Stick to your pay, pal – “What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of ‘stuff’ except helping people pay for it.”
Stick to your pay, pal – “What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of ‘stuff’ except helping people pay for it.”
Case in point this article from Canadian Geographic about using modern technology to farm.
http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/oct11/space-age_farming.asp
Maybe our goverment should have spent less on AGW ?
I read the article at the Harvard Crimson:
“Thiel said that he believes the greatest hope for future technological and economic growth lies in free enterprise, and in particular, the innovation of young people.
Thiel said that he believes that young people need new creative avenues, citing his Thiel Fellowship, also known as the “20 Under 20,” which gives $100,000 to students 19 or younger to drop out of college and pursue creative expeditions in science, investment, and entrepreneurship…
Thiel—who is a self-identified libertarian—said he is skeptical of welfare programs, which he believes may hinder innovation and healthy economic growth.”
His grasp of these issues might be deeper than one brief quote.
I’m a grad student in GIS & Remote Sensing, and we get to design some of the technology and methods described in the above article. I continue to be amazed at how accurately one can determine the health and productivity of a field from satellite measurements.
Unfortunately, You will find few academics with an understanding of how to turn their work into practical tools for the farmer, and too few farmers aware this type of work actually exists.
Great potential, but not yet fully realized.
Justin, I don’t think that government will use advanced technology to help the farmer. For example (via instapundit):
“Farm subsidies in the EU cost taxpayers billions of euros each year, and so it’s naturally in the best interests of regulators to maintain tight oversight over who gets how much. For years now, regulators have relied on satellite imagery to help them keep an eye on those claiming subsidies, photographing farmland from above and looking for the telltale signs of subsidy cheats or breaches of environmental rules.”
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/eu-considering-using-drones-police-farm-subsidies-enforce-environmental-rules
It shouldn’t be a question of the gov’t doing so, it is a question of commercializing these academic projects and making farmers aware of how they can be used.
The only role for the gov’t in this would be opening up access to the imagery, which would be a very challenging prospect. The Open Data portal is a good step forward, but still quite a ways to go.
OK, maybe he’s deserving of some criticism on this precise statement but Thiel is one of the few Internet pioneers who’s hugely supportive of free enterprise and small government. He was trying to make the pt that even more innovation would be happening in these spaces without the gov’t getting involved.
The accuracy of Thiel’s particular statement notwithstanding, one commenter made an interesting point to the effect that what now passes for “higher education” churns out large numbers of scientific/technical imbeciles whose calling seems to lie in thwarting or sabotaging the implementation of the innovations that are made, either through hysterical fear mongering or hijacking the political process in order to stifle those innovations. The hysteria over GM foods comes to mind.
The idea that technological innovation in most fields other than computing has stalled in the last few decades is one that Mark Steyn’s been talking about for a while now.
I fail to see how computing has improved much of anything. It takes longer now to do the simplest transaction. And a way more paper is generated. Producing stacks of paper that nobody will ever read. Being able to do more doesn’t always mean one needs to do more.
And, even with all the information now available, people are, on average, much less well educated than 100 years ago.
Grade 8 final exam 100 years ago;
http://mrcard.org/Education100YrsAgo.htm
Since I’ve been working in the ag equipment aren for the last three years I can say with some certainty that the customers are demanding tractors and other equipment with ever increasing levels of sophistication.
We are building tractors right now that go for up to 500k… with imtegrated navigation/performance/control systems that are worth 30k to 50k.
Whatever Thiel has going for him … understanding of where technology and ag-business are now or where they are heading does not seem to be his forte….
Computers help people make mistakes ten times faster than they ever could before.
Garbage in –> garbage out.