I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What
apenwarr concludes is true:
All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.
Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").
There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets.
My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.
The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live.
Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work.
But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.
It's a matter of how much we all have to agree to.
Agreeing to contract law is fine, for example.
It's possible to go too far. If you're going to use force to get people to do things they don't want to, you might be going too far. Naturally, there are such things that aren't tyranny: taxes for example. Even with taxes there are levels of taxation that are tyrannical. For example, a 100% property tax would be tyrannical.
People are going to disagree about where the boundary between tyranny and not-tyranny lies. If you have a very sizeable minority saying "this is tyranny", well, it probably is (but doesn't have to be).
The notion of "using force" to get someone to agree is interesting.
If someone wants to pay me $X for Y. Then you think there's force involved there somewhere? If is X is too large, is that force? If I'm very poor and will accept a really low X, is that force?
As long as you're free to say no, and as long as your poor circumstances aren't caused by the person or entity offering you $X for Y, then no, that's not force.
> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost...
That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor.
It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant.
In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.
Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.
It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.
This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).
> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour)
yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.
whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.
wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.
one more example to drive this home:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."
> people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of
the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".
True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.
While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.
The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.
A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).
> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.
Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.
This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.
What we actually have is representative democracy, where the choice is often nominal, and leaders generally come from the same class in practice (and represent the interests of that class). So the fact that people don't "vote them out" is not an indication that they don't care enough - they might care but not have the choice that would reflect it.
It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.
They can't do whatever they want. They can do more than you'd want them to be able to do, but they can't just take billions of dollars and put them in their own pockets. Company bribes makes every American politician a multi millionaire, sure, but if they could do what they wanted they would be multi billionaires like the rulers of Russia and China.
One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.
Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution
Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.
If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually
I guess you could argue the set of laws is the central authority that produces a two-party system, even though it may not have been intentional. Presumably you could adjust the laws so that other constellations would emerge.
Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.
I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?
No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.
This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.
Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.
Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.
I didn't say you should run society like that. I only provided an example to prove that centralized control is not necessary to enforce rules.
Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.
It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.
Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.
I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.
I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.
Yep there is so much overhead to making things decentralized. Take a look at filecoin sealing. Its a super cool system with a bunch of fun cryptography and math, but generating the proofs requires a lot of time and compute power and adds a whole bunch of restrictions to how you can upload data.
If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.
- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]
- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
Just to make a point, it's fine if something's audience is entirely composed of computer nerds or academics at first. After refinement it can gradually make its way into consumer world; e.g., the internet, the most successful distributed system.
Out of which 12 millions went to the Ethereum foundation. The other 60 millions were given to people who crowdfunded the project (and they did it using BTC). The ETH supply has more or less doubled since now. The Ethereum foundation holds today about 10% of all Ethereum and as far as I know they are "locked" in a smart contract.
One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.
Ethereum Foundation had at most 6 percent of tokens, and today has less than 0.3 percent, because it liquidated the vast majority to fund various software projects that made the Ethereum network possible.
Nope, Holo / Holochain has nothing to do with Ethereum; HOT is just the place-holder token (issued during the ICO used to fund the project, initially, a couple of years ago).
When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?
> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?
Well, if "excited" and "shilling" are synonyms, then maybe! ;)
But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/)
So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel.
Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible.
So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound".
You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny."
I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am.
With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.
> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish.
That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.
2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.
>That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.
Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.
I see it more as idealism vs pragmatism. We need both. I think older people tend to be conservative because they've become jaded by idealists and/or politics in general. To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.
"someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical."
100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.
> it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government
The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.
Liability is a good deterrent in many situations but is far inferior to cooperation. Let's take an extreme example: the death of a child by a irresponsible corporation. Even with generous compensation, the family will not be made whole with the loss of a child's life.
Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.
Why is liability -- which can only kick in after some damage has been done, possibly displacing someone from their home -- a better solution than a process by which dying/dead trees can be compelled to be removed?
This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?
> Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).
Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).
There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).
> FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner
This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.
In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.
Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.
Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.
> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish
WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.
> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.
"That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy."
My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.
"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "
Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.
> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees.
This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees.
I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.
In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.
To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all.
From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making:
> The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance".
As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is:
majority agree
minority disagree...
but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.
In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient.
Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
You can certainly get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, if the premise is that there's no lunch at all until they agree on what to have. There will be some compromising involved, so not everybody might get the dish that is their first choice, but the more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate.
That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by decentralizing, you make that domain smaller - and thus make consensus easier. Federation can be used to replicate this process on as many layers as needed for decentralized organization of larger societies.
Invite people to abandon their preferences and then organize those people so they show the world how many more needs it meets than not doing it. In particular, abandoning preferences allows the need for not to get met more easily.
I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.
Woah cool! Thanks for sharing, this actually reminds me of this quote:
The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx
I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus.
All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.
I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.
Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos.
"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."
This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"
This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws.
Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
It's possible to craft laws that don't explicitly fail to bind one group, but do in practice. Other times, it's more explicit.
A recent example of the former would be some of the voting security laws that have been popular lately. A recent example of the latter would be disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentencing (I think this is no longer the case? God, I hope not. But was not that long ago) and that's just the de jure part—in all cases, the de facto enforcement is what matters.
Historical examples abound, obviously.
[EDIT] another example is mentioned by someone else in this thread, as abortion laws, but it's worth noting why those are an example: the rich never have trouble obtaining abortions, and there's a history of pro-life advocates doing so when they "need" to, for themselves or for family members (I'm sure their case is different, of course eyeroll). In fact a major factor in the Republican legislature of New York passing early abortion rights laws was precisely this disparity, which was that anti-abortion laws in effect only existed for the poor.
"The law" in gp's quote is not referring to codified (abstract) laws, but rather their application in reality. To wit: we refer to police officers as "the law" because they represent, and wield, the law, and in the moment it doesn't matter what the codes say, the living breathing officer ("of the law") takes precedence.
You need to broaden your view from American political culture. Conservatives exist in many different types of governments and many different cultures. This explanation makes no sense.
Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces.
Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:
> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.
The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.
what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now).
i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf
I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overwhelming those who valued the open culture and structure which came before.
Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.
I think it's rather disingenuous to complain about vague and un-named "internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world" in a thread about explicitly enumerated problems that capitalism has directly led to.
