I do think that ZiRP distorted things extremely badly. There's an entire generation in this software industry that lives around the business-culture expectations set during that time which as far as I could see basically amounted to "I build Uber but for X" (where X is some new business domain).

Perhaps after a bit of a painful interregnum things will be a bit different now that rates are higher and risk along with it.

Also anybody can throw a SaaS together in a few days now. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the next few years will be... interesting.

That's a extremely strong statement, and may only be true in libertarian-land, where pure capitalism is a god to be worshiped and "good" has been redefined to be "whatever the unregulated free market does."

But in the real world, capitalism is a tool to perform socially useful functions (see the marketing about how it was better able to do that than Soviet central planning). When it fails, it should be patched by regulation (and often is) to push participants into socially useful actions, or at least discourage socially harmful ones.

I didn't say I agree with it.

You said:

>>>> I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody...

I just made a such an argument, and the fact that I'm not alone can be inferred from the actions of the government in regulating capitalism. Also, if you read the newspaper, it's fairly frequent to see an op-ed decrying some particular market entity, and advocating for something to stop what they're doing.

Also you'll note I wasn't arguing "everyone at all times needs to perform a socially-useful function," but rather "we've identified a particular important area where the social utility is too low, lets do something about that problem."

Why would I want to do that? I think they should be disciplined until the perform a more socially useful function. Competing with them is an entirely different thing that's unlikely to accomplish that goal.

This was, is, and always will be a most braindead response in such conversations. I bet you even use the word entrepreneur unironically.

Spoiler alert: commercial fusion power may not be practical at all, but if it is, the timescales to delivery are measured in numbers closer to centuries than decades. Don’t fall for the hype generated to sucker those VCs you’re talking about.

I actually don't care that much about the specifics, just the general direction: pumping money into developing technology that doesn't exist, instead of looking to flip yet another software startup where GitHub stars would matter.