A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.

Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.

I mean, that's one way to get Indians!

Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.

Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.

Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.

Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:

“Smart People Should Build Things”

> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.

I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.

This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.

Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.

Can you demonstrate that this misallocation is worse in the US than it is in other countries?

The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.

Because compensation?

Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)

For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.

The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.

If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.

They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.

Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!

That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.

I would push on how well GDP measures "economic might".

If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.

In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.

Services are all basically a proxy for the physical world though. Other than things like art and media that people value for their own sake.

I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.

There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.

I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.

I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.

There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.

>we

Google and Facebook?

GDP made sense in 1900, back when it took so much labor to keep us all alive and well that we could think of any economic activity as a proxy for progress towards that goal--a goal we could all agree was good. Our concept of value was mostly aligned with our values, so more = better.

Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.

We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.

I'm not entirely sure what your question is - are you asking how Google/Facebook are proxies for physical thing?

Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.

Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.

The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.