8 ms·

A man whose software ate the world

139 points by jger15 5y ago

breck 5y ago
Mind expanding read. Tangent. Made me want to read Around the World in Eighty Days. Here's a public domain ePub version: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
simlan 5y ago
Yeah hard and fast liberalism. Way to go /s off Started out legit... Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence.
- fencepost 5y ago
  Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence. If Covid had a higher fatality rate, there's an excellent chance we'd have seen vaccines in accelerated trials as early as March 2020. The vaccines were in existence by around that point[0], but in part because mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology there wasn't as much push to accelerate distribution as there could have been. If the fatality or long term damage rate was 10x what it is, there'd have been a lot more willingness to "try it NOW." [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/ - of note, Moderna had a vaccine prepared 42 days after the spike protein sequence was published on January 10. It took roughly another 6 weeks before that vaccine was being injected in Phase 1 trials in early May.
  - breck 5y ago
    Medical records will shift to be owned by the patients, will be real time, the grammars will be open source and public domain, and people will be able to opt in and out of studies with a single click. When we have that, then when confronted with the next novel virus we could launch trials in under 30 days.
    - uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
      Grammars...na elaine will just get a "difficult:true" kv pair added to her json object
wankerrific 5y ago
A great read of a man getting high huffing his own farts -- like all of our billionaire overlords.
- emteycz 5y ago
  I don't want to dismiss your feelings - could you please explain why do you feel like there are some "billionaire overlords" over you? I personally never ever felt anything close to that even though I am coming from a small, formerly communist and poor European country, so I'd like to understand where is that coming from. As I see it, nobody is forcing me to do anything and I am met with great opportunities nearly daily - I can't ask for more.
  - jmeister 5y ago
    +1 from a 3rd world immigrant. I’ve been visiting these parts of the internet ever since PG started writing his essays. There is marked shift in the attitudes here, from celebrating success to hating it. This is of course not limited to SFBA. The phenomenon has been, and continues to be, endlessly analyzed by journalists, culture critics and social scientists. A common theme is that of decadence, that only a society as rich as the US can begin to afford to hate itself.
    - yzombinator 5y ago
      Poorer societies can hate themselves for being corrupt. I don't think this is a rich game. I guess it's harder to understand the reasons for rich societies.
    - MathYouF 5y ago
      Or perhaps only a society rich as rich as the U.S. can begin to question if total economic output is a noble metric that our brightest and ablest minds ought to strive for or be awarded public accolade for. Perhaps it's only in disfunctional societies, possibly ones who've seen a lot of harm from communistic rhetoric, that they think in simple terms that those making a larger pie are still morally better than those who shrink the pie in the name of equality or morality. Perhaps that dichotomy isn't as relevant in the U.S., where the pie is already large and many further methods of expanding it don't actually benefit society and the metric of assuming those with a large slice must've also expanded the total size of the societal pie isn't holding up to scrutiny. My critique of your your critique aside, I agree that I don't personally feel under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs, though they clearly do unduly influence our legislative process to benefit themselves to a higher degree (corruption) than in Northern and Western European nations which we comapre ourselves to in terms of degree of liberty.
morelisp 5y ago
Watch carefully as the paragraph beginning with a semi-reasonable assertion that "the notion of scientific objectivity [has] existed for a very short window of time" goes all the way to the batshit "rule of law... emerged in the wake of our post-Enlightenment textual explosion." What fucking charlatans.
okareaman 5y ago
America can build nuclear power plants and high speed trains but we choose to do it in a responsible way or not at all if a better idea comes along. The Chinese govt can seize all the land they want, displace whoever they please and destroy their environment to build things. I don't know anyone excited about a high speed train between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It's pretty easy to Uber to the airport and hop on a jet to get there quicker. I keep reading Andreessen to find something that expands my thinking but I never find it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
taneq 5y ago
> They're not building fusion reactors super fast, they're not building things we don't have super fast. Uh... https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a36630528/china-artificial-sun-breaks-fusion-world-record/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a36630528/ch...
- slashdot2008 5y ago
  it ran for 101 seconds at .... 120,000,000 DEGREES CELCIUS!! for comparison the sun is 15,000,000 degrees C. I wonder how they measure a temperature that high.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Spectrum?
  - sien 5y ago
    These videos goes over various methods: How do we measure 15 million degrees? (from Tokomak Energy (4:34)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77af1ZivgA&t=57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77af1ZivgA&t=57s And this longer one from UKAEA (55 minutes) Hotter than the sun and lighter than air; measuring the extreme conditions of fusion plasma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8JEky-Bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8JEky-Bo Spectroscopy and laser measurements and other measures are used. The engineering and science in fusion research is amazing.
f00zz 5y ago
I read "Around the World in 80 Days" not too long ago, and as I was reading the part where they're crossing the US I had exactly that same thought: the US was the China of the late 19th century.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  One difference would be that population was relatively low (and growing fast). In 1870 the population of the US was similar to that of France.
neilv 5y ago
