I wonder if Marc Andreessen would have invested in any of the things he now says that are in shortage. Words are cheap. By writing his essay Marc portrays that he is interested in the greater good but when it comes to actions its all quickbucks.
This was my first reaction, but Tren Griffin pointed out something fairly reasonable; VC funding is very small ($50 billion/year or so compared to the trillions the central government spends, to say nothing of the states).
Your point is reasonable, I think, but the scale is pretty off as it relates to VC funding vs. public spending.
The money does and can make a huge difference even if it only helps with building out a proof-of-concept? Uber took on the entrenched Taxi industry world-wide with VC money. Zenefits did the same to the insurance industry.
The problem is, one cannot compete with the incumbents head-on, for which one might need a gazillion dollars from the get-go, but I think one can definitely take on them with a humble investment to the tune of a few million dollars... Isn't that anyway the promise of nimble, innovative startups [0] -- out-manouver large corporations? I don't see VCs balking at startups competing squarely with a FAANG, say, for instance. Somehow, this rationale that the government has deeper pockets seems like a dishonest excuse.
I agree public spending does trump any amount of money private investors can conjure up, but I do not agree that they are blame-free
for not moving the needle forward, because they don't really lack ambition on-paper at least [1].
And, hey, software has been eating the world without significant public spend for a long time. There's been talk of private money building the future [2] for sometime, now...
Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Posthttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
> COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else.
The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives. If it's any solace, us other NATO countries haven't been better, but at least our leaders were not as stubborn as to claim "corona was under control" until Feb. 24 or "[the Democrat's] new hoax" (Feb. 28) as Trump did.
The ones who did not waste any time and who actually do have a standing pandemic response team are Asian countries like Taiwan - Taiwan is directly adjacent to China, has a shitload of travel to China under normal circumstances, got sidelined from the WHO thanks to Chinese pressure, yet only 422 cases with 6 deaths IN TOTAL.
That's what happens when a competent government is in action: they locked down travels on end of december and put actual experts in charge.
>The USA have alerted NATO allies and Israel in mid-November (!) about coronavirus:
Yes, the US alerted allied nations of a new disease that ought to be watched. Similar warnings went out for SARS, MERS, and Ebola, as well as (for example) the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
>The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives.
"Patient Zero" arrived in Seattle from Wuhan on January 15. At that point
* The WHO was still denying that COVID19 could be spread by person-to-person contact.
* Trump was still impeached by the House of Representatives and awaiting trial in the Senate.
What would have happened if on January 1 Trump announced the only thing that would have prevented COVID19 from arriving in the US: A complete and indefinite shutdown of all land, sea, and air borders?[1] Trump would have been denounced by the entire world as a racist sexist fascistNaziKKK preparing to seize unlimited power to avoid being removed from office, using the thin pretext of a disease that seemed only China's problem.
>"[the Democrat's] new hoax"
No. Trump called the Democrats' response to what the administration was doing about COVID19 a hoax, consistent with his describing what led to his impeachment as a hoax a few sentences before the above words.
[1] And before you say that that wasn't necessary, that a 14-day quarantine would have been sufficient, a) That time period wasn't known for sure then. Very, very little was known about the disease or SARS-CoV-2, partly because China wasn't saying anything and WHO wasn't inclined to get China to talk. b) A 14-day quarantine for all visitors is effectively a shutdown of the border. Very, very few people are willing to visit any country that mandates such a thing at entrance.
The point is, this is a problem. When the task forces all end up dominated with rich, white, old men, then the problems that specific groups of the society face end up ignored/overlooked.
We have a similar issue in Germany at the moment - while we do have Ms. Merkel as chancellor, the advisor group (Leopoldina) only has two women in it and no representatives of e.g. disabled people - leading to the problem that issues of childcare or care for disabled persons, or poor people, or people locked down in totally inadequate cramped conditions completely lacked representation in their latest recommendations.
In France, it's similar but worse - there have been violent explosions last night as people literally cannot endure the enormous stress that a really strict lockdown in cramped housing causes.
A lack of diversity in advisory groups and task forces has real, quantifiable and sometimes deadly consequences.
Wow. So the "Pandemic Response Team" that Bolton eliminated was really just two people in a white house advisory committee, who had the three people reporting to them moved to reporting to other committee members.
If existance of two people on a comittee were the only thing standing between success and failure, then the US still has some deep systemic problems.
Bail out money is a death march to insolvency. The unlimited helicopter money the Fed is promising is enabling politicians to ignore fundamental, long term consequences of the economic shutdowns. We cannot run a country or a currency on the bail out model. Our national debt is skyrocketing to higher levels than World War 2 (as percent of GDP). We've got an insolvency crisis fast approaching with boomers retiring and unfunded liabilities in the dozens of trillions. Our economy is contracting dramatically as we speak. 22 million people are unemployed and it's week 4. Millions of businesses are going to go bankrupt from the largest cash flow retraction in world history. The financial contagion is not being addressed. It's the 800 pound elephant in the room, but it will be with us much longer than the virus will.
It's not 1945. First of all, we had Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 establishing dollar as world reserve currency backed by gold. That of course, went away by 1971 and modern dollar is fiat and susceptible to poor monetary policy. We had 50% of world economy coming out of WWII as we were the only major country not buried in ashes. We had a birth boom (the boomers now retiring). We had tons of assets to still borrow against and we weren't overlevereged on everything from housing to education to corporate assets, etc. We had tons of technological and economical expansion left to experience, like interstate highways, jet travel, spread of electricity, computing, world trade, integration of women in work force, etc.
It's 2020. We don't have the deck stacked in our favor like we did in 1945. We've got massive obligations and a populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts, loan forgiveness, UBI, etc which are all untenable given that our existing social programs are already approaching insolvency. The government is on pace to spend half or more of GDP this year alone. Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
> It's 2020. We don't have the deck stacked in our favor like we did in 1945. We've got massive obligations and a populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts, loan forgiveness, UBI, etc which are all untenable given that our existing social programs are already approaching insolvency.
US Social Security is effectively funded by US Treasuries. There is no "locked box" that somehow the US government "saves" contributions into. The national debt is debt generated now to be paid in the future, perhaps. The question about what that borrowing is spent on now is the question. Right now, spending it on social programs will aid the individuals that otherwise would be in dire poverty. Spending it on infrastructure (and the US infrastructure is woeful) is useful investment that will generate returns in the future.
I agree with your points, except of phrasing of one thing.
>populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts
Its corporations that setup that system and those are sole beneficiary of the system. Now days you cannot default on student debt even if you are working in completely different area.
Corpos eat up all profits in times of prosperity, and in times of crisis all they do is cry for bailout money. Which they will promptly get, award the ceo for their cunning skills and move on.
That is the problem, the business model of too big to fail.
That is straight out rent seeking.
And that is the problem. Bloated 'too big to fails' copros are holding nations as hostages. Allowing them to act like they are 'too big to fails'.
> Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
This is another clear example of current insanity. Building infrastructure was the solution, it worked. It gave money to the bottom guy, who spend it locally allowing small business to stay afloat further propping up confidence in spending.
