
The long, slow, rotten march of progress - pmcpinto
https://theoutline.com/post/1611/the-long-slow-rotten-march-of-progress?utm_source=TW
======
ryandrake
The passage about Capitalism not knowing what to do with its capital anymore
rings true. We've allowed society to bifurcate into 1. a great many people
without, who know exactly what they'd do with an extra $100, and 2. a tiny
number of ultra-rich who literally can't figure out what to do with all their
money and have run out of possessions to gold-plate and diamond-encrust. What
does the end-game look like? When interest rates are perpetually zero and you
simply can't squeeze another single dollar out of the masses?

~~~
tormeh
>What does the end-game look like? When interest rates are perpetually zero
and you simply can't squeeze another single dollar out of the masses?

Pet peeve: Low interest rates somehow hurting the huddled masses. Low interest
rates benefit those with loans and hurts those with capital. Poor people are
massively more likely to benefit from low interest rates than to be hurt by
it.

~~~
meric
Poor is a state of having low capital. Low interest rates make it hard for
poor people to save their way out of being poor. Making it harder to
accumulate capital keeps the poor being poor. That's why it's so expensive to
buy stocks and housing at the moment. There's less ways for poor people to
become less poor.

~~~
marze
There are lots of options to buy stocks without big fees, in small dollar
amounts.

Lack of good investment options really has little to do with poverty. Complex
causes, complex remedies.

~~~
meric
But those stocks pay low dividends due to low rates. They are expensive
stocks. High capital people can access the near zero rates to invest, the poor
only have access to credit cards. At high interest rates it is expensive for
both the rich and poor to invest. In low rate environment low capital people
are at a disadvantage.

------
abalashov
I'm a dropped-out philosophy major with a humanities family and cultural
background, and wearing what occasionally feels like the impostor's mantle of
a software engineer.

This leads to a lot of amusing, sometimes infuriating cultural conflicts. I
frequently have this type of conversation with colleagues in my profession,
and it's frustrating to see all the technocratic utopianism and narrowly
conceived TEDdie-ism that often obtains on the other side.

Lately, I've resorted to making the point about mindfulness and purpose
through the compact vehicle of jest, since business interactions seldom
organically accommodate discussion of serious ideas and issues. In our hipster
age of sham social capital, deniable low-calorie intellectual commitments, and
instant disavowal of anything that begets complications down the road, oblique
jokes seem to work better than direct critiques.

Something like:

\- Client: "Our server has had five-nines uptime this past year!"

\- Me: "But was it running good stuff?"

\- Client: "What?"

\- Me: "What's better, a highly available server sitting idle or running crap,
or a less reliable server running good stuff? Quality over quantity, right?"

\- Client: "Uhhh..."

\- Me: "Think about it. Is the measure of a server really in how long it's
been running? The essence of a server is that it serves, yeah? Availability is
a secondary—if important—quality."

\- Client: "... okay ...?"

\- Me: "So, it's not enough to just be up. The host has to run good stuff. Has
the server been running good stuff?"

\- Client: "Erm... it runs our middleware? Are you asking if it's good code?"

\- Me: "No, I'm asking if it's a good thing to run, although I suppose for a
thing to be good to run, it has to be written well enough. Bad code doesn't
run well."

\- Client: "WTF?"

\- Me: "Is your middleware good stuff?"

\- Client: "What does that even mean?"

\- Me: "Doesn't it bother you that you don't know?"

\- Client: "... I guess I never really thought about it like that."

It's what I encourage everyone to do. Bring a little ancient Greece to the
cloud data centre.

~~~
pram
Sounds tedious.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Arguably the definition of philosophy. It's tedious, pedantic, semantically
focused and rigorous. All which makes it insufferable, yet ultimately
important.

~~~
abalashov
Well, there's a reason I dropped out, after all. ;-)

But the article offers a good exposition of what happens when you have a world
with _too little_ philosophy. And that's the relatively harmless side of it.
Everyone from Kafka to Hannah Arendt to Erich Fromm has sketched out the
malignant side of capitalist education -- a society of people with skills but
no Knowledge, a globe of narrow technical specialists with, to borrow a
favoured turn of phrase from Dmitry Orlov, "nary a forehead in the crowd
disfigured by a sentient impulse".