> running something like Netscape 3.x while watching the ‘throbber’—a looping, pixelated animation of a planet-straddling ‘N’ getting hit with a meteor shower Trivia (but maybe relevant to HN): I believe the reason it was called a "throbber" was from the throbbing "N" [1] with which Netscape Navigator replaced NCSA Mosaic's cool spinning globe.[2] I always thought that the throbbing N seemed like a placeholder. I vaguely recall JWZ later having a collection of throbbers/spinners for Navigator. [1] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/nscape1.html http://www.andrewturnbull.net/nscape1.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s
visualradio 5y ago
"All of Europe had been what you were describing for 300 years or so. But by the time the US came along, that spirit was starting to fade. So what they did quite literally was put all their money in the US. The way JP Morgan got established was that his father Junius Morgan ran the leading merchant bank in London, and then set up his son Pierpont to run a correspondent bank in New York, and the two of them basically funneled money from the UK to the US to build everything in what was known as the Second Industrial Revolution." The money was not as important as the workers, thinkers, raw materials. The prior civil war era was a period of massive industrial output, despite the government simply throwing legal tender into circulation without obtaining gold from Europe, and the destruction of huge quantities of wealth in the war. The railroads and war effort required business to organize the transportation and production of large quantities of material wealth which lead to a greater focus on industrial profits, rather than hollow financial profits from real estate speculation. The later form of investment is 'hollow' because the procedure is a M -> M' paper gain which does not produce any material goods or fixed capital as a side effect. European investors had been investing money in America since 1600s, primarily to engage in real estate speculation on western lands, what was important in industrialization is that there was a shift in investment from real estate speculation to industrial development. The driver of the shift was industrialists like Andrew Carnegie who were involved in the war effort. To promote industrial investment without militarism it's primarily a matter of reducing large after-tax total returns and access to credit for financial speculators obtaining hollow M -> M' gains relative to industrial investors.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- markdown 5y ago
  > To promote industrial investment without militarism .. implement a Georgist land value tax.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    While I tend to agree with you, this isn’t r/neoliberal you need to explain why that would help and that is why you are being downvoted.
blueyes 5y ago
Couple interesting ideas and terms here: * "vetocracy" - the rule of those who say no. Andreessen says it contributed to IBM's obsolescence. Happening now to the USA. * Related to: Why don't we solve carbon emissions with nuclear fission? Totally fair question. * The Internet saved the economy during the COVID lockdowns. (I think that's pretty plausible.)
- adolph 5y ago
  I think “vetocracy” may be related to Taleb’s idea that “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    In the US, Joe Manchin is now recognized as the most powerful senator in some ways, precisely because while there are a lot of other Democrats, he is the one dragging his feet the most on major bills that need every Democrat to support. On the other side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell has even MORE power in practice since he has centralized the Republican vote in himself and holds more than the 40 Senators needed to veto most legislation. I say more power in practice, because Manchin could participate in removing the filibuster and break McConnell's power, but failed negotiating class and has already committed to not doing that. -- The sum is, with veto power centralized in just two Senators, together they have accrued most of the power of the whole Senate, and (since it has veto power), the entire Congress.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Joe Manchin Sorry, not a native English-speaker... So how is that pronounced; Mannikin or Manchild?
narrator 5y ago
"It’s really striking how many Clubhouse rooms that are on these very tense topics that can go for hours and hours and hours without actually blowing up. Whereas on Twitter, they would have detonated three minutes in." The difference between Clubhouse and Twitter is Twitter has bots and people who are paid to influence. Bots haven't mastered faking speech well enough to disrupt Clubhouse yet. The influencers will show up eventually, but it seems like Clubhouse has some good moderation features and since it's slow and linear, and only one person can speak at a time, it's more human manageable. "I can't watch television, news or commentary or anything like that anymore. It's just too much of an alienating and frustrating experience; I'd much rather go listen to three-hour podcasts" Yes, absolutely. I can't stand TV any more. I now listen to podcasts when I eat dinner instead of T.V. The great part about podcasts is there is so much variety. T.V seems to be locked into a much smaller set of ideas. "California has had this incredibly absurd period…you could make a Terry Gilliam movie about high speed train construction in California. Like a sequel to Brazil or something, set in the California bureaucracy and political system where you spend billions and billions of dollars and absolutely nothing happens. What would be the most obvious thing in the world is a high speed train between San Francisco and LA. All of these programs exist, they've been authorized, with taxes and all kinds of stuff and like nothing." The peak of the absurdity is San Francisco. That it took 1 billion dollars to construct 1 mile of subway in San Francisco is pretty funny. San Francisco also spends $300 million a year on 8,035 homeless people. We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, double as a percentage vs any other country and have worse outcomes. There's something going on here that nobody wants to talk about. I think it's related to this: "I'll confess to being shocked and stunned by how well things worked. I thought last March, when we decided suicidally that we were going to basically shut the economy down. I was like, oh shit, this is really going to be a horrific depression. What's the worst possible depression you can have? It's one where you have simultaneous blows to the supply and demand side and you kill the engine and stall the plane." It makes you think. How much of the economy is just "bullshit jobs"[1]. How much is just make work, and what we need to do our daily routine and survive just sitting around at home with our laptops is maybe 30% of the actual economy, plus a bunch of stuff made in China? Despite what most doom-mongers claim, there seems to be an ENORMOUS amount of slack in the system, and to actually do something that doesn't take advantage of all that slack, like building new infrastructure, is an enormous ask. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
