A man whose software ate the world(thepullrequest.com)
thepullrequest.com
A man whose software ate the world
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-man-whose-software-ate-the-world
59 comments
Money doesn't represent that. I think it is obvious to everyone that gold is, in and of itself, useless to developing anything.
Money represents who gets to recognise what is and isn't to be done with resources. It isn't like European settlers were the first people to tread on American soil (that would be that native Americans). It was technology and organisation that was causing the development.
Money is the surface level of how that organisation is implemented. It is important in deciding who, what, how and why. For example, if financiers weren't on the scene organising for maximum economic outcomes then some form of more explicit nobility might have taken root.
Money represents who gets to recognise what is and isn't to be done with resources. It isn't like European settlers were the first people to tread on American soil (that would be that native Americans). It was technology and organisation that was causing the development.
Money is the surface level of how that organisation is implemented. It is important in deciding who, what, how and why. For example, if financiers weren't on the scene organising for maximum economic outcomes then some form of more explicit nobility might have taken root.
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[deleted]
> To promote industrial investment without militarism
.. implement a Georgist land value tax.
.. implement a Georgist land value tax.
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.
The GP commenter pointed out that there was very little economic development and progress because all the money was tied up in real estate speculation.
LVT would largely end that, and result in money being put to more productive purpose.
LVT would largely end that, and result in money being put to more productive purpose.
> The money was not as important as the workers, thinkers, raw materials.
Industrialization requires money ( capital ) + resources ( workers, thinkers, raw materials, etc ). Money, being half the equation, is quite important. But in actuality, money/capital in capitalism is the driver/catalyst for everything and hence you could say it is the most important thing.
Also the guy's idea that JPMorgan and the money from their relatively small ( though leading ) bank provided enough capital for the "Second" Industrial Revolution doesn't pass the smell test. Certainly European capital played an important role but it was mostly funded by capital generated via the opium trade. One only needs to look at the explosion of banks created in the 19th century due to the opium trade in the US and British territories.
Perversely enough, these same banks capitalized with chinese opium money would be the source of capital that started china's industrialization 50 years ago. China certainly had the resources ( workers, thinkers, raw material, etc ), but they didn't have the capital for industrialization.
Most people think it's the excess population/workers, raw materials, etc that drove industrialization but it's was actually excess capital. The elites wanted to their "money to work".
Industrialization requires money ( capital ) + resources ( workers, thinkers, raw materials, etc ). Money, being half the equation, is quite important. But in actuality, money/capital in capitalism is the driver/catalyst for everything and hence you could say it is the most important thing.
Also the guy's idea that JPMorgan and the money from their relatively small ( though leading ) bank provided enough capital for the "Second" Industrial Revolution doesn't pass the smell test. Certainly European capital played an important role but it was mostly funded by capital generated via the opium trade. One only needs to look at the explosion of banks created in the 19th century due to the opium trade in the US and British territories.
Perversely enough, these same banks capitalized with chinese opium money would be the source of capital that started china's industrialization 50 years ago. China certainly had the resources ( workers, thinkers, raw material, etc ), but they didn't have the capital for industrialization.
Most people think it's the excess population/workers, raw materials, etc that drove industrialization but it's was actually excess capital. The elites wanted to their "money to work".
> Also the guy's idea that JPMorgan and the money from their relatively small ( though leading ) bank provided enough capital for the "Second" Industrial Revolution doesn't pass the smell test.
It could have led the investment of more money.
It could have led the investment of more money.
Money doesn't objectively exist; it's purely a figment of people's imagination. This ten-trillion-Zimbabwean-dollar bill isn't money anymore, even though it used to be, and it isn't physically changed in any relevant way. The only thing that changed was how people thought of it.
It might seem strange to say that a purely imaginary thing like money could be "the driver/catalyst for everything" in industrialization, but many strange things are true. I'm writing you this note in letters of lightning far too small to see, which are persistently trembling within a few tiny slivers of quartz that can thus contain the lightning because the vital air has been removed from it—stranger still, but true, because that is how DRAM chips work.
Still, let's see if we can analyze how industrialization happens in terms of objectively existing reality rather than shared hallucinations like money—surely the picture will be partial, but it may still be useful. Industrialization itself seems to be objectively observable: it doubles people's life expectancy at birth.
Let's start with an outside view of economic production as a whole. How would we explain it to a Martian?