The internet didn't become capitalist because socialism is inherently bad. The internet became capitalist be we live in a society run by capitalists and they realized they could exploit it.
Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.
You're conflating Western leftism with liberalism. Wikipedia defines liberalism as "a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law." [1]. Liberals are interested in individual rights and often are opposed to collectivist ideas such as those espoused by state socialists. Your position on global consensus is a more collectivist perspective, not necessarily a liberal perspective.
> We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions.
What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought.
> I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive.
And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond?
You have three basic options:
1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no)
2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink)
3. Force people to say yes
The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.
4. "How about we have a conversation, perhaps if we think about it we can find a compromise that works out for both of us?" Note also that such conversations can even be had that don't involve the disagreeable party (if they're that difficult), but if they are of high enough quality and visibility (such that they can get public momentum) they can change the person's mind based on them seeing which way the wind is blowing.
4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. That only works for up to N parties. You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.
You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.
But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".
> That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.
Very nice!
Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?
And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.
> But you can't solve everything with consensus...
Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.
> ...and you're welcome to play word games...
As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.
> ...but forcing people is not "consent".
Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.
This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).
I agree. I dont think all systems require consensus and its likely most things do not. When it comes to things that optimizes for survival, it is likely we will need consensus to be productive.
Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
I don't think technology has to bring us closer together.
I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want.
I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules.
Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them.
Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.
>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves
Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.
Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.
Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.
The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.
But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
Yes, the original US idea was that of a central government that had very restricted power, and a bunch of states that could reach different decisions within that framework. And that the people being governed had more influence over what the state did than over what the country did, so the state was more responsive to the peoples' needs, wants, and desires.
I would argue that over the years, we have moved away from that. We now have a much more powerful national government, that is more ruler over the states. And I think in doing so, we have gained some things, but we have also lost some things.
I think there is merit to the idea of a multi-level hierarchy, where the higher levels have more restricted areas of power, but are also harder to change. But there's one other piece that's needed: Mobility between lower-level domains. If I don't like what California's doing, I can move to Texas, and we need similar things (hopefully easier than physically moving) in other systems.
>But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely:
>All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast.
Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.
Paul Frazee (of Beaker Browser) had a thread that got some good reach on distributed without consensus (but often some ability to see people break their contracts). Holo did come up. :)
> Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code
As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.
One key observation leading to Holochain, is that the systematic breaking of the assumptions of a "Smart Contract" (the shared DNA code, in Holochain terms) is a valid form of agreement.
If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.
The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.
A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?
> Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital.
most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'.
also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/)
anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/
Is it a hosting marketplace or did they also secretly break the CAP theorem and forget to mention it on the front page?
Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.
> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.
People constantly forget that large multinationals like Amazon are bigger that many countries, are purely authoritarian structures and work as 100% centralized economies.
> Central panning doesn't scale
On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
The problem is that dictatorships (both countries and private companies) exist to benefit those in power. When push comes to shove everybody else is expendable.
Take Walmart as an example. If a country, it would rank 25th economically (above 188 other countries and the likes of Austria, Argentina, Norway, Ireland, and South Africa).[1] Walmartian central planning scales at least that far.
Nobody is claiming the central planning doesn't produce value - i think the language is ambiguous as to the meaning of "doesn't work".
Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages).
Central planning in a communist regime is exactly the same - it enriches the regime, at the expense of the people.
Central planning is the ultimate version of monopoly. It is what happens when a single company owns the entire country and no longer has to compete for anything. It is the only employer and the seller of goods, for every good. They banned the import of other goods, so they are all you get. Also they make the laws, so you can't even protest without having tanks moving you down.
"I really hate these corporate overlords, what can we do to fix it? I know, what about giving the corporate overlords all the power in the entire country? Yeah, that will fix it!"
I don't know about the internal workings of Amazon specifically, but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within: selling their products and services within the company. There's still a market, not everything is determined centrally.
> On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.
China grew much faster after it instituted market reforms. I'm not as familiar with Soviet Russia, but I'd be surprised if it grew faster than similar market-based countries during the same time period.
Sears mostly collapsed because they decided to make their internal departments independent competing companies. The departments acted more in their own interests rather than in the interests of the whole company...
> but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within
The overwhelming majority of companies, including Amazon, does not allow different units, departments or teams to compete with each other by providing the same service.
Essentially each BU or even team is a little monopolist.
Soviet Russia actually had to reintroduce markets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy) to dig itself out of the economic hole caused by the hyper-centralized planning of "military communism".
You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
Amazon has competitors, a central government do not. If the central planning fails to deliver a product then there is nobody there to deliver the product, if that product was food then people starve. This lack of competition is both bad for robustness as I described, and bad for efficiency since it means that people has to get their goods from the government and can't choose to get it somewhere else, so there is no selective pressure to keep the government deliver goods people want. You could say that other countries pressured them via war, but the people couldn't choose to buy American, the competition happened at a way too high level to matter.
Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.
We definitely do broad-strokes central planning in the US and every other developed country with tax system design, social support systems, and industrial policy.
The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.
The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
I think it's more that you need layers. A centrally planned layer of regulation and safety nets that provide a base level to keep things running (and people alive), but without the cost and inefficiency of trying to control everything, and then a more efficient, free market–like layer on top that relies on the lower layer to provide the "free" in "free market".
I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)
How are the current economic agents solving the NP-hard problem of economy? It seems like they are are just as incapable as a computer (assuming the substrate independence of computation).
Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus.
apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.
Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.
I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completely unprofitable if it could get access to freshly printed money every quarter to prop it up. What then happens to all the other businesses who don't get access to that freshly created money? When we have situations like the BoJ owning more than 60% of the Nikkei 225 we really ought to be asking some serious questions about if we really have free markets? We also should be asking some questions about the properties we desire in money itself. If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities we can quickly have a situation whereby an unelected group of bureaucrats can damages the ability of money to be used as a means to convey information. Further there's questions about picking winners and losers that comes up there too. As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be. It seems that these difficult questions really fell out of favor a while ago and as a result things have been drifting in a direction that many people aren't comfortable with.
If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.
You're merely documenting how current regulations are inefficient at catching current abuses. With proper regulations, these kind of abuses could be mostly prevented. With anti-regulation sentiment permeating government and politics right now, this becomes much, much more difficult. People will use the failure of antiquated regulations that need to be updated as justification for removing or kneecapping them, because "clearly they don't work anyway".
