
The side effects of an unfinished internet - patil215
https://neilpatil.me/2020/02/15/Unfinished-Internet.html
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hinkley
For a few years there we talked and talked about how GDP can’t continue to
grow forever. Or at least not as long as we are a single planet civilization.
Higher growth means higher consumption until everything is gone.

Just as other tech has delayed Peak Oil for decades by finding more, and using
what we find more efficiently, I think virtual goods should be able to reduce
the resource burden of goods and services. Whether that has happened I am not
equipped to say.

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chrisco255
Higher growth does not necessarily mean more materials consumed. For example,
if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon, it likely
wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it would decrease
demand for gas. Likewise if you can increase crop yields, or food produced per
acre, the end result will be less farm land necessary to feed the population.
Productivity is all about doing more with less.

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thaumasiotes
> For example, if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon,
> it likely wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it
> would decrease demand for gas.

This is not true in general. Much higher gas efficiency lowers the amount of
gas that existing uses need. (Sending one cruise ship to the Azores takes less
gas!) That reduced requirement means reduced demand. But it also raises the
value of gas. (One gallon of gas does much more work than it used to!) That
increased value means increased demand. Maybe we should start sending more
cruise ships to the Azores!

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im3w1l
The government could tax it to prevent that.

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pixl97
How many businesses started in what America calls the third world that feed
products and services into the first?

I think this article misses the massive amount of real world growth that has
occurred were Twitter users cant see it.

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basharov
As the author says, you could argue both ways - either that the internet is a
great tool with a net positive effect on people (those who know how to use it
and can ignore the noise) or that we have adopted it so quickly and blindly
that the internet hasn't caught up with humanity, causing these harmful side
effects. Sometimes I think the internet was actually better 15 years ago, all
things considered.

However if we expect it to become our sixth sense, we better a) evolve faster
as a species to increase our bandwidth, and/or b) humanise the internet,
educate ourselves to use it better, and consume information in a more natural
way. Since the former is nowhere near, I'd like to see a Richard Hendricks
appear and introduce Internet 2.0 for humans. But just like the author I don't
know what that "better version" really means, or what it would look like...

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32gbsd
I find it hard to have discussions at a higher level on the internet
([http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2559/](http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2559/)).
Everything is a beginner JavaScript tutorial catered to noobs but it never
goes beyond that because going beyond that noob-stuff is difficult and the
audience is smaller. So I end up digging deeper and deeper into the internet
which wastes more and more of my time. And probably the worse thing about the
new internet is that if you point this out the defenders of internet will
attack you for being negative and looking beyond the curtain of low hanging
fruit which they constantly postulate about. I agree wholeheartedly with the
article but I do not see how it can be fixed. There are just 2 internets and
if you want to be creative you should just avoid the new internet altogether
because it consumes everyone it touches.

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ForHackernews
> This issue [with a recently trendy Javascript framework] was posted 5 months
> ago. why has no one responded?

...

> It would seem to me that no one wants to tackle the hard problems. The
> difficult-physics breaking walls. This is probably why we still do not have
> flying cars or floating cities.

I don't know whether to be impressed or appalled by the rapid extrapolation
from "nobody cares about this React.js rendering glitch" to "this is why we
can't solve Hard Problems in physics."

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sneak
A lot of the new businesses and associated jobs and growth that the Internet
could have enabled have been made illegal, often by people too scared and
short-sighted (or greedy) to envision a world very much different than the one
before the internet.

Just look what happened with Uber, with that broadcast TV re-streaming
service, with internet radio, with online banking and microlending, and
especially with cryptocurrencies, for a few examples. Billions upon billions
of opportunity and new wealth creation strangled in the crib. Pretty much
wherever there is a big new opportunity, there are new heavy-duty restrictions
on what you are allowed to do with this new communications tech.

People don’t give up wealth-creating income streams and associated power in
society without a dirty fight.

Try starting an ISP or a telco to see how much of the promise of the future
has been robbed from us by government overzealous to protect existing greedy
and inefficient businesses.

Even the ones they thought safe to let roam free that wouldn’t affect them,
social media, are now in danger of getting the hammer brought down on them
because it turns out that anyone being able to talk to anyone _is_ insanely
powerful and disruptive, and they’re going to start regulating the kind of
communications you are allowed to have there; either directly via public
policy, or by veiled threats that cause the resulting winners (Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter) to self-censor to be allowed to continue to exist.

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32gbsd
it is often the case with these "new internet" businesses that they are
parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses. offer convenience with
no guarantees and provide no fallback except for the business they feed upon.
if your bread start-up runs out of bread the local baker is your fallback. As
the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who lose
direct business because the start up is more convenient. the local bakers
start to complain which creates a pushback against the startup.

~~~
sneak
> _parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses_

That’s how business works. You aren’t entitled to your customers. Either they
come to you, or they go to someone else. Ultimately, it’s _their choice_.

You say it’s parasitic, but really all it is is customers making a different
choice. The whole concept of the status quo is an abstraction. A customer that
bought from you yesterday is not “your customer”. She may make a different
choice tomorrow.

> _As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who
> lose direct business because the start up is more convenient._

If you aren’t constantly working to make life easier for your customers and
deliver more value, someone else is going to. You can’t just wake up and bake
bread the same way for 30 years and expect it to yield you the same amount of
revenue it did years earlier. The world is changing and people participating
in it need to adapt and grow, or get left behind.

Everyone in a market needs to actively level up or get out of the way of those
who are. It’s always day one.

~~~
32gbsd
That is going to be a hard business strategy for the people doing business in
the real physical world

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ecomgalaxy
Thank you very much sharing a very helpful article and the thing controlled
like boom.

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foobarbecue
"Twitter is magical"?

