"In Silicon Valley you decide to start a company then look for ideas. In real America you have an idea that eventually becomes a company."
That certainly seems to be the case. I know some successful business people locally who didn't have to pivot, or face many of the problems tech/web startups do.
Agreed. I think that was Cringley's best point, and also why I sometimes get frustrated in the valley. Some people say they like ideas here, but what they really like are startups and the effects of the ecosystem.
I was wondering why Woodside Rd was so packed with cops when I went to my friend's house in Woodside last night. She thought there was a flood or something. This explains it.
It was, of course, just an interesting coincidence but I used it as an excuse to accuse them of brand hijacking. Wouldn’t you? So we’re literally moving toward the White House getting an IP license from me.
I'm not a lawyer, but hasn't he just effectively torpedoed his legal case for accusing the White House of anything to do with brand hijacking?
Neither am I a lawyer, but I'd look at it this way: suppose I had never heard of Google or Android, and I tried to name a new operating system "Android" purely by coincidence.
Given his writings on this subject in the past, I think he's really using it as an excuse to have a dialog with the White House on how to help startups. How else could he have gotten their attention?
Almost always certainly, but I'm not sure about the perfect one to one-ness. I take enormous pride in my work. It's important to me personally that I do a good job. There are tasks I have to do as part of my job I in no way love (integrating accounting systems for example), but I do them as well as I can because I consider that part of being a software professional. Or maybe I'm being too specific, I certainly love my job at the highest level and I do find the work interesting even the parts I don't love.
Driving home last night, maybe around 10 PM, I heard a deafening whump-whump-whump over San Mateo. It was almost extraterrestrial in nature. Crane out the car window to see one of those beefy helicopters with dual rotors. It passes. Then another one. This would have been Obama's entourage, yes? If so, a much smaller footprint than last time he was on the Peninsula. His motorcade shut down a nice stretch of the 101 for a few minutes.
I used to work in NYC and we could see the helipad out of our window, and when the president came to visit there were three identical choppers, presumably so that if you wanted to try and shoot him down you'd be playing 3-card monte.
Thanks for posting this - its a pretty good example of requirements creep. I doubt that anyone in the fifties planned out that the president would need 16 cars to go anywhere, but thats whats happened. One can picture the Secret Service holding meetings in which they decide to add "just one more" agent.
To me, "creep" implies that much of what's there is unnecessary. If you told me adding 4 more cars to the motorcade would make the President more secure, I'd so, "go buy 4 more cars now". No part of the motorcade comes close to the cost to the world --- in damage to the markets and in the stupid subsequent policymaking that would result --- of a successful attack.
I've worked in DC, and the problem is that the Secret Service sees no end to the amount of things they'd like to do to protect the president: shutting down Pennsylvania Avenue, putting Stingers on the roof of the White House, etc.
That's their job, and they're damned good at it. But like everything else, there has to be a bit of balance. They just keep pushing and pushing. No matter what concessions your give to the SS, next week they'll be back asking for more. Many DC residents already feel the situation is out of whack -- try sitting dead still in a traffic jam for an hour while the president goes to get a hot dog or something mundane like that. Or find you cell phone and cell modem suddenly stops working because of jammers. Or -- and this was fun -- find that when you are driving in the only bright yellow pickup truck around that DoHS are stalking you in a Blackhawk for target practice.
I haven't been up there working in the last four years or so, but from what I hear it just keeps getting worse.
We should do everything reasonable to protect the president, but, in my opinion, we should also realize that the Office of President is supposed to be filled by somebody just like us, not somebody who for all intents and purposes is treated like an emperor and lives in an armed security bubble that extends for miles. If we want that -- and its fine with me if we do -- perhaps we should find some place with a lot of open unused land to house him in away from the millions of people whose lives keep constantly getting disturbed.
Our office in Chicago is directly across the street from the Federal building where Obama's Senate office was, and where the transition team was based out of. For a couple months after the election, the streets would routinely get closed down as he came or went from the office. We'd get stuck in our car for 15-20 minutes waiting for that to clear.
This has nothing to do with "treating the President like an emperor". How the President feels has nothing to do with the catastrophic cost of a successful attack. It seems reasonable to me that we should deal with inconvenience here.
I think the point is that if the President needs a 5 mile wide security bubble, he should avoid stepping outside for a hot dog, teleconference a bit more, and relocate the senate office to the suburbs.
I.e., be a little bit polite with that 5 mile wide security bubble.
(Besides, I think his personal chef can handle making him a hot dog - as I recall, she and Bobby Flay beat Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse on Iron Chef.)
