| > I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades. I don’t think it’s something that was lost. Rather, as time went one, more and more focus went into financialization of these firms to the detriment of providing people with actual stable jobs and growth. Every industry other than software is pretty much unattractive for anyone talented. Why would you slave away at Boeing making maybe 75k when you can make almost triple that at Facebook? I make the comparison to software because even though we, the hacker news reader & software guru, complain about boneheaded product decisions from Google; American software is just a leagues better than the rest of world (even if it’s in ways we don’t like, like Surveillance). This level of quality is driven by motivated individuals with great incentives, respected by peers and somewhat clear career paths driven by launching great products. Contrast that with the 737MAX, which engineers knew they were building a clown car and felt powerless to do anything about it. Not to say that FAANG doesn’t have internal power struggles, but the 737 is Boeing’s baby at the largest aeronautics company in the world. I doubt you would see similar dysfunction on Google’s AdWords team. While the CCP is able to completely bend private industry, I don’t think it requires an authoritarian government, but I have no solutions. In the case of Halliburton, it’s unsurprising that when you focus on figuring out how siphon government funds into the pockets of executives while doing the bare minimum to deliver on product you end up with crippled infrastructure 20 years later. It’s not that we forgot how to make things right, we simply never invested the resources to do things right at all |