People work, planting and harvesting and preparing food. If they do not eat food, they die in a few months from lack of various molecules crucial to their biochemistry and energy (collectively "nutrition"). They expend energy and water and damage their bodies by working, damages which they repair automatically if they have time to rest, but which will otherwise eventually kill them. So their capacity for work is limited. Not everyone has to work, but if the people collectively produce too little food from their work, then they will start dying from lack of nutrition, and pretty soon they will all die. One old book of poetry sums this up by saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."
On the other hand, if they can make a lot of food despite their limited work capacity, more than they need to survive—a "surplus"—many of them will live for decades, they will reproduce, and their population will increase, typically by about 4% per year. Groups that manage to do this come to vastly outnumber groups that do not.
(There are some other material necessities for human survival and reproduction besides food, but none of them are different in relevant ways, so for the time being I'll stick to food.)
The other conventional factors besides labor that affect productivity are land and something called "capital". Some land yields a lot of food and is easy to plant and harvest; other land yields very little. By "capital" is conventionally meant not money but durable goods that increase labor and land productivity, such as hoes and waterwheel-driven mills for making flour. If people don't need to spend their entire labor capacity on making enough food to survive, they can instead devote some of it to making these durable goods: cords, needles, ropes, bows and arrows, shoes, knives, hoes, axes, pots, and so on. Cords and ropes enable you to climb palm trees, hang meat over a fire, or bridle a horse; needles enable you to make clothing and all manner of sturdy, flexible fiber goods; bows and arrows enable you to kill dinner at a distance; shoes enable you to walk or run longer distances; knives and axes make cooking and woodworking much easier; hoes allow you to plant much more land; pots enable not only cooking but food storage and the storage of other goods; and so on.
So these are "capital goods": once you have a surplus, then by spending some of your work creating durable goods instead of satisfying basic necessities for survival, you thenceforth multiply their possessors' future production, or at least until the durable goods stop enduring. But a hoe or a blast furnace is produced in the same way as a vegetable garden: people work to turn raw materials into the desired end product, directed by their skills and knowledge. Instead of hoeing the field today, perhaps they're hammering the hoe blade into shape or molding bricks from fireclay. Most capital goods are more or less specialized to a particular sort of production—you cannot harvest more corn by dumping blast furnaces or gristmills into the cornfield—though some are more versatile than others.
I haven't mentioned skills and energy before, but they're crucially important. A person is skilled when they can direct their work to produce their intended results with ease and precision, and labor specialization develops skill much more highly.
Energy is a fundamental physical quantity which can be converted between many different forms, including heat and kinetic energy; many kinds of work require a lot of kinetic energy and a lot of heat, and this has historically often been the limiting resource for work productivity, particularly when all the relevant kinetic energy came via people's muscles from their food, and all the relevant heat came from firewood.
The available kinetic energy for production has greatly expanded five times in the past: ox-yokes (6000 years ago), horse-collars (1500 years ago, in the Sui), the steam-engine (250 years ago), and electric dynamos and motors (140 years ago). Photovoltaic cells seem at long last to be adding a sixth item to this list now that they have finally become cheaper than steam-engines.
The available heat energy for production has greatly expanded three times: fire (400,000 years ago), oil drilling (2300 years ago), and deep-shaft coal mining (250 years ago). Again, photovoltaics are probably a huge factor here today.
So, in these terms, we can analyze industrialization as a set of several major synergistic shifts.
First, enormously increased specialization, which would have been counterproductive to effective productivity in the absence of the worldwide markets created by the British Empire and by cheaper transport via canals. The ten workers in Adam Smith's pin factory could produce 48000 pins a day, far more pins than a village could use, or maybe even a city—perhaps each household might ruin five or six pins in a day as they repaired their clothing. Without easy shipping, the tonnes of pins thus produced would be as worthless as an asteroid belt converted into paperclips.
Second, enormously increased use of capital goods enabled by that specialization—only a few decades after Smith observed his pin factories of ten or eighteen men, the whole operation became automated by cam-driven pin-making machinery, further decreasing the labor per pin, and of course the rise of the spinning-machines and jacquard and other automated looms is even more notorious.
Third, as improved capital goods like the cotton gin and the combine harvester became abundant, the planting and harvesting of larger and larger amounts of land required less and less labor, so smaller and smaller amounts of farming work per person sufficed to prevent mass starvation. This surplus manifested as a mass population migration from the countryside to the cities, where increasingly specialized capital-intensive production of all kinds was carried on by large crews of people harnessing steam power, rather than by individual farmers plowing behind teams of horses.
