maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class.
Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners.
Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.
A) this is a pledge by companies they may or may not even have the cash required to back it up. Certainly they aren’t spending it all at once, but to be completely honest it’s nothing more than a PR stunt right now that seems to be an exercise in courting favor
B) that so called private capital is going to get incentives from subsidies, like tax breaks, grants etc. It’s inevitable if this proceeds to an actual investment stage. What’s that about it being pure private capital again?
C) do to the aforementioned circumstances in A it seems whatever government support systems are stood up to support this - and if this isn’t ending in hot air, there will be - it still means it’s not pure private capital and worse yet, they’ll likely end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the upside.
I’ll bet a years salary it plays out like this.
If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government subsidies of any kind, I’ll be shocked and elated. Look at anything like this in the last 40 years and you’ll find scant few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they didn’t play out this way.
Which brings me to my second part. So we are going to - in some form - end up handing out subsidies to these companies, either at the local state or federal level, but by the logic of not paying off student debt, why are we going to do this? It’s only propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?
Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but it’s fine to have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it under the “creates jobs” smoke screen? Despite the fact the overwhelming majority of money made will not go to the workers but back to the wealthy and ultra wealthy.
There's no sense of equity here. If the government is truly unequivocally hands off - no subsidies, no incentives etc - than fine, the profits go where they go, and thats the end of it.
However, it won't be, and that opens up a perfectly legitimate ask about how this money is going to get used and who it benefits
AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA,
> could reach five times that sum
(5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)
Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
2) Put solar on top of all highways.
3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
4) Build transmission.
And many more ...
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
Like which wars in this century?