Do you really think he doesn't exercise this restraint? I have a hard time believing the President steps out side for superfluous reasons.
And to be honest, stepping outside for a hot dog isn't a trivial thing when you're overworked and the most stressed human being on the planet: http://i.imgur.com/PpJek.jpg. If going to grab a hot dog helps the President feel a little more human and helps him do his job better, people just need to put up with the inconvenience.
Let's also put sitting in traffic for one hour into perspective. You're already paying 1/3 of your income in taxes, you can be called for jury duty any time, you could be drafted, etc... the utility you lose from that hour is trivial compared to the other costs of being a citizen. People who complain about sitting in traffic for an hour for the President just aren't thinking rationally.
Interestingly, interruptive presidential security is a relatively recent development. Truman used to walk freely around Washington, DC and his security staff didn't do much to stop him.
During the assassination attempt at Blair House, Truman actually opened the second story window and peered out to see what all the gunfire downstairs was about. (If I remember my McCullough correctly, he walked back to the White House just a few hours later with essentially no security.)
This is a problem between the office of president and the Secret Service. Obama is just the current occupant of that office.
And it's not even the president. DC has become an armed camp. Dick Cheney used to go into the White House early every morning between 5 and 6. How do I know that? Because of the screaming sirens and large motorcade it took just to get him across town. Five O'Clock in the morning, and they need sirens to clear the streets. Guys I knew who had military experience were getting carry licenses and working part-time as armed security for 2nd and 3rd tier government and foreign government officials. It wouldn't be unusual to have a dozen or more different police forces all operating over top of each other in any one spot -- and then you had all the private security guys on top of that.
It was crazy back in 05, and each year they just keep adding a little more. It's so bad that I think the best thing if they want to keep it up like this is to just get rid of all housing, ground transportation, and local government in DC entirely. Make it some kind of National Urban Park or something.
And it was more-so under Bush than under any previous president, and under Clinton, and (I don't remember Reagan very well, but I suspect) under Bush as well.
In my opinion, the ongoing damage to the local economies caused by these security bubble monstrosities far outweighs the impact of an attack. But to each his own.
So I'll simply ask the obvious question: how much is too much? You seem to be saying that anything the secret service wants they should get. How about closing off huge hunks of DC to ground traffic? Shutting off all wireless availability for a dozen or so miles around wherever the president is? Because the changes requested will just keep getting more drastic. That's the nature of the problem I'm describing. So now that we know that I think it's too much already and you don't, where do you draw the line?
DC is small. Without the Federal government, it'd basically be an exurb of Baltimore. I am not too concerned by how much the motorcades are tying up DC traffic.
The Secret Service (or FPS or whatever it was) closed down chunks of Chicago in '08. It wasn't too much then. I don't know what too much is, but nothing I've heard about what they're actually doing sounds like "too much" to me.
However, it is simply not my job to make this determination. I don't have all of the facts, and neither do you.
Of course, it's not either of our immediate jobs to do any of that, but that's not what I was asking. You seem to be very good at bringing up everything else in the world but the answer to the logical follow-up question your post implied.
If you want to say that there is no limit at all to the amount of funds and inconvenience your would incur for the safety of the president, that's a perfectly fine position. Just come out and say it. I think you know, however, that it's untenable, hence all the hemming and hawing over your opinion of DC, or your ignorance of the actual facts, or of our ability for you or I to make such complex decisions.
So you're not going to answer. That's fine. Been nice chatting with you. :)
Sounds to me like the problem is the "catastrophic cost of a successful attack," as you put it. As a nation, we seem to celebrate single points of failure.
What about 10 more? 40 more? Tanks? Shutting down the city one block either side of the route? Does the Pres really need a Jumbo Jet to himself?
A lot of it is just wanting to be seen to roll with the biggest entourage. Nothing wrong with that per se; diplomacy has been about impressing your counterpart with ostentation since time began. But it is what it is.
This is an easy, cheap, and boring comment. He's the President. He already won. Adding a tank isn't going to make him feel better about himself, and he's not the one who decides what his motorcade looks like.
Huge swaths of D.C. were shut down and reflagged for President Hu a few weeks agov (red flags and gold stars everywhere!). So yeah, when a big-wig comes into town we notice. The President of Finland? Might make an few lines buried in the local news section....so...it depends.
He doesn't have a jumbo jet to himself. He has a jumbo jet to carry a miniature white house--press pool, kitchen, office, and hospital included--wherever he goes.
