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It's Time to Build for Good
- brenden2 6y agoWhat's the point? There are no rewards for doing good just for the sake of doing good. Hopium is a great way to get people to do your bidding, but why should people work hard for nothing while someone else gets rich?
- samsquire 6y agoThere isn't any thing pulling people together to build things. There's no shared desire between people to demand a thing.
- erjjones 6y ago.. and there was a time to not build for good??
- analognoise 6y agoMake weapons. It's good for you, bad for somebody else.
- tick_tock_tick 6y agoCorruption, environmental reviews, and labor costs make most major projects in the US a failure. San Francisco's subway extension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway 3 years behind schedule, with work starting in 2012 and a cost of 1.6 billion dollars for 1.7 miles of rail. The same story repeats itself all over the country. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... New York clocking in at 2.7 billion per mile for a 6 billion dollar extension.
- RangerScience 6y agoAnything jump out at you when you compare/contrast with non-failure projects? AFAIK, examples are: 1) The east bay bridge ramp repair after that tanker fire 2) The Culver CIty <-> Santa Monica portion of the LA Expo Line AFAIK, both of these finished early and the first one "under budget".
- renewiltord 6y agoGreat comparisons. I'm not familiar with these, so would you mind spelling out why you think those worked?
- RangerScience 6y agoThe story I remember for the bridge repair... An oil truck tipped over, lit on fire, melted the steel in the overpasses (same level, above, and below). Bids were put out; you got a bonus if you got it done in under a month, and then for every day before that, further bonus. One bid came in both super low on "cost", and in time (like a week or something), and they'd make all their money on the bonus structure. Firm succeeded (lost like a day to a flat tire on a shipment, too), and AFAIK they were the firm selected for the Yerba Buena changeover. No quality issues either, although I don't know details. For LA... LA expo line was originally not going to reach the beach until... nowish? But something happened, and it got done years early. AFAIK, that schedule increase didn't come with a cost increase. Literally right now, my understanding is that the Beverly Hills line is getting accelerated, since there's no traffic to interrupt / work around. Edit: Has any government project been on time and overbudget, or are they always both over time and over budget?
- MAGZine 6y agoDoing anything in san francisco underground is a huge PITA. By nature, this consumes a lot of money, time, and expense. As soon as you start digging underground you find a whole litany of old pipes, wires, mains, etc that do not appear on any drawing. You're unsure if they're in use or not, and some of them are so old that just pulling the earth away from them causes them to fail. There's more to it other than politics. These things are hard to do in established cities, especially at the shallow depths that muni operates at.
- novok 6y agoYou compare america vs other even older cities in other developed european cities delivering new rail lines far faster and cheaper and those kinds of excuses just doesn't pass muster. More context: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
- MAGZine 6y agothey specifically call out san francisco's line as having reason to be expensive, but point taken—America has broader problems developing rapid transit.
- bluGill 6y agoEverything you say should apply to Madrid or Barcelona Spain, but worse as the city is older. Yet Spain manages to build subways for a small fraction of the cost.
- pm90 6y agoIt’s certainly not an easy engineering task but it’s made even more complex by regulations. At some point we need to understand the trade offs that come with regulations and either redesign them to enable large scale infrastructure projects or accept the fact that such projects are just not possible in the current framework. So for eg environmental regulations to deter coal plants are fantastic because they encourage the alternatives. But regulations that prohibit anything seem as useless as no regulations: we need to generate power somehow.
- jimthrow 6y agoHere in the Bay Area we have local politicians who brag about all the building plans they’ve shut down and voters applaud this!
- BurningFrog 6y agoMaybe I'm overly cynical, but my impression is that San Francisco building projects are primarily intended for contracting companies, unions, and elected officials to make as much money as possible on. The resulting built thing is a distant afterthought.
- renewiltord 6y agoEspecially when Dianne Feinstein's husband owned large portions of Tutor Perini. TPC were the guys who tried to pass off the low-quality steel rails they installed as equivalent to what was requested in the Central Subway. My personal hypothesis is that Americans get very defensive about this because there's a cultural resistance to being the guy who got fooled, so many of us will invent reasons that fall down really fast like "SF is an old city with lots of underground things." or "SF is in an earthquake zone" or (my new favourite) "Liquefaction", etc. etc.
- BurningFrog 6y agoThanks, I wasn't aware of that only mildly surprising piece of seeming corruption. My suspicion is that SF these days is more like an oil emirate. It can pump all this free tech money, and doesn't need to worry about having a functioning society around it. Just an unfinished thought.
