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The National Review is a conservative publication. It's unfortunate that an interesting hypothesis -- our society is no longer innovating and advancing as much

• 001sky 14y ago
  [The National Review is a conservative publication.] [Sorry to go all Rachel Maddow on you.] [While Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity smugly bring up Solyndra every time they can] Don't let other people frame your questions. Does a college studnt only argue: thesis,antithesis, synthesis? Viz your 5 footnotes? These are (reverse) partisan talking points and wikipedia entries edited by PR firms. [My opinion is that the dramatic tax cuts starting in the 1980s have fed this income inequality], [because the current design of our private sector is pretty much optimized to concentrate wealth.] Look at some Data. Where is the wealth, in terms of richest counties in the USA? Washington DC suburbs. Four of the five wealthiest counties in the nation are in the D.C. suburbs, according to the latest rankings from Forbes Magazine. [The other is los alamos, NM] http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mdg45gkhk/fairfax-county-virginia/#gallerycontent http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mdg45gkhk/fairfax-county-virg... Plot that data with time, government spending, US debt, and US deficits for the past 12 years. How is you're R2? How can it be that the gov't is going into debt but wealth is accruing to lobbyists? Talk about concentration of wealth? Gov;t is the largest concentrator of wealt - they spend 30pc of GDP. And How does monopoly sound? Hollywood is built on government sanctioned monopoly. The #1 high-paid lobbyist (in teems of $$ salary) is Chris Dodd, ex-democratic senator of CT, and head of the MPAA. [The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation ] [Also, for government spending on technology projects, the ROI is not based on the single project's performance but any ancillary benefits as well.] Again, review some research on the actual $$ spent on this. http://www.kpcb.com/insights/usa-inc-full-report http://www.kpcb.com/insights/usa-inc-full-report Its tiny. Government spending is about 30% of GDP. Avast majority (60-70%) is spent on wealth-transfer (basically welfare and social security). Actual government spending on technology is a fraction of the ~10% of govt spending that is non-wealth-transfer and non military. The actual amount of $$ even to run the government (ie, laws and such) is shockingly small and in the big picture reasonably efficient). Honestly, NASA is not the problem. That's like people who think it makes sense to take away coffee at work to save money. Businesses don't fail because of runaway coffee consumption by employees. They fail on the big picture stuff. Like product market fit and negative gross margins. Etc. [And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous.] [Stagnant wages have nothing to do with the "end of the future," they have to do with executives getting paid in stock] [The S&P 500 is up about 550% during this time, and so is CEO compensation. So our executives have had their paychecks increase exactly as much as the value of their companies, and the typical worker gets their annual 2.7% raise that barely beats inflation and gets fucked.] Ironically, the reason BigCo ceos get paid like fat cats in stock is due to silicon valley. This is a vestigial out-growth of the last bubble. Its also due to a variety of other factors, but you're not explaining them or shedding light on the mechanics here with your attributions. Look at % comp in equity prior to 1990 and plot that against your chart of CxO pay. It has nothing to do with libertarians, thiel, and Rachel Maddow. Remember that Clinton (Democrat) repealed Glass-Stegal. Which turnesd the banks into "too big to fail". The other conspirators in Ceo/equity etc pay? Wall Street post '98. [Clinton also signed off on the consolidation of the oil companies in the 1990s (chevron, etc), empowering more of your bogeymen.] [You think all the oil companies are just twiddling its thumbs, assuming at some point we'll stop wanting to run on our cars by burning prehistoric goo and they'll just shut down the business and go golfing?] [Do you think Mitt Romney is against Obama's new car MPG efficiency standards because of "onerous regulations," or that it will lead to less profits for his Republican friends at Haliburton?] This is also just off point. If you read history, you'll understand why we use petrol. Its physics: energy to mass for mobility. Same reason nuclear is in subs and carriers. http://www.epmag.com/archives/digitalOilField/5911.htm http://www.epmag.com/archives/digitalOilField/5911.htm Churchill selected diesel oil in 1910 for the british navy. Nothing has replaced petrol, because "so-called-green" energy has bad math when you do power to weight and infrastructure transportability. The amount of environmental damage it would take implement most green energy solutions also is like a 10-20% better at X calculation (say, net carbon consumed/emitted), but excludes the wholesale infrastructure damage to the environment to integrate the alt power sources. If the physics made sense at any cost, Nasa or Mil would be using it. They both use Nuclear, for example. [The middle east is a mess because UK went to Iraq and Iran in WW1 to protect their Oil Supply for the Navy of the British Empire. The US went into Saudi for the Same reasons. The USSR into the baltic/stans etc.] [Obama's much maligned "stimulus" -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[3] -- allocated $27 billion towards renewable energy.] [Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations]? These are just talking points and have nothing to do with innovation. [Makes me wonder how much farther we'd be if we still lived in the days where we lauded the government for for making major technological bets that paid off with things like nuclear power, space travel, and the internet, instead of calling it "out of control government spending"] If you think about it, Nuclear power and space travel are a direct result of War and defense budgets. Not the type of government spending you think of as altruistic R&D. The manhattan project was the sin-qua-non of nuclear. The ICBM that of space travel. Same thing Darpa-net to Internet. Same thing GPS. Same thing Titanium (skin of SR71 spy plane). Carbon Composites, etc. It goes without saying that Rachel Maddow and Obama do not favor "a pro-war for pro-technology" public policy thought process, do they?/ [If VCs as we know them today existed in the 1960s, can you imagine one of them scratching his chin and saying, "So you want to put a man on the moon. How are you going to make money? Actually, don't worry about that, I'm sure it'll be awesome, here's billions of dollars] VCs existed in silicon valley starting in the 1940-1960's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital#Early_venture_capital_and_the_growth_of_Silicon_Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital#Early_venture_c... They venture backed companies throughout the 60's and 70's, including Intel, apple, etc. They helped found companies that would have otherwise never existed. When they were tiny. And the reason for the space program was military in Origin. It was never a business proposition, and in the same way all military is spent from "public pools of money" not private pools of money targeted for investment. So, I think without debating the policy A vs B of left and right, it makes sense to take a closer look at history. Even the NYT had this to say about the internet. It makes for interesting reading and it is more in the spirit of what HN is usually talking about: Like many of the bedrock technologies that have come to define the digital age, the Internet was created by — and continues to be shaped by — decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world. Yes, government financing supported much of the early research, and private corporations enhanced and commercialized the platforms. But the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers. [edits for refeneces, etc]