But now only solution is to shower fire with money in hopes that eventually it will die down.
The government should be helicoptering money into the system, it can print endless amounts of it.
It should do it as long as the rest of the economy (consumers / businesses) are not. However, the money should be going to Main St, not Wall St.
Equity and Debt holders can and should be taking haircuts and losses in recognition of the risk of their investments. Bailing out Wall Street just leads to continuing asset bubbles as investors seek returns independent of risk.
The problem will be when does the government withdraw that support? And how? As business and consumption returns, the government should reduce its addition to the money supply proportionally.
I wanted to disagree with Marc on twitter about some of his views but for some unknown reason he has blocked me and countless others on twitter even though we have never interacted in anyway
He blocks many people for no apparent reason. There was an article written back in 2015. Some considering a pmarca twitter block a sign that you’ve made it!
Someone he follows may have commented on something you posted and he didn’t want the noise. I do this all the tine to clean out my feed of views I have no interest in entertaining.
I was waiting for Cory to get to the main reason he had an issue with Marc's article, since most of his initial response was just quoting other random bits and pieces to try and prove him wrong. And then came this sizzler:
> We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country.
And there it is. Racism is to blame. All the deaths in NYC due to unpreparedness, lack of funding over decades, a shitty private health system, no decent leadership from both sides of politics ... they're actually because the US is just a racist country. The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Sorry. You need to do better than that.
> Or, you know, break the systemic racist, classist policies that form the backbone of repression throughout this country.
Oh look, there it is again. Not enough hospitals being built? That's because we're racist. Core infrastructure falling apart? Yeah, racism. Not enough jobs to go around? That's racist too!
Just so we're clear, you actually don't think there is wide scale systematic institutionalized racism? Not that there are not other contributing factors, that it doesn't exist?
I do not believe the poster said that, it is more that, in the style they quoted it, the article says `p -> q`, where q = we are racist and q = we did not build this system.
They never claim there is not racism in the United States, only that they do not agree that is why the system was built.
I wouldn't normally quote politico as a source, my politics don't align. That said:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/why-new-jerseys-ven...Lawmakers in New Jersey, which is quickly becoming the new epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, are worried new emergency triage guidelines for the state’s hospitals could push younger, whiter patients to the front of the line.
“We do know that it exists, institutional bias exists throughout all of health care,” Persichilli said Wednesday
I’m not OP but I absolutely do not believe there is wide scale systematic institutionalized racism. Everyone wants to be a victim rather than facing the reality that they are responsible for their outcome in life. Being a victim is just too easy.
At least some of life for some people is luck in the real sense that undeserving people (Joe Biden's son, say, merely to cite one example) are lifted up thanks to who their parents are.
Bad luck is when you're effectively ruined by the age of 5 thanks once again to who your parents were. The only way out for someone that fits this description is to adopt a self-reliant, goal directed attitude.
Self-reliant, goal directed behavior is essentially what people not born lucky or ruined do to improve their position in life.
What society can do to help is communicate clearly that the virtues of persistence, resilency, self-reliance and goal directed behavior are "cool" or in sociological-speak, society's normative values.
Unfortunately, since Rousseau and Marx, we have birthed a counter-culture that is determined to do the opposite. It's determined to place the locus of control over one's life outside of the individual and onto a nepharious "society".
Marx personally was an unhappy, deeply defective, and cruel personality. His philosophy stems directly from this. It attracts people who share his defects- namely people filled with resentment, envy, a desire to extract revenge for perceived slights and a lust for absolute power.
The hope is that eventually, through CRISPR and other techniques, that as a side effect of improving human functioning the well-spring of such people will simply dry up.
Until then, we have to do battle with a philosophy which preaches the diametric opposite of what we know leads to human flourishing and happiness.
Life is full of luck and for every Hunter Biden there are 100 children growing up in failed homes. I didn't say luck and privilege don't exist but I absolutely do not agree that as a nation we have institutionalized racism. I can't even believe it's such a controversial statement to get downvote bombed.
Poverty rates are disproportionately high among black and hispanic citizens but as a percentage of total population they are absolutely dwarfed by white poverty. What is the reason that so many white Americans are living in poverty? Is it perhaps possible that it is a similar reason that black and hispanic citizens are living in poverty?
Poverty rates are always written as a percentage of the population of that race but if you rewrite them to be a percentage of US population a different narrative starts to emerge...
~2.7% of Americans are black people in poverty.
~3.0% of Americans are hispanic people in poverty.
~6.5% of Americans are white people in poverty.
We have problems of economic opportunity in this country. Writing it off as racism is missing the elephant in the room.
I agree with you which is why I got downvoted too. People with nothing better to do in their lives than get paid to downvote on public forums. My solution I guess is to leave this forum and find one that doesn't enable downvote brigades the way this one does.
Supposedly, commentors here have something of value to offer, otherwise it would just be a news headline site without commentors. I am taking whatever value I have to offer and going elsewhere. I suggest you do the same. Sure, HN will turn into a political echo-chamber but it's really that already, right? I had 10% of my karma- whatever that is and whatever it's good for- disappear in an hour when I proferred the opinion that I didn't blame Trump for the virus.
You get a result like that - people telling you that that should NOT be your opinion and here's the punch in the face to teach you that lesson- and you know the forum is already a lost cause.
Gab has a browser plugin that will let you comment on any website, including this one and not be censored. Also there are scrappy alternatives to Reddit, saidit I think is one, where its not a groupthink party.
It's just a period of time we're living through and technology will catch up with it.
Historically, problems had to go on much longer than people reading about them later realize they did before corrective action was taken. This is no different.
For all the busy-beaver downvote-assassins on HN- way to waste the days and hours of the prime of your life, fighting the losing battle against freedom!
It's also quite clear he takes issue with the Trump administration and Marc's attempts to downplay their role in the current crisis and our preparedness.
> The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Cory didn't say the IRS is racist for requiring bank accounts, he's saying racist/classist policies prevented people from getting them in the first place.
You're intentionally misrepresenting his response to claim everything is about the current crisis — it is obviously not. Nor is Marc's original article.
Odd that you hyperfocus on the racism piece, when he said racist and classist. Honestly, if you have an argument that fundamentally accepting race and class injustices lead to the damaging reality we're living now, I'm not seeing it. I feel like the only argument I'm really seeing is "surely it can't be as simple as systemic injustices", which just seems like a silly caveat to me. Of course it could be, and likely is.
People are intentionally inserting identity politics into their articles to get views and upvotes. Even if it means being intellectually dishonest. It’s really a shame too, because there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the original article.
Of course you're going to say that, though; your religious beliefs are so thick that they obscure your ability to empathize with other humans.
Let's get some data, shall we? Here's demographics of NYC [0], and here's demographics of COVID-19 deaths in NYC [1]. Black/African-American folks make up 25% of NYC's population, but 33% of all deaths. White folks make up 45% of the population, but 31% of all deaths. I don't need a t-test to know that that's statistically significant.
Shitty private health is due to racism and classism; folks aren't willing to foot the bill for others, as if we're somehow not living in a society. We have plenty of good leadership from sides not commonly represented; Bernie and the Larrys were frozen out, remember? This country's Overton window is so far to the upper-right that it's nigh-impossible to get any traction on positive social policies.
