>>> "But there is no place for it today, where better scholarship exists and the Internet provides ready access to a plethora of view points"
Thats now how history works at all man. Pretty much all writing on history goes into the metaphorical dust bin maybe 20-40 years after it is created but the "dust bin" isn't a dead place that no one should ever explore, its the world of historiography, and understanding how people understood their point in time at different points in time. No one should read a history book like its the bible handed down from on high, they should read it knowing the authors biases, the contemporary views on the authors work from other experts in the field, and an understanding of their own knowledge level and context. The reality is that a huge amount of K-12 American history education is propaganda and for someone with a K-12 American history background this book is a very compelling read that provides a useful counter narrative to what they have been taught, the main function of which is not to blindly trust the words in the book, but to understand the practice of history not as a recitation of facts but an analysis of past events with a specific point of view, and how different points of view from authors with different motivations can give different views of the past. IMO, this really brought the field of history to life for me.
It seems like the spirit of your comment is in accord with GP. GGP put forth that Zinn is "the truth."
GP may have phrased it a bit dismissively but I read that comment as making the same argument you do: no given history book contains the final truth.
As for GP's comment that Zinn has no place today -- you offer a more nuanced take. But we're in a moment replete with valorizing paeans to Zinn (like TFA) and calls for using People's History more widely as a _textbook_. Maybe, given that we are 40 years on from it's writing, that's not the best move.
Uber would set hours because they would only hire people to work at times when there is demand. You would not be able to "clock in" at will, because there might not be any rides for you to take, and thus no reason for you to get paid.
I dunno man, im getting kind of jaded as I get older. "True moonshot" to me seems more like cheap clean water for everyone, or a real way to sequester carbon, not a way for rich folks to get to their country cottages faster.
Isn't the original literal moonshot (i.e. flying to the moon) more in the category of "things that don't help the working people" than "things that solve poverty/suffering"?
I know the meaning may have shifted over the years, but i've always interpreted it as "audacious and unlikely to succeed", rather than any particular moral / altruistic content.
True. This kind of technology would be a game changer for poorer rural communities with limited infrastructure and vast distances. Places like Greenland or East Congo. But this article did not mention this benefit at all. All they seem to care about is getting rich people between places they already can.
This is just basic marketing. You sell to the guy who can buy.
The Tesla company was started in 2003 to productionize the AC tzero. In 2005, the Roadster was conceived as the product it became and Tesla and Lotus tied up.
The Secret Master Plan arrived in 2006. So yeah, that's just how it goes. Because there is an army of people who lament things targeted at rich people, but that army does not participate in progress, either in money or in sweat.
The intelligent futurist always ignores them because they contribute nothing.
That makes the current state of our humanity kind of sad, doesn’t it.
It is also not true. There are numerous innovations targeted for the betterment of us all. The three-point seat-belt is a quick one that comes to mind. The field of medicine has tax funded research innovating at a remarkable frequency, where the target beneficiaries is all humans who need it. Expensive infrastructures like roads, train networks, electric grids, and trash disposal systems are build around the world for everyone who needs, not just the once who can afford it.
But we do lament things that are target at rich people, because these rich people are literally destroying the world with their over-consumption. They certainly don’t deserve more nice things that the rest of the world is paying for.
It's always been the case. We linked the world via trade in search of making a rich man's food taste better. I don't think it's sad. I think it's wonderful. The rich 'subsidize' progress for everyone.
All of the things you mention (except the 3-point seatbelt, perhaps) have a story just like this one with some guy saying things just like this guy and a veritable shower of lament with no effort behind it.
This sounds like an HN version of trickle down theory which I thought had been thoroughly debunked by economists.