- Paradox0 6y agoThen why does Europe execute much better on infrastructure projects with similar labor costs (and more unionized workers and labor protections) and similar if not stricter environmental regulations? Seems like corruption is potentially the only big differentiating factor here.
- jcranmer 6y agoThe New York Times' report on the exorbitantly overpriced Second Avenue Subway work highlighted extensive union featherbedding in that instance, which probably explains some (but not all) of the cost premium. Another plausible factor is the push to privatization and contracting in the US public sector removing effective management from the picture, so that the public sector is no longer capable of cost control. For example, by realizing when bidders on contracts are bullshitting too high or too low, or by pushing people to suggest cheaper designs. A corollary to the previous point is that the US generally seems unwilling to look at foreign countries (especially countries not named Canada or the UK) for insights into what can be done better. This can result in people not adopting newer, cheaper technologies in a kind of NIH syndrome. Another possible factor is that, for several kinds of projects, the US's diverging rules (e.g., FRA regulations basically banning all European rolling stock until they were revised a year or two ago) combined with a relatively low install base could be preventing economies of scale to make things cheaper. There's lots of plausible factors. Actually digging into what makes them so expensive is very time-consuming, and I suspect there is very little pressure (let alone ability!) from anyone on any side of the political spectrum to actually make it happen. It's much easier to pick the factor you personally believe in and say it's so without any evidence to back it up.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago“Another plausible factor is the push to privatization and contracting in the US public sector removing effective management from the picture, so that the public sector is no longer capable of cost control. “ This seems to be a big factor also in companies. My company’s IT department has outsourced a lot and so a lot of projects are managed by people who can’t judge if something is good or not. I have heard the same about government agencies. They have no experts left.
- lasermike026 6y agoAt the start of the covid crisis we realized that we did not have enough local manufacturing capacity to make what we need and we still do not. We have the facilities just sitting idle. It's time to get to it. There is little or no leadership to make this happen. Leadership is where it starts.
- draw_down 6y agoI don’t think this will change in America. Neither in the short, medium, nor long term. To say “let’s build” without an analysis as to why we weren’t building is fatuous.
- cs702 6y agoThis essay is full of wishful expressions, such as "stagnation is a choice", "if we want to", and "we must circumvent", followed by exhortations to "regain the will" -- to do this or that thing for the good of everyone. It all sounds very reasonable, very worthwhile, very moral. As Larry the Liquidator would say, "Amen!"[a] Alas, I think the root of the problem is that companies and people have strong economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust (i.e., inefficient/redundant) socially beneficial infrastructure that everyone agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly diffuse, or might not be recouped until well after everyone alive today is dead. No amount of exhortation will change rational behavior. (Stronger, harsher mechanisms may be necessary.) -- [a] From the movie "Other People's Money:" When Larry the Liquidator attempts to take over a company, the CEO gives an inspiring speech to shareholders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws -- to which Larry responds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q
- throwanem 6y agoThat's why the article also talks about state coordination, of the sort most famously seen at the tail end of the (first) Great Depression and through the Second World War - the use of government power to construct a scheme of incentives whereby building a durable future becomes rational behavior. Which, granted, is also probably a pipe dream, the way things have gone lately. But it wasn't always, nor need it always be henceforward.
- core-questions 6y agoThere is a name for the third position where government works together to guide industry without centralizing everything, but it's gone out of vogue and is grossly mischaracterized most of the time by folks that don't understand the intention.
- pbourke 6y agoThis is the reason why the US made so many advances in aerospace, computing and networks during the midcentury. Not to mention the basic research that is funded (insanely cheaply) by the grant-making apparatus of the NIH, NSF, DOD, etc.
- mgummelt 6y ago"The only choice we seem able to make anymore is the choice not to make anything." "American manufacturing output is larger than ever" Which is it?
- MattGaiser 6y agoIt is not quite larger than ever, but pretty close. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
- jbay808 6y agoIs this just that thing where the performance of intel processors is computed as being exponentially higher than in the past, so the accounting is inflated accordingly?
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe table is labeled "Real Output" which usually means inflation-adjusted and uses 2012 as the base year. I'm no expert on this data but it appears to be.
- analognoise 6y agoNo, we make more stuff than at almost any point. We've lost zero manufacturing capability. We just need a fraction of the people that used to be involved - they've been replaced by robots. "The job at the plant" died, not the manufacturing sector.