You act as if this country's classist and racist history doesn't exist, which is silly. Hopefully you know about the Voting Rights Act [2] and the fact that this country has been so classist and racist that we have explicitly passed laws about it. And yes, there is a long history in this country of disenfranchising minorities by, amongst other things, denying them banking services.
Sorry, but you need to do better, you pathetic sad-sack snowflake! Right now you sound like not just part of the problem, but happily part of the problem. Fix yourself.
"Sorry, but you need to do better, you pathetic sad-sack snowflake! Right now you sound like not just part of the problem, but happily part of the problem. Fix yourself."
This comment is totally unnecessary and really not appropriate for HN.
This is tone-policing; if "pathetic" is not appropriate here, then it's not appropriate in the (great-grand)parent's post, either.
But I will unpack exactly what I meant. "pathetic" is literal, and used in the same sense that the parent used it; it connotes that their comment evokes pathos, and lacks ethos, logos, or bathos. A "sad-sack" is somebody who ruins the tone or vibe of a conversation with their attitude, usually by making people feel uncomfortable and sad. A "snowflake" is somebody who cannot stand being criticized, and erupts in anger whenever confronted with evidence which contradicts their beliefs.
"part of the problem" is an old rhetorical idea relating to good-faith argumentation; the idea is that if somebody repeatedly admits to all of the premises but not the conclusion, over and over, then eventually we must conclude that they are refusing to engage with the argument in good faith. "fix yourself" is pretty direct; I want the parent to read the links that I provided and reconsider their beliefs, and optionally to then re-read the original linked article and commentary and see if they come to a better understanding.
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, Cory is probably mostly right on the specifics. On the other, Andreeson's article was so vapid and ignorant it's barely worth addressing. We only talk about it because the guy's a US ubermensch (a nation & class rapidly losing significance, to everyone's benefit). Yet here I am commenting too I suppose.
We seem to live in an age where comprehensively refuted ideas readily gain adherents (not that I have an Age of Reason in mind to be particularly nostalgic about). There can be a fine line between useful refutation and promotion. A hard one to draw, I would accept.
It is not clear if properly refuting really does anything anymore. The release of the info in the first is the ball game. It was popularized on Hackernews and is now part of the guardrails of debate. Marc wins. We have a huge manufacturing consent problem.
Horrified and shocked. I’m deeply grateful for the technical discussions on HN. Which makes it all the harder to see such shortsighted views promulgated here.
Well I've read enough over the years (Philip Tetlock springs to mind) to rarely be any more confident of my own predictions in the political sphere than anyone else's. Only time will tell!
As for the spirit of friendship, and just to be clear, I believe the US's declining significance, although having some distinctly ignoble proximate causes, will ultimately be of benefit to her own citizens also. I really meant 'everyone'.
Can someone expand on this? I found the article interesting, energetic and containing a strong and, to me, positive and useful message ("ask yourself what are you building?").
Yet parent calls it ignorant, of what? a sibling comment is "horrified" that the article gained so much attention here, although it seems to me that with it's focus on building stuff it's 100% on topic (which is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting").
As it's a little unsettling to me that other people find it horrifying that people like me found the article interesting, any details would be appreciated.
Marc's article was calling for things like building delivery drones and automating vaccines, which would be fantastic, but we're not living in a world where that's feasible right now. It was interesting, I agree, but as this response points out, there's more pressing matters right now like homelessness and internet access.
Have you read the article that you are commenting on? Because the very first paragraph starts explaining things that Andreeson appears to be ignorant of.
Yes, I have. "Every Western institution" is obviously an hyperbole, I wouldn't consider that ignorant. I started skimming the reply-article at some point, as it seemed to me like most nitpicks the author had might be correct, but missed the point of the original article. Reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854475.
(OT: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." ', from the HN guidelines)
OT: perhaps that guideline should be updated to say that when asking a question that appears to be entirely covered by the article under discussion, commenters should clarify that they have read and it, and explain why the article does not sufficiently answer the question. As it is, it's just a suggestion to be more passive aggressive - those two examples convey exactly the same thing except in the second one, you pretend that you are not accusing the commenter of not reading it. For example here, my response could have been "The very first paragraph says that." Would you have interpreted that differently in any way?
I'm really reluctant to say any more about this particular dead duck, but the ignorance and vapidity go hand-in-hand. The notion that we just apolitically need to 'want' the right things is risibly divorced from the reality of the complex, historical, political world we live in. It's a marketing slogan, not an analysis. "Just do it!", coming straight out of the world of the magical thinking books that so often dominate management & business categories. It pretends we're all hyper-individualist point-form existentialist entrepreneurs without history or culture or politics or .. anything much really.
The details, such as they are, are too flimsy to be worth addressing in detail. It's all too dreary - the tired conflation of the 'West' with one large outlier nation, the endless shrill calls on public provision advocates to demonstrate what's been amply demonstrated for decades, etc etc etc.
I truly make efforts to not be crudely incendiary about matters of importance. I do fail more often than I'd like because the issues matter and evoke strong reactions. But I'm not even going to try in the case of an article so flatly stupid. It merits only dismissal, and has already had more attention than it deserves. Over and out.
> They have bank accounts, permanent addresses, internet access. We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country.
I don't know if this is true. Withholding aid to migrants that don't have legal immigration status might not be the right thing to do right now. However it need not have any racist motive. Yes it will have a strong racial bias in it's outcome but does that make it racist?
He’s talking about people who are outside the system - who don’t have access to banks, don’t have a permanent address, internet access, or a phone. Some combination thereof, and which prevents them from fully participating in society, as well as making it difficult to receive a stimulus check.
The most common meaning of "racism" in conversation is "acting based on the race of some person / group of people".
Immigration policies can (should) be discussed without taking into account people's race, and still lead to racially-biased outcomes, simply because the majority of immigration-seekers have a race that's different from the majority of people in the target country.
I don't think this is the case. I don't think the US bases immigration policy even partially on race.
Some nations leaders are a threat and their people are going to have a harder time but that is not a race issue. For example a North Korean would have a harder time than a South Korean yet they are the same race.
Isn't there some value in having terms that differentiate between policies design to hurt a given race and policies that hurt a given race as a by product?
To me it seems similar to the difference between murder and manslaughter. Intent seems to make the crime more morally wrong. Neither are good but they are seen as very different things.
Perhaps my understanding of the word is wrong but if it is I feel that English is missing the ability to express an important nuance if that's the case.
If it's racist to treat people differently in a way that affects people of some races, than anything less than open borders (allowing anyone to immigrate for any reason) is racist. If you don't support open boarders, you're either a racist, or that definition of racism is too broad.
Because it wasn't "us" who proposed it, but "them", and bam!, it just became partisan. Or maybe someone asked for clarification, no one replied, and now it seems "they" blocked it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While there are good points here, I can't help but feel the auther felt compelled to comment negatively on every aspect of what was said, even where it made little sense and they had to bring up u related or at best tangentially related issues.
Should the left have to prove their models? Yes! And so should the right! They both see outcome as intent[1], and that's not a useful way to comrpomise and actually achieve change.
