You have a very charitable view of Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX. There's nothing private industry can't do better than the government...........right after the government bears the burden of years of basic research.
Agreed. Palantir in particular is a bizarre example. It's a private company specifically engineered to vacuum up government money. Anything it makes in nominally-private transactions just window dressing.
> There's nothing private industry can't do better than the government...........right after the government bears the burden of years of basic research.
I read this kind of stuff all the time and it always rubs me the wrong way, because it is as wrong as can be.
Ever heard the phrase "Practice makes perfect"?
Well, it's bullshit.
Practicing correctly makes perfect. Just practicing random crap or practicing in the wrong manner make a mess and nothing even close to "perfect".
So, applying that simple principle: What do you think would have happened if Elon Musk did not start SpaceX and decide scrapping every rocket was a dumb idea?
I can tell you exactly what would have happened. Our government would have continued to invest in "basic research" for years and buying billion dollar rockets that got scrapped every flight.
NOBODY told Musk to make reusable rockets. Nobody from government came over and said "Do this for us because we want to save money".
One has to wonder where some areas of industry would be if government funding had not caused the typical level of stagnation we see time and time again. I remember visiting a company years ago that made hydraulic valves used in navy ships. The valves were as unremarkable as could be. This company has survived decades without innovating one millimeter of these valves. The place was so depressing I would have to take out my eyeballs with a spoon if I had to work there. It is remarkable to see just how much of that is common to government programs across a range of industries.
Compare that to the dynamic world of consumer and industrial products that elevated China to the second largest economy in the world. We, in the US, can't even make iPhones. Heck, we can't even make N95 masks. We don't have the supply chain. We don't have the materials. We don't have the educated workforce. We don't even make the equipment needed to make such products here.
But we make great government-funded valves that cost 10x to 100x what they should cost.
That is some fantastically magical creative reading of articles that have nothing to do with what I said.
No. No. No. The US government did not go to SpaceX and say: Design and build reusable rockets. They couldn't even imagine landing rockets. The best we got from a government effort was the Space Shuttle. Impressive as it was, it imploded under its own cost structure.
Source: I worked in that industry for a number of years. It was my job to be aware of these things.
Beyond that. Government contracts are public. Go find a contract where any government agency requests that any company, SpaceX or otherwise, develop a self-landing reusable rocket.
You can't.
How about we don't play this game of negating Musk credit for the incredibly audacious innovations he has championed and the risk and effort it took for thousands of people to make such amazing things happen.
Our politicians can barely use email and struggle to understand how Facebook works. Does anyone really think they are equivalent to determined, old and innovative entrepreneurs? No f-ing way.
This is what we have to fix, or the American economy will be doomed in 20-40 years, when even the carcass of our "service economy" has been gutted by more nimble players.
I think the rate of change of the decline will likely accelerate (the second derivative).
We have done nothing but waste valuable time for, I don't know, somewhere between 25 and 50 years. And 100% of it is in the hands of our "leaders" in government. They are so incredibly incompetent and partisan its sad.
I don't want to blame any one party in particular because this mismanagement goes back decades.
Oddly enough, as much of an asshole as he was, Trump was, in fact, doing the right things. And now things are derailing again.
Two simple examples: Spend billions on infrastructure. This is 100% bullshit. We have plenty of roads. Good ones. We have everything we need. What we don't have is a legislative, regulatory, tax and educational framework that pushes innovation, entrepreneurship and business to the level we need to survive and grow.
Anyone who thinks this can be solved by building more roads and bridges has to answer very simple questions:
1- How long will that take?
2- If this is a precondition for success, what will you do to encourage companies --in massive numbers-- to come to the US?
3- How long will that take?
My prediction, if we don't get off the bullshit train, the "infrastructure" bullshit bill will consume twenty years (that might be a low estimate) and nobody is going to have any interest in moving or starting businesses here at scale because during that time the action will most definitely be in China. It already is.
Second example: The Border.
Yeah. Controversial subject. Last month they detained somewhere in the order of 150K people at the border, of whom 25% are from countries other than Latin America.
The run rate, at the moment, is in the order of about TWO MILLION people coming in this year, if it doesn't get worse.
Answer this very simple question:
What industry is creating TWO MILLION new jobs for these people to land without affecting current employment?
If policies don't change we will add somewhere around 8 to 10 MILLION people in four years. More if this administration manages to gain another four years. 20 MILLION?
We are losing jobs to China and other locales by the millions. Where are these people going to work? Who is going to employ them? And, at $15 per hour, what kind of job will support them when our economic outlook doesn't look so great?
Border states are clamoring for the completion of the border wall and control of the border. What is currently happening is abominable. Kids piled into cages. They have 4,000 people in a venue that is only allowed to have 250.
This is demented. We have gone insane. And our leadership is failing us at a massive scale.
If anyone disagrees, before posting a randomly opposing reply. Do one thing:
Name ONE company that, in the past, say 25 years, chose not to locate their major operations in the US due to our roads, bridges, power lines, government buildings (lighting, construction, whatever) not being adequate. Name just ONE company.
If you do find one --which I very seriously doubt is possible-- explain why it is that they were not able to find adequate infrastructure in any of our 50 states and hundreds of large cities.
After you are done with that bit of futile research, take a look at how many companies are leaving the US and why. Mexico, for example, is costing us somewhere in the order of a million jobs a year.
Why?
Regulatory costs, taxes and, yes, labor costs.
Our minimum wage is $15 per hour. Theirs? About ONE DOLLAR per hour.
If you pay someone in the US $25 per hour you can expect to pay someone in Mexico $3 per hour for the same work.
And we are not even talking about China.
Infrastructure? Really? Like I said, this is demented and, sadly, an exercise in futility.