Fourth, invention became central to economic production in the newly industrializing countries, as it had been a thousand years before in the Song; we can think of an invention as a skill that has been digitized, expressed in words or pictures so that it can be copied, rather than having to be learned by practice. New notions of precision, innovation, specification, tolerances, and standardization became central to work in a way entirely foreign to previous generations. New notions of measurement and metaphors of clockwork universes allowed the implicit to become explicit, legible, and reproducible.
Fifth, the advent of the steam-engine, which permitted pumping water out of deep-shaft coal mines, which provided a vastly increased fuel supply.
(continued below)
It might seem strange to say that a purely imaginary thing like money could be "the driver/catalyst for everything" in industrialization, but many strange things are true. I'm writing you this note in letters of lightning far too small to see, which are persistently trembling within a few tiny slivers of quartz that can thus contain the lightning because the vital air has been removed from it—stranger still, but true, because that is how DRAM chips work.
Still, let's see if we can analyze how industrialization happens in terms of objectively existing reality rather than shared hallucinations like money—surely the picture will be partial, but it may still be useful. Industrialization itself seems to be objectively observable: it doubles people's life expectancy at birth.
Let's start with an outside view of economic production as a whole. How would we explain it to a Martian?
People work, planting and harvesting and preparing food. If they do not eat food, they die in a few months from lack of various molecules crucial to their biochemistry and energy (collectively "nutrition"). They expend energy and water and damage their bodies by working, damages which they repair automatically if they have time to rest, but which will otherwise eventually kill them. So their capacity for work is limited. Not everyone has to work, but if the people collectively produce too little food from their work, then they will start dying from lack of nutrition, and pretty soon they will all die. One old book of poetry sums this up by saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."
On the other hand, if they can make a lot of food despite their limited work capacity, more than they need to survive—a "surplus"—many of them will live for decades, they will reproduce, and their population will increase, typically by about 4% per year. Groups that manage to do this come to vastly outnumber groups that do not.
(There are some other material necessities for human survival and reproduction besides food, but none of them are different in relevant ways, so for the time being I'll stick to food.)
The other conventional factors besides labor that affect productivity are land and something called "capital". Some land yields a lot of food and is easy to plant and harvest; other land yields very little. By "capital" is conventionally meant not money but durable goods that increase labor and land productivity, such as hoes and waterwheel-driven mills for making flour. If people don't need to spend their entire labor capacity on making enough food to survive, they can instead devote some of it to making these durable goods: cords, needles, ropes, bows and arrows, shoes, knives, hoes, axes, pots, and so on. Cords and ropes enable you to climb palm trees, hang meat over a fire, or bridle a horse; needles enable you to make clothing and all manner of sturdy, flexible fiber goods; bows and arrows enable you to kill dinner at a distance; shoes enable you to walk or run longer distances; knives and axes make cooking and woodworking much easier; hoes allow you to plant much more land; pots enable not only cooking but food storage and the storage of other goods; and so on.
So these are "capital goods": once you have a surplus, then by spending some of your work creating durable goods instead of satisfying basic necessities for survival, you thenceforth multiply their possessors' future production, or at least until the durable goods stop enduring. But a hoe or a blast furnace is produced in the same way as a vegetable garden: people work to turn raw materials into the desired end product, directed by their skills and knowledge. Instead of hoeing the field today, perhaps they're hammering the hoe blade into shape or molding bricks from fireclay. Most capital goods are more or less specialized to a particular sort of production—you cannot harvest more corn by dumping blast furnaces or gristmills into the cornfield—though some are more versatile than others.
I haven't mentioned skills and energy before, but they're crucially important. A person is skilled when they can direct their work to produce their intended results with ease and precision, and labor specialization develops skill much more highly.
Energy is a fundamental physical quantity which can be converted between many different forms, including heat and kinetic energy; many kinds of work require a lot of kinetic energy and a lot of heat, and this has historically often been the limiting resource for work productivity, particularly when all the relevant kinetic energy came via people's muscles from their food, and all the relevant heat came from firewood.
The available kinetic energy for production has greatly expanded five times in the past: ox-yokes (6000 years ago), horse-collars (1500 years ago, in the Sui), the steam-engine (250 years ago), and electric dynamos and motors (140 years ago). Photovoltaic cells seem at long last to be adding a sixth item to this list now that they have finally become cheaper than steam-engines.