m0llusk 5y ago
This is toxic garbage. Let me explain some problems with the main points: 1. This guy did Netscape, which ate the world. But actually, someone else came up with browsers and the web and shortly after Netscape other browsers buried it. No, not so much the guy who's software ate the world as someone who briefly made large amounts of money from an intermediate stage development. 2. Time to build essay about not being ready for COVID-19. Actually, we were ready but political games blocked execution of plans that had been prepared in advance as well as most creative adaptation. Failing to acknowledge or take responsibility for the political mess only makes it worse. 3. Recollection of radical train transport development fails to take into account that much of that development was subsidized, built so badly that it had to be rebuilt in the short term, and the practice of charging what traffic would bear severely limited the positive impact of rail technology for decades. Again, politics was a huge part of what went on. Also in this case the progress was far less impressive when viewed in detail. 4. China, China, China, so far ahead except not. China is facing a demographic implosion, a national political implosion, huge environmental problems, and many problems with their vaunted developments. The last high speed train collision cost many lives but was never properly investigated. Dams and bridges all over China are failing catastrophically or operating in a severely risky in degraded state. Now their economy is melting down before their consumers can support it and this is held up as an example? 5. Hippies and environmental movements made a softer culture in the 60s and 70s? Actually, they rejected endless war without reason and want to make a peace with the environment which is harder than merely considering only through the economic magic of externalization. People joke about the Cuyahoga catching fire, but that was a nasty tragedy that made a lot of people sick. Wanting to move on from that is wanting to take responsibility and solve the hard problems instead of simply flushing toxic chemicals into rivers and calling that progress. 6. Use nuclear power for eliminating emissions? That is a nonstarter at two critical levels. First, solar and wind are already cheaper and have lower negative impacts. Second, the public has been completely turned off to nuclear power by all of the hype and the lies. Keep in mind that we still have no actual plan for phasing out radioactive plants at end of life and the nuclear waste is piling up. But it is the spreadsheet facts that are the most damning. How can anyone claiming to be interested in business and commerce fixate on an unworkable expensive solution? 7. We can't make our own medical equipment? Probably because we did not try. The usual thing is to smooth out any regulatory problems and make sure that financing is available preferably through commercial entities but by government if necessary. Instead people at the top (politics again) played games with statements about the effectiveness of masks instead of being honest and working to figure out production details. We absolutely chose to not even bother trying to make our own medical equipment. 8. California High Speed Rail is expensive and not done yet. This, if you look at the many published details, is because of the scale of the project and the robustness of the solution. The stretch currently being constructed has a grade separation roughly every one and two third miles which is a huge amount of complication that results in better safety and less environmental impact, both things that build oriented capitalists apparently do not care about. 9. High cost of infrastructure revealed by the Second Avenue Subway--except not. If you actually investigated that situation you would find that roughly 100 years ago the Second Avenue Subway was proposed and it was found that already at that time the huge amount of infrastructure and other subway lines already installed in that area would make the project too expensive to make sense. Over the next hundred years the subway line was repeatedly proposed and ruled out. Then eventually we decided that cost was no obstacle and moved forward and amazingly enough the project turned out to be hugely expensive. The only thing that this shows is the tremendous contempt that politicians and capitalists have for science, knowledge, research, and basic spreadsheet economics. 10. COVID-19 vaccine could have been had earlier, but instead we insisted on extremely rigorous safety trials because this would be administered to millions of people who needed to be convinced taking it would be the right move. So mister build build build capitalist wants to take a big risk? Sorry, the medical community does not operate by stripped down companies for shareholder profit view of what is important. 11. IBM died because their management got conservative? Sort of. Probably the best way to view this is from the study of the lifetimes of corporations which have been revealed to have a youth, middle age, and old age leading to death just like organisms. This is how development and building and economics works and this is why even small slices of modern corporate offerings such as Oracle and AWS offer far more than IBM could ever have conceived. 12. Government spending is now at WWII levels and what did we get? This is an indirect endorsement of austerity economics which we have now proven through much experience is a colossal failure. Government spending in a downturn limits the duration and severity of the downturn. Of course a fantastically rich developer of a browser that briefly mattered does not need to care about either of these things, at least not until the revolution comes. The Hamptons are not a defensible position. 13. "We spent the last 20 years like putting broadband everywhere" Translation: I do not travel outside of coastal US cities. This covers points to around halfway through, but I think it makes the point relatively well. This man is not an enlightened leader, but dangerously deluded with a lack of understanding of reality and a lack of respect for basic spreadsheet economics.
ElViajero 5y ago
