
It's Time to Build for Good - ivanech
https://palladiummag.com/2020/04/30/its-time-to-build-for-good/
======
cs702
This essay is full of wishful expressions, such as "stagnation is a choice",
"if we want to", and "we must circumvent", followed by _exhortations_ to
"regain the will" \-- to do this or that thing for the good of everyone. It
all sounds very reasonable, very worthwhile, very moral. As Larry the
Liquidator would say, "Amen!"[a]

Alas, I think the root of the problem is that companies and people have strong
economic/competitive incentives NOT TO INVEST in the kind of expensive, robust
(i.e., inefficient/redundant) socially beneficial infrastructure that everyone
agrees is necessary but on which the payback is highly uncertain, highly
diffuse, or might not be recouped until well after everyone alive today is
dead.

No amount of exhortation will change _rational behavior_.

(Stronger, harsher mechanisms may be necessary.)

\--

[a] From the movie "Other People's Money:" When Larry the Liquidator attempts
to take over a company, the CEO gives an inspiring speech to shareholders:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws)
\-- to which Larry responds:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q)

~~~
heavyset_go
> _No amount of exhortation will change rational behavior._

Short-term thinking*. Rational behavior would be setting aside personal risks
and benefits to do what needs to be done.

~~~
mgummelt
That's not what "rational" means, in economic terms.

------
tick_tock_tick
Corruption, environmental reviews, and labor costs make most major projects in
the US a failure.

San Francisco's subway extension.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway)

3 years behind schedule, with work starting in 2012 and a cost of 1.6 billion
dollars for 1.7 miles of rail.

The same story repeats itself all over the country.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-
construction-costs.html) New York clocking in at 2.7 billion per mile for a 6
billion dollar extension.

~~~
MAGZine
Doing anything in san francisco underground is a huge PITA. By nature, this
consumes a lot of money, time, and expense.

As soon as you start digging underground you find a whole litany of old pipes,
wires, mains, etc that do not appear on any drawing. You're unsure if they're
in use or not, and some of them are so old that just pulling the earth away
from them causes them to fail.

There's more to it other than politics. These things are hard to do in
established cities, especially at the shallow depths that muni operates at.

~~~
novok
You compare america vs other even older cities in other developed european
cities delivering new rail lines far faster and cheaper and those kinds of
excuses just doesn't pass muster.

More context: [https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-
ex...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-
build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/)

~~~
MAGZine
they specifically call out san francisco's line as having reason to be
expensive, but point taken—America has broader problems developing rapid
transit.

------
waingake
Corporate America stopped building nationality once it realised it could
offshore to failing states with populations who's alternative to wage slavery
was starvation.

If you want to build for good, we need alternatives such as worker owned
business where insentives align with the interests of the communities they are
from.

~~~
aero142
I genuinely want to believe that these are alternatives to the shotfalls of
capitalism, but I find the evidence pretty sparse. When you say this, what is
the best example you are thinking of that makes you believe it can work? I'm
not asking you to do research for me, but I am curious if others have clear
examples in mind when they suggest these.

~~~
luckylion
An example for worker-owned might be Mondragon [1]. I don't know how well that
works in different settings and how easy it is to replicate. I do know that
cooperatives, even if not worker-owned but customer-owned do work quite well
in Germany. They serve their customers, as their customers are also their
members/owners, so their interests are aligned. They often also have social
sub-goals (their primary goals being servicing their members).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation)

------
seltzered_
This sparked a couple thoughts:

1) I recently learned from a friend about Manly P. Hall's[1] 1928 book "The
Secret Teachings of All Ages" which delves a bit into people like Ernest
Holmes, Emma Curtis Hopkins about doing things around a framing of doing "for
good".

2) Venkatesh Rao recently wrote[1] about Andreesen's "It's time to build"
piece and tried to explain what he think it really meant as now being a time
for a "Macro Rebuild" and foundational changes to happen after earlier phases
of tool-making, alternative-building, and disruption.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_P._Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_P._Hall)

[2] [https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/how-what-and-where-
to-b...](https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/how-what-and-where-to-build)

------
beefee
How do we do this in the face of systemic, subsidized discrimination against
American industry?

The ePacket program forces the USPS to subsidize shipping from the PRC to the
US. End this immediately and let's start analyzing the forces behind this
abusive practice.