All systems trend towards chaos eventually. The answer is always more or better regulation. Sometimes better means more, sometimes better means "take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes". We don't want a rulebook so large no one could ever read all of it (we already have that). We don't want the complexity of the regulations to spiral out of control along with the system -- regulations need to be adapted over time to handle the current (and near future) complexity of the system. And we don't want no regulations -- then the system itself will spiral out of control.
The whole idea of legal precedents works against this too -- the logic is inverted --- instead of constantly coming up with new takes and new rules to govern old and current situations, we hark back to a decision someone made 50 years ago and we say "this is set in stone", when we should be constantly updating and modifying those precedents to better fit the current state of the system. Eventually new laws get passed, but the judicial system itself is largely a damper on progress in this regard, dragging us into the past and making changes that could take 5 years take 50 years. We see this reflected in our astounding incarceration rate, and a number of other areas.
The pace of technological and societal evolution has grown to be much faster than the pace at which we upgrade our regulations. We are speeding towards a brick wall.
Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance.
Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up rivaling anarchy. Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance. Without precedents, every single legal case would turn into a gamble. Only fools and the insane would ever stick their necks out; not far from where we are now, I suppose.
I've been reading about the philosophy of Law, and how other cultures deal with legal codes. One of the most intriguing takeaways was critically examining our own system and just how verbose it is. American (and just about all Western Legal Codes) are extremely detailed and contain tons of clauses that are explicitly enumerated.
Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.
We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is that human behavior is inherently complicated and because legal systems need to account for human behavior there's no getting around the introduction of complexity into the system. There's just a question of where that complexity lives.
Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.
Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.
A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).
So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.
Right, but society has accelerated. 50 and 100 year precedents used to make sense. Now it seems like they need to be updated at least every 10 years, because that's how long it takes for society to fundamentally change at the current rate of progress.
Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructurings that prevent the government from having the bad traits it currently has, or 2) the removal of existing regulations that are preventing the government from being better in your eyes.
If your statement is "I don't like the current state of the government" then you are simply for transforming it into something you do like. This can be done through a regulatory framework.
If you don't trust the government as it is, then you are one more voter for regulating X, Y and Z such that you do trust the government.
There is also a cultural element though. The laws and regulations may encourage corrupt behaviour, but if there was a strong cultural expectation that the most upstanding people go into government to serve their communities - and if that were actually who was attracted to the role - that wouldn't matter all that much.
I'm trying to encourage a discussion about what money itself should be. I think without this discussion it will be very hard to make effective regulations around money and the implications this has on the operations of the banking system. Once people are more informed about these topics better regulation will be possible. Frankly I don't see people talk about the fundamentals of money much, the current monetary system is convenient enough for most people such that they don't have to think about the details of how it works in their day to day lives.
What money is in what sense though? In a centralized/decentralized sense? In a philosophical sense? Are we considering going back to bartering?
My point is, you see companies abusing bailouts and say "oh no, our fundamental concept of money is changing because bailouts". I see that same situation and say "oh no, our regulations are so antiquated that they are 50 years behind in terms of the abuses they are able to prevent, we need to update our regulations and create new ones, and create a framework for rapidly adjusting regulations going forward, because the current rate is untenable."
This problem extends well beyond money and touches every area of society. Society and technology are evolving faster than the legal frameworks that supposedly govern them. Limiting the scope of the discussion to just cover money would do just that, limit the scope of what should be a much wider discussion.
> But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.
The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".
We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).
Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.
Specifically, we need more regulatory coverage coming from a fewer number of regulations. That is the guiding star. More restrictions, more elegant / simpler rules / fewer actual rules.
It’s always refreshing to see a fellow skeptic of legal precedent in the wild. The precedent set by making the just ruling in one specific case may set up far greater injustices in the future.
I'm not sure why you'd take from this that I'm ignoring the role of regulation when I'm commenting on a situation whereby the regulatory framework of central banks allows them to take actions that damage the signaling power of pricing. I most definitely think that banks and central banks must be carefully regulated because they have the special privilege of creating money and with this comes a lot of responsibility.
The other part though is that if money is corrupted it impacts the process of regulation itself. For example creating good regulation to tax companies is made far more difficult when there's fundamental differences between the nature of the money that those companies themselves have access to. I'm sure it would be possible with a large amount of effort to have regulations with non-fungible money but there's challenges there that would be substantially difficult to address and the complexity of that regulation would come with it's own non-zero costs to society.
In simpler terms, for any complaint you come up with, here's a regulation to fix it. Problem solved.
If the problem is a regulation, let's remove or modify that regulation. Problem solved.
If your problem is there are too many regulations, let's get rid of 20 of them and simplify down to just this one. Problem solved.
Oh, that simplification created its own problems? Let's create new regulations covering those three scenarios. Problem solved.
But if we are much slower at creating regulations than we are at creating new situations that require regulation, it creates the perception that regulations don't work, which leads to rapid de-regulation of everything. Our current legal and political framework simply wasn't designed for this. It was designed for 13 small colonies writing paper letters back and forth, where waiting 3 months for a court to make a decision or 1+ years for congress to pass a bill was considered quite timely and fine. We now live in a society where there is probably a need for 2-3 new regulations per day, and 1-2 adjustments to existing regulations, per day, and an AI chat bot that will tell you whether something is legal based on current regulations.
> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be.
Money is not some concrete thing that has some inherent value. It's never been that. It's always been a promise, an abstract thing backed by collective trust.
Fractional reserve banking was not a coup d'etat of an elite few performed to disenfranchise the 99% in order to ballast the 1%. It was a considered decision by rational actors and was necessary to enable economic growth since its introduction.
In many ways it's wonderful that the current generation is questioning the old ways of doing things. This is how progress is made. I'm down. But money, government, everything which is the product of historical trial-and-error is a Chesterson's Fence: you really do need to understand why it's there before you try to rip it out and replace it with something else. And it's just so clear to me that basically nobody trying to replace fiat currency with crypto or whatever actually understands why fiat came to be.
It would seem that the temptation to set the price of everything is increased when there are impediments to setting the interest rate (since this removes an important monetary policy lever). I think this has been seen lately as the zero-lower-bound on nominal interest rates has started to come into play in many places.
> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be.
Yes! This is an incredibly important conversation and this conversation is already happening. You see MMT becoming mainstream. Because MMT is a description of how money works today. That it's a technology (and always has been) for governments to provision themselves.
