[sremani]

This is absolutely crazy, he did say, that he gained much of data point from Armadillo Aerospace project. Again, Peter Thiel reiterates the similar thing about "bytes and atoms".

What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.

The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than John Carmack.

Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.

[matt4077]

He calls out regulation but can't provide a single example? How can that be called "empiricism"? And while he lists "regulation", this rant is almost exclusively a complaint about taxes.

The old chestnut about "how can it be fair to extract money with the threat of jail" is also a huge warning sign. The government only has two methods of enforcement, one being fines and the other being prison. If you buy into that idea, you are left without any means to collect any taxes and therefore the concept of "government" no longer makes any sense. That leads you into Ayn-Rand-la-la-land which is a nice idea for a 14-year old to entertain but not a serious option to organise a society.

I'm also sceptical of his claims of government inefficiency, considering Armadillo Aerospace doesn't exactly strike me as a paragon for the magic efficiency of private enterprises.

[davidivadavid]

Is John Carmack 14 years old? What makes you think your ideas are more "serious" than his?

[neutralid]

Carmack probably experienced a lot of government waste in aerospace. It's an industry that's long been dominated by subsidized government programs. On the other hand, Carmack should have experienced the dramatic development of the electronics industry, basically the break up of large electronics corporations into a vertically integrated semiconductor industry. Government had a huge role to play in that. The same thing needs to happen to the aerospace industry and other technology areas, e.g., health care, transportation, comm, etc..

One of the major reasons that the semiconductor and software industry took off is because of agencies like DARPA, where program managers are rotated (never permanent). If we continue to have careerists in charge then, unlike DARPA, we're bound to have inefficiencies develop. We would benefit from a reorganized government, where only small term-limited crack teams are kept in civil service and rotated to address gaps and challenges. This is how the Obamacare website was changed from a dysfunctional site being developed by a politically connected contractor selected/overseen by civil service to a more robust site developed by a volunteer crack team from SV. So, I disagree with Carmack in that it's possible to reformulate government to make it more effective and have government fund risks that private sector is unlikely to take due to short-term profit perspectives.

Despite the perceived waste in defense and other tech centers, I would guess the waste in the state department dwarfs everything. Not sure what to do about this area.

[ant6n]

I'm a lefty because I believe in single payer health care, paid parental leave, cheap day care, cheap post-secondary education, and representative, pluralist parliamentary democracies. Those views have nothing to do with regulation.