I urge everyone who thinks "there's too many regulations" to read Jennifer Pahlka's *Coding for America*. (H/t the redoubtable Dan Davies for the rec.) It's all well and good for someone from a regional afterthought of a country to start swinging a pickaxe at what he sees, but it hits different for a global superpower.
To put this in perspective, the systems diagram for a Veteran's Administration claim that Pahlka saw was a printout eight feet high and twenty feet long, in type you needed to stand three feet away to be able to see...and when she dug down, screaming in horror all the while, she found that there were non-trivial reasons this was so. A few of the issues were big enough that any one of them would be a reasonable target for an administration's sole focus over a term. (And indeed this is what happens: during my time at SSA, it was slashing disability claim time by implementing EHRs, a direct Obama order, and it got done--just because moon shots don't make the news doesn't mean they're not moon shots.)
As so often, I think of RAND discussions about Vietnam in 1962 or so. "How hard could it be?!?" they said. "They don't even have an Air Force! Let's get 'em, sir!"
“By the time Facebook came to life, and Reddit, Twitter, and then all the rest, we'd doubled our user base again. We were creating wealth and novelty out of sunlight and thin air, almost like trees. A colleague-turned-competitor of mine would one day call it ‘Moore's Law for Everything.’ Everyone would soon have more riches and power than they knew what to do with. That was the goal. That was the game's win condition. It never occurred to me that it might also be the losing one.”
By all means, let’s look at some who studied economics and speaks in platitudes. Elon Musk, who states he can “cut $2 trillion from the federal budget,” has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Interest payments, which account for 13% of total spending, cannot be cut, either – unless the US wants to defaulton the national debt. (Though Trump has reveled in his ability to default on debts, having declared business bankruptcy six times, most Republicans are not interested in the US doing so.) And this bill, too, is likely to continue rising, as debt is rolled over at interest rates well above the rock-bottom rates of five or 15 years ago.”
— Jeffrey Frankel
And Trump a businessman? Is that defined by serial bankruptcies? Musk is an entrepreneur, with TSLA pulled away from the abyss of bankruptcy by a low-interest government loan, and now SpaceX larded with government contracts. SpaceX is a great company, but let’s not kid ourselves: the libertarian Musk is a government contractor. Full stop. BMW has been outselling TSLA in Europe since August. CATL’s EV is far superior to Tesla. And a TSLA semi-trailer truck turned into a giant fire bomb, closing a California highway for a day and requiring a small army of firefighters with air support and a small lake of water to extinguish the blaze.
There’s plenty of ink to spill about Trump and Musk, but it looks like propaganda or fairytales when reality is edited-out.
Crypto currencies: Because there is an urgent need to burn more energy to accelerate global warming. Keep moving the goalposts: 1.5C, 2.0C, and now 2.5C. All for one big grift.
I urge everyone who thinks "there's too many regulations" to read Jennifer Pahlka's *Coding for America*. (H/t the redoubtable Dan Davies for the rec.) It's all well and good for someone from a regional afterthought of a country to start swinging a pickaxe at what he sees, but it hits different for a global superpower.
To put this in perspective, the systems diagram for a Veteran's Administration claim that Pahlka saw was a printout eight feet high and twenty feet long, in type you needed to stand three feet away to be able to see...and when she dug down, screaming in horror all the while, she found that there were non-trivial reasons this was so. A few of the issues were big enough that any one of them would be a reasonable target for an administration's sole focus over a term. (And indeed this is what happens: during my time at SSA, it was slashing disability claim time by implementing EHRs, a direct Obama order, and it got done--just because moon shots don't make the news doesn't mean they're not moon shots.)
As so often, I think of RAND discussions about Vietnam in 1962 or so. "How hard could it be?!?" they said. "They don't even have an Air Force! Let's get 'em, sir!"
Great post. Very interesting optimistic news
“By the time Facebook came to life, and Reddit, Twitter, and then all the rest, we'd doubled our user base again. We were creating wealth and novelty out of sunlight and thin air, almost like trees. A colleague-turned-competitor of mine would one day call it ‘Moore's Law for Everything.’ Everyone would soon have more riches and power than they knew what to do with. That was the goal. That was the game's win condition. It never occurred to me that it might also be the losing one.”
— Playground, Richard Powers
By all means, let’s look at some who studied economics and speaks in platitudes. Elon Musk, who states he can “cut $2 trillion from the federal budget,” has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Interest payments, which account for 13% of total spending, cannot be cut, either – unless the US wants to defaulton the national debt. (Though Trump has reveled in his ability to default on debts, having declared business bankruptcy six times, most Republicans are not interested in the US doing so.) And this bill, too, is likely to continue rising, as debt is rolled over at interest rates well above the rock-bottom rates of five or 15 years ago.”
— Jeffrey Frankel
And Trump a businessman? Is that defined by serial bankruptcies? Musk is an entrepreneur, with TSLA pulled away from the abyss of bankruptcy by a low-interest government loan, and now SpaceX larded with government contracts. SpaceX is a great company, but let’s not kid ourselves: the libertarian Musk is a government contractor. Full stop. BMW has been outselling TSLA in Europe since August. CATL’s EV is far superior to Tesla. And a TSLA semi-trailer truck turned into a giant fire bomb, closing a California highway for a day and requiring a small army of firefighters with air support and a small lake of water to extinguish the blaze.
There’s plenty of ink to spill about Trump and Musk, but it looks like propaganda or fairytales when reality is edited-out.
Crypto currencies: Because there is an urgent need to burn more energy to accelerate global warming. Keep moving the goalposts: 1.5C, 2.0C, and now 2.5C. All for one big grift.