
John Carmack on the Government - badmon
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1895320834035758&id=100006735798590
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justicezyx
A tech god start talking about topic he does not understand well enough, and
the article is full of descriptions without much data to back.

No one is immune from human nature after all.

~~~
sremani
This is absolutely crazy, he did say, that he gained much of data point from
Armadillo Aerospace project. Again, Peter Thiel reiterates the similar thing
about "bytes and atoms".

What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software
produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not
impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.

The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but
the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is
the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than
John Carmack.

Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article
from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes
and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased
even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.

~~~
matt4077
He calls out regulation but can't provide a single example? How can that be
called "empiricism"? And while he lists "regulation", this rant is almost
exclusively a complaint about taxes.

The old chestnut about "how can it be fair to extract money with the threat of
jail" is also a huge warning sign. The government only has two methods of
enforcement, one being fines and the other being prison. If you buy into that
idea, you are left without any means to collect any taxes and therefore the
concept of "government" no longer makes any sense. That leads you into Ayn-
Rand-la-la-land which is a nice idea for a 14-year old to entertain but not a
serious option to organise a society.

I'm also sceptical of his claims of government inefficiency, considering
Armadillo Aerospace doesn't exactly strike me as a paragon for the magic
efficiency of private enterprises.

~~~
davidivadavid
Is John Carmack 14 years old? What makes you think your ideas are more
"serious" than his?

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aphextron
Carmack is a highly focused, driven, successful individual that believes in
meritocracy. Combine that with being a tech focused white male, and of course
he is a libertarian. How could he possibly see the world in any other way?

What gets me the most about libertarian rants though, is how the person
writing is always so completely convinced that they have come up with some
novel solution to the world's problems. As if the only thing standing between
us and a techno-utopia is the EPA and the FCC. They do not acknowledge that
the structures in place are a direct result of the failure of free markets to
handle basic human needs on a wide scale.

~~~
zeveb
> They do not acknowledge that the structures in place are a direct result of
> the failure of free markets to handle basic human needs on a wide scale.

That's not really correct: those structures are the _direct_ result of
politicians creating them, in response to a _perception_ that markets (unfree
markets …) failed to do one thing or another.

~~~
aphextron
>in response to a perception that markets (unfree markets …) failed to do one
thing or another.

Was it a mistaken _perception_ that rivers were catching on fire in the 60's,
leading to the EPA? I guess we should have left that to the free market too.

Government and business can work together, but we must acknowledge that the
goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare. The goal of the
government is to drive human welfare, not profit. The two should be seen as
litigants in a court of law; combative yet civil, with an agreed upon set of
values. The opposition of these two forces creates a dynamic far preferable to
one extreme or the other.

~~~
zeveb
> the goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare

I agree, and that is indeed a problem.

> The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit.

I disagree strongly: the goal of government is _power_. No-one runs for office
to make the world a better place: he runs for power or, if we're very, very
lucky because he wants to be _the one_ to make the world a better place.

To your dialectic of government & business, I'd like to add a third party: the
people. We're not pure either, of course (as a group, we like to oppress,
ignore & line our own pockets!), but we're the ones that create government;
we're the ones it ought to serve; we're the ones who ought to hold it
accountable.

Some of us fall into the trap that whatever a corporation wants is okay,
others into thinking that the State is always right, others still into
thinking that the People are always right. The truth is that all of them are
sometimes wrong. There's no real solution.

But let's try to minimise the amount of violence in our society, and try to
maximise the utility we get for that violence. Am I okay sending men with guns
to wrest your property away in order to fund the national defense? Sure. Am I
okay sending them to prevent people starving in the streets? Okay. Am I okay
send them over in order to finance a cowboy poetry festival? Hell no.

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soheil
> What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in
> pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them? A few layers of distance by
> proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it
> boils down to. Feeding starving children? The justice system? Chemotherapy
> for the elderly? Viagra for the indigent? Corn subsidies?

nailed it.

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unwind
Considering recent changes in the US government's leadership, this really
needs a (2010) in the title.

~~~
thinkpad20
He reposted it last month.

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funkysquid
"Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it
with great inefficiency? Not so much."

Just because scaling a process results in inefficiencies doesn't mean there's
no need to scale it. If you feel like you personally can help every person
directly, please do, disrupt taxes! But until you, we're not tearing down the
system that works (however inefficiently).

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antisthenes
Nothing more to see here than the regular libertarian, economically illiterate
drivel:

Need less government, government is bad, regulation is bad, taxes are theft.

There, I just saved you 10 minutes. I apologize for the snark, but for an
outsider (someone who's not part of the tech bubble, and not a libertarian),
these rants from libertarian tech people are _comically_ identical to each
other, yet none of them ever amount to anything, because all fail to take
human nature into account.

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kbenson
> My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for
> the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off
> with a government that was less ambitious.

Well, since we are stating theses, _mine_ would be that while the government
delivers poor value for services it consumes in some areas, the private sector
_sometimes_ provides _very_ poor value for the services it consumes because it
is incentivized to do the opposite.

Believing one is better than the other without actually looking at the
economics involved leads to things like privatized prisons (where the
incentive is to keep people in and returning to prison, not to rehabilitate
them), and large public lending systems (Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac) which are
susceptible to being brittle under economic stress.

Any time you think you believe something strongly enough that it falls under a
90/10 rule, it's probably worth really looking into that 10% and understanding
it. You might find your 90/10 rule is more accurately a 70/30 or 60/40 rule,
and that's really a different thing.