1: School funding is different for black communities because it's poorly optimized for merit and susceptible to horrible feedback loops, not because racist people decided it. Criminal juatice/prison reform isn't about making life better for criminals, it's about making sure people have people have the chance to be productive members of society, which is better for everyone involved.
It is generally true that systems like school funding are racist in outcome but not design - but there are a surprising number of instances where the design actually is created with that intent. Most commonly seen these days with a rich white suburb deciding to incorporate their own school district so they can stop having nearby black kids attend - usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/6/20853091/school-secession-racia...
> usually they can skate by with some platitudes about local control but when actually on a witness stand it doesn't hold up.
Maybe I'm missing the portion you're looking at, but all I'm seeing this says is that the plaintiffs argued it was about race, and the defendants didn't have good evidence as to their reasoning why they did it. To my eyes, and based on a lot of the information presented in the article, it is just as likely (if not more so) that it was about class. I sincerely doubt that district wanted to invite the poor white students from the full district any more than the poor black ones.
What that means is that this attempted change, which would have been racist in outcome if possibly not intent, was defeated by viewing it as racist as intent. Was that a good thing? Maybe? I guess it depends on what else they did.
How do you rectify the actual problem, when you assume it's people not liking others with different skin colors? You vilify those people and try to punish them or change them or wait for them to die or by marginalized, none of which seem to work very well. But if they weren't actually racist, and it was more a problem of class and poverty, there are other solutions, because in addition to trying to change the people you can also try to help those in poverty.
Distilled to a simple form, it's like seeing a white shop owner turn away a black homeless person. You can assume racism, and ostracize the shop owner. Or you can assume classism, and do the same but also try to help the homeless person. I think in many cases racism is used as an easy way to "resolve" a problem without addressing it at all. It exists, but it's also intimately ties with class and poverty, and one of those is much more useful to address at this point than the other, but it also much less likely to be addressed.
> there are other solutions, because in addition to trying to change the people you can also try to help those in poverty.
Yes. That solution, to the problem of rich white people trying to stop sharing their school funding with poor black people, is to not allow them to leave. That's what happened. Nobody ostracized anyone and your simple form is an invalid analogy. If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
> That solution, to the problem of rich white people trying to stop sharing their school funding with poor black people, is to not allow them to leave. That's what happened.
But what about the solution to the problem of the rich people not wanting to share with the poor people? What if that's a major part of the problem? Was that addressed at all, or just swept under the rug as "racist people will be racist, just don't let them"? Preferably, something that also addressed the issue of poverty, or at least kept it acknowledged as part of the problem.
> If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
Exactly. But is that the better solution? What about the poor white person that comes in next? Do they get turned away, because they're not black? What about the fact that they're both still homeless?
When you identify the wrong problem, you're at risk of implementing a worse solution. Racism is bad, and it's sometimes the case it perfectly explains what happened, but not always, and not often entirely, but it's convenient because it means nobody else has to change or do anything. We all get to point at the bad people that make convenient scapegoats and comment about how we would never do anything like that, while nothing really changes, because the problem was only partially racism to begin with, and there's not a lot to change structurally to stop it that hasn't already happened when it is racism.
Are the right really in to defining sweeping social policies based on the output of academic models? I can't say I've seen much of that, at least not from deeply conservative types. Middling centrists, yeah. A key part of conservative thought is the notion that the world is large, complex, and you only understand a tiny piece of it. That sort of worldview doesn't mesh well with attempts to simulate a planet inside a desktop PC.
> Are the right really in to defining sweeping social policies based on the output of academic models?
Whether proposing something new or preventing something new, the position needs to be defended with facts. The status quo gets extra points because we have experience with how it works, but equally important we have experience with how it doesn't work.
> That sort of worldview doesn't mesh well with attempts to simulate a planet inside a desktop PC.
I'm not really espousing that as much as experiments where possible or found (in the case of natural experiments), and sober consideration of the results. When's the last time you think you were presented with with a measured assessment of a major policy that wasn't blatently biased through omission of facts for one (or both!) sides from a popular public source such as a politician, activist group, or news agency (you'll get closest with the news, but they know their audiences and what keeps them coming back)?
This is less a problem of liberals and conservatives and more a problem of liberal and conservative politicians and activists warping messages because they inevitably become so tribal that their stated goals often end up taking a back-seat to the short-term gain of hurting the competing narrative at any cost.
We're still mid pandemic. The error bars are tightening but there is a lot we don't know about the disease. There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs. People don't even know what the costs are yet.
Marc Andreessen's diagnosis was a knee-jerk guess at where the problems are and is probably wrong. Cory does a good job of pointing that out. However, if anything makes Americans wake up to the looming strategic threat of China that has been around for at least a decade then that is probably for the best. The CCP are the same type of 'friend' as the Saudis.
The US hasn't been making sensible strategic decisions since at least '08. There is a lot of spending on wars that don't suppress rivals and a lot of debt that isn't making the economy robust. The research advantage that America once had is being chipped away; Huawei won't be the last time China achieves technical dominance over US tech companies.
> There has been no time to determine whether the response was actually good or bad when considering the costs.
Lockdown takes us from exponential growth to linear growth. This has played out so many times, in so many different regions, that I think it's pretty clear as to what the response accomplished on the plus side.
You can quibble over what lockdown should look like, and which of the measures are not necessary to stop the exponential, but it's pretty clear that the form of it adopted in every country that has tried it... Works.
Only one country has successfully gotten to linear growth without lockdown. South Korea. [1] [2] [3]
Every other place has had exponential growth, that goes linear a week or two after lockdown is in place.
That's more than enough evidence for me. We know that lockdown works. We know that wishful thinking doesn't. All we can do is tweak the parameters of what lockdown looks like.
[1] Except it does have a lockdown! Whoops! It banned gatherings, shut down parks, closed borders, closed daycares, schools, sporting events, closed public spaces, etc, etc, etc. It's a lockdown by another name.
[2] Sweeden also closed its borders, and banned large gatherings. It didn't do most of the other things. It's currently in the exponential growth stage.
[3] Singapore is also on an exponential trajectory. Which is why it is also shutting down.
Norway has closed schools, universities, gyms, and placed restrictions on cafés, bars, and restaurants. But as private individuals, while encouraged to work from home if we can, we are free to go where we please (except no spending the night in your cabin in the mountains). Our public spaces are open, shopping centres are open, quite a few cafés are also open.
If we leave the country we have to go into 14 days quarantine.
Our death rate per unit population (3) is a lot lower than, say the UK (23), even though we are free to move about and they are not. So lockdown is not always as effective as might be hoped and also not always necessary. Local conditions mean a lot, not all populations are willing to behave responsibly even when the law demands it, while some merely need to be told what is necessary.
The author is saying that we had the tools and the plans, but the system de-incentivizes the ideal response, for a number of reasons the author claims throughout.
People in "power that the author approves of" seems like subtext that one would have to see on their own reading of the article. To me it seems like the author was arguing against some aspects of capitalism and how incentives for profit can misalign with benefits for society.