In fact, I doubt you would have had the stimulus package we had with COVID without that conversation. And it helped millions of people. It also had the unfortunate side affect of growing inequality. We also have the euro, which is, in my opinion a bad implementation of money (central bank without democratic oversight). And of course bitcoin based on the idea of hard currency economics.
One discussion I don't see at the moment is a vision for society without money. That's a discussion the communists had over 150 years ago. It's a serious question because money IS a technology. Is the telephone the best communication technology? No, we moved on from the telephone. We should be asking the same thing about money. Because money is a technology designed around organizing economic activity. But is it the best technology?
Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
People need to have imagination if we are going to survive as a species.
> Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
The whole value of monetary prices is that they're fungible - rather than having to compare the value of things in x different dimensions, you reduce everything to that scalar concept of value.
> In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
On the contrary, having value be a scalar is the solution, because it allows us to make tradeoffs between value and pollution. Cap and trade works (it worked for acid rain); the missing part is the will to actually do it.
All that said, you might be interested in China's "social credit" system - that's the main example I know of this concept of "vector value", because it exists to impose a standard of behaviour on individuals that's not tradeable and fungible.
There are glints, Rainbow Gatherings, for example, are small transitory communities that function entirely without money. There are "intentional communities" that operate (in various ways) without money (althoug usually not without some formal accounting?) And things like Ithaca Hours, a "local currency".
> the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is measured in units of USD say, and the latter is measured in units of kg CO_2(e), say.
Suppose I go to shopping to buy a new CPU. Vendor A offers CPU_A for ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)) while vendor B offers an equivalent product CPU_B for ($198, 50 kg CO_2(e)).
In the current economy, where externalities of global warming caused by market participants are not priced or regulated, I will purchase CPU_B, as it costs me $198, and I save $2 . I choose the product with the additional CO_2(e) footprint of (50 - 15) = 35 kg CO_2(e). The negative impact of that additional 35 kg CO_2(e) pollution is amortized over 8 billion humans [1], so everyone in the world pays the price of an additional 35 kg CO_2(e) / 8 billion = 4.375e-7 grams CO_2(e) per person. Myself as the end-user and the counterparties in the transaction (merchant, distributor, manufacturer, suppliers, etc) get to share in the value generated from the transaction, but most of the 8 billion people in the world do not get a cut of the value or utility, they only pay the cost.
As well as making the prices vectors, it would be necessary to add some other kind of limited resource into the vector-money economy, to constrain individuals from making decisions with large carbon pollution externalities, otherwise we're back to the same situation where we started, but with a lot more bookkeeping that nearly everyone will ignore.
One way to do this could be introduce regulation for a greenhouse gas pollution rationing system: for argument's sake, suppose we allocate each of the 8 billion people in the world an equal quota of kg CO_2(e) / year pollution they are permitted to emit [2]. Suppose there's roughly 40 gigatons of CO_2(e) pollution per year, and roughly 8 billion people in the world. That gives a quota of 5000 tons of CO_2(e) pollution allowance per year per person. Assuming humanity manages to hold the rate of carbon emissions steady and hold population steady, that gives a quota of 5000 kg CO_2(e) per person per year. Each time you purchase a good or a service, the carbon cost is deducted from your personal carbon budget. For efficiency, suppose we also allow carbon quotas to be traded between market participants. Now we have a carbon market where people exchange $ for CO_2(e) carbon emission allowance.
Now, arguably, we can go back to having scalar prices: Instead of the price of CPU_A being the vector ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)), it can be the scalar $200 + carbon_price * 15 kg_CO_2(e) . Similarly for CPU_B .
If we assume a carbon price of around $200 / ton of CO_2(e) , as has been proposed in Canada for ~ 2030, that gives prices of $200 + 15 kg * $ 0.2 / kg = $203 for CPU_A , and a $198 + 50 kg * $0.2 / kg = $208 for CPU_B . So as a selfish individual trying to make choices that are good for me, now I am incentivised to pick CPU_B , which is also (relatively) a better choice for the rest of society.
[1] conservative working assumption that the current generation of 8 billion humans is the last generation, and no new humans are born. if we assume future generations, then there's even more humans to amortize the cost of pollution over.
[2] in the real world, not everyone is going to get an equal carbon quota. we don't have a world-scale regulator able to regulate a world scale problem. as has been demonstrated throughout human history, individuals and groups with more power will use that power to wrangle a better deal for themselves at the expense of others. we're not all in it together, even if it is a problem with a global pollution sink becoming full. e.g. i am an australian, in our country we have a per-capita carbon footprint of around 21,000 kg / CO_2(e) per person per capita. That's over four times higher than the pollution per-capita if everyone in the world polluted an equal amount. No domestic politician is going to get elected running on a platform of "unilaterally reduce everyone's carbon footprint by 75%" - the stakeholders who would benefit most from that are the 99.6% of humanity who live in other countries, and they aren't allowed to vote in Australian domestic elections. Dear reader, if you have read to the end of this rant, please lobby your government to put tariffs on your trading partners until they introduce carbon taxes -- particular us in australia.
Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics? See existing cross-border tariffs for a long list of physical properties which influence tariffs for a perceived and often disputed, social objective.
> Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics?
that's a good point. there's definitely other societal goals that can be nudged toward through prices.
but on another hand, i'm not sure thinking about prices as vectors is that helpful. to change behaviour a regulator needs a way to internalise the external costs into prices, or some equivalent mechanism, and some enforcement mechanism for non-compliance.
but if you have all that, it isn't clear what use price vectors are. and if you only had price vectors but the extra components weren't reflected in the price, with no enforcement mechanism, then they won't change behaviour.
> A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself.
Historically, Western democratic states owned a significant amount of assets as measured as a percent of national income - it was only in the period 1970-2008 that the value of total state-owned assets shrunk to near-zero (or even became negative in some cases). So the large increases in value of states' balance sheets (and corresponding impacts) is not at all unusual. That being said, you're correct to point out that Central Banks heading these trends is a little concerning, mostly because it basically represents democracy outsourcing these important decisions to unelected bureaucrats.
I think there's a massive difference between the government owning things and the central bank owning things for the reasons you mention about accountability.
Exactly. I watched read about 2009 watched the Big Short and watched all these USELESS tech companies thrive on empty promises and venture caps where rich people are basically playing the lottery.