> We want to complain about them; we just don't want to fix them. This dismisses the actual problem, citizens of the USA are fighting against big corporation interests and systemic abuse. This is the kind of thing a movie bully tells the kid that he is punching with the kid's own fist: "Stop hitting yourself". USA citizens are fighting, are organizing, are more conscious than ever of their lack of health-care, education, justice. So, unless you refer to the billionaires, it is not true at all that "we just don't want to fix them.". All the rest are trying their best. > we could have had that in March of last year and stopped this whole pandemic slideshow from the start. We chose not to do so. Is his proposal to give a vaccine to millions without testing it properly first? Is this the the final "move fast; break things"? And that things are people's lives. > And then as you saw, the stock market came back, like really fast, and the stock market intuited something that turned out to be really true, The "market is always right", like communism, works in theory. But, in practice many have forgotten 2006. > I think the biggest change in the past three centuries of human history was the decoupling of the movement of information from the movement of matter, of bits from atoms. Industrial revolution maybe? > By the way, every CEO I’ve talked to is saying Every one of them. The best CEOs. All say the same. > This idea that you can now make actually independent choices about how you live on the one hand, and how you work on the other hand, and you can actually decouple those things. If you have the money, yes. And the it ends with a rant on Twitter. The guy that wrote on Twitter: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”. At least, he apologized. It is very interesting to peek into the mind of someone so out of touch of day-to-day life for most people. His views on how, if he was let free to do as he pleases, he will solve all the problems, that easy. I guess that too much money gives people a "delusion of grandeur".
- j-bos 5y ago
  Regarding the vaccine in spring of 2020, there were sufficient volunteers to run challenge trials.
goldwind 5y ago
Well we are not finished with that sect of the NY subway because now we have workers rights. And a lot of industrial jobs are used to fund blue collar workers. If you want things built faster then use more AI and less humans and see how that turns out. Most blue collar workers I believe are conservative as well. It’s a bipartisan effort
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  You haven’t seen 5 people watching 1 person dig a ditch in your hometown?
haecceity 5y ago
> They're not building fusion reactors super fast, they're not building things we don't have super fast. They're building things that we were building a hundred years ago…super fast. It was the Chinese that built the railways here and they were building it the opposite of "super fast". > I'm in favor of everyone having train stations and freeway systems, it's all good. But the American freeway system got built out starting in the 1930s; it's been a long time since that kind of thing has amazed us. This is the reason we can't have nice things isn't it. What a waste of time I want 10 minutes of my life back.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
"but what you could enforce in common is this: let’s just agree on how to score the result." Why would this be important? For example, what value would there be in the Right scoring how well the Left succeeded in implemting gun control? Why would you care how well your opposition accomplished a result you oppose? I don't think this would foster commonality.
hliyan 5y ago
Much of this makes perfect sense, but: can a wealthy person be trusted to make decisions (or advocate policies) that affect the entire world population? Because his thinking will be influenced by how the world affects his wealth. But he will be generally more rational in decisions in his personal life because he is financially secure enough to not be governed by fear. The reverse will be true of a poor person. Perhaps even well-meaning billionaires will subconsciously advocate policies that maintain the status quo, because it is the status quo that enabled his wealth in the first place.
throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
Why don't we have flying cars? It's a choice. If we wanted to, we could build them. Same for climate change, world hunger, a pill to make you skinny, etc. Yes, we can literally achieve anything if we "choose" to do so. So we chose not to. Or at least that's what this article seems to indicate. > Step one: Point out that it's a choice we are making. This has been pointed out a lot through history. But first you have to get past the ego-shattering realization that actually, it's not always a choice we are making. To make a choice, you have to have a choice. That is to say, multiple options. If you don't see multiple options, you effectively don't have a choice. Even if multiple options exist, if you aren't aware of them, then for practical purposes they don't exist. It took 2,250 years for a person to combine a pulley with a ratchet and make the first safety elevator. Before that, nobody had really considered safety to be a core function of an elevator. It was just an annoying problem that you had to accept. If somebody had realized they had a choice to make safety mandatory, and had also realized what the impact of that choice was, they would have discovered this method back in antiquity and we would have had something resembling skyscrapers for thousands of years. Imagine pyramids of workers, all shuttling up and down quickly and safely. Imagine the pyramids being built with elevators! > Step two: We really need to decide at an individual and collective level if this is how we want to live. Let's say I don't want to live without wings. Like, literal wings. Bird wings. According to this principle, all we have to do is decide that we want to live with wings, and we'll make it happen. But this goes back to the first step. Who the hell right now thinks that they have the choice to live with literal wings?? Who is sitting around going, "it's crazy that my arms aren't flappy" ?? Nobody is. You have to know you have the choice, and then you can maybe do something about it, once you figure out how, and deal with every obstacle in your way. And even then it's no guarantee. We achieved a plane that cruises at Mach 3.2. We don't have it anymore. We achieved electric cars (more of them than any other type) at the start of the 20th century, and they're making a comeback a century later. We've had cars that can drive through water for just as long, but you don't see many folks driving their Escalade across the lake to beat traffic. It's not so much that we can't or don't do a thing. Life is more complex than simply having or making a choice. Sometimes things just don't come together, for reasons. It's also kind of ridiculous that they're so obsessed with Clubhouse. You know what we called that back in my day? A conference call (or a party line).
- 5y ago
magwa101 5y ago
"Polio vaccine rolled out to 1M kids as a test" is seen as a good thing but remember: * Tuskegee experiment * LSD experiments on military * Many other hidden experiments But you know, that wouldn't affect him so let's go do it. I just find his pov so self serving it's very hard to read.
magwa101 5y ago
"Polio vaccine rolled out to 1M kids as a test" is seen as a good thing yet fails to state the downside: * Tuskegee experiment * LSD experiments on military * Many other hidden experiments and abuses But you know, that wouldn't affect him so let's go do it. I just find his pov so self serving it's very hard to read.