The available heat energy for production has greatly expanded three times: fire (400,000 years ago), oil drilling (2300 years ago), and deep-shaft coal mining (250 years ago). Again, photovoltaics are probably a huge factor here today.
So, in these terms, we can analyze industrialization as a set of several major synergistic shifts.
First, enormously increased specialization, which would have been counterproductive to effective productivity in the absence of the worldwide markets created by the British Empire and by cheaper transport via canals. The ten workers in Adam Smith's pin factory could produce 48000 pins a day, far more pins than a village could use, or maybe even a city—perhaps each household might ruin five or six pins in a day as they repaired their clothing. Without easy shipping, the tonnes of pins thus produced would be as worthless as an asteroid belt converted into paperclips.
Second, enormously increased use of capital goods enabled by that specialization—only a few decades after Smith observed his pin factories of ten or eighteen men, the whole operation became automated by cam-driven pin-making machinery, further decreasing the labor per pin, and of course the rise of the spinning-machines and jacquard and other automated looms is even more notorious.
Third, as improved capital goods like the cotton gin and the combine harvester became abundant, the planting and harvesting of larger and larger amounts of land required less and less labor, so smaller and smaller amounts of farming work per person sufficed to prevent mass starvation. This surplus manifested as a mass population migration from the countryside to the cities, where increasingly specialized capital-intensive production of all kinds was carried on by large crews of people harnessing steam power, rather than by individual farmers plowing behind teams of horses.
Fourth, invention became central to economic production in the newly industrializing countries, as it had been a thousand years before in the Song; we can think of an invention as a skill that has been digitized, expressed in words or pictures so that it can be copied, rather than having to be learned by practice. New notions of precision, innovation, specification, tolerances, and standardization became central to work in a way entirely foreign to previous generations. New notions of measurement and metaphors of clockwork universes allowed the implicit to become explicit, legible, and reproducible.
Fifth, the advent of the steam-engine, which permitted pumping water out of deep-shaft coal mines, which provided a vastly increased fuel supply.
(continued below)
In none of the above do we find any money, or for that matter any elites or banks or other corporations. All of it could, at least hypothetically, have happened through Stakhanovite altruism or telepathic mind control, if human nature contained such possibilities. The investment of surplus production capacity in capital goods which thenceforth further increase the production surplus, faster than the human population can increase, combined with labor specialization, urbanization, and invention, creates industrialization, and that is what creates the profligate material abundance and extended lifespans we are struggling to cope with today.
But of course it is not enough that such a pattern of changes improves the overall welfare; if the status quo ante is a Nash equilibrium, anybody who unilaterally attempts to automate pinmaking, invent cotton gins, or move to a city might merely impoverish themself and their family. Indeed, if you merely specialize in pinmaking, surely you will have made more pins than your family needs within only a few weeks—and how will they eat this winter if you've spent the whole planting season making pins instead of plowing? Even if your aunts and uncles will plow for you, they probably don't need that many pins either.
And this is where money comes in: trade gamifies work by allowing you to cooperate productively with people you don't trust, breaking the Nash equilibrium that keeps everybody poor, and money enormously simplifies trade. You can ship a box of pins from your French pin factory to Spain or England or some godforsaken place like Connecticut, and receive gold in return, which you can use to buy both potatoes and better pin-making machinery. As you said, it's a lubricant.
Modern capitalism largely arose in the Industrial Revolution as a form of gambling. Many entrepreneurs can bootstrap: a machinist can buy a lathe, a drill, a work-bench, a file, dividers, a square, etc., with his wages as a machinist's apprentice, and as long as he has a "production surplus" (now, as measured in the collective hallucination of money, rather than in the increased harvests of the farmers using his machinery) he can keep improving and buying machinery to increase his productive capacity and thus his surplus, and perhaps begin to hire workers—not apprentices for a limited term, now, as in pre-capitalist craft production, but employees for life. But a competing machinist who sells her business to capitalists (whether a few wealthy investors or many subscribers) suddenly has enormously more money with which to buy such tools, and perhaps she can win customers away from the bootstrapped entrepreneur, producing superior goods at a lower price because of her superior tools.
Effectively the capitalist is offering the worker a deal: the capitalist provides the tools, the worker provides the labor, and each receives part of the value produced. In capitalism qua capitalism, the worker is an employee and receives a fixed wage, while the capitalist receives a variable profit, but of course there are lots of other variations; the machinist might take a loan from a bank or rent the tools, precisely reversing the roles, or someone who's nominally merely an employee might receive most of their compensation in the form of incentive stock options.
