Entrepreneur’s Letter to Obama: Give Americans a Great Challenge to Pursue

http://technori.com/2013/01/3089-an-entrepreneurs-letter-to-president-obama-give-americans-a-great-challenge-to-pursue/

by MarlonPro • 13 years ago

33 72 13 years ago

I've felt for years that we could do better with our mpg, and BMW's have been the only manufacturer to seem to be trying to achieve great mileage with traditional internal combustion engine technology. I'd love to see our country take on such a challenge. And I'd buy the car such a project produces.

mchusma2• 13 years ago

Building a car in 10 years that costs under 20k and 100mpg is a yawn-worthy goal. If that were seriously the Country's 10 year goal, do you think that would inspire anyone? I thought this letter was a pretty good example of people's "Big Vision" stuff being actually pretty small and extrapolating from current trends.

His examples are pretty flawed. A more direct example would be "Other presidents have gone to war, you should too". In addition to the war on terror and war on drugs, of course.

Here are two good/crazy government 10 year goals: 1) Eliminate the need for a legislature by using technology to collect votes. 2) Do more for less - find a way to provide today's services for 1/10th the cost. That way if you want to keep spending you can spend it on new stuff.

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

Eliminate the need for a legislature by using technology to collect votes

Oh, please, no! California's government is a mess, thanks to all the propositions that have forced it legislature to do more while tying its hands on funding.

While I agree the idiots we have right now are far from ideal, falling back to the base common denominator is not the right solution. Representative democracies allow the representatives to make hard, unpopular choices, something the average citizen won't do.

It we want to dump the legislature in favor of pure democracy, we will need a better way to qualify who can vote. And I'm sure that wouldn't be used to disenfranchise some group of people[1].

I think before we consider dumping the legislature, we could play with different options. One I would like to see is having congressional seats divided up among parties by the percentage of the vote you get. So congress represents the entire country and the senate represents each state (or vice-versa).

1. I like the Starship Troopers method of qualification, though: serve your country (military or otherwise) for a minimum time period and you can vote.

mchusma2• 13 years ago

Regarding direct democracy: 1) Let's be clear, California's politicians haven't done a great job except for propositions 2) I think direct democracy is a solvable problem. One really simple thing: don't use 50% as the threshhold. Something like 70-90% makes sense to me. Not claiming it is easy, or politically feasible, but if we are in the "what big dream could/should the government work towards in 10 years" category, it seems to fit.

Regarding serving for voting: I went to West Point then was in the Army. I like the book Starship Troopers. I think it is a terrible idea in practice. 1) The only thing this does for sure is increase the size of the public payroll. 2) No evidence to support it actually making the country better. 3) I feel like I help my country more working in the private sector than I ever did in the Army. (Anecdotal)

youngerdryas17• 13 years ago

A car with triple the gas mileage is yawn-worthy? How out of touch are you? Do you not believe emissions are a serious problem?

1) Eliminate the need for a legislature by using technology to collect votes.

I think you have a serious misunderstanding about government and complex systems in general.

2) Do more for less - find a way to provide today's services for 1/10th the cost.

Sounds great but is a total fantasy. Wildly unrealistic goals are of no use to people that actually get things done.

tomjen34• 13 years ago

Yes it is boring, it is doable and it doesn't involve the country.

In the sixties getting a man to the moon was an acceptable challenge. More than 50 years later we shouldn't waste ten years of our countries best and most brilliant minds on something like merely better millage.

How a commercially viable replacement for oil, that can be made in the US in a way that doesn't produce CO2? That would do a lot to improve the world is a worthy goal.

rayiner6• 13 years ago

> I think you have a serious misunderstanding about government and complex systems in general.

Careful. Around here that kind of talk will get you labeled a statist. In reality society is simple and self-governing, if only government gets out of the way! Also: ponies.

SilasX7• 13 years ago

>A car with triple the gas mileage is yawn-worthy? How out of touch are you? Do you not believe emissions are a serious problem?

Of course they are, but increasing efficiency is only loosely related to that, due to Jevons Effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Having more efficient (and probably phallic shaped) vehicles could reduce aggregate emissions ... or, more likely, the lower cost of driving could increase how often it's done.

Unless the newer efficiency is combined with laws that make emissions directly more costly, you're ultimately just bailing from one side of the pool to the other.

But then, if you're going to put those laws in place, then you don't need to reward any one specific technology's creation; you've already incentivized (sorry) any emission-reducing change in behavior, which is a far longer list than any bureaucrat or contest-creator can come up with. Unless, of course, you think that we're going to have separate contests for "make the average distance of worker from workplace less than one mile" or "make average driving distance less than 11k miles/person-year", etc etc etc.