139 points by jger15 5y ago

Mind expanding read. Tangent. Made me want to read Around the World in Eighty Days. Here's a public domain ePub version: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

simlan 5y ago

Yeah hard and fast liberalism. Way to go /s off Started out legit... Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence.

fencepost 5y ago
Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence. If Covid had a higher fatality rate, there's an excellent chance we'd have seen vaccines in accelerated trials as early as March 2020. The vaccines were in existence by around that point[0], but in part because mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology there wasn't as much push to accelerate distribution as there could have been. If the fatality or long term damage rate was 10x what it is, there'd have been a lot more willingness to "try it NOW." [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/ - of note, Moderna had a vaccine prepared 42 days after the spike protein sequence was published on January 10. It took roughly another 6 weeks before that vaccine was being injected in Phase 1 trials in early May.
- breck 5y ago
  Medical records will shift to be owned by the patients, will be real time, the grammars will be open source and public domain, and people will be able to opt in and out of studies with a single click. When we have that, then when confronted with the next novel virus we could launch trials in under 30 days.
  - uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
    Grammars...na elaine will just get a "difficult:true" kv pair added to her json object

wankerrific 5y ago

A great read of a man getting high huffing his own farts -- like all of our billionaire overlords.

emteycz 5y ago
I don't want to dismiss your feelings - could you please explain why do you feel like there are some "billionaire overlords" over you? I personally never ever felt anything close to that even though I am coming from a small, formerly communist and poor European country, so I'd like to understand where is that coming from. As I see it, nobody is forcing me to do anything and I am met with great opportunities nearly daily - I can't ask for more.
- jmeister 5y ago
  +1 from a 3rd world immigrant. I’ve been visiting these parts of the internet ever since PG started writing his essays. There is marked shift in the attitudes here, from celebrating success to hating it. This is of course not limited to SFBA. The phenomenon has been, and continues to be, endlessly analyzed by journalists, culture critics and social scientists. A common theme is that of decadence, that only a society as rich as the US can begin to afford to hate itself.
  - yzombinator 5y ago
    Poorer societies can hate themselves for being corrupt. I don't think this is a rich game. I guess it's harder to understand the reasons for rich societies.
  - MathYouF 5y ago
    Or perhaps only a society rich as rich as the U.S. can begin to question if total economic output is a noble metric that our brightest and ablest minds ought to strive for or be awarded public accolade for. Perhaps it's only in disfunctional societies, possibly ones who've seen a lot of harm from communistic rhetoric, that they think in simple terms that those making a larger pie are still morally better than those who shrink the pie in the name of equality or morality. Perhaps that dichotomy isn't as relevant in the U.S., where the pie is already large and many further methods of expanding it don't actually benefit society and the metric of assuming those with a large slice must've also expanded the total size of the societal pie isn't holding up to scrutiny. My critique of your your critique aside, I agree that I don't personally feel under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs, though they clearly do unduly influence our legislative process to benefit themselves to a higher degree (corruption) than in Northern and Western European nations which we comapre ourselves to in terms of degree of liberty.

morelisp 5y ago

Watch carefully as the paragraph beginning with a semi-reasonable assertion that "the notion of scientific objectivity [has] existed for a very short window of time" goes all the way to the batshit "rule of law... emerged in the wake of our post-Enlightenment textual explosion." What fucking charlatans.

okareaman 5y ago

America can build nuclear power plants and high speed trains but we choose to do it in a responsible way or not at all if a better idea comes along. The Chinese govt can seize all the land they want, displace whoever they please and destroy their environment to build things. I don't know anyone excited about a high speed train between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It's pretty easy to Uber to the airport and hop on a jet to get there quicker. I keep reading Andreessen to find something that expands my thinking but I never find it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

taneq 5y ago

> They're not building fusion reactors super fast, they're not building things we don't have super fast. Uh... https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a36630528/china-artificial-sun-breaks-fusion-world-record/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a36630528/ch...

slashdot2008 5y ago
it ran for 101 seconds at .... 120,000,000 DEGREES CELCIUS!! for comparison the sun is 15,000,000 degrees C. I wonder how they measure a temperature that high.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Spectrum?
- sien 5y ago
  These videos goes over various methods: How do we measure 15 million degrees? (from Tokomak Energy (4:34)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77af1ZivgA&t=57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77af1ZivgA&t=57s And this longer one from UKAEA (55 minutes) Hotter than the sun and lighter than air; measuring the extreme conditions of fusion plasma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8JEky-Bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8JEky-Bo Spectroscopy and laser measurements and other measures are used. The engineering and science in fusion research is amazing.

f00zz 5y ago

I read "Around the World in 80 Days" not too long ago, and as I was reading the part where they're crossing the US I had exactly that same thought: the US was the China of the late 19th century.

kgwgk 5y ago
One difference would be that population was relatively low (and growing fast). In 1870 the population of the US was similar to that of France.