This was a pretty good takedown of a pretty garbage essay, but I was disappointed the author didn't spend more time talking about how capitalism has failed us here. For instance, corporations are fundamentally good at one thing: maximizing the amount of profit they can make by selling whatever it is they sell.
This is precisely why we were scrambling for ventilators a few weeks ago: it wouldn't have been profitable to build them a year ago, because hospitals wouldn't buy them, because they didn't have the ability to use, store, or maintain them.
Another example is the current situation with toilet paper. What's happening here is not that people are pooping more than they were a few months ago. It's just that they're doing it more at home, rather than at work. TP for home use and TP for commercial use are different products (anyone who's pooped at work or in a public bathroom knows this), made by different companies and using different supply chains.
While we have enough capacity to make and ship all the TP we need right now, what's happening is that commercial TP makers are (rightly!) not switching to making TP for home use, because that would be really expensive for them to do. They don't have the proper supply chain (contracts, logistics, etc.) to support it, either. End result: no TP in the stores. [0]
I saw a shower thought on Reddit that said something to the effect of "the economy is in a bad state right now because people are only buying what they need." While this vastly oversimplifies the issue, there is a good amount of merit to it. Right now, most of my spending on stuff that is not rent is literally food for myself and my dog, and the occasional item to make this lockdown a bit more bearable. There's no way I'm spending money on anything that isn't immediately useful or will become necessary in the near to medium term future. And, I'm one of the lucky ones who still has their job, because I can WFH.
OTOH, there are a number of things I hope we can learn from this lockdown. I've already written about how I hope people can realize Keynes was right, and we don't really have to work so damn much. [1] More importantly, though, I hope people can realize that most of our elected representatives simply do not have our interests in mind (e.g. Trump wanting to "reopen the economy" by Easter, in spite of all the deaths that would have caused), and start voting in people who actually do represent them.
It's an absolute crying shame that the US doesn't have even the most basic levels of worker protections that every country in Europe offers. So many people are suffering right now through no fault of their own, simply because we can't afford to let people who have lost their jobs have more than a pittance of unemployment benefits, and a pathetic $1200 check they had to wait to get because someone wanted their signature on them.
The criticism in the Cory Foy’s post takes two forms: 1. We were prepared, and 2. Preparedness can not overcome the systemic oppression and exploitation built into western capitalist society.
I have little patience for the second point which is core to social justice activism. I have little patience for MAGA protectionism either so I’ll address the first point on preparedness.
We, across the globe, had varying degrees of strategic preparedness but utterly failed with respect to the tactics and execution required to make those strategies a reality. A good example is the CPIP: Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness guide:
This strategy is almost perfect with a few tweaks but Canada dropped the ball on three fronts: 1. Data Sharing, 2. Process Scaling, and 3. Communication. The failures started with an inability to integrate Border Services data into the plan and the system failed to anticipate the scale of isolating the peak number of Snow Birds and March Break travellers returning back to Canada.
Strategy is a starting point but it is not the full story with respect to COVID-19 preparedness.
Narratives that blame "greed" and other kinds of non-egalitarian behavior seem to forget that humans are animals. We should recognize that expecting organized forethought across a species, and organized ethical behavior is expecting something never, ever, ever seen before in nature.
There are no animals, besides us, that ideate about anything except benefit to themselves and their offspring. However "bad" we are, we are the sole species that has spent a full single second of its existence trying to be "good" instead of just eating and fing and killing our way to the next day, possibly feeding the animal next-to us to our lovely offspring. For every other animal, killing an adjacent creature to take what they have is exactly is routine, and they are unapologetic.
It is great to see humanity become more impact-aware, and I have high hopes for an even more enlightened future, but it is somewhat absurd to presume that honesty, kindness, and altruistic thinking are somehow the baseline because that is the way we would like it. We imagine that something is "wrong" when they aren't happening. These are the default conditions. Every time a human departs from "hand-to-mouth", and from rationalizing deaths of the weak is a valiant leap from natural instincts.
By these measures, humanity's response has been unprecedented. The coordination, however flawed, has never been seen like this in the history of this world or any other that we have seen. It is only the grandiosity of our fantasies about what we are that lets us tell these alternate stories.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadTo be clear, I think the original post by Andreessen and this response are both silly in their own ways.
I just find the public discourse around this very entertaining.
Your point is reasonable, I think, but the scale is pretty off as it relates to VC funding vs. public spending.
The money does and can make a huge difference even if it only helps with building out a proof-of-concept? Uber took on the entrenched Taxi industry world-wide with VC money. Zenefits did the same to the insurance industry.
The problem is, one cannot compete with the incumbents head-on, for which one might need a gazillion dollars from the get-go, but I think one can definitely take on them with a humble investment to the tune of a few million dollars... Isn't that anyway the promise of nimble, innovative startups [0] -- out-manouver large corporations? I don't see VCs balking at startups competing squarely with a FAANG, say, for instance. Somehow, this rationale that the government has deeper pockets seems like a dishonest excuse.
I agree public spending does trump any amount of money private investors can conjure up, but I do not agree that they are blame-free for not moving the needle forward, because they don't really lack ambition on-paper at least [1].
And, hey, software has been eating the world without significant public spend for a long time. There's been talk of private money building the future [2] for sometime, now...
/rant
[0] https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508356
What’s the point of having a plan if it’s not put into action?
Reminds me of this timeless quote:
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson
We where told we would be punched in the mouth and guidance was not enough to prevent the damage
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
The USA have alerted NATO allies and Israel in mid-November (!) about coronavirus: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-dise...
The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives. If it's any solace, us other NATO countries haven't been better, but at least our leaders were not as stubborn as to claim "corona was under control" until Feb. 24 or "[the Democrat's] new hoax" (Feb. 28) as Trump did.
The ones who did not waste any time and who actually do have a standing pandemic response team are Asian countries like Taiwan - Taiwan is directly adjacent to China, has a shitload of travel to China under normal circumstances, got sidelined from the WHO thanks to Chinese pressure, yet only 422 cases with 6 deaths IN TOTAL.
That's what happens when a competent government is in action: they locked down travels on end of december and put actual experts in charge.
What does Trump do, in contrast? Infection rates are nowhere near "under control", and he appoints his daughter and son-in-law on a "council to re-open America": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/14/21220755/t...
Yes, the US alerted allied nations of a new disease that ought to be watched. Similar warnings went out for SARS, MERS, and Ebola, as well as (for example) the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
>The ban on China travel came two months later. Two months of inaction that have cost a lot of lives.
"Patient Zero" arrived in Seattle from Wuhan on January 15. At that point
* The WHO was still denying that COVID19 could be spread by person-to-person contact.
* Trump was still impeached by the House of Representatives and awaiting trial in the Senate.
What would have happened if on January 1 Trump announced the only thing that would have prevented COVID19 from arriving in the US: A complete and indefinite shutdown of all land, sea, and air borders?[1] Trump would have been denounced by the entire world as a racist sexist fascistNaziKKK preparing to seize unlimited power to avoid being removed from office, using the thin pretext of a disease that seemed only China's problem.