~~~
MattGaiser
How many Americans are actually ordering stuff off Alibaba through ePacket? Is
this actually having a major impact or is it just a very visible problematic
practice?

------
pharke
> Functional industry requires a great deal of implicit knowledge that is not
> easily regained once traditions of manufacturing die out—like a master dying
> before they can find an apprentice to teach.

The masters aren't dead yet and neither are their apprentices. There are still
quite a few old timers around that have retreated or retired to running small
shops doing a greatly scaled down version of their trade. We could get a lot
of them back in business if we made them competitive with overseas
manufacturing. The word tariff is suspiciously absent from this discussion
though.

------
mgummelt
"The only choice we seem able to make anymore is the choice not to make
anything."

"American manufacturing output is larger than ever"

Which is it?

~~~
MattGaiser
It is not quite larger than ever, but pretty close.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS)

~~~
jbay808
Is this just that thing where the performance of intel processors is computed
as being exponentially higher than in the past, so the accounting is inflated
accordingly?

~~~
analognoise
No, we make more stuff than at almost any point.

We've lost zero manufacturing capability.

We just need a fraction of the people that used to be involved - they've been
replaced by robots.

"The job at the plant" died, not the manufacturing sector.

~~~
skaevola
Why can't I buy an American made toaster? This isn't a gotcha -- I actually
tried a few weeks ago and all I found for my trouble was this website:
[https://buyingamericanblog.com/2017/05/29/quest-for-made-
in-...](https://buyingamericanblog.com/2017/05/29/quest-for-made-in-america-
toaster/)

People with direct experience of the manufacturing sector in the US and abroad
(including me) will certainly tell you that America's capabilities have
deteriorated, at least relative to other countries. The machine tool industry
is considered a good bellwether for industrial capacity and there's been some
good research on this topic if you're interested:
[http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf](http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf)

~~~
jbay808
Why is this downvoted? Seems to present a cogent argument (whereas its parent
is a mere assertion) and I'm interested to see any well-sourced rebuttals to
it. Anecdotally, I have had a similar impression -- it seems to me like across
a wide variety of product categories, it's rare if even possible to find
American manufacturers. Go even to a high end department store selling
upmarket goods and check where manufactured items are made; very few complex
products seem to be in the US.

Edit -- by comparison, when I lived in Japan I found it extraordinarily easy
to buy locally made products of all sorts; pots and pans, coffee mugs, water
bottles, stationery, clothes, shoes, electronics, tools, injection molded
plastic items, paper products, everything. Even in their equivalent of dollar
stores. Sometimes they were a bit more expensive than those produced in
China/Vietnam/Indonesia, but often they were price competitive. It was weird
coming back to North America and adapting to not being able to find anything
locally made.

~~~
analognoise
I work in defense. I've literally watched a team put together a factory line
to build fighter jets fuselages. We can build whatever we want, and the
numbers reflect this.

We don't build low margin anything because nobody would buy it if it costs
more.

Japan is a good example - they setup all their car factories in the US in the
South specifically to avoid union labor costs! Many Japanese cars, for our
market, are made... Right here! Because the shipping and labor overhead would
make them uncompetitive.

~~~
jbay808
Are iphone margins low?

Fighter jets are almost a cost-is-no-object project, so to me at least, it
isn't a good proxy for a country's manufacturing prowess.

Your ability to build something is measured by how cheaply you can build that
thing. This means that if I can make something more cheaply than you can, I'm
actually better at making it than you are, assuming the end product is the
same. (You can also cheapen something by cutting corners on the design or
materials, but then you're making a different thing).

~~~
analognoise
Without an integrated supply chain? Yes.