neilv 5y ago

> running something like Netscape 3.x while watching the ‘throbber’—a looping, pixelated animation of a planet-straddling ‘N’ getting hit with a meteor shower Trivia (but maybe relevant to HN): I believe the reason it was called a "throbber" was from the throbbing "N" [1] with which Netscape Navigator replaced NCSA Mosaic's cool spinning globe.[2] I always thought that the throbbing N seemed like a placeholder. I vaguely recall JWZ later having a collection of throbbers/spinners for Navigator. [1] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/nscape1.html http://www.andrewturnbull.net/nscape1.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s

visualradio 5y ago

"All of Europe had been what you were describing for 300 years or so. But by the time the US came along, that spirit was starting to fade. So what they did quite literally was put all their money in the US. The way JP Morgan got established was that his father Junius Morgan ran the leading merchant bank in London, and then set up his son Pierpont to run a correspondent bank in New York, and the two of them basically funneled money from the UK to the US to build everything in what was known as the Second Industrial Revolution." The money was not as important as the workers, thinkers, raw materials. The prior civil war era was a period of massive industrial output, despite the government simply throwing legal tender into circulation without obtaining gold from Europe, and the destruction of huge quantities of wealth in the war. The railroads and war effort required business to organize the transportation and production of large quantities of material wealth which lead to a greater focus on industrial profits, rather than hollow financial profits from real estate speculation. The later form of investment is 'hollow' because the procedure is a M -> M' paper gain which does not produce any material goods or fixed capital as a side effect. European investors had been investing money in America since 1600s, primarily to engage in real estate speculation on western lands, what was important in industrialization is that there was a shift in investment from real estate speculation to industrial development. The driver of the shift was industrialists like Andrew Carnegie who were involved in the war effort. To promote industrial investment without militarism it's primarily a matter of reducing large after-tax total returns and access to credit for financial speculators obtaining hollow M -> M' gains relative to industrial investors.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
markdown 5y ago
> To promote industrial investment without militarism .. implement a Georgist land value tax.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  While I tend to agree with you, this isn’t r/neoliberal you need to explain why that would help and that is why you are being downvoted.

blueyes 5y ago

Couple interesting ideas and terms here: * "vetocracy" - the rule of those who say no. Andreessen says it contributed to IBM's obsolescence. Happening now to the USA. * Related to: Why don't we solve carbon emissions with nuclear fission? Totally fair question. * The Internet saved the economy during the COVID lockdowns. (I think that's pretty plausible.)

adolph 5y ago
I think “vetocracy” may be related to Taleb’s idea that “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- Nevermark 5y ago
  In the US, Joe Manchin is now recognized as the most powerful senator in some ways, precisely because while there are a lot of other Democrats, he is the one dragging his feet the most on major bills that need every Democrat to support. On the other side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell has even MORE power in practice since he has centralized the Republican vote in himself and holds more than the 40 Senators needed to veto most legislation. I say more power in practice, because Manchin could participate in removing the filibuster and break McConnell's power, but failed negotiating class and has already committed to not doing that. -- The sum is, with veto power centralized in just two Senators, together they have accrued most of the power of the whole Senate, and (since it has veto power), the entire Congress.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Joe Manchin Sorry, not a native English-speaker... So how is that pronounced; Mannikin or Manchild?

narrator 5y ago

"It’s really striking how many Clubhouse rooms that are on these very tense topics that can go for hours and hours and hours without actually blowing up. Whereas on Twitter, they would have detonated three minutes in." The difference between Clubhouse and Twitter is Twitter has bots and people who are paid to influence. Bots haven't mastered faking speech well enough to disrupt Clubhouse yet. The influencers will show up eventually, but it seems like Clubhouse has some good moderation features and since it's slow and linear, and only one person can speak at a time, it's more human manageable. "I can't watch television, news or commentary or anything like that anymore. It's just too much of an alienating and frustrating experience; I'd much rather go listen to three-hour podcasts" Yes, absolutely. I can't stand TV any more. I now listen to podcasts when I eat dinner instead of T.V. The great part about podcasts is there is so much variety. T.V seems to be locked into a much smaller set of ideas. "California has had this incredibly absurd period…you could make a Terry Gilliam movie about high speed train construction in California. Like a sequel to Brazil or something, set in the California bureaucracy and political system where you spend billions and billions of dollars and absolutely nothing happens. What would be the most obvious thing in the world is a high speed train between San Francisco and LA. All of these programs exist, they've been authorized, with taxes and all kinds of stuff and like nothing." The peak of the absurdity is San Francisco. That it took 1 billion dollars to construct 1 mile of subway in San Francisco is pretty funny. San Francisco also spends $300 million a year on 8,035 homeless people. We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, double as a percentage vs any other country and have worse outcomes. There's something going on here that nobody wants to talk about. I think it's related to this: "I'll confess to being shocked and stunned by how well things worked. I thought last March, when we decided suicidally that we were going to basically shut the economy down. I was like, oh shit, this is really going to be a horrific depression. What's the worst possible depression you can have? It's one where you have simultaneous blows to the supply and demand side and you kill the engine and stall the plane." It makes you think. How much of the economy is just "bullshit jobs"[1]. How much is just make work, and what we need to do our daily routine and survive just sitting around at home with our laptops is maybe 30% of the actual economy, plus a bunch of stuff made in China? Despite what most doom-mongers claim, there seems to be an ENORMOUS amount of slack in the system, and to actually do something that doesn't take advantage of all that slack, like building new infrastructure, is an enormous ask. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