- skaevola 6y agoWhy can't I buy an American made toaster? This isn't a gotcha -- I actually tried a few weeks ago and all I found for my trouble was this website: https://buyingamericanblog.com/2017/05/29/quest-for-made-in-america-toaster/ https://buyingamericanblog.com/2017/05/29/quest-for-made-in-... People with direct experience of the manufacturing sector in the US and abroad (including me) will certainly tell you that America's capabilities have deteriorated, at least relative to other countries. The machine tool industry is considered a good bellwether for industrial capacity and there's been some good research on this topic if you're interested: http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf
- beefee 6y agoHow do we do this in the face of systemic, subsidized discrimination against American industry? The ePacket program forces the USPS to subsidize shipping from the PRC to the US. End this immediately and let's start analyzing the forces behind this abusive practice.
- MattGaiser 6y agoHow many Americans are actually ordering stuff off Alibaba through ePacket? Is this actually having a major impact or is it just a very visible problematic practice?
- MattGaiser 6y agoAnd I thought that Marc Andreessen’s original essay was light on substance...
- the_reformation 6y agoBeen following this guy on Twitter for a while, he's great. I like him a lot because he's so eloquently defends beauty and humanism vs. what he calls "pod life"- the Zoom/UberEats/WFH triumvirate- the airportification of our cities, the bleh futurism imagined by contemporary sci-fi.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> airportification of our cities I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it further?
- novok 6y agoI think it's the bland sanitized global style that you see everywhere in in airport/mall combos around the world.
- core-questions 6y agoIt's the new brutalism: cheap functional architecture with no nods to true beauty or mathematical form. It feels like a punishment to look at.
- daotoad 6y agoBrutalism is NOT just "cheap functional architecture with no nods to true beauty". Yes, it is an extension of Bauhaus, with exposed fixtures and minimalist, functional designs. Yes, in the hands of a hack, this yields ugliness. Buildings like Habitat 67 in Montreal, Vancouver BC's central library, and UC San Diego's Giesel Library are works of art. To say there was no thought of form or beauty is patently a calumny. Strip-mall architecture is the fast food of architecture. Quick, cheap, and, at best, lacking in nutritional value.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSo what are the flaws of brutalism? To look at the referenced examples, no storage space would be one. Confusing floorplan is another. Huge volumes spent on being brutal, but little attention to functional value?
- arithmetician 6y agoas a Yale alum, I like to play the drinking game "take a shot every time a Yalie uses the word 'qua'" in all seriousness, decent take, but it doesn't seem to add that much to Andreesen's essay. e.g. the whole bit about how building a new world is inherently political... yes, in a more philosophical sense. But when Andreesen writes "we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building," he clearly is referring to America's dysfunctional political climate, not "living together" / some conception you'd be considering in political philosophy. fwiw, I do think Andreesen's essay could have more explicity (as Isaac's is) criticized out how creative/productive effort has been spent in recent times. I remember reading a quote about how crazy it is that the nation's (and globe's) top talent is being brought to Silicon Valley to, in large part, figure out how to more effectively addict young people to their apps (rather than, as it were, "build for good").
- novok 6y agoWe chose silicon valley because we'd rather build than waste our time in tar pits that we are not very good at navigating and frankly find excruciating to navigate. I think many of us would of loved to work in pure physics, mech eng spaceX type stuff too.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- starpilot 6y agoThe problem with those other fields is they're about delayed gratification, which tech people are bad at. What you see as "wasting time" is just the normal development process for rockets, medical equipment etc.
- novok 6y agoThe thing is, in the past, there weren't those wastes of time in those fields and they delivered. The sclerosis is recent.
- starpilot 6y agoEverything up this point was building for bad in the attention economy. At least they admit it.
- waingake 6y agoCorporate America stopped building nationality once it realised it could offshore to failing states with populations who's alternative to wage slavery was starvation. If you want to build for good, we need alternatives such as worker owned business where insentives align with the interests of the communities they are from.
- aero142 6y agoI genuinely want to believe that these are alternatives to the shotfalls of capitalism, but I find the evidence pretty sparse. When you say this, what is the best example you are thinking of that makes you believe it can work? I'm not asking you to do research for me, but I am curious if others have clear examples in mind when they suggest these.