Can we make an iPhone? Yeah, we design not only the chips here but the circuit
boards. They're prototyped here!

Can we increase our margins by throwing the chemicals into the local river and
having people manually stand there for 12 hour shifts breathing in toxic
chemicals to manually polish them? Yup.

~~~
jbay808
Having a sophisticated supply chain in place is a big part of manufacturing
prowess!

------
arithmetician
as a Yale alum, I like to play the drinking game "take a shot every time a
Yalie uses the word 'qua'"

in all seriousness, decent take, but it doesn't seem to add that much to
Andreesen's essay. e.g. the whole bit about how building a new world is
inherently political... yes, in a more philosophical sense. But when Andreesen
writes "we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology
and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building," he clearly is
referring to America's dysfunctional political climate, not "living together"
/ some conception you'd be considering in political philosophy.

fwiw, I do think Andreesen's essay could have more explicity (as Isaac's is)
criticized out how creative/productive effort has been spent in recent times.
I remember reading a quote about how crazy it is that the nation's (and
globe's) top talent is being brought to Silicon Valley to, in large part,
figure out how to more effectively addict young people to their apps (rather
than, as it were, "build for good").

~~~
novok
We chose silicon valley because we'd rather build than waste our time in tar
pits that we are not very good at navigating and frankly find excruciating to
navigate.

I think many of us would of loved to work in pure physics, mech eng spaceX
type stuff too.

~~~
starpilot
The problem with those other fields is they're about delayed gratification,
which tech people are bad at. What you see as "wasting time" is just the
normal development process for rockets, medical equipment etc.

~~~
novok
The thing is, in the past, there weren't those wastes of time in those fields
and they delivered. The sclerosis is recent.

------
MattGaiser
And I thought that Marc Andreessen’s original essay was light on substance...

------
sudosteph
Decent enough problem analysis, but the solutions proposed seem to fall into
either the "absolute fluff" category:

> Beauty is not simply some pleasant thing to be considered once we smash the
> zoning codes. It is the aesthetic force necessary to reach deep into our
> subconscious and activate our will to live in a new world (which, yes,
> includes new zoning codes).

or the "proven to be insufficient" category: > Reconstructing the better part
of an industrial society will take decades; and with our present white-collar
workforce left utterly directionless, inflated by elite overproduction, and
medicated at world-historic levels, sending a million students to Harvard will
not, as Andreessen suggests, help spur technological progress. Rather, it is
the regeneration of practically-grounded trade schools and state-backed
coordination that is needed to retrain a productive workforce.

Trade schools are great and all - but retraining efforts consistently fail
when the jobs do not line up with an individual's self-image. Truckers will
not line up to be trained as CNAs, no matter how many training programs or
jobs are offered and jobs are demanded. Likewise, most white collar workers
will not line up to be factory workers.

The essential thing he's missing is that the reason many Americans didn't
freak out when Bill Clinton signed the bills which caused these jobs to
overseas is the first place - is because the reality of factory jobs is at
odds with the American dream of self-determination. Many humans don't like
being a cog in the machine, even if it's a steady income. Many children of
these manufacturing workers saw the harmful side of those types of jobs, and
instead opted for college or service-industry jobs where they focus on
developing soft skills and relationships with people. Yes they want good jobs
and to not get abused by the gig job industry, but many Americans don't want
to go back to being treated as human machinery in factories either. The real
thing Americans want is better opportunity to use those skills to start their
own businesses, to put their skills and creativity to use. That's part of the
reason craft brewing took off so intensely - it's one of the only fields that
young people can still break into and differentiate themselves even with
limited starting resources.

All that said, I do admit that I was surprised when I saw that the author is
just an undergraduate. His naivete is a bit less concerning with that in mind.

------
samsquire
There isn't any thing pulling people together to build things. There's no
shared desire between people to demand a thing.