m0llusk 5y ago

This is toxic garbage. Let me explain some problems with the main points: 1. This guy did Netscape, which ate the world. But actually, someone else came up with browsers and the web and shortly after Netscape other browsers buried it. No, not so much the guy who's software ate the world as someone who briefly made large amounts of money from an intermediate stage development. 2. Time to build essay about not being ready for COVID-19. Actually, we were ready but political games blocked execution of plans that had been prepared in advance as well as most creative adaptation. Failing to acknowledge or take responsibility for the political mess only makes it worse. 3. Recollection of radical train transport development fails to take into account that much of that development was subsidized, built so badly that it had to be rebuilt in the short term, and the practice of charging what traffic would bear severely limited the positive impact of rail technology for decades. Again, politics was a huge part of what went on. Also in this case the progress was far less impressive when viewed in detail. 4. China, China, China, so far ahead except not. China is facing a demographic implosion, a national political implosion, huge environmental problems, and many problems with their vaunted developments. The last high speed train collision cost many lives but was never properly investigated. Dams and bridges all over China are failing catastrophically or operating in a severely risky in degraded state. Now their economy is melting down before their consumers can support it and this is held up as an example? 5. Hippies and environmental movements made a softer culture in the 60s and 70s? Actually, they rejected endless war without reason and want to make a peace with the environment which is harder than merely considering only through the economic magic of externalization. People joke about the Cuyahoga catching fire, but that was a nasty tragedy that made a lot of people sick. Wanting to move on from that is wanting to take responsibility and solve the hard problems instead of simply flushing toxic chemicals into rivers and calling that progress. 6. Use nuclear power for eliminating emissions? That is a nonstarter at two critical levels. First, solar and wind are already cheaper and have lower negative impacts. Second, the public has been completely turned off to nuclear power by all of the hype and the lies. Keep in mind that we still have no actual plan for phasing out radioactive plants at end of life and the nuclear waste is piling up. But it is the spreadsheet facts that are the most damning. How can anyone claiming to be interested in business and commerce fixate on an unworkable expensive solution? 7. We can't make our own medical equipment? Probably because we did not try. The usual thing is to smooth out any regulatory problems and make sure that financing is available preferably through commercial entities but by government if necessary. Instead people at the top (politics again) played games with statements about the effectiveness of masks instead of being honest and working to figure out production details. We absolutely chose to not even bother trying to make our own medical equipment. 8. California High Speed Rail is expensive and not done yet. This, if you look at the many published details, is because of the scale of the project and the robustness of the solution. The stretch currently being constructed has a grade separation roughly every one and two third miles which is a huge amount of complication that results in better safety and less environmental impact, both things that build oriented capitalists apparently do not care about. 9. High cost of infrastructure revealed by the Second Avenue Subway--except not. If you actually investigated that situation you would find that roughly 100 years ago the Second Avenue Subway was proposed and it was found that already at that time the huge amount of infrastructure and other subway lines already installed in that area would make the project too expensive to make sense. Over the next hundred years the subway line was repeatedly proposed and ruled out. Then eventually we decided that cost was no obstacle and moved forward and amazingly enough the project turned out to be hugely expensive. The only thing that this shows is the tremendous contempt that politicians and capitalists have for science, knowledge, research, and basic spreadsheet economics. 10. COVID-19 vaccine could have been had earlier, but instead we insisted on extremely rigorous safety trials because this would be administered to millions of people who needed to be convinced taking it would be the right move. So mister build build build capitalist wants to take a big risk? Sorry, the medical community does not operate by stripped down companies for shareholder profit view of what is important. 11. IBM died because their management got conservative? Sort of. Probably the best way to view this is from the study of the lifetimes of corporations which have been revealed to have a youth, middle age, and old age leading to death just like organisms. This is how development and building and economics works and this is why even small slices of modern corporate offerings such as Oracle and AWS offer far more than IBM could ever have conceived. 12. Government spending is now at WWII levels and what did we get? This is an indirect endorsement of austerity economics which we have now proven through much experience is a colossal failure. Government spending in a downturn limits the duration and severity of the downturn. Of course a fantastically rich developer of a browser that briefly mattered does not need to care about either of these things, at least not until the revolution comes. The Hamptons are not a defensible position. 13. "We spent the last 20 years like putting broadband everywhere" Translation: I do not travel outside of coastal US cities. This covers points to around halfway through, but I think it makes the point relatively well. This man is not an enlightened leader, but dangerously deluded with a lack of understanding of reality and a lack of respect for basic spreadsheet economics.