- luckylion 6y agoAn example for worker-owned might be Mondragon [1]. I don't know how well that works in different settings and how easy it is to replicate. I do know that cooperatives, even if not worker-owned but customer-owned do work quite well in Germany. They serve their customers, as their customers are also their members/owners, so their interests are aligned. They often also have social sub-goals (their primary goals being servicing their members). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- teachrdan 6y agoYou might compare the experience of being a member of a credit union to being a customer of a major bank. The CU, as a member owned non-profit, has fewer incentives to screw you over with hidden fees and high transaction costs.
- pharke 6y ago> Functional industry requires a great deal of implicit knowledge that is not easily regained once traditions of manufacturing die out—like a master dying before they can find an apprentice to teach. The masters aren't dead yet and neither are their apprentices. There are still quite a few old timers around that have retreated or retired to running small shops doing a greatly scaled down version of their trade. We could get a lot of them back in business if we made them competitive with overseas manufacturing. The word tariff is suspiciously absent from this discussion though.
- lowwave 6y agoHow hard is to have a web site viewable without javascript? I mean it is not a web site that has maps or some kind of desktop app type of feature. At least make it so it will be viewable without javascript.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI just flipped off my Javascript and it loaded fine. Are you sure that is the problem?
- erik_seaberg 6y agoThe head is bulky but the body is readable in curl | less.
- seltzered_ 6y agoThis sparked a couple thoughts: 1) I recently learned from a friend about Manly P. Hall's[1] 1928 book "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" which delves a bit into people like Ernest Holmes, Emma Curtis Hopkins about doing things around a framing of doing "for good". 2) Venkatesh Rao recently wrote[1] about Andreesen's "It's time to build" piece and tried to explain what he think it really meant as now being a time for a "Macro Rebuild" and foundational changes to happen after earlier phases of tool-making, alternative-building, and disruption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_P._Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_P._Hall [2] https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/how-what-and-where-to-build https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/how-what-and-where-to-b...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jimmyvalmer 6y agoThe author can start with himself by abstaining from this kind of wordy pontificating. Unfortunately as a political science and Chinese major, he's rendered himself incapable of answering the call for "bridges not bullsh_t."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sudosteph 6y agoDecent enough problem analysis, but the solutions proposed seem to fall into either the "absolute fluff" category: > Beauty is not simply some pleasant thing to be considered once we smash the zoning codes. It is the aesthetic force necessary to reach deep into our subconscious and activate our will to live in a new world (which, yes, includes new zoning codes). or the "proven to be insufficient" category: > Reconstructing the better part of an industrial society will take decades; and with our present white-collar workforce left utterly directionless, inflated by elite overproduction, and medicated at world-historic levels, sending a million students to Harvard will not, as Andreessen suggests, help spur technological progress. Rather, it is the regeneration of practically-grounded trade schools and state-backed coordination that is needed to retrain a productive workforce. Trade schools are great and all - but retraining efforts consistently fail when the jobs do not line up with an individual's self-image. Truckers will not line up to be trained as CNAs, no matter how many training programs or jobs are offered and jobs are demanded. Likewise, most white collar workers will not line up to be factory workers. The essential thing he's missing is that the reason many Americans didn't freak out when Bill Clinton signed the bills which caused these jobs to overseas is the first place - is because the reality of factory jobs is at odds with the American dream of self-determination. Many humans don't like being a cog in the machine, even if it's a steady income. Many children of these manufacturing workers saw the harmful side of those types of jobs, and instead opted for college or service-industry jobs where they focus on developing soft skills and relationships with people. Yes they want good jobs and to not get abused by the gig job industry, but many Americans don't want to go back to being treated as human machinery in factories either. The real thing Americans want is better opportunity to use those skills to start their own businesses, to put their skills and creativity to use. That's part of the reason craft brewing took off so intensely - it's one of the only fields that young people can still break into and differentiate themselves even with limited starting resources. All that said, I do admit that I was surprised when I saw that the author is just an undergraduate. His naivete is a bit less concerning with that in mind.
- slx26 6y agoprobably out of topic and not too helpful, but lately I feel we spend so much time in intellectual discussion about other intellectual discussion that we kinda forget about the basics. what does people want and why don't we have it? maybe I'm just too tired today, but in my mind it's like nowadays debate about the world always ends up polluted by a never-ending collection of disconnected elements and a cloud of complexity that we can never manage to navigate with a clear sense of direction. To me Andreessen's essay sounded like just another political speech, and then this article diffuse echo around the former. Maybe I need some sleep.