Projects like the "car with ultra-high gas mileage" are instances of a very unproductive mentality when it comes to responsible environmental stewardship: it's a mentality that, stripped of misdirection, says "it's okay to be wasteful, as long as you're wasteful with efficient technology".

cryptoz3• 13 years ago

> A car with triple the gas mileage is yawn-worthy?

In 10 years? Extremely yawn-worthy. Tesla plans on building a 0 emissions, all-electric car and selling it around $20,000 in two years. Not 10 years with epic, huge pollution going everywhere.

> How out of touch are you? Do you not believe emissions are a serious problem?

How out of touch are you? Obviously emissions are a serious problem. That's why we shouldn't aspire as a country to be emitting gigantic amounts of greenhouse gasses from our cars in 10 years.

cb33• 13 years ago

"Abraham Lincoln had a single-minded vision: Preserve the Union. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t really become great until he united America behind the cause of ending Fascism and Imperialism. John Kennedy asked us to put a man on the moon. Ronald Reagan was hell bent on winning the Cold War."

All of those examples are centered around war and/or homeland security and some of them don't have a lot to do with entrepreneurship. The beauty of the world we live in today is that we don't need a leader to supply us with a unified vision/direction; we have tons of companies simultaneously working very hard on innovating in a multitude of different areas.

There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?

abraininavat3• 13 years ago

Good point. Doesn't a unified vision/direction typically imply a huge problem to be solved? Even the space race was more a race against Communism than a common motivation to accomplish something great.

The ideal is to have no huge problems to solve. Humans being humans, without a common thing to scare us into working together, we'll all work on whatever we want.

That said, one might argue that we have huge problems we just haven't realized are huge problems yet. Climate change comes to mind.

abstractbill2• 13 years ago

There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?

The idea, I suppose, is that by focusing on a single "big problem", we could make very rapid progress (instead of making slower progress on a bigger set of problems). At its height, the US was spending almost 1% of its GDP on the Apollo program. Now imagine we could all agree on some other goal that we would spend that much money on. The hard part would be choosing a good goal, and then convincing enough people that it's the "right one".

smokeyj2• 13 years ago

> Now imagine we could all agree on some other goal that we would spend that much money on.

Then create a kickstarter page and leave my paycheck alone. Just an idea.

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

A 100 mpg car is highly constrained by the laws of physics to be crappy, or at least extremely unappealing.

A much better goal, in terms of usefulness, challenge, and well-defined-ness, would be to develop a self-driving car. This probably could have been done 20 years ago if we had started a Manhattan-style project. But I guess we'll just have to wait for Google.

abstractbill2• 13 years ago

Actually many other car manufacturers are making (perhaps more incremental) steps towards that goal too: http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/19/mercedes-and-other-carm...

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

These incremental advances have been appearing for at least 20 years, and eventually we will have self-driving cars even without an organized effort (either by the government or a company like Google with massive resources). But that's a very slow option.

abraininavat3• 13 years ago

If only there was a politician who had lofty goals.. like a Moon Base!

abraininavat3• 13 years ago

If I was The Decider in Chief, our big goal would be to build a car-free city: http://www.carfree.com/

cema• 13 years ago

Fortunately, we do not have a decider in chief, and the US president is (emphatically!) not one. Everyone decides for themselves, and on the business arena, every business decides for itself.

stcredzero• 13 years ago

Sorry, but "Preserve the Union" is not any more concrete then "Energy Independence." In fact I can come up with quantifiers for both.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

The President of the United States (and I don't mean the current office-holder, I mean the office of the President) is uniquely incapable of being this person that you want.

They are the head of the Executive branch. They uphold the Constitution, specifically the laws passed by Congress.

In this conversation, the President can merely suggest goals to Congress.

Also, Congress is in no position to do what you ask, either: they make laws.

It should not be illegal to NOT pursue the Great Challenge you talk about. It should also not require taxing everyone. It should require motivating people to help.

If it's to succeed, it also needs to pay for itself, or be so self-evidently worthy that people donate to it enough money to keep it going.

In short: I don't think the Government can do you what you want.

Here's where I put my hope for the future:

http://www.planetaryresources.com

rayiner6• 13 years ago

The space race was funded with tax dollars and I doubt the fees charged for commercial launches ever paid a fraction of it.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

and the great railroads first came from private industry as did the canals as did the airlines and so on and so on. The only reason the space race was done by government first is because they were more concerned with killing other people with the results.