I used to live and work in DC, and on my way to the Metro in the morning I'd regularly be passed by the vice presidential motorcade. Not quite as interesting, but still fun.
The hassle is hardly linear. Choppers are probably closer to being linear, because they are more vulnerable, but the motorcade consists of armoured vehicles - they're basically tanks - so it changes the whole game plan just to have more than one target.
I'm sure there are other advantages to having transport doubles.
Sometime in the late 90's I was driving north on I280 near Woodside CA. I got off at the Sandhill exit and found myself in the middle of Al Gore's motorcade to one of those private residence fund raisers. Evidently the offramp had been unblocked a moment too soon. Half a mile later I turned off onto the road home without having been forced off the road or tailed or visited by the secret service. I realized what was going on at the time, which made it a very strange experience.
I can think of plenty of American startups that are hindered (or simply don't exist) as a result of regulation.
Betfair should be a Silicon Valley (or NY) company with billions in revenue. Instead, it's a UK company with $350M in revenue, available only to the UK market. See also Intrade, Hollywood Stock Exchange, etc. All due to regulatory issues.
How about automated medical diagnostics? Many prototypes have been built which outperform human doctors, but the entire industry is dead due to fear of litigation/FDA.
Leverage the internet to disruptively innovate in education? Good luck, with the massive subsidies given to the traditional system.
See also the regulatory issues that Ubercab, AirBnB and others are running into.
This isn't taxes, but it sure doesn't count as "stay out of our way".
You listed three things that I'm really glad the government does:
- Attempts to keep all investment activity well-regulated and conformant to some definition of legitimate. Thus minimizing the risk that my money manager is going to lose my money on an illegitimate, thinly disguised gambling platform like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
There's no reason why something like that shouldn't be tightly regulated -- HSX is not the same thing as the NYSE and shouldn't be allowed to take real money in exchange for fake value. The NYSE returns my investment when companies I've selected do well: actual value. The HSX returns my money when random celebrities have an on camera nipple slip: no value.
- Make sure that there are tight restrictions on what counts as a medical device, or as medicine. If there's something approved to go into my body for medical reasons, I want associated risks to be minimized. This is not where I want the boomtown to be -- I don't want to undergo the therapeutic equivalent of WebVan or Twitter.
- I also don't want just any jackass to be able to print a textbook off of Blurb and start selling it to my kid's teachers. Qualified jackasses only, thank you :) No seriously, the way education is decided in this country is currently suboptimal, but the goal is to have all children on the same page. I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
But you're also wrong about this. It is possible to start an alternate education system, so long as you conform to guidelines about what you teach. I've never heard anyone complain that they couldn't get their education startup going because of "massive subsidies given to the traditional system." There are a number of folks trying to crack this one from different angles, from textbooks to actual brick-and-mortar institutions.
If you tell your money manager not to limit his gambling in your behalf to NYSE listed equities, he is legally obligated to do so. He will go to jail if he does not. However, even if your wallet stays closed, you can reap the positive external benefits - if HSX says some movie will suck, you can avoid shelling out $12 to your local movieplex (guess why Hollywood's bought and paid for politicians killed it?).
Or perhaps your goal is not to protect your money, but to prevent me from harmlessly entertaining myself in activities you dislike?
The same thing applies to manual medical diagnostics - you are free to pay extra for a human to give you a less accurate diagnosis if you want. Although I'm not sure why you think human doctors do such a great job - diagnostic procedures and surgery are not regulated by the FDA at all. Only devices are. So an automated medical diagnostic tool would actually be more regulated than the system we have now.
I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
This already happens under the current system. Ever hear of "whole language"?
Both you and your sibling poster are claiming that individual instances of failure within the existing regime are reasons why the current regime should be abolished, which is a completely absurd reduction. I don't care how you entertain yourself. I do care if your method of entertainment, if scaled to billions of dollars, has the potential to destroy volumes of wealth for no particular reason of consequence. And I do want an agency to try to keep completely unviable quackery off the medical market.
> Attempts to keep all investment activity well-regulated and conformant to some definition of legitimate. Thus minimizing the risk that my money manager is going to lose my money on an illegitimate, thinly disguised gambling platform like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
As opposed to losing it on a regulated, totally-not-gambling company like Enron, or in a regulated, totally-not-gambling market like sub-prime mortgage derivatives? Similar arguments could be made against the other two items as well, under the general framework of "regulatory capture". Your arguments presume that government regulation agencies always act in the best interest of the general public.
> I've seen several people who think taxes are too low,
Oh really - how much extra do they pay?