The financial system captured our society a while ago.
I really don’t get why so many smart people come up with every possible theoretical solution and yet they fail to observe that Bitcoin was engineered to solve this exact problem
Bitcoin had design goals in mind to avoid certain downsides of centralized currencies. The cryptocurrency space however lives inside the broader economy and questions about what money is and the regulations around it don't go away just because a specific cryptocurrency thought about some of these aspects in it's design. Even if bitcoin were to solve everyone's problems as some maximalists would claim how do we even implement this? Considering much of the world doesn't have holdings in bitcoin what are we to do? Similarly what do we do about people who don't have the infrastructure to run full nodes? What about dealing with interference with using the cryptocurrency imposed by external actors?
There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
Assuming bitcoin fixes this like the maximalists claim, the way forward is to continue educating people on bitcoin and more importantly what’s wrong with the current monetary system. Way too many people buy into the narrative of bitcoin being harmful for the environment and being an outdated technology (“Blockchain, not bitcoin!”).
Much of the world doesn’t own bitcoin but as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, there’s a way to buy some. The technology’s been working for 12 years now and it can scale just fine, no need to tamper with anything. People don’t need to run full nodes, it’s already decentralized enough. I have one running off a raspberry pi and a 1TB hard drive, but it’s just because I want to and not because I think the additional node is needed for the network. Bitcoin is resilient against external actors by design, maximum decentralization and security. Remember when China finally cracked down on all bitcoin mining in May? The hashrate has recovered by now and China lost almost all of its 50% foothold on global bitcoin mining. The rest of the world’s bitcoin miners thanks China for its contribution.
It seems to me like Bitcoin is dismissed too easily by people who haven’t done enough unbiased research on it. For me, it’s not so much that Bitcoin is such an awesome invention and everyone should worship it like a cult. My question is what happens after fiat currencies collapse? Every single government backed currency has collapsed from hyperinflation in the past, and there’s still a good number of countries with hyper inflating currencies today. Historically, after chaos and war, some people’s debts are flushed away at the expense of everyone else and a new currency is issued by the affected jurisdiction. Do we just want to repeat that cycle when the USD collapses? I think that a free market currency that cannot be controlled by any organization (including governments) deserves more limelight.
* Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves
I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate mission.
But working from home for the past years I feel like I mercenary working among mercenaries. Working with people that have never met and will never meet and for whom work isn't about the mission or the customer. If I get work done early, I now just call it a day. Why bother with ad-hoc testing, documentation, checking in on that new hire, proposing a conference paper, investigating technical debt, etc. It's liberating but it's also depressing.
> If I get work done early, I now just call it a day. Why bother with ad-hoc testing, documentation, checking in on that new hire, proposing a conference paper, investigating technical debt, etc.
Office workers can have this attitude as well. If you'd think poorly of others having this attitude in the office perhaps you should look at your own attitude with remote work.
I have formed bonds through remote work, and yes, they are different, but a lot of the difference you describe is because of you. That's ok, people are different, just don't assume everyone else is the same.
I know. I'm mixed on this, but isn't it ultimate work-life separation?
Getting a little sci-fi here, but imagine not even knowing the names of your coworkers, project, manager, or even employer in the future; the system is so well-designed that you just have to do the little mission and there are communication channels minimally restricted to just the questions you'd have. Once such a system got up and running it would be the closest thing to a genuine "AI" or rather the more general case of an emergent intelligence; emergent since none of the actors are directly cooperating with the other actors, and hypothetically such a system could independently evolve and evolve with nobody at the steering wheel.
For an example of a compartmentalized operation, see CIA, NSA. I'm not saying these organizations are anything like what I described above. Just examples of highly compartmentalized work systems.
> I know. I'm mixed on this, but isn't it ultimate work-life separation?
Work-life separation originally meant that you were done with work at 5PM, didn’t have to worry about staying late or answering e-mails at night, and your weekends were 100% yours.
This latest iteration of work/life separation has gone to an extreme where you’re supposed to suck the life out of work and pretend all of your coworkers are just faceless screen names instead of actual people.
Work/life balance is good.
Sucking the life out of work is not fun, IMO. I’d much rather work with people, collaborate, and build relationships than be reduced to a robot taking tasks from the queue.
This sounds like a corporate/team culture issue with remote work, rather than remote work as a whole. I can still tell when my coworkers are falling behind and check if they need help, as well as building bonds. The bonds certainly aren't as strong as when we used to all go out for lunch or drinks every so often, but they're still there.
I know you didn't personally insult me here, but I hate this comment.
I'm a remote worker and I spend a large chunk of my time every week helping other team members. I'm very, very good at it.
From now on, I'm going to ask everyone about their attitude towards remote work during interviews, and I'll be a hard NO on anyone with the attitude displayed here.
You can have employees who hate remote or you can have remote employees. You can't have both.
Lots of people have that attititude (80%?) - and it is not connected to remote work.
They do just the absolute minimum.
In some ways it is debatable if they arent right. Also: if you are the one who cares in a team of those who dont (which is the usual situation), then you are in a world of pain. Snafu.
I'll go even nerdier. Having implemented raft and paxos many times over (don't ask why, and also don't ask what implementing paxos means, no one really knows) The most efficient distributed systems rely on _not_ having Byzantine faults[1] -- effectively there's a certain amount of trust you need to delegate to the network. The network itself is the substrate in which these algorithms can work efficiently. Short of that you'll need to move to a system that is tolerant to Byzentine faults. The cost of moving there is very expensive transactionally-speaking.
For markets the analogy is the same: a regulatory environment provides the substrate in which an efficient distributed system can rely on to prevent Byzentine faults.
I generally agree with this essay, but I think the listed problems with society misses the mark.
"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination.
"The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening." The gap between rich and poor is not the correct target to optimize. The only problem you can reasonably try to solve is improving the quality of life for the have-nots. World-changing innovation (steam engine, electricity, printing press) always makes a few individuals exorbitantly wealthy, and the world is better off because of it.
presuming from the domain the author is Canadian and so likely this is more a proximal/recency comment on Canadian society, to which I actually do agree it is really changing.
That's fair, but I think focusing on one region over a limited time period can lead to incorrect conclusions. A single country is not a closed system.
The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent.