>"[the Democrat's] new hoax"
No. Trump called the Democrats' response to what the administration was doing about COVID19 a hoax, consistent with his describing what led to his impeachment as a hoax a few sentences before the above words.
[1] And before you say that that wasn't necessary, that a 14-day quarantine would have been sufficient, a) That time period wasn't known for sure then. Very, very little was known about the disease or SARS-CoV-2, partly because China wasn't saying anything and WHO wasn't inclined to get China to talk. b) A 14-day quarantine for all visitors is effectively a shutdown of the border. Very, very few people are willing to visit any country that mandates such a thing at entrance.
CNN on January 30: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...
We have a similar issue in Germany at the moment - while we do have Ms. Merkel as chancellor, the advisor group (Leopoldina) only has two women in it and no representatives of e.g. disabled people - leading to the problem that issues of childcare or care for disabled persons, or poor people, or people locked down in totally inadequate cramped conditions completely lacked representation in their latest recommendations.
In France, it's similar but worse - there have been violent explosions last night as people literally cannot endure the enormous stress that a really strict lockdown in cramped housing causes.
A lack of diversity in advisory groups and task forces has real, quantifiable and sometimes deadly consequences.
If existance of two people on a comittee were the only thing standing between success and failure, then the US still has some deep systemic problems.
Funny, that you say that. What happened after WW2 with taxes and the economy?
It's 2020. We don't have the deck stacked in our favor like we did in 1945. We've got massive obligations and a populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts, loan forgiveness, UBI, etc which are all untenable given that our existing social programs are already approaching insolvency. The government is on pace to spend half or more of GDP this year alone. Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
US Social Security is effectively funded by US Treasuries. There is no "locked box" that somehow the US government "saves" contributions into. The national debt is debt generated now to be paid in the future, perhaps. The question about what that borrowing is spent on now is the question. Right now, spending it on social programs will aid the individuals that otherwise would be in dire poverty. Spending it on infrastructure (and the US infrastructure is woeful) is useful investment that will generate returns in the future.
So the answer is to do both.
>populace that's becoming increasingly demanding of bailouts
Its corporations that setup that system and those are sole beneficiary of the system. Now days you cannot default on student debt even if you are working in completely different area.
Corpos eat up all profits in times of prosperity, and in times of crisis all they do is cry for bailout money. Which they will promptly get, award the ceo for their cunning skills and move on.
That is the problem, the business model of too big to fail. That is straight out rent seeking.
And that is the problem. Bloated 'too big to fails' copros are holding nations as hostages. Allowing them to act like they are 'too big to fails'.
> Its not clear this spending will actually stimulate economy in the same way building interstate highways, airports, nuclear power, etc. in the 50s did.
This is another clear example of current insanity. Building infrastructure was the solution, it worked. It gave money to the bottom guy, who spend it locally allowing small business to stay afloat further propping up confidence in spending.
But now only solution is to shower fire with money in hopes that eventually it will die down.
It should do it as long as the rest of the economy (consumers / businesses) are not. However, the money should be going to Main St, not Wall St.
Equity and Debt holders can and should be taking haircuts and losses in recognition of the risk of their investments. Bailing out Wall Street just leads to continuing asset bubbles as investors seek returns independent of risk.
The problem will be when does the government withdraw that support? And how? As business and consumption returns, the government should reduce its addition to the money supply proportionally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Venezuela
https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/23/technology/marc-andreessen-...
> We’ve chosen not to build a system because we’re a racist, classist country.
And there it is. Racism is to blame. All the deaths in NYC due to unpreparedness, lack of funding over decades, a shitty private health system, no decent leadership from both sides of politics ... they're actually because the US is just a racist country. The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Sorry. You need to do better than that.
> Or, you know, break the systemic racist, classist policies that form the backbone of repression throughout this country.
Oh look, there it is again. Not enough hospitals being built? That's because we're racist. Core infrastructure falling apart? Yeah, racism. Not enough jobs to go around? That's racist too!
This is pathetic.
They never claim there is not racism in the United States, only that they do not agree that is why the system was built.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/why-new-jerseys-ven... Lawmakers in New Jersey, which is quickly becoming the new epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, are worried new emergency triage guidelines for the state’s hospitals could push younger, whiter patients to the front of the line.
“We do know that it exists, institutional bias exists throughout all of health care,” Persichilli said Wednesday
Does racism exist? Yes. Wide scale systematic institutionalized racism? Absolutely not.
Bad luck is when you're effectively ruined by the age of 5 thanks once again to who your parents were. The only way out for someone that fits this description is to adopt a self-reliant, goal directed attitude.
Self-reliant, goal directed behavior is essentially what people not born lucky or ruined do to improve their position in life.
What society can do to help is communicate clearly that the virtues of persistence, resilency, self-reliance and goal directed behavior are "cool" or in sociological-speak, society's normative values.
Unfortunately, since Rousseau and Marx, we have birthed a counter-culture that is determined to do the opposite. It's determined to place the locus of control over one's life outside of the individual and onto a nepharious "society".
Marx personally was an unhappy, deeply defective, and cruel personality. His philosophy stems directly from this. It attracts people who share his defects- namely people filled with resentment, envy, a desire to extract revenge for perceived slights and a lust for absolute power.
The hope is that eventually, through CRISPR and other techniques, that as a side effect of improving human functioning the well-spring of such people will simply dry up.
Until then, we have to do battle with a philosophy which preaches the diametric opposite of what we know leads to human flourishing and happiness.
Poverty rates are disproportionately high among black and hispanic citizens but as a percentage of total population they are absolutely dwarfed by white poverty. What is the reason that so many white Americans are living in poverty? Is it perhaps possible that it is a similar reason that black and hispanic citizens are living in poverty?
Poverty rates are always written as a percentage of the population of that race but if you rewrite them to be a percentage of US population a different narrative starts to emerge...
~2.7% of Americans are black people in poverty. ~3.0% of Americans are hispanic people in poverty. ~6.5% of Americans are white people in poverty.
We have problems of economic opportunity in this country. Writing it off as racism is missing the elephant in the room.
Supposedly, commentors here have something of value to offer, otherwise it would just be a news headline site without commentors. I am taking whatever value I have to offer and going elsewhere. I suggest you do the same. Sure, HN will turn into a political echo-chamber but it's really that already, right? I had 10% of my karma- whatever that is and whatever it's good for- disappear in an hour when I proferred the opinion that I didn't blame Trump for the virus.
You get a result like that - people telling you that that should NOT be your opinion and here's the punch in the face to teach you that lesson- and you know the forum is already a lost cause.
Gab has a browser plugin that will let you comment on any website, including this one and not be censored. Also there are scrappy alternatives to Reddit, saidit I think is one, where its not a groupthink party.
It's just a period of time we're living through and technology will catch up with it.
Historically, problems had to go on much longer than people reading about them later realize they did before corrective action was taken. This is no different.
For all the busy-beaver downvote-assassins on HN- way to waste the days and hours of the prime of your life, fighting the losing battle against freedom!
You go girl!
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/cory_foy/status/1251705040873689088
It's also quite clear he takes issue with the Trump administration and Marc's attempts to downplay their role in the current crisis and our preparedness.