Face it, government rarely does something first or best except when one government wants to eradicate another.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

Yes, and I agree that it felt like a feel-good mission at the time.

Many people theorize, and I believe correctly, that it was entirely an aggressive posturing war between the US and USSR. We could just drop a nuke from space, with no launch to detect, so no way to retaliate in time - no mutually assured destruction, which was the only real defense either party had.

Don't get me wrong - I'm generally very liberal by US standards, and I think the Government should do a LOT more to "promote the general welfare". I just think that money doesn't care how you spend it, and governments can't set the kinds of goals that the OP proposes. Other than ending diseases, I suppose.

rohern• 13 years ago

Human colonization of Mars.

cryptoz3• 13 years ago

We already know Obama's policy on that: No Americans on Mars until he's elderly, somewhere in his late 70s.

ShawnBird• 13 years ago

I think we should get cheap internet to everyone. I really thought the plan to use television white space[0] was interesting. Funneling money into something like Google Fiber would also be amazing. Broadband, like the postal and telephone systems, should be available nearly everywhere to everyone at a reasonable price.

[0] http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/google-wants-to-put-wireles...

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

Ridiculous. We do not need Obama to innovate. He is not a King, he is not supernatural, and his job is not to provide challenges for entrepreneurs.

bloaf2• 13 years ago

There are two problems with any automotive-based great challenges.

1. The accomplishment of the goal will almost certainly not result in any great swell of national pride. Defeating an enemy makes us believe we are great. Being the first to the moon makes us feel proud of our accomplishment. Driving a somewhat more efficient car does not give us that same sense of collective pride.

2. The government should not be directly doing R&D, market research, or advertizing for private industries. We got away with the moon landing because NASA is a government organization, the same is not true of the US auto industry. The auto bailout was unpopular, why would any sort of government/auto industry project be seen as anything other than meddling?

Instead, the government should focus on areas that are more directly under its purview: infrastructure, energy, military, education, public safety, etc.

What sorts of goals might we consider? I think these are better candidates:

Cure any form of cancer in the next 10 years.

Become #1 in international measures of 4th grade student performance in the next 10 years and 1st in 8th grade performance in 15 years.

Achieve the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any developed nation within 15 years.

geoka9• 13 years ago

Achieve the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any developed nation within 15 years.

Considering the amount of CO2 emissions from cars, here's a simple one: avoid using the car for personal reasons whenever possible. Use a bike, public transportation, your feet.

I, for one, would be very proud of my country if that became the norm for a significant number of people.

AnthonyMouse• 13 years ago

>Achieve the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any developed nation within 15 years.

The problem with this is that it's too broad. There are a million different ways to do it which are almost all trade offs of one thing or another, and the people who have to sacrifice for any given one will be fighting tooth and nail to make you choose a different one, so you spend all your time arguing with people and never accomplish anything.

Pick a specific goal. Build a working commercially viable fusion reactor. Take something like that and put moonshot resources behind it and it will happen.

bloaf2• 13 years ago

Broad is different from general. I see breadth as a double edged sword. It does have the problems you mention. However, if the government could get sufficient buy-in, it helps because there are a large number of ways to improve per-capita CO2 emissions (e.g. improving housing insulation, increasing public transportation usage, development of CO2 scrubbing/sequestration technologies.)

I feel that the real killer of challenges is actually vagueness. "Improve health care" is vague because there is no well defined goal or target that we will be able to meet.

tomjen34• 13 years ago

Apart from the cure for cancer, I have one thing to say to all of these:

Booooooooring.

The goal has to be huge, extremely difficult to pull of, easy to measure and easy to rally around. It has to be something the tech geek and the redneck can agree would be awesome, something that screams USA is number one, something the entire country can take pride in.

Kilimanjaro• 13 years ago

So you need a war to unite the country?

How about the 'War On Corruption'™?

msg• 13 years ago

Manhattan project focused on climate change.

Pros: lots of disciplines to get involved, obvious ways for ordinary people to take part (monitoring and reducing home energy use), and a regulatory environment that is in need of reform (tragedy of the commons for pollution, carbon market). And obviously, a dire, human-race affecting need.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

Next generation energy (including storage and distribution). And the multiple, domestic career and educational tracks that go with this.

Unfortunately, the energy industry is currently held hostage.

Entrepreneur’s Letter to Obama: Give Americans a Great Challenge to Pursue

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