It’s funny but, I’ve always been under the impression that the opposite were true in standard economics, the poor—with their labour—are the once who subsidize the rich. I find it hard to believe that the economics of progress are any different. Let me draw up some napkin economics:
Scenario A: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. The rich uses the infrastructure and the higher skilled workforce to work on a thing. The rich get richer on that thing. The rich give them self a higher percentage of the profit then the workers or the state. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
Scenario B: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. A team of PhD students (the poor) and their assistance (the poor) spend thousands of work-hours to figure out how a thing can be improved. A company uses their findings free of charge to deliver a better product. The company does not give the students and their assistance a fair share of the profits. The company pays their shareholders (the rich) the majority of the profits. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
“Trickle down theory” has not been “debunked” by economists because it’s not an actual economic theory. It’s a pejorative used to criticize tax cuts.
Also the fact that technological progress/experiment typically (but not always) targets the top end of the market and works its way down is not controversial.
This phenomenon is also not what most people mean by “trickle down economics” as it relates to the pejorative against tax cuts which, again, isn’t a real theory peddled by credible economists.
I'm not sure about the medicine example. There are many cases of diseases being ignored because despite being widespread there isn't much money in treating them.
This is an effect of massive wealth inequality. In some cases, you could run a more profitable business with Jeff Bezos as your only customer than building products for an entire country's worth of people.
Sometimes I imagine if our collective minds were put together to figure out some of those basic - civilization wide problems like clean water for all, clean energy for all, or carbon sequestration. Imagine that world...
Who is going to feed these members of the collective mind while they are working? Who is going to pay for the water, electricity, compute power they use while solving the world problems?
Access to transportation is a stronger predictor of economic mobility than growing up in a two parent household, early test scores or the crime rate. So yes, it is in fact, extremely socially beneficial.
I’m not so sure. “A cheap and easy way to clean water” is probably the easiest Kickstarter scheme you can pull off. So naturally you will hear a lot of ideas, and none of them will work.
But lets say that your right on your first point, and a general solution exists. Then your second point is most definitely false. It is not the problem that nobody wants to pay for it. It is a problem that the people who need it can’t pay for it, and that nobody is willing to give it to them. See it’s a problem of distribution, not of demand.
That sounds like a "true green revolution". Moonshots are, to me, technology projects supercharged by heavy investing to bypass present market forces.
Sure, perhaps your age may indicate a preference for that kind of project but DDE was 70 when he started the moonshot so it's less likely to be age and more likely to be a predisposition to that sort of thing.
Helicopters and ambulances are already pretty good at that. This vehicle seems to have some added restrictions (like landing capabilities) which would make it less good.
Helicopters are really expensive to operate though, so perhaps this vehicle could fit in if frequent flights would have to be made to a place without a road connection, such as to provide an emergency relief after big disaster.
Where it could be a game-changer is transporting people and light cargo in rural communities with limited infrastructure, such as East Congo or Greenland.
We can easily do both those things already, the problem is nobody wants to pay for it, because the people most affected by bad water/hunger/climate change are the people with no money.
Moonshots afaik are risky ideas/ventures that have the potential to "moon" i.e. make a shit-ton of money. Solving a problem with no funding can't be a moonshot by that definition.
I mean, this is specifically accurate but a useless metrics.
Its literally bullets/kill.
Modern urban warfare tactics include a whole lot of shooting where the intent is not to kill the enemy, but to make the enemy hide and reduce their ability to shoot at you.
The army also uses lot of ammo to train and stay competent.
Its similar to how most military pilots clock hundreds of hours flying for every hour of combat they experience.
Bullets/kill is like an extreme version of "game winning scores"/"all shots ever taken in a game or training"
Some 100+ comments on here and no mention of the horrible impact having more of these giant trucks around is going to have on the climate. This is technically interesting, but experience shows us that most of these trucks will be purchased by suburban dwelling office workers who commute 90+ minutes/work in this thing, and use the plug in feature 2x/year tops. We really need to stop seeing enormous trucks as socially acceptable and need to start seeing them as sociopathic.
