Thread by @jhamby

Reading "The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have The Money" by J. Bradford DeLong. Great analysis of the problems created by neoliberalism. My only complaint is that we didn't "[use our] economic dominance exclusively for global good." a.co/1hJrwak

Other than that suspicious claim on page 1 (was the author intentionally ignoring all of the social democracies that the CIA worked so diligently to subvert during the Cold War, to benefit American companies at the expense of the people of the targeted countries?), good analysis.

The book was published in 2010, so the stress of the then-recent recession led the author to be more clear sighted about the dangers of America's excesses back when we "had the money." We don't "have the money" any more. China, Japan, sovereign wealth funds, and billionaires do.

I wonder what might happen if the countries where Apple & Google are hoarding their profits (to avoid paying US taxes on them) decided to seize that money on some pretense or other. Would the US invade Ireland, the Netherlands, or Bermuda, to get it back? theverge.com/2018/1/2/16842…

The bad thing about neoliberalism is that both Democrats (Carter, Clinton, Obama) & Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Bush) believe in it. They've abandoned any attempt to formulate industrial policy, leaving decisions on investments to greedy, shortsighted venture capitalists.

I remember when Benedict Evans, of a16z, blocked me on Twitter because I got in an argument with him trying to explain to him that neoliberalism is a real word with an actual policy meaning, and not *just* a smear word. He was probably deservedly called a neoliberal.

Venture capitalists are mostly charlatans. Marc Andreessen blocked me on Twitter a year before Ben Evans did, when I called him a "thin-skinned billionaire" when he was acting salty because a woman dared criticize him for not promoting more women. Maybe he's not that wealthy?

I wondered if pmarca was a billionaire because of the money his wife is going to inherit from her real estate mogul father, but I see that Andreessen's father-in-law is still alive. So he's a billionaire on his own merit, but just barely. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andr…

So he blocked me for calling him thin-skinned. And Ben Evans blocked me for trying to explain the macroeconomic orthodoxy of the past 40 years to him. It must help his salary to not know how the economy works. I think the goal of a16z is hoodwinking limited partners for profit.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Just read this 2015 long read in the New Yorker about Marc Andreessen, his philosophy of life, his miserable Midwestern upbringing, and his toxic narcissistic attitude, and tell me I'm wrong about him being awful. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…

And his head is shaped like an egg. I'm not sure where that fits into his major malfunction (hubris), but I bet it gives him a psychological complex about his looks that drew him further into the web of greedy acquisition of the world's profits. How else to keep score besides $?

I'm not saying that all venture capitalists are charlatans who are making the world an objectively worse place for humanity. I'm saying that the most celebrated Silicon Valley VCs are all charlatans who are making the world an objectively worse place for humanity.

Venture capital can be used for good, of course. I used to work at Danger, Inc., and we had a very good and innovative proto-smartphone called the "hiptop" (lowercase h), but better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick.

Lean & mean private company. Then Microsoft acquired us.

The Kin phone was a nightmare fiasco because of the politics of Microsoft. There are some good postmortems about it, but it's hard to convey in words the despair we all felt after what we had built up and owned small pieces of (options that turned into cash payouts) was trashed.

Now I work for a company about the same size as Danger that sells touchscreen cash registers (and now self-service kiosks, the product I'm personally working on) for sports & entertainment venues.

Presumably we will either go public or be acquired, and my options will pay off.

Assuming the company remains happy with my work and I don't find a massively better job somewhere else. It's actually pretty interesting work for me: I get to use Kotlin and all the new Android architecture components that didn't exist back when I worked on the Android team.

I bring this up as an example of a case where neoliberal economic policy works out fairly well. The market can figure out how to price & fund reasonable ideas that aren't too risky.

The reason I say big SV VCs are charlatans is they profit by inflating the values of risky stuff.

The last essay I read by Benedict Evans (because it was highly recommended in another post I read) was about how he sells people on machine learning.

I think his pitch that it's a conceptual tool for analysis, potentially as powerful as the relational database, is a good pitch.

And then he mentions that one of the startups a16z funded is Instacart, and how they were using machine learning to try to improve the recommendations for shoppers. Okay, good luck, maybe it works out for you.

It just seems like famous startups are really overvalued. Uber, too.

Everyone is comparing them against Facebook or Google and I think it's PT Barnum stuff.

Instacart figures prominently in the Tad Friend New Yorker article on Andreessen that I linked earlier. The level of hubris & contempt for the Instacart doubters is amazing.

"Then a general partner named Chris Dixon asked, “Is it a marketplace or an enterprise company?” Marketplace companies sell to consumers; enterprise companies sell to other businesses. Clearly perplexed by the distinction, Ringwald said that she was signing up workers as well as

companies. Everyone became a shade more remote.

Afterward, Andreessen told his colleagues, “She didn’t really answer Chris’s question. If it’s marketplace, it’s defensible; if it’s enterprise, she can be undercut.” If Ringwald’s customers were the workers,

who would keep using LearnUp as they moved from job to job, she could create a network effect. If her customers were actually the companies, they could start doing the training themselves—or another startup could. A16z views marketplace and enterprise companies very differently.

The firm invests early with enterprise, but waits with consumer companies, because they tend to take off—suddenly, everyone wants to be on Instagram—or fail fast. It’s a risk-averse way to embrace risk."