What - they mean that other people's taxes are too low?
Do they actually mean "taxes are too low" or is that a proxy for "not enough govt services"?
I ask because the US govt collects about as much per person as Western European govts (and more than Canada). Yet, those countries do provide more services, but it's not because they collect more money. (The US has lower rates but has a higher gdp.)
That's a silly argument. There's nothing inconsistent about believing that it would be better off for the country as a whole if tax rates are higher, but not volunteering to personally pay higher than the current actual rate.
You play the game by the current rules, not the rules you are advocating the game change to.
> There's nothing inconsistent about believing that it would be better off for the country as a whole if tax rates are higher, but not volunteering to personally pay higher than the current actual rate.
If the country would be better off with $100B additional tax revenue, it would be better off with $5B additional tax revenue.
They mean taxes are too low. 2 ways to make up a deficit: Raise taxes or cut services. They want the deficit fixed, and they want it done through taxes.
> They mean taxes are too low. 2 ways to make up a deficit: Raise taxes or cut services.
Interesting that you equate spending with services.
The deficit is spending - revenues. The latter are only slightly connected to rates, especially the top marginal rate.[1]
Are they looking to get more revenues from the 50% of the population that isn't paying much of anything or the 1-2% which is paying 40% of revenues?
Which reminds me - while the top marginal rate has jumped around a lot, the "tax revenue as a fraction of GDP" hasn't managed to top 21% for very long and tends to stick around 18%.
We're currently spending around 25% of gdp. Why will we be able to hit that with tax revenue?
[1] The estate tax has never been, and never will be, a significant revenue source. The very rich don't die often enough and they engage in significant estate planning. The estates of the rich folks who died in 2010 weren't going to pay much in taxes because they did estate planning in previous years.
I'm not particularly interested in talking tax policy on HN as I view a great majority of it offtopic. If you'd like to hit reddit.com/r/politics, I'll talk till the cows come home.
If I understand correctly, he was there with Jobs and Zuckerberg, among others. Two generations of hard core startup OGs, I think that's pretty tough to beat.
edit: I mean, isn't the best startup guy to talk to the kind who made himself a billionaire?
In retrospect, I probably should have used a term like "typical" or "statistically representative".
The point is that there are a lot of people who are currently running startups, most of whom are not much like Jobs or Zuckerberg (these are the "average" people). There are also many people who have not started a company, but who might decide to do so if circumstances changed slightly (the marginal people) [1].
In aggregate, both of these groups have just as big an impact on the economy as the few outlier successes.
[1] One might also consider startups which failed, but only barely, as marginal.
You've done a great job presenting a compelling case against talking to successful people about how to breed more success with your comment. I am now convinced!
I had a roommate in college who slept all the time, let's make a point of getting him into the Oval asap. He's going to know way more about job creation than these ass clowns who have created billion dollar companies. </zealoftheconverted>
Straw man argument about the lazy people who sleep all day. Your smug sarcasm and attitude is also not appreciated. You sound like a child.
Facebook employs less than 3000 people. Apple less than 50k. The underemployment rate in the US is over 15%. That's millions and millions of people without work. Is John Doerr single handedly going to put all these people to work?
How about Obama talk to a group of executives from mid-cap or small-cap private and publicly traded companies run by not-any-less real business people who employ MILLIONS of people on a daily basis?
This billionaire hero worship is just so over the top and short sighted. The real economy of everyday goods and services is SO much bigger and just as important than consumer devices and social networking.
Sorry, mom. I will be super, duper serious from now on. As we all know, the internet is serious business and there is never to be any humor, ever.
> This billionaire hero worship is just so over the top and short sighted. The real economy of everyday goods and services is SO much bigger and just as important than consumer devices and social networking.
I think you're kind of missing the point about what you're going to learn from someone like Zuckerberg or Jobs.
Why do you think they have billion dollar businesses? What got them there? What chain of events transpired leading to the creation of that wealth?
In both of those cases, you have guys who figured out concrete ways where new technology could benefit people every day. They saw a future just over the horizon that could be better for everyone, then built companies to create that future. And in each case, their companies gave birth to lucrative cottage industries that let individuals and businesses make some great money.
In a country clearly destined to transition to a very different day-to-day existence than we knew in the 90's, Obama is absolutely better served to go and talk to people with visions of the future than he is talking to the guys who run the Octopus carwash chain or Panera Bread.
But don't listen to me – I'm not serious enough to be taken seriously.
That certainly seems to be the case. I know some successful business people locally who didn't have to pivot, or face many of the problems tech/web startups do.