There are lots of self employed people that own nice trucks, but the primary sales target of the F150 is a wealthy office worker who lives in the suburbs. By far their biggest customer base is people who like the aesthetics of the truck but do not need a truck, and do not use the features of the truck beyond its size.
demand has changed quite a bit, lots of people are leaving cities, and fewer people, especially new grads from undergrad and profession school like business/med, are moving in.
Firms that are monopolistic are less competitive, larger, and slower growing. Reducing monopolistic tendencies increases capital growth, competition, and reduces average firm size. This is well understood economics.
Monopolies arent' some hypercompetitive ultra capitalist battlespace, they're fat and happy, and the most impactful teams they employ are lobbyists and policy folks in DC. Look at like, comcast and what they did with the FCC.
Those attributes stem from them being a monopoly, they don't create it in the first place. He's questioning the implication that being less competitive and slower growing would allow you to obtain more of a monopoly.
The large, lumbering not-yet-a-monopoly has no method to increasing market share other than buying smaller competitors; thus leading to monopolization.
That’s a pretty strange ordering, mixing up a Seattle and Boston metros of 4 and 4.6m with an SLC, Portland, and Austin metros Of 1.2, 2.5, and 2.1m respectively. Why mix up the small and large cities in T2? Then your T3 has Minneapolis, at 3.6m. Why would Minneapolis be ranked lower than tiny SLC given it has 3x the population?
Thanks for the population numbers, I didn't know they were so different. I just ranked them from (my perceived) livability - SLC close to skiing/nature, while Minneapolis/Ann Arbor are not destination cities like the other ones.
I think Seattle / Boston can be T1, but then you'd have too many T1s. My logic was "do lots of people want to move to this city?" and I think the answer is "no" compared to the demand for the T1s.
I see your logic though, and maybe it's better to just have a T1 and T2.
Minneapolis is the biggest American metro between Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix. It basically anchors a huge amount of the country. SLC in contrast plays second fiddle to nearby (relatively speaking) Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (at least it is bigger than Boise).
Ann Arbor is so small and close to Detroit, it is odd to hear it listed as a significant city in its own right (like Madison WI). Heck, they are about the same close-ish distance away from Toledo, and Toledo is much bigger than Ann Arbor.
Don't really agree with this at all unless you are only talking in the context of the software engineering job market - which I don't think is usually what people refer to by "tier N"
I could argue that Atlanta is tier 3 as well, the distinction between tier 2/3 could just be a simple rule of numbers (over a 1M pop vs. under 1M pop) and not a tech center. Or in my case that when I've interviewed people from the given locations that they didn't meet the bar by a given level. UIUC produces some amazing engineers, but UChicago doesn't...
Ann Arbor is an amazing town, but I'm surprised to see it on the same level as much larger metros. Is tech that much deeper there than when I was in school a handful of years ago? Who are the big players these days?
"Uber is absolutely not on the scale of those companies, and most of the time they should probably be using off-the-shelf solutions when they become available."
I agree, but I'd also add that the state of the world in 2016 when most of these infra projects were launched is very different from the state of the world in 2020. Back then, uber was not easily able to run on a bunch of OSS/cloud native solutions, but now for sure its not just possible but likely the best/most responsible way to do it [source: worked there for 4+ years]
Thats now how history works at all man. Pretty much all writing on history goes into the metaphorical dust bin maybe 20-40 years after it is created but the "dust bin" isn't a dead place that no one should ever explore, its the world of historiography, and understanding how people understood their point in time at different points in time. No one should read a history book like its the bible handed down from on high, they should read it knowing the authors biases, the contemporary views on the authors work from other experts in the field, and an understanding of their own knowledge level and context. The reality is that a huge amount of K-12 American history education is propaganda and for someone with a K-12 American history background this book is a very compelling read that provides a useful counter narrative to what they have been taught, the main function of which is not to blindly trust the words in the book, but to understand the practice of history not as a recitation of facts but an analysis of past events with a specific point of view, and how different points of view from authors with different motivations can give different views of the past. IMO, this really brought the field of history to life for me.