> The IRS? Turns out they're actually racist for requiring a bank account to transfer money to.
Cory didn't say the IRS is racist for requiring bank accounts, he's saying racist/classist policies prevented people from getting them in the first place.
You're intentionally misrepresenting his response to claim everything is about the current crisis — it is obviously not. Nor is Marc's original article.
Let's get some data, shall we? Here's demographics of NYC [0], and here's demographics of COVID-19 deaths in NYC [1]. Black/African-American folks make up 25% of NYC's population, but 33% of all deaths. White folks make up 45% of the population, but 31% of all deaths. I don't need a t-test to know that that's statistically significant.
Shitty private health is due to racism and classism; folks aren't willing to foot the bill for others, as if we're somehow not living in a society. We have plenty of good leadership from sides not commonly represented; Bernie and the Larrys were frozen out, remember? This country's Overton window is so far to the upper-right that it's nigh-impossible to get any traction on positive social policies.
You act as if this country's classist and racist history doesn't exist, which is silly. Hopefully you know about the Voting Rights Act [2] and the fact that this country has been so classist and racist that we have explicitly passed laws about it. And yes, there is a long history in this country of disenfranchising minorities by, amongst other things, denying them banking services.
Sorry, but you need to do better, you pathetic sad-sack snowflake! Right now you sound like not just part of the problem, but happily part of the problem. Fix yourself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#...
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965#Prov...
This comment is totally unnecessary and really not appropriate for HN.
But I will unpack exactly what I meant. "pathetic" is literal, and used in the same sense that the parent used it; it connotes that their comment evokes pathos, and lacks ethos, logos, or bathos. A "sad-sack" is somebody who ruins the tone or vibe of a conversation with their attitude, usually by making people feel uncomfortable and sad. A "snowflake" is somebody who cannot stand being criticized, and erupts in anger whenever confronted with evidence which contradicts their beliefs.
"part of the problem" is an old rhetorical idea relating to good-faith argumentation; the idea is that if somebody repeatedly admits to all of the premises but not the conclusion, over and over, then eventually we must conclude that they are refusing to engage with the argument in good faith. "fix yourself" is pretty direct; I want the parent to read the links that I provided and reconsider their beliefs, and optionally to then re-read the original linked article and commentary and see if they come to a better understanding.
But it's not practically feasible.
You can autogenerate bullshit, or manually do it with complete disregard for sourcing or legitimacy, but you can do neither for refutations.
I don't have a solution for this, but the old adage "truth prevails" is looking more and more dead.
Naturally it attracts people (although not _only_ people) who want to suck up to venture capitalists, or who share the same hyper-capitalist mindset.
[0] http://n-gate.com/
If I may offer a prediction, and one totally meant in a spirit of friendship: that comment will not age well.
As for the spirit of friendship, and just to be clear, I believe the US's declining significance, although having some distinctly ignoble proximate causes, will ultimately be of benefit to her own citizens also. I really meant 'everyone'.
Yet parent calls it ignorant, of what? a sibling comment is "horrified" that the article gained so much attention here, although it seems to me that with it's focus on building stuff it's 100% on topic (which is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting").
As it's a little unsettling to me that other people find it horrifying that people like me found the article interesting, any details would be appreciated.
(OT: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." ', from the HN guidelines)
The details, such as they are, are too flimsy to be worth addressing in detail. It's all too dreary - the tired conflation of the 'West' with one large outlier nation, the endless shrill calls on public provision advocates to demonstrate what's been amply demonstrated for decades, etc etc etc.
I truly make efforts to not be crudely incendiary about matters of importance. I do fail more often than I'd like because the issues matter and evoke strong reactions. But I'm not even going to try in the case of an article so flatly stupid. It merits only dismissal, and has already had more attention than it deserves. Over and out.
I don't know if this is true. Withholding aid to migrants that don't have legal immigration status might not be the right thing to do right now. However it need not have any racist motive. Yes it will have a strong racial bias in it's outcome but does that make it racist?
Functionally, yes absolutely?
If racially biased outcomes just somehow keep happening, "racist" is absolutely a correct English word for that phenomenon.
Immigration policies can (should) be discussed without taking into account people's race, and still lead to racially-biased outcomes, simply because the majority of immigration-seekers have a race that's different from the majority of people in the target country.
I don't think this is the case. I don't think the US bases immigration policy even partially on race.
Some nations leaders are a threat and their people are going to have a harder time but that is not a race issue. For example a North Korean would have a harder time than a South Korean yet they are the same race.
To me it seems similar to the difference between murder and manslaughter. Intent seems to make the crime more morally wrong. Neither are good but they are seen as very different things.
Perhaps my understanding of the word is wrong but if it is I feel that English is missing the ability to express an important nuance if that's the case.
That's why this is a class issue.
And then look at the racial make-up of those on the lower rungs of the class system.
That's why this is a race issue.
“The agreement would include $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing, which have been major Democratic demands.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/19/trump-co...
Should the left have to prove their models? Yes! And so should the right! They both see outcome as intent[1], and that's not a useful way to comrpomise and actually achieve change.
1: School funding is different for black communities because it's poorly optimized for merit and susceptible to horrible feedback loops, not because racist people decided it. Criminal juatice/prison reform isn't about making life better for criminals, it's about making sure people have people have the chance to be productive members of society, which is better for everyone involved.
Maybe I'm missing the portion you're looking at, but all I'm seeing this says is that the plaintiffs argued it was about race, and the defendants didn't have good evidence as to their reasoning why they did it. To my eyes, and based on a lot of the information presented in the article, it is just as likely (if not more so) that it was about class. I sincerely doubt that district wanted to invite the poor white students from the full district any more than the poor black ones.
What that means is that this attempted change, which would have been racist in outcome if possibly not intent, was defeated by viewing it as racist as intent. Was that a good thing? Maybe? I guess it depends on what else they did.
How do you rectify the actual problem, when you assume it's people not liking others with different skin colors? You vilify those people and try to punish them or change them or wait for them to die or by marginalized, none of which seem to work very well. But if they weren't actually racist, and it was more a problem of class and poverty, there are other solutions, because in addition to trying to change the people you can also try to help those in poverty.
Distilled to a simple form, it's like seeing a white shop owner turn away a black homeless person. You can assume racism, and ostracize the shop owner. Or you can assume classism, and do the same but also try to help the homeless person. I think in many cases racism is used as an easy way to "resolve" a problem without addressing it at all. It exists, but it's also intimately ties with class and poverty, and one of those is much more useful to address at this point than the other, but it also much less likely to be addressed.
Yes. That solution, to the problem of rich white people trying to stop sharing their school funding with poor black people, is to not allow them to leave. That's what happened. Nobody ostracized anyone and your simple form is an invalid analogy. If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
But what about the solution to the problem of the rich people not wanting to share with the poor people? What if that's a major part of the problem? Was that addressed at all, or just swept under the rug as "racist people will be racist, just don't let them"? Preferably, something that also addressed the issue of poverty, or at least kept it acknowledged as part of the problem.
> If anything, it would be more accurate to say that they saw a white shop owner consistently turning away black people and took them to court to say that black people should not be turned away.