End quote. So that's how elite VC firms discount B2B companies.

Wait a sec. I misread that. A16z invests early in B2B companies because they're low risk. They hold off on B2C companies because the market is fickle. That's defensible. It's just that they obviously play favorites based on how bro-ish the sales pitch is. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business-…

“At the same time,” Andreessen said, “we’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition. Companies can only have a big impact on the world if they get big.”

That excerpt is from a part of the story where 31-year-old Alexis Ringwald pitches LearnUp, "a job-training startup that has worked with Staples and Old Navy."

The idea came from "her work interviewing people on the unemployment line, and how she’d eventually realized that…

…the country’s biggest gulf is between those who have the basic skills to be employable—showing up on time, dressing neatly—and those who don’t. “So it’s a modern ‘My Fair Lady’ sort of thing?” Horowitz asked…. Ringwald noted… that her process triples an applicant’s chance of

…getting a job, and that eighty-two per cent of LearnUp’s trainees outperform their fellow-workers. Horowitz and Andreessen nodded: she could handle the pressure. Afterward, Horowitz told me, “My big conclusion was she’s a legit Pied Piper, with charisma and will and fury.”

"A16z wants to learn if the founder has a secret—a novel insight, drawn from personal experience, about how the world could be better arranged. If that new arrangement is 10x better, consumers might be won over."

🎶 Everybody wants to rule the world. 🎶

"Ringwald, back into her planned remarks, promised bigness: “LearnUp will transform employment in America. We can unleash human potential and move the needle on the G.D.P.” Andreessen said, “Question: This is a known problem. Why do companies not just do this themselves, once

…they see that it works?” Ringwald replied, “We’ll keep on differentiating by moving fast and collecting more data on what companies need now.”"

End quote. People sometimes ask me why I've never watched Silicon Valley. Too traumatic. Too true to life to be funny. Much too dark.

Anyway, back to the book I started reading this morning. Other countries have the money, and our global corporations are squirreling away massive profits overseas as well.

Investment is largely controlled by bankers who think like venture capitalists. Society is an externality.

Neoliberalism is the idea that this is proper and good, and that government shouldn't play any role in trying to shape the needs of the people who live here.

Imagine no libraries, no roads, no public parks, nothing that isn't privatized and requires you to install an app to use.

What happened when we swapped Obama for Trump is that now we have a President who doesn't want to be complicit in this great experiment to hollow out society and put companies in the hands of vultures who think like Mitt Romney & the vulture capitalists of Sand Hill Road.

Now we have a President who wants to start tariff wars with the entire rest of the world. I'm not even sure that this is a bad thing, considering the overall incompetence of Trump and the disaster that the GOP tax cuts are gonna be for us.

The tariffs may lead to new factories.

It's not the worst thing Trump is doing, except from a diplomatic perspective, which of course Trump is absolutely awful at. Setting all that aside, at least we have a President who is thinking about industrial policy for the first time since Nixon (who supported it crookedly).

It wasn't until Watergate, or decades later, even, that people figured out that Nixon had structured his entire Presidency with the sole intention of getting reelected. Which meant that he had to prolong the doomed Vietnam War for 5 years instead of ending it, as he'd promised.

And he took bribes from groups like the dairy industry, then promoted their interests from the executive branch. But at least we had an industrial policy, crooked as it was. (See also: South Korea's chaebol system.) brennancenter.org/blog/got-corru…

All I have to say is that if Bernie Sanders and Tucker Carlson agree that Amazon warehouse employees are paid too little and Jeff Bezos is paid too much, then we have a unanimous mandate to do something about a problem that neoliberal orthodoxy says we should let fester forever.

If Hillary Clinton had been elected, then Bernie Sanders would be there pushing her to the left on the issue of minimum wages and progressive taxation.

But with GOP dominating all three branches of federal government, we give out a tax cut for companies to buy back their shares.

Another thing we might be talking about if Democrats were in control of Congress or the Presidency is the tremendous cost to the environment in greenhouse gas emissions from the dirty combustion engines that power cargo ships to import from, say, China. wiki.anton-paar.com/en/bunker-oil-…

"The chief drawback to residual fuel oil is its high initial viscosity, particularly in the case of No. 6 oil, which requires a correctly engineered system for storage, pumping, and burning." You have to heat it to 65–120 °C (149–248 °F) to pump it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil

Apparently newer cargo ships are *less* fuel efficient than the ones built in the 1990s. That's interesting. Did the shipbuilders get lazy, or not care? The industry is finally starting to make more efficient ships. transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shi…

"The shipping industry is finally going to cut its climate change emissions. That’s a big deal." washingtonpost.com/news/energy-en…

I don't want to say anything bad about the movie that spawned a beloved 1990s side-scrolling platform game that omg has an Amiga 1200 version too (!), but… the Lion King has an odd message about monarchy & predators being good & in the natural order. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_…

I read an essay on that and I thought some of the conclusions about that movie & others in the canon were a bit unfair, but The Lion King does stand out in terms of having all the prey animals inexplicably consenting to be eaten by the predators. It's kind of a rough message.

And I think maybe people who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s picked up some ideas from pop culture that it's okay for things to be unfair. Or perhaps a magical wise-cracking genie will come along to save us. That was another great PC/Amiga platformer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27…