From the point of view of economic development, these questions of how the pie is divided are minor, but they matter enormously to the participants. This division depends mostly on cultural expectations and on the negotiating positions and skills of the parties; in an industrialized economy, the capitalist has a very strong negotiating position, since capital goods like drill presses and rail locomotives are very commonly the critical limiting factor in productivity. For many expensive products that can be cut on a lathe, there are fewer lathes that can turn them than machinists skilled enough to turn them. The machinist without a lathe must resort to backyard aluminum casting and hand scraping before he can start to turn parts.
Ultimately, though, the money is just a scorekeeping device, a lubricant. What makes the machine shop more or less productive is not the money, but the tools it bought, which were necessarily produced by the production surplus of the existing economy. If suddenly machine shops as a whole attract a hundred times as much investment, it won't make their productivity skyrocket by bringing a hundred times as much tools into existence—it will just drive up the price of the tools. Pretty soon it will drive up the prices of the machine shops' products, too, since if their management doesn't deliver a respectable return on that investment, it will be replaced, and if that doesn't fix it, the company will be shut down. These higher prices will tend to decrease the market for the products.
When we're talking about international capital flows, we also have the well-known resource curse or Dutch disease: investing a lot of money from England in US companies will tend to devalue the pound relative to the dollar, which makes US products less economically competitive and/or UK products more economically competitive. This is precisely the opposite of driving US industrialization.
— ⁂ —
So if some Englishman sent a bunch of money across the Atlantic to invest in nascent industrialization, that wouldn't speed up the industrialization—unless a bunch of that money went back across the Atlantic to buy the capital goods needed for industrialization. Maybe it did! From 01780 to 01824 artisans were forbidden to emigrate from Britain, and exportation of metalworking or glass manufacturing equipment was likewise forbidden; but these prohibitions were widely flouted, and at any rate they excluded steam-engines, and they ended in 01843. A lot of the machinery and artisans during this time went to the US. The "American System of Manufacturing" was the world's most advanced manufacturing technology by the mid-01850s.
More likely, though, if someone in England was investing in US industrial firms in the 01800-01850 period, they weren't meaningfully promoting a flow of needed capital goods from England to America; they were just giving the American firms they invested in a leg up on competing American firms, and perhaps other sectors of the US economy, like the slave plantations.
But where does Junius Morgan come into all this? Well, it turns out that Junius S. Morgan was born in Massachusetts in 01813; his father was a Revolutionary War veteran and one of the founders of Aetna in 01819. Junius Morgan was a partner in various US banks from 01833 to 01853, inheriting his father's fortune in 01847 and then becoming a partner in London's leading American bank in 01854. So that was when he started funneling British investors' money into American industrial companies by selling things such as railway bonds. J. P. had nothing to do with it! He started working with his father in London in 01857 and acting as his father's overseas agent in the US in 01860.
Moreover, by this point it was no longer a question of "driving industrialization" in America. The US had already been the world's leading industrial power for decades. The B&O railroad opened in 01830, using a US-built locomotive; by 01861 it had 236 locomotives, 3451 rail cars, and 826 km of railroad, and it had many domestic competitors. In 01830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first intercity railway and the first to be powered entirely by steam, also opened. The US had power looms from 01815, milling machines by 01816, small arms with interchangeable parts by the 01830s, 2000 steam engines by 01838, cloth exports from the 01830s, electric telegraphs from 01844, and invented the Corliss steam engine in 01848.
So, Morgan was far too late to drive industrialization in the US. He certainly did make a lot of money from it, though. And he arguably got a lot of other people to invest in its expansion—US industry expanded a lot in the second half of the 19th century.
But of course it is not enough that such a pattern of changes improves the overall welfare; if the status quo ante is a Nash equilibrium, anybody who unilaterally attempts to automate pinmaking, invent cotton gins, or move to a city might merely impoverish themself and their family. Indeed, if you merely specialize in pinmaking, surely you will have made more pins than your family needs within only a few weeks—and how will they eat this winter if you've spent the whole planting season making pins instead of plowing? Even if your aunts and uncles will plow for you, they probably don't need that many pins either.