However, once you widen your lens to a global view, you will see poverty world-wide drastically improved over the same period of time. So the regression of wealth away from the middle class in the US might more accurately be considered as transfer of wealth to the rapidly-industrializing world.
If you are referring to something different that's been happening in Canada, I apologize. I am not very familiar with Canadian history.
> the working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades,
Do you define regression as absolute position or relative position? For example does it matter if Jeff Bezos has 100 Ferraris if the middle class, on average, have .25 more cars per capital than 50 yrs ago?
I would love to put some data behind this discussion because it's long been mixed up as to which case is the ethical one (absolute vs relative growth).
What I mean is a regression of wealth and income relative to the cost of living for most young people (ie pretty much anyone who doesn't work in tech or other STEM field). I don't mean relative to the most wealthy.
I think the Bezos-Ferrari question is a good one. I feel it is personally unethical for Bezos to spend that amount of wealth on luxuries when the resources could alternatively be spent reducing the suffering of others.
However I also think it is impractical and misguided for a state to enact policies with the primary purpose of minimizing the number of Bezos Ferraris or to automatically attribute the lack of cars per capital to Bezos's excess of cars (although in some cases it might be)
this is where somethings get really tricky to measure, and i'm not trying to say i have the best answers.. But this article talks about housing being up and that's tricky because sq ft per person (and quality of each sq ft) is way up, I'm sure there is a similar story about health care costing more but also having better outcomes?
I admit it's a difficult thing to measure and to discuss, but I also do think that the tide is rising, but being creatures who's feel good brain chemicals are related to relative outcomes (see the primates w/ cucumber vs grapes studies), we're also feeling a bad feeling because we see others doing better to a greater extent than we are...
Yeah, I see the point. My only good argument against trying to optimize relative outcomes is that it isn't practical to try to do so.
To talk about the difficulties of implementing true socialism would be beating a dead horse, I think. But even if we could remove wealth inequality completely, people would still find ways to feel better or worse than others (sports, looks, social skills, intelligence, etc.). My high school in the suburbs was fairly homogenous from a socioeconomic standpoint, but that microcosm seemed more hierarchical than any other point in life.
I also would expect the good-or-bad feelings people get by making comparisons are more-or-less ordinal in nature, so I think people would manage to feel just as bad about small wealth differences (keeping up with the Jones's) if there were no more billionaires.
I would argue it does matter. Not to say that absolute position doesn't matter, it does, and probably even more so, but relative position has some very real effects.
The main one that jumps out for me is power, and influence. As an example, it doesn't really matter if I can donate $100 to the EFF instead of $50 when a billionaire can outspend me 1,000,000:1 without even flinching.
I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on.
When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It's just more more! now now! to survive. So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
To me, what's wrong with the world is that people are ok with being wealthy. They're ok with rising to positions of power and then denying empowerment to others. They're ok with the law not being applied equally and fairly to everyone.
They haven't realized that inequity affects themselves in another life, that violence against others hurts themselves, that destroying the planet this century leaves no planet for their next life.
I can't prove any of this, but I know it's true, because I'm here now, just like you.
Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs.
Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?
Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respect to the evolution of groups and cultures (meta groups).
>> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur?
One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point.
There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.
Ok. How exactly would you implement that? How can we get there from where we are now? What are the incentives? Why would people do that? What happens to people that don't do that?
> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?
Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity.
Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boomer with a printing press is doing. You have to worry about a government that runs with the emotion of a Millenial and the depth of understanding of a TikToker, making that affect your personal freedom, your wealth, and your life. I'm talking about the US in this case, but it's really a mess everywhere. No country has good governance at this point in time.
By all means, wealth is nice to have, but there is a function between increasing wealth and increasing time spent preserving it. At a certain point of wealth you realize that the most valuable things cannot be bought, and it becomes a chore rather than a source of comfort. We are also clearly bad at preserving wealth, otherwise Mesopotamia would be the richest place on the planet.
Being rid of wealth can be extremely freeing, but the communities that see it this way also play by completely different rules than society does at large. You don't see a lot of religious being held up as successes by the current global standards for example.
This has problem been rolling around in my head and where I’ve landed is that humans are terrible administrators, mainly because we get bored administering something after it’s built.
We see it in software development all the time. People are less interested in maintaining code they’ve inherited and are more interested in building their own.
I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. We’re creative optimistic creatures. We prefer green field because when we’re working on it, we feel great imagining the possibilities. When it’s older, “played out”, and to the point where we feel it’s something that’s to be administered, there’s less possibilities and we get bored. Time to try something else.
Everywhere you look, this pattern is present. We love building stuff. We don’t love administering stuff.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I've been wary of wealth for so long that I've internalized that feeling, so I forgot to phrase it more like "people are ok with being wealthy while others are poor".
I could never be a billionaire or even a millionaire, and then walk around and not see the countless people suffering all around me, and around the world.
Now, I imagine many of them feel that they are making a positive contribution to the world by employing people, creating products that help people, making charitable donations, etc.
But that stuff stems from the ego. I believe that true wealth is in divine things like the love between a parent and child. Stuff that doesn't cost money.
This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies. Science and technology's greatest failure is that there's still scarcity. A contrived scarcity now, that keeps people working so hard and distracted that they never get a chance to catch a breath and question the system. Just so that a chosen few can suckle on the priceless time of the poor, using them as human chattel.
> This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built
In addition to my above recommendations you might also want to investigate your ideologies. It seems to me your view of the world and how it works, as presented here in your comments, is from a woefully low resolution representation of the extraordinary detail that goes into society and economic systems.
> around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies.
No. Not at all, in any way shape or form. You'll probably want to investigate, as well, human psychology, neurology, and the history of civilization. But start with the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
There isn't any scientific explanation for "incarnation", let alone "reincarnation". There is still no explanation for how a chemical reaction controlled by persuasive spirals results in "experience", is there?
Anyways: I accept Kant's argument for the evaluation of philosophical maxims ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
... and it seems that one can adopt any maxim as guidance for one's behaviour, so I choose to take as a maxim:
There is only one "subject" of reality, and that subject seems to be experiencing itself via this particular meatsack known as "me". Anything "I" can do to improve that experience via another meatsack known as "somebody else" is worth doing, because it is the very same "subject" experiencing that act. "Karma" means "action", because any action taken is experienced through another be-ing.