ElViajero 5y ago

> We want to complain about them; we just don't want to fix them. This dismisses the actual problem, citizens of the USA are fighting against big corporation interests and systemic abuse. This is the kind of thing a movie bully tells the kid that he is punching with the kid's own fist: "Stop hitting yourself". USA citizens are fighting, are organizing, are more conscious than ever of their lack of health-care, education, justice. So, unless you refer to the billionaires, it is not true at all that "we just don't want to fix them.". All the rest are trying their best. > we could have had that in March of last year and stopped this whole pandemic slideshow from the start. We chose not to do so. Is his proposal to give a vaccine to millions without testing it properly first? Is this the the final "move fast; break things"? And that things are people's lives. > And then as you saw, the stock market came back, like really fast, and the stock market intuited something that turned out to be really true, The "market is always right", like communism, works in theory. But, in practice many have forgotten 2006. > I think the biggest change in the past three centuries of human history was the decoupling of the movement of information from the movement of matter, of bits from atoms. Industrial revolution maybe? > By the way, every CEO I’ve talked to is saying Every one of them. The best CEOs. All say the same. > This idea that you can now make actually independent choices about how you live on the one hand, and how you work on the other hand, and you can actually decouple those things. If you have the money, yes. And the it ends with a rant on Twitter. The guy that wrote on Twitter: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”. At least, he apologized. It is very interesting to peek into the mind of someone so out of touch of day-to-day life for most people. His views on how, if he was let free to do as he pleases, he will solve all the problems, that easy. I guess that too much money gives people a "delusion of grandeur".

j-bos 5y ago
Regarding the vaccine in spring of 2020, there were sufficient volunteers to run challenge trials.

goldwind 5y ago

Well we are not finished with that sect of the NY subway because now we have workers rights. And a lot of industrial jobs are used to fund blue collar workers. If you want things built faster then use more AI and less humans and see how that turns out. Most blue collar workers I believe are conservative as well. It’s a bipartisan effort

TheJoeMan 5y ago
You haven’t seen 5 people watching 1 person dig a ditch in your hometown?

haecceity 5y ago

> They're not building fusion reactors super fast, they're not building things we don't have super fast. They're building things that we were building a hundred years ago…super fast. It was the Chinese that built the railways here and they were building it the opposite of "super fast". > I'm in favor of everyone having train stations and freeway systems, it's all good. But the American freeway system got built out starting in the 1930s; it's been a long time since that kind of thing has amazed us. This is the reason we can't have nice things isn't it. What a waste of time I want 10 minutes of my life back.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

"but what you could enforce in common is this: let’s just agree on how to score the result." Why would this be important? For example, what value would there be in the Right scoring how well the Left succeeded in implemting gun control? Why would you care how well your opposition accomplished a result you oppose? I don't think this would foster commonality.

hliyan 5y ago

Much of this makes perfect sense, but: can a wealthy person be trusted to make decisions (or advocate policies) that affect the entire world population? Because his thinking will be influenced by how the world affects his wealth. But he will be generally more rational in decisions in his personal life because he is financially secure enough to not be governed by fear. The reverse will be true of a poor person. Perhaps even well-meaning billionaires will subconsciously advocate policies that maintain the status quo, because it is the status quo that enabled his wealth in the first place.

throwawaaarrgh 5y ago

Why don't we have flying cars? It's a choice. If we wanted to, we could build them. Same for climate change, world hunger, a pill to make you skinny, etc. Yes, we can literally achieve anything if we "choose" to do so. So we chose not to. Or at least that's what this article seems to indicate. > Step one: Point out that it's a choice we are making. This has been pointed out a lot through history. But first you have to get past the ego-shattering realization that actually, it's not always a choice we are making. To make a choice, you have to have a choice. That is to say, multiple options. If you don't see multiple options, you effectively don't have a choice. Even if multiple options exist, if you aren't aware of them, then for practical purposes they don't exist. It took 2,250 years for a person to combine a pulley with a ratchet and make the first safety elevator. Before that, nobody had really considered safety to be a core function of an elevator. It was just an annoying problem that you had to accept. If somebody had realized they had a choice to make safety mandatory, and had also realized what the impact of that choice was, they would have discovered this method back in antiquity and we would have had something resembling skyscrapers for thousands of years. Imagine pyramids of workers, all shuttling up and down quickly and safely. Imagine the pyramids being built with elevators! > Step two: We really need to decide at an individual and collective level if this is how we want to live. Let's say I don't want to live without wings. Like, literal wings. Bird wings. According to this principle, all we have to do is decide that we want to live with wings, and we'll make it happen. But this goes back to the first step. Who the hell right now thinks that they have the choice to live with literal wings?? Who is sitting around going, "it's crazy that my arms aren't flappy" ?? Nobody is. You have to know you have the choice, and then you can maybe do something about it, once you figure out how, and deal with every obstacle in your way. And even then it's no guarantee. We achieved a plane that cruises at Mach 3.2. We don't have it anymore. We achieved electric cars (more of them than any other type) at the start of the 20th century, and they're making a comeback a century later. We've had cars that can drive through water for just as long, but you don't see many folks driving their Escalade across the lake to beat traffic. It's not so much that we can't or don't do a thing. Life is more complex than simply having or making a choice. Sometimes things just don't come together, for reasons. It's also kind of ridiculous that they're so obsessed with Clubhouse. You know what we called that back in my day? A conference call (or a party line).

5y ago

magwa101 5y ago

"Polio vaccine rolled out to 1M kids as a test" is seen as a good thing but remember: * Tuskegee experiment * LSD experiments on military * Many other hidden experiments But you know, that wouldn't affect him so let's go do it. I just find his pov so self serving it's very hard to read.

magwa101 5y ago

"Polio vaccine rolled out to 1M kids as a test" is seen as a good thing yet fails to state the downside: * Tuskegee experiment * LSD experiments on military * Many other hidden experiments and abuses But you know, that wouldn't affect him so let's go do it. I just find his pov so self serving it's very hard to read.