------
erjjones
.. and there was a time to not build for good??

~~~
analognoise
Make weapons. It's good for you, bad for somebody else.

------
slx26
probably out of topic and not too helpful, but lately I feel we spend so much
time in intellectual discussion about other intellectual discussion that we
kinda forget about the basics. what does people want and why don't we have it?
maybe I'm just too tired today, but in my mind it's like nowadays debate about
the world always ends up polluted by a never-ending collection of disconnected
elements and a cloud of complexity that we can never manage to navigate with a
clear sense of direction. To me Andreessen's essay sounded like just another
political speech, and then this article diffuse echo around the former. Maybe
I need some sleep.

------
jimmyvalmer
The author can start with himself by abstaining from this kind of wordy
pontificating. Unfortunately as a political science and Chinese major, he's
rendered himself incapable of answering the call for "bridges not bullsh_t."

------
starpilot
Everything up this point was building for bad in the attention economy. At
least they admit it.

------
lasermike026
At the start of the covid crisis we realized that we did not have enough local
manufacturing capacity to make what we need and we still do not. We have the
facilities just sitting idle. It's time to get to it. There is little or no
leadership to make this happen. Leadership is where it starts.

------
the_reformation
Been following this guy on Twitter for a while, he's great. I like him a lot
because he's so eloquently defends beauty and humanism vs. what he calls "pod
life"\- the Zoom/UberEats/WFH triumvirate- the airportification of our cities,
the bleh futurism imagined by contemporary sci-fi.

~~~
MattGaiser
> airportification of our cities

I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it
further?

~~~
novok
I think it's the bland sanitized global style that you see everywhere in in
airport/mall combos around the world.

~~~
core-questions
It's the new brutalism: cheap functional architecture with no nods to true
beauty or mathematical form. It feels like a punishment to look at.

~~~
daotoad
Brutalism is NOT just "cheap functional architecture with no nods to true
beauty".

Yes, it is an extension of Bauhaus, with exposed fixtures and minimalist,
functional designs. Yes, in the hands of a hack, this yields ugliness.
Buildings like Habitat 67 in Montreal, Vancouver BC's central library, and UC
San Diego's Giesel Library are works of art.

To say there was no thought of form or beauty is patently a calumny.

Strip-mall architecture is the fast food of architecture. Quick, cheap, and,
at best, lacking in nutritional value.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
So what are the flaws of brutalism? To look at the referenced examples, no
storage space would be one. Confusing floorplan is another. Huge volumes spent
on being brutal, but little attention to functional value?

~~~
daotoad
I think the biggest flaw in brutalism is that it does not suffer hacks well.
Badly done, it looks and performs worse than just about any other style of
architecture. You get hideous boxes with conduit everywhere.

None of the brutalist buildings I've actually been in suffered from confusing
floorplans or lack of storage. The tendency is more for big, striking open
spaces and wide walkways.

In the Pacific Northwest there's a recent trend to build a lot of ugly boxy
townhomes and small apartment buildings in a neo-brutalist style. One notable
features of these buildings is big, smooth rectangular panels in their outer
cladding. They often look like the builder just got a bunch of OSB sheets,
painted them dark brown and tacked them up as siding. Add thoughtless
placement of conduit and vents and the interaction between window locations
and the lazy siding, and you have a sloppy mess of unintentional asymmetry and
unevenness.

If you are going to have your conduit hanging out as an architectural feature,
you have to _treat it like an architectural feature_ and think about how its
placement and routing impacts visual balance and rhythm as well as the
functional issues of delivering power, water, and ventilation. It's not just a
license to nail something up and omit the trim.

------
lowwave
How hard is to have a web site viewable without javascript? I mean it is not a
web site that has maps or some kind of desktop app type of feature. At least
make it so it will be viewable without javascript.

~~~
MattGaiser
I just flipped off my Javascript and it loaded fine. Are you sure that is the
problem?

~~~
erik_seaberg
The head is bulky but the body is readable in curl | less.

------
brenden2
What's the point? There are no rewards for doing good just for the sake of
doing good. Hopium is a great way to get people to do your bidding, but why
should people work hard for nothing while someone else gets rich?