The truth of this is irrelevant, in the "will that it should become a universal law" sense: if everyone acted in this way, seeing each and every being as another aspect of their self, then we surely would all have fewer problems. That's how the categorial imperative applies.
To resort to argument by authority, there's always this:
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." — Carl Sagan
I don't always (or even most of the time) follow this, because I'm not sure that the "universal law" makes sense when surrounded by self-centred automatons, so I resort to an even higher authority, Douglas Adams:
Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. Well, that's where it all falls down, of course.
I am often inspired by eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism, but I've not been able to grasp the whole reincarnation things.
It is certainly true that the atoms that make up your body have been transformed from the atoms around you (the food you eat, for example) into what you call "my body". And they will not remain as "your body" forever. Hell, I think the majority of cells in your body do not even carry your DNA.
Same with your habits, with many of the thoughts we think. Would you be exactly the same person if you were born in a completely different culture?
Perhaps the point in talking about reincarnation is not to figure out "how it works", but taking a holistic view beyond the perceived boundaries of "self". Much of eastern philosophy appears to be, at least to me.
I’m aware that it’s pretty whack, but my pet argument for reincarnation is this: you used not not exist. Then, at some point in time, you transitioned into existing. When you die, you’ll go back to not existing again (if that’s what you believe). If reincarnation is just a matter of coming into being from non-existence, then the fact that you exist is an evidence that it’s possible. Obviously there’s many holes in this argument (to start with, is every incarnation a probabilistically independent event?), but hey, what good’s freedom of religion if you can’t make up your own mind about things you can’t possibly know right?
I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term. It's not a bad idea to use tools like this, especially since all attempts so far to design a "science of morality" have been bloody, catastrophic failures.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
At first glance things like this can sound good. However, religious ideologies like this are always double edged swords. In India, their caste system is heavily reinforced by the believe that people in a lower caste were "bad people" in a past life, and so there are no reservations about subjugating or otherwise discriminating against them.
This _always_ tends to happen to _every_ spiritual law scheme eventually, under different cultures. If a religion has enough followers, people have used its (seemingly good natured) ideology to kill and discriminate against those they don't like. This is the nature of humanity, I doubt there is any possible spiritual teachings that wouldn't eventually fall into this trap.
Your causation is backwards. People who feel like discriminating find a rationalization for their beliefs post hoc. Yes religious ideologies have been used to justify racism, but so to has there been "scientific racism" with with all its babbling on about skull sizes. If it weren't science or religion then it would be something else. The underlying issue is some people are bastards.
> I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is the only and ultimate final authority. It really is not a bad assumption. There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition.
> but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
No it is not, science functions perfectly fine for complex processes. We can describe and draw actionable conclusions from the behaviours of fluids and gases even though they are made up of inconceivably complex interactions of billions of quantum effects.
We could easily model most of human behaviour if we really wanted to. It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain from it. We make do with observing humans in the wild, and the observations we make sometimes have enough significance to make weak statements about human behaviours.
If the belief in reincarnation could be used as a moral tool to help people think long term, that should be scientifically demonstrable if it's true. It would be a hard ethical argument though, as you're basically trading a persons ability to make correct judgements of their own safety and well-being for a larger "long term" better functioning society. Not saying it's definitely wrong, but it better lead to a much better world for it to be worth it.
> Science is the only and ultimate final authority
Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.
I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.
Sure, it's a great method for understanding causal relationships in the world. It's also a method that humans invented, and it's not proven that some future invented method could not provide as much insight into the world as the scientific method. Calling it the ultimate authority and saying that "here literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition" is hard to defend IMO. Science gets its authority from consensus, right now we all agree that science should be granted authority! But it is clearly lacking as an all encompassing tool for understanding: How does the scientific method teach morality? It's not clear that it even can.
That it's the ultimate authority doesn't mean you should always believe it. It's just the best we've got. It's the best thing about science is that it's explicit about the bounds of what we know and don't know.
You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision.
Regardless if there was junk science in the early 1900s (don't know much about it but wouldn't be surprised), it was people who decided to sterilize people. Just as it's people who decide to kill people for Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever excuse they come up with.
Even if the science were true, and some subset of Americans is less intelligent or more violent or whatever, it still wouldn't change the fact that now we've decided that eugenics is unethical. We embrace diversity because that's what aligns to our values. Maybe if we're in the middle of famine and war our values will shift again. The authority of science has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.
So science as I view/understand it, is the effort to extract knowledge from the observable universe through experiments, observations and logic. If I compare science to religion, this is where I see the difference: In the church you have the clergy, who preach their understanding of the religion, and you have the basis of the religion, usually a book. To the religious the book or some idea from the book is the foundation, and the clergy are the guides. Similarly in science you have the scientists who do the actual science, and the foundation is observations of the universe. The faith I have and my dogma, is in believing the scientists, that is the part where I can have doubt and where I might be corrected in my beliefs, and the foundation is the actual universe which as far as I have been able to tell is consistent with itself so far. It's a bit of a cop out, because any time someone says "oh but these scientists were wrong", then I will go "ok yeah but those were junk science" and move on with my merry life.
> We've got to repress those urges of curiosity to appease glorious science
No, it's to appease our desire to live in a society that aligns with our morality. If you'd read the religious books for what they are and respect them for their interpretation of what it means to be a kind and loving human being, instead of using them as tools to manipulate the minds of the unwashed masses into behaving as a cohesive unit, then maybe you'd understand.
I believe the parent understood more than you are giving them credit for. You don't think you're being too dogmatic when you replace one authority (scripture) for another (science) while retaining the exact same language?
The content of science, the body of knowledge, by definition, not supposed to be based on authority. Authority means that exactly the same counterfactual statement is considered either right or wrong based on whether the speaker of that statement has authority.
Science is currently not ultimate or final because is it is changing. For science to be ultimate and final, it would mean that tomorrow's science is the same as today's science. Nothing new or different can follow that which is ultimate.
However, we need to assert social authority in order to defend a discourse against the fallacies like "argument from authority" or other unproductive disruptions.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
I find this highly offensive. The people must be lied to so they can do the thing that's best for them, because they can't come to this conclusion in a way that doesn't involve lieing.
I read it as taking a spiritual route to arrive at something like original position, which you can certainly get to by more secular means. (Rawls did, after all.)
