the very mistake it so eloquently showed through the essay is hindering any form of change. You can't change the system from within. You have to crush it and build something completely new or you just end with the same filibuster situation just about what system of systems to build. You can't change a system with the very principles that create the system to begin with.
- dj_gitmo 6y agoSince this is a US-centric article it's worth noting that the US spends half of all federal discretionary spending (i.e. everything except Social Security or Medicare) on the military. Almost a trillion dollars a year. If even half that money were spent on an actual industrial policy we would be in much better shape. I maybe shouldn't be surprised the Vox article doesn't mention this.
- creddit 6y agoThe problem isn't lack of money and that's a huge part of the point of this article and the Andreesen blog post.
- Press2forEN 6y ago"As I’ve argued for years, we should prefer the problems of a system where elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where elected majorities cannot deliver on the promises that the American people voted for." Does that include building the wall, privatizing social security, eliminating the income tax, or implementing school choice? When you live in a country where one side just wants to undo the policies of the other, there's a deeper problem. Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan 1309, and I'm paraphrasing, if you want to build a good system, give it to your enemy for 10 years. We can't build because the idea of "we" needs to be reevaluated.
- RoboticWater 6y agoThe argument is that the electorate can't vote on policy unless they can see those policies in action. Voters can rest on the dogmatic idea that private markets solve everything without ever having to experience the effects of privatized social security. Elected officials can rely on dogma too, styling themselves like sports teams, knowing that because actually accomplishing something is off the table for both parties, they have to appeal to voters almost entirely by signaling their virtues. Yes, it would mean rapid fluctuations in policy, but the idea is that we need to inject some volatility so we can see what works and what doesn't. Obviously, this can lead to problems, like a majority party implementing policies which restrict the electorate or affect populations that can't form a strong voting coalition, but I'm not sure this is worse than what we have already. Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually do? Alter the electorate? Split the union?
- bhupy 6y ago> Further, I'm not really sure how we're supposed to reevaluate "we." That's a neat soundbite, but what does that mean? What are you suggesting we actually do? Alter the electorate? Split the union? There's no need to split the Union if we just follow the US Constitutions as the Framers intended: a Union of States with powers broadly vested in the States (see: the 9th and 10th Amendments). The more we take out of the purview of the Federal government and the more we allow States the leeway to enact whatever systems they wish (democratically), the more the States coexist harmoniously. The United States begins to look like the European Union.
- avmich 6y ago> If even the government is forced to turn a constant profit on its programs and to avoid anything that might look like a boondoggle Exhibit A of government boondoggle program is most expensive NASA programs. SLS (Space Launch System) - and its predecessors have spent so much that humanity could have a sizeable buzzing town on the Moon for that kind of money. The problem is that government both too afraid of responsibility in some places and very irresponsible in others, and there is no working mechanism to timely deal with that.
- cryptica 6y agoThere is definitely a problem with funding which is harmful for value creators. Funding which is not optimally allocated is much worse than no funding at all. Imagine if there are two people: - PersonA who has the potential to produce a lot of value but is useless when it comes to pitching ideas to investors because they spend all their effort thinking about how to solve problems. - PersonB who is useless at creating value but is really good at selling empty ideas to investors because they spend all of their effort thinking about their pitching techniques. In our economy, PersonB will beat PersonA every single time. What this means is that PersonA cannot get any funding at all and they end up being forced to work as an employee of PersonB who doesn't know what the heck they're doing because the only thing they are good at is attracting investors and telling them what they want to hear. In reality, it would be more efficient to let PersonA get all the funding and put PersonB on welfare (because PersonA would be smart enough to not hire them). As good as PersonB is at talking and convincing people to give them money, the reality is that they are less than useless for the economy. Unfortunately, we cannot BS our way to a stronger economy. If you watch some interviews by Masayoshi Son of Softbank, you will understand this. The guy is a genius at convincing people of the most fanciful, outlandish ideas - But he added no net value... He just distributed the funding he received to other snake oil salesmen like himself. The biggest VC in the world didn't know what the heck he was doing and was giving money to other people who also didn't know what the heck they were doing. I think it would be better if the activity of investing or loaning money would be made illegal. People should just get rich and retire; let the next person have a go. Getting rich and not retiring is immoral IMO. These people have every tool necessary to enjoy the rest of their lives but they prefer to stay in control and dedicate their entire careers to preventing other people from getting the same opportunities as they got. Because of them, our entire economy is now founded on the arbitrary top-down picking of winners instead of bottom-up value creation.
- Nasrudith 6y agoWhile bullshit is certainly a problem there are some major problems with your proposals. 1. How can you tell type A from type B before seeing them to ensure the "right" people get all of the funding? 2. Part of the reason the rich are encouraged to work is because they have proven high value of sort - regardless of the basis of the evaluation. The immorality assumes a smooth transition of similiar expertise would be trivial - along with experience not mattering. To be frank that is seldom the case. 3. Capital availability allows for upscaling which gives massive efficency over the small scale - it is why the megacompanies can retain dominance. If they could only produce product at a worse margin and quality then dealing with a mass of small scale producers would be a way to get concrete gains.
- twomoretime 6y agoThe US political system only works if some critical mass of politicians are operating in good faith. I skimmed the article and searched for "pork" to no results, so I assume there was no mention of what I'd say is the real problem - I don't think any modern bills come without pork, and that's part of the idiocy keeping our political system from working efficiently. Bills have exploded in size out of purely selfish political gaming wherein sponsors will attach dozens of pet projects as riders and as an added bonus, anyone who votes against the riders can be smeared later as voting against the primary topic of the bill. On top of that, because of this practice our politicians aren't even reading most of what they vote on. It's totally broken but short of a collapse I'm not sure how to convince a few hundred senators/congressmen to stop this idiotic, scummy practice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation)
- jessriedel 6y agoKlein conflates vetos by many small minorities with slight supermajority rules. That you can't build in SF w/o satisfying a thousand parties extracting their pound of flesh is very different than the 60% de-filibuster. Giving 51% majorities unhindered power is not the answer.
- buboard 6y agoWhere in the world can people build?
- golemiprague 6y agoI am surprised they don't mention the moving of manufacturing to China and pressuring the local building force with "undocumented" immigration. This created a society where nobody wants to do the building jobs and created a service based society. The people who do work in actual physical building type of jobs are mocked and berated by the elite because they don't subscribe to their every changing cultural shifts. People here ask why Germany or Japan got such a great infrastructure forgetting that those two countries are first and foremost an industrial countries that give respect and protect their blue collar workers.