And this is where money comes in: trade gamifies work by allowing you to cooperate productively with people you don't trust, breaking the Nash equilibrium that keeps everybody poor, and money enormously simplifies trade. You can ship a box of pins from your French pin factory to Spain or England or some godforsaken place like Connecticut, and receive gold in return, which you can use to buy both potatoes and better pin-making machinery. As you said, it's a lubricant.
Modern capitalism largely arose in the Industrial Revolution as a form of gambling. Many entrepreneurs can bootstrap: a machinist can buy a lathe, a drill, a work-bench, a file, dividers, a square, etc., with his wages as a machinist's apprentice, and as long as he has a "production surplus" (now, as measured in the collective hallucination of money, rather than in the increased harvests of the farmers using his machinery) he can keep improving and buying machinery to increase his productive capacity and thus his surplus, and perhaps begin to hire workers—not apprentices for a limited term, now, as in pre-capitalist craft production, but employees for life. But a competing machinist who sells her business to capitalists (whether a few wealthy investors or many subscribers) suddenly has enormously more money with which to buy such tools, and perhaps she can win customers away from the bootstrapped entrepreneur, producing superior goods at a lower price because of her superior tools.
Effectively the capitalist is offering the worker a deal: the capitalist provides the tools, the worker provides the labor, and each receives part of the value produced. In capitalism qua capitalism, the worker is an employee and receives a fixed wage, while the capitalist receives a variable profit, but of course there are lots of other variations; the machinist might take a loan from a bank or rent the tools, precisely reversing the roles, or someone who's nominally merely an employee might receive most of their compensation in the form of incentive stock options.
From the point of view of economic development, these questions of how the pie is divided are minor, but they matter enormously to the participants. This division depends mostly on cultural expectations and on the negotiating positions and skills of the parties; in an industrialized economy, the capitalist has a very strong negotiating position, since capital goods like drill presses and rail locomotives are very commonly the critical limiting factor in productivity. For many expensive products that can be cut on a lathe, there are fewer lathes that can turn them than machinists skilled enough to turn them. The machinist without a lathe must resort to backyard aluminum casting and hand scraping before he can start to turn parts.
Ultimately, though, the money is just a scorekeeping device, a lubricant. What makes the machine shop more or less productive is not the money, but the tools it bought, which were necessarily produced by the production surplus of the existing economy. If suddenly machine shops as a whole attract a hundred times as much investment, it won't make their productivity skyrocket by bringing a hundred times as much tools into existence—it will just drive up the price of the tools. Pretty soon it will drive up the prices of the machine shops' products, too, since if their management doesn't deliver a respectable return on that investment, it will be replaced, and if that doesn't fix it, the company will be shut down. These higher prices will tend to decrease the market for the products.
When we're talking about international capital flows, we also have the well-known resource curse or Dutch disease: investing a lot of money from England in US companies will tend to devalue the pound relative to the dollar, which makes US products less economically competitive and/or UK products more economically competitive. This is precisely the opposite of driving US industrialization.
— ⁂ —
So if some Englishman sent a bunch of money across the Atlantic to invest in nascent industrialization, that wouldn't speed up the industrialization—unless a bunch of that money went back across the Atlantic to buy the capital goods needed for industrialization. Maybe it did! From 01780 to 01824 artisans were forbidden to emigrate from Britain, and exportation of metalworking or glass manufacturing equipment was likewise forbidden; but these prohibitions were widely flouted, and at any rate they excluded steam-engines, and they ended in 01843. A lot of the machinery and artisans during this time went to the US. The "American System of Manufacturing" was the world's most advanced manufacturing technology by the mid-01850s.
More likely, though, if someone in England was investing in US industrial firms in the 01800-01850 period, they weren't meaningfully promoting a flow of needed capital goods from England to America; they were just giving the American firms they invested in a leg up on competing American firms, and perhaps other sectors of the US economy, like the slave plantations.
But where does Junius Morgan come into all this? Well, it turns out that Junius S. Morgan was born in Massachusetts in 01813; his father was a Revolutionary War veteran and one of the founders of Aetna in 01819. Junius Morgan was a partner in various US banks from 01833 to 01853, inheriting his father's fortune in 01847 and then becoming a partner in London's leading American bank in 01854. So that was when he started funneling British investors' money into American industrial companies by selling things such as railway bonds. J. P. had nothing to do with it! He started working with his father in London in 01857 and acting as his father's overseas agent in the US in 01860.