Exactly. But is that the better solution? What about the poor white person that comes in next? Do they get turned away, because they're not black? What about the fact that they're both still homeless?
When you identify the wrong problem, you're at risk of implementing a worse solution. Racism is bad, and it's sometimes the case it perfectly explains what happened, but not always, and not often entirely, but it's convenient because it means nobody else has to change or do anything. We all get to point at the bad people that make convenient scapegoats and comment about how we would never do anything like that, while nothing really changes, because the problem was only partially racism to begin with, and there's not a lot to change structurally to stop it that hasn't already happened when it is racism.
Whether proposing something new or preventing something new, the position needs to be defended with facts. The status quo gets extra points because we have experience with how it works, but equally important we have experience with how it doesn't work.
> That sort of worldview doesn't mesh well with attempts to simulate a planet inside a desktop PC.
I'm not really espousing that as much as experiments where possible or found (in the case of natural experiments), and sober consideration of the results. When's the last time you think you were presented with with a measured assessment of a major policy that wasn't blatently biased through omission of facts for one (or both!) sides from a popular public source such as a politician, activist group, or news agency (you'll get closest with the news, but they know their audiences and what keeps them coming back)?
This is less a problem of liberals and conservatives and more a problem of liberal and conservative politicians and activists warping messages because they inevitably become so tribal that their stated goals often end up taking a back-seat to the short-term gain of hurting the competing narrative at any cost.
Marc Andreessen's diagnosis was a knee-jerk guess at where the problems are and is probably wrong. Cory does a good job of pointing that out. However, if anything makes Americans wake up to the looming strategic threat of China that has been around for at least a decade then that is probably for the best. The CCP are the same type of 'friend' as the Saudis.
The US hasn't been making sensible strategic decisions since at least '08. There is a lot of spending on wars that don't suppress rivals and a lot of debt that isn't making the economy robust. The research advantage that America once had is being chipped away; Huawei won't be the last time China achieves technical dominance over US tech companies.
Lockdown takes us from exponential growth to linear growth. This has played out so many times, in so many different regions, that I think it's pretty clear as to what the response accomplished on the plus side.
You can quibble over what lockdown should look like, and which of the measures are not necessary to stop the exponential, but it's pretty clear that the form of it adopted in every country that has tried it... Works.
Do you have data that supports lockdown does this better than advisories?
Every other place has had exponential growth, that goes linear a week or two after lockdown is in place.
That's more than enough evidence for me. We know that lockdown works. We know that wishful thinking doesn't. All we can do is tweak the parameters of what lockdown looks like.
[1] Except it does have a lockdown! Whoops! It banned gatherings, shut down parks, closed borders, closed daycares, schools, sporting events, closed public spaces, etc, etc, etc. It's a lockdown by another name.
[2] Sweeden also closed its borders, and banned large gatherings. It didn't do most of the other things. It's currently in the exponential growth stage.
[3] Singapore is also on an exponential trajectory. Which is why it is also shutting down.
If we leave the country we have to go into 14 days quarantine.
Our death rate per unit population (3) is a lot lower than, say the UK (23), even though we are free to move about and they are not. So lockdown is not always as effective as might be hoped and also not always necessary. Local conditions mean a lot, not all populations are willing to behave responsibly even when the law demands it, while some merely need to be told what is necessary.
Is the author saying we had all the tools ("ability") but we did not have the people in positions of power that the author approves of?
People in "power that the author approves of" seems like subtext that one would have to see on their own reading of the article. To me it seems like the author was arguing against some aspects of capitalism and how incentives for profit can misalign with benefits for society.
White males are to blame for all evils in the Universe.
This is precisely why we were scrambling for ventilators a few weeks ago: it wouldn't have been profitable to build them a year ago, because hospitals wouldn't buy them, because they didn't have the ability to use, store, or maintain them.
Another example is the current situation with toilet paper. What's happening here is not that people are pooping more than they were a few months ago. It's just that they're doing it more at home, rather than at work. TP for home use and TP for commercial use are different products (anyone who's pooped at work or in a public bathroom knows this), made by different companies and using different supply chains.
While we have enough capacity to make and ship all the TP we need right now, what's happening is that commercial TP makers are (rightly!) not switching to making TP for home use, because that would be really expensive for them to do. They don't have the proper supply chain (contracts, logistics, etc.) to support it, either. End result: no TP in the stores. [0]
I saw a shower thought on Reddit that said something to the effect of "the economy is in a bad state right now because people are only buying what they need." While this vastly oversimplifies the issue, there is a good amount of merit to it. Right now, most of my spending on stuff that is not rent is literally food for myself and my dog, and the occasional item to make this lockdown a bit more bearable. There's no way I'm spending money on anything that isn't immediately useful or will become necessary in the near to medium term future. And, I'm one of the lucky ones who still has their job, because I can WFH.
OTOH, there are a number of things I hope we can learn from this lockdown. I've already written about how I hope people can realize Keynes was right, and we don't really have to work so damn much. [1] More importantly, though, I hope people can realize that most of our elected representatives simply do not have our interests in mind (e.g. Trump wanting to "reopen the economy" by Easter, in spite of all the deaths that would have caused), and start voting in people who actually do represent them.
It's an absolute crying shame that the US doesn't have even the most basic levels of worker protections that every country in Europe offers. So many people are suffering right now through no fault of their own, simply because we can't afford to let people who have lost their jobs have more than a pittance of unemployment benefits, and a pathetic $1200 check they had to wait to get because someone wanted their signature on them.
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[0]: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430
I have little patience for the second point which is core to social justice activism. I have little patience for MAGA protectionism either so I’ll address the first point on preparedness.
We, across the globe, had varying degrees of strategic preparedness but utterly failed with respect to the tactics and execution required to make those strategies a reality. A good example is the CPIP: Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness guide:
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/flu-influenz...
This strategy is almost perfect with a few tweaks but Canada dropped the ball on three fronts: 1. Data Sharing, 2. Process Scaling, and 3. Communication. The failures started with an inability to integrate Border Services data into the plan and the system failed to anticipate the scale of isolating the peak number of Snow Birds and March Break travellers returning back to Canada.
Strategy is a starting point but it is not the full story with respect to COVID-19 preparedness.
There are no animals, besides us, that ideate about anything except benefit to themselves and their offspring. However "bad" we are, we are the sole species that has spent a full single second of its existence trying to be "good" instead of just eating and fing and killing our way to the next day, possibly feeding the animal next-to us to our lovely offspring. For every other animal, killing an adjacent creature to take what they have is exactly is routine, and they are unapologetic.
It is great to see humanity become more impact-aware, and I have high hopes for an even more enlightened future, but it is somewhat absurd to presume that honesty, kindness, and altruistic thinking are somehow the baseline because that is the way we would like it. We imagine that something is "wrong" when they aren't happening. These are the default conditions. Every time a human departs from "hand-to-mouth", and from rationalizing deaths of the weak is a valiant leap from natural instincts.
By these measures, humanity's response has been unprecedented. The coordination, however flawed, has never been seen like this in the history of this world or any other that we have seen. It is only the grandiosity of our fantasies about what we are that lets us tell these alternate stories.