This is a great article. I nominate it for article of the year.

~~~
to3m
Approximate chance a Sam Kriss article isn't the article of the year on Hacker
News: 0 (at least when displayed as an integer). But I wonder if this one
would win in a fight with the one about Neil deGrasse Tyson...

(I like a lot of HN articles, but the average Sam Kriss article is a lot
better. Like I'm a dog drooling over my kibble... and then one day I get a
sniff of my master's well-cooked person-food.)

~~~
abalashov
I didn't know the author was a thing. This is my first collision[1] with his
writing, as far as I know, although I don't always pay attention to bylines as
much as I should.

[1] Badoom tss.

------
imgabe
> Code What? To Do What? And Why?

Seriously? Our infrastructure is crumbling, billions of people still don't
have enough food or clean water. Diseases, even curable ones, are killing
people every day and you have to ask "To Do What?"??

Give me a break. Stop gazing at your navel for 10 seconds and go out and
interact with the world. I guarantee you'll find a problem that needs fixing.

~~~
mehwoot
_Our infrastructure is crumbling, billions of people still don 't have enough
food or clean water._

And what % of tech startups are tackling these problems?

~~~
relyio
And what % of capital is available to entrepreneurs tackling those problems?

------
siliconc0w
Enjoyable, if verbose, read. Reminds me a bit of American Gods. There are a
handful of startups that are offering genuine attempts at innovation and
progress and, of course, a lot of garbage. It feels relatively slow moving
until you realize how much you work differently, eat differently, drive
differently than just a few years before. Like being slowly boiled alive in a
bathtub.

~~~
crpatino
Would you mind to clarify what you mean by "X definitely"? I think you are on
to something, but cannot fully grasp wha you mean.

~~~
kornish
You may have misread: the post said "differently" and not "definitely".

~~~
siliconc0w
To be fair it did and I corrected it - slight dyslexia

------
redm
It's not trivial to get money into the cryptocurrency system as it is even
with trusted companies like Coinbase. For it to come closer to ubiquity, it's
going to need to be trusted companies to help money enter the market and for
it to be used as universally as VISA or Mastercard. Those payment points (Best
Buys, Amazon, etc.) and hard currency exchange points (CoinBase, Gemini, etc.)
are always going to be subject to regulation by local governments, as they
should be.

Trusted points and regulation/taxes doesn't remove the benefits (distributed
nature, smart contracts, and visibility) of a cryptocurrency like Ethereum.
They are going to grow based on big corporate support and adoption. In fact,
it's already happening: [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/bigger-than-bitcoin-
enterpris...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/bigger-than-bitcoin-enterprise-
ethereum-alliance-grows-in-size.html)

~~~
relyio
It is actually surprisingly difficult. I have been trying to open a Coinbase
account for like two weeks. First week I was stuck in a limbo state where my
attempts at adding my visa were stuck (because of a bug on their end - took
them long enough to fix, must be interesting being VP of Operations at
Coinbase). Now, I have finally added it, but it is in a "pending state" and
the verification process is taking too long than it is worth.

How do people do it (buying BTC, or ETH)?

~~~
redm
I have the same problem but imagine the alternatives. One reason it's so bad
the last 2 weeks is the volume. The US exchanges have been hammered. Week to
verify my bank on Coinbase, a week to verify my ID on Gemini.

------
ShannonAlther
Normally I don't like Sam Kriss' writing, and here it's because of the civil
war comparison that just feels ham-fisted — that said, one can appreciate how
"learn to code" is not the universal solution (especially when it's just
thrown out as a conversation-stopper).

~~~
ThomPete
In general learning to code is up there with learning to read and write and
math as it can be applied to almost any area or industry and be used to do
simple scripting to advanced systems development. You dont have to become a
developer but understanding how to "talk with technology" is imo one of the
most important general skills one can learn.

~~~
aswanson
But that's not the subtext of how it's being used when journalist/political
people/noncoders use it. They specifically are saying a vast majority of
people should just learn to program, do it full time, and it will solve all
our economic woes. Computer skills are useful, no doubt. But they are not a
universal panacea for everyone in the workforce. That inspires a new word for
these blurts people mak: Friedmanism, in honor of Tom Friedman of the NYT.

~~~
ThomPete
I think you are wrong. Think coding as in talking with technology, think
technology as a kind of species. Sure my dad wont be able to program a new
plumber but he will be better able to take advantage of many of the benefits
technology offers.

------
Lagged2Death
"Uber for dogs" has been around for a few years.

    
    
        https://wagwalking.com/
    

So it's not just real, it's actually bordering on passé.

Now, does that make the essay sillier or does it make it scarier?

