"Let me be clear, this is a catastrophic development for our country. When the private sector can no longer compete with the public sector, you know that society is on its way out."
What? Of course the government outcompetes in terms of job security. I would too if I get a dollar for every three you made. But that's where the outcompetition ends. Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work. You can stay in your cage where Farmer feeds you on the clock; those of us who have a passion for what we do will continue to live in the wild.
Related is PG's essay on the nature of the employee in a startup as opposed to in a corporation, although in this case the contrast is between the private and public sectors.
What? ... Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Wake up and look around: the government built first computers, your beloved Lisp, freaking Internet, not to mention sending man to space. Most universities are public. Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.
Government, believe it or not, will be the one who solves the energy problem, will eventually cure cancer and AIDS and hopefully build a true AI, while entrepreneurial types will continue "throwing sheep" on facebooks.
Inefficient? Yes. Non-innovative? No. And WTF is general business competitiveness?
It's not some amazing feat of innovation that somebody thought to hook up computers to talk to each other. Give somebody enough power to confiscate money from the people, and monopolize tech research, and they might eventually come up with something useful.
Of course, who's to say private industry research wouldn't have been able to come up with something that's even more useful, had the government not monopolized these functions? They might have been able to come up with networking protocols without such serious security holes as in today.
Government "monopolized" these functions? Does it mean there is an established mechanism that discourages innovation in private sector, i.e. punishes innovators with higher taxes or imprisonment or what?
Hey, Microsoft and Apple have tons of cash and do nothing interesting with it. The reason behind 'sudden' GM's death isn't shitty cars, they've been shitty for a long time. GM is dying because instead of trying to build a decent car business it essentially transformed itself into a bank (GM Financial) which found nothing better to do with their cash than "invest" them in guess what.
Now look at startups: have you ever seen a TechCrunch announcement that was in any way memorable? I see nothing but a never-ending conversion of MySQL tables into HTML pages, or wrapping OSS projects into HTML/JS UIs hoping to get rich quick: the distance of their "R&D trajectories" are measured in months and working prototypes are expected within weeks from the first napkin drawing.
Now look at Google, a poster child for "SV magic". Google is a creation of two Stanford students, i.e. an academia project turned into business (just like Symbolics and DEC had grown out of MIT). Entrepreneurship or corporate R&D had nothing to do with Google's success what-so-ever.
Businesses don't give a shit about innovation, technology and science. Their goal has always been quick profits, for which there always seems be some kind of a scheme to take a ride on. Look what IBM, HP, AT&T and Xerox, former think tanks, transformed themselves into. IBM especially grosses me out with their "we're a services company" bullshit. So is my pet sitter.
It is corporate never-ending search for increased efficiency that essentially kills innovation because the process of inventing is terribly inefficient by its nature: it's unpredictable, cannot be put on schedule, you can't budget for it and the outcome isn't guaranteed: find me one MBA who'll like any of the above.
I've never been especially smooth with my writing, given that English isn't my first tongue, but Phillip Greenspun has:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg
It monopolizes these functions by crowding out any private investment there might have been. Private companies like AT&T/Bell Labs and IBM used to do LOTS of research. Now it's all in the realm of the government, thanks to their massive expenditures in the area.
Business innovates because there are huge profits to be made in making people's lives easier and better off. Government doesn't innovate. It merely saps innovation that would have occurred in the private sector.
thank you for bringing some sanity to this discussion. I read hacker news as an escape from the looters and moochers of the world. I hope this remains a place for people who produce and love doing it.
Please, please, someone just tell me, why are so many people convinced that taxes are outright theft? I can understand anger over how it's all spent, but I don't understand the concept that every year some guy with a badge mugs us and takes one third of our income.
* I love Lisp? While I don't "love" any one language, most of my favorite projects were developed by open source communities.
* Of course the government will do all of this: It's placed itself at the center of motion. Monopolization doesn't indicate superiority.
* General business competitiveness: A business typically has to take other things that I didn't mention into account to be viable. I wasn't prepared to enumerate all of the differences between how a government institution and a for-profit business are run. It's no mystery that being beholden to paying customers or even a community that votes with its feet is more challenging than appealing to the many forces that drive government. And obviously, we're well past the point where American citizens throwing off the bridle is a possibility.
> Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.
Keep in mind that all the money of the public sector comes from the private sector... and ultimately ends up in some pockets in the private sector as well.
What? Of course the government outcompetes in terms of job security. I would too if I get a dollar for every three you made. But that's where the outcompetition ends. Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work. You can stay in your cage where Farmer feeds you on the clock; those of us who have a passion for what we do will continue to live in the wild.
Related is PG's essay on the nature of the employee in a startup as opposed to in a corporation, although in this case the contrast is between the private and public sectors.