Moreover, by this point it was no longer a question of "driving industrialization" in America. The US had already been the world's leading industrial power for decades. The B&O railroad opened in 01830, using a US-built locomotive; by 01861 it had 236 locomotives, 3451 rail cars, and 826 km of railroad, and it had many domestic competitors. In 01830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first intercity railway and the first to be powered entirely by steam, also opened. The US had power looms from 01815, milling machines by 01816, small arms with interchangeable parts by the 01830s, 2000 steam engines by 01838, cloth exports from the 01830s, electric telegraphs from 01844, and invented the Corliss steam engine in 01848.
So, Morgan was far too late to drive industrialization in the US. He certainly did make a lot of money from it, though. And he arguably got a lot of other people to invest in its expansion—US industry expanded a lot in the second half of the 19th century.
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.)
* "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.)
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-dict...
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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.
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.
> Joe Manchin
Sorry, not a native English-speaker... So how is that pronounced; Mannikin or Manchild?
Sorry, not a native English-speaker... So how is that pronounced; Mannikin or Manchild?
> 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
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s
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
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s
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.
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.
> 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/ch...
Uh... https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a36630528/ch...
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.
for comparison the sun is 15,000,000 degrees C.
I wonder how they measure a temperature that high.
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
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
Spectroscopy and laser measurements and other measures are used.
The engineering and science in fusion research is amazing.
How do we measure 15 million degrees? (from Tokomak Energy (4:34)) 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
Spectroscopy and laser measurements and other measures are used.
The engineering and science in fusion research is amazing.
Spectrum?
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.
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.
What fucking charlatans.
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
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
[deleted]
> 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".
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".
Regarding the vaccine in spring of 2020, there were sufficient volunteers to run challenge trials.
"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.
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.
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
You haven’t seen 5 people watching 1 person dig a ditch in your hometown?
"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
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
> We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, double as a percentage vs any other country
Saying something is double when it is not really undermines your comment[1]. Note this is GDP, so much of that spending is not controlled by your government. Use real facts.
> and have worse outcomes.
I am guessing the US has worse outcomes for the poor, but I am guessing that for the top ~40% of wealth the American health system gets good results (but just very fuckling expensively?)
Certainly the US health system is broken on average, but I can say the NZ health system has its failures, although it is more equitable for the less wealthy. For example, we eliminated COVID which depended on our people and government working well, but although we are a wealthy country we have ~1% vaccinated...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
Saying something is double when it is not really undermines your comment[1]. Note this is GDP, so much of that spending is not controlled by your government. Use real facts.
> and have worse outcomes.
I am guessing the US has worse outcomes for the poor, but I am guessing that for the top ~40% of wealth the American health system gets good results (but just very fuckling expensively?)
Certainly the US health system is broken on average, but I can say the NZ health system has its failures, although it is more equitable for the less wealthy. For example, we eliminated COVID which depended on our people and government working well, but although we are a wealthy country we have ~1% vaccinated...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
> I am guessing the US has worse outcomes for the poor, but I am guessing that for the top ~40% of wealth the American health system gets good results (but just very fuckling expensively?)
Yeah, pretty much. But guess which there are more of, poor people or rich? And knowing that, what does it mean for total or average outcome?
Yeah, pretty much. But guess which there are more of, poor people or rich? And knowing that, what does it mean for total or average outcome?
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.
Started out legit... Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence.
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/ - 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.
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/ - 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.
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.
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).
> 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).
" they would have discovered this method back in antiquity and we would have had something resembling skyscrapers for thousands of years."
Uh. Rome had 7 story buildings and probably some 8 or 9 story buildings as well, even though they were actually against the law [0]. Fire safety and, in some regions, earthquake safety were the two dominant limits on height of ancient buildings, not absence of elevators.
But elevators generally need a source of power. Prior to steam or better electricity, that meant human or animal power, which would be very impractical in residential buildings in a city. Pre-industrial elevators were rare because their design was awkward.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)
Uh. Rome had 7 story buildings and probably some 8 or 9 story buildings as well, even though they were actually against the law [0]. Fire safety and, in some regions, earthquake safety were the two dominant limits on height of ancient buildings, not absence of elevators.
But elevators generally need a source of power. Prior to steam or better electricity, that meant human or animal power, which would be very impractical in residential buildings in a city. Pre-industrial elevators were rare because their design was awkward.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)
wankerrific(2)
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.
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.
Your bit about China is hilariously deranged. Have you ever talked to a Chinese person?
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.