For me, reincarnation means that there is always an observer. Regardless of our mental state, whether we're awake or asleep, intoxicated, locked in a sensory deprivation tank, etc, we're still observing our lives.
What happens when we die? I believe that our consciousness finds a way to continue somewhere else. There's no gap, because not being conscious is a non-sequitur. We just fade out and fade in seamlessly, across time, without our memories, like tuning into a new TV station.
I think that self-awareness stems from source consciousness, which is a universal force like gravity. At the most basic level, it's God experiencing itself through every possible contextual reality. Because what else is there to do? We explain it as emergent behavior arising from stochastic processes, but that's from an individual mindset. As a whole, our consciousnesses act more like waves interacting with one another and resonating at frequencies we feel subjectively as harmony and discord.
There are a number of basic operations that science could use to "prove" that reincarnation exists. We could merge and split minds, pause minds and unpause them, turn parts of them on and off, play minds at different speeds, put them in simulations, etc. Aliens probably have access to technology like this, and these ideas have been explored a ton in sci fi. But at the end of the day, would knowing the truth give us any more satisfaction than say, recreational drugs like psychedelics? I'm just not sure.
This wavy-stochastic-quantum aspect of reality may seem far-fetched, except it's looking like the wave equations that underpin quantum mechanics are nothing special, and in fact can be simulated classically on ordinary computers:
This lends a lot of credibility to the idea that reality is a simulation. And that we can (and probably are) interacting with our reality in macro ways that follow similar math to the micro. This New Age - quantum connection always seemed pretty out there to me, but now I'm having trouble finding a better model for reality.
One way to look at consciousness/life that I find interesting is as a quantum influencer. Life may direct probabilities around it to work in its favor. Reincarnation has a lot in common with multiverse theory. As in, if the observer always exists, then it exists no matter how improbable it is to exist. In other words, when an individual is born, a universe may get created for it. When it dies, it may go on living in its own reality in a separate universe, we just can't be with it anymore. ESP experiments suggest that life may influence "real" probability from quantum random number generators, choosing the reality most beneficial to life. So Schrödinger's cat may always be alive from its perspective, even if it dies from ours, although these experiments may be inherently impossible to replicate:
My favorite takeaway from all of this is that if we are all one, drawn from the same source consciousness, then each of our beliefs are no more or less valid than anyone else's. We can choose to see the miracle of life and the magic in each moment.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, this is just the best working theory that I've found so far.
We humans are gene making machines. We like to pretend we are superior and full owners of our choices, that we are above animalistic tendencies, that we are special and not like the others, but... couldn't be further from the truth. We are different, but not that different. Gene making still drives our behavior, whether we see it or not. And in more ways than most people imagine.
Why are people ok with being wealthy? Because having access to resources means more chances that your genes will be passed on - based on how it used to be in nomadic times. Maybe now that doesn't apply as much, but genes don't know it. For all our limbic brain and genes know, we're all still cavemen hunting, fighting for resources, foraging, etc. So yes, people will be ok with being wealthy.
Why is there no limit of wealth where people who have it say "ok that's enough, I don't need another one billion dollars"? Why do people keep hoarding absurdly until infinity? Because our genes are not used to infinity. It used to be that "the more the better". Famine would come. Let's save up as much as possible, let's get as many nuts as possible. There never was infinity of resources. We are not built to get it. This is what people need to understand about rich people that seem insane (besides possible trauma that drives other parts of their behavior). This is just how we are programmed.
Why is there so much political corruption and people stomp on top of each other to get more power? Why is it that morality seems to be such a fallible reason for people to act? Same. Exact. Reason. Evolutionary advantage based on millennia old hardware. If you kill my genes, yours go on, and mine don't. If you have more power, you have more access to resources. More chance of survival.
Asking someone to use their higher intellect and go against their instincts in favor of morality is often really hard. All of these are instincts. And unless we change humans' genetic code, or we somehow with AI merging change our intellect, we will continue being this way. We are the same guys that would burn witches, and chant "kill kill kill!" in gladiator coliseums. Just now the way we burn witches and chant that is different. More "sophisticated".
Not the parent commenter, but Thank you fellow Internet stranger.
With people speculating about re-incarnation and linking it with Quantum stuff (basically pulling things out of their cloaca), I had to scroll way far down to see your direct, logical and sensible reply.
Having lived (and born into) all my life amongst followers of an eastern religion, I've observed that religious texts in my region of the world that specifically talk about re-incarnation attempt to 'make us go against our own instincts' (somewhat analogous to Puritanism).
It's a clever way to make you 'regret your misdeeds' in past lives and be 'hopeful' about future lives (assuming you perform good deeds and don't rock the boat)-- if you learn to believe it. Call it Chicken Soup for the Primitive Soul.
Has all that attempt to promote 'Love thy neighbor, selflessness and self-actualization' from these religious texts been successful ? Mostly No. If anything, humans have used these same religious texts to rationalize their agenda of 'Hate thy neighbor, selfishness and materialism' covertly - Who would've guessed a several millenia old human genes would handily defeat a few thousand year old advice+propaganda disseminated in the form of these religious texts.
Anyone reading this might think I'm only bashing religious texts but as long as someone who cares to casually read any of those texts would realize - If you ignore the miracles & non-tangible stuff (propaganda) like immortality, re-incarnation, teleportation et al, these religious texts does include several down-to-earth advice for humans living in those eras - simple things like - living in the present moment, keeping a calm mind and eating a nutritious diet - stuff that seems so obvious now but is perhaps more relevant in the 21st century
I like to think of it as a dark tunnel with light at the end. Helps me bear with the depression. But somedays it just feels imposssible to see the light, I gotta agree.
Not the author - but I can relate - for me most depressing is the fact that most people that I will ever meet in my life will or have already choosen (or it was chooses for them by others) a random set o high level assumptions about the life, the universe and everthing and will treat them as revealed truth.
And they will never allow anyone to disect them because it will as per quote from my old friend "destroy the meaning of life".
And by all means - I sincerlly believe we should all set our own meaning for life, just never forget that every one of us is probably wrong.
> So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
> To me, what's wrong with the world is [...]
What if the world is not wrong at all? What if we're failing? That's how humanity learns, by failing. Sometimes by failing big time.
I think it's human nature to resist change for the large part, except for when the benefits of changing clearly outweigh the benefits of not changing. If that's true, then a large failure in any context is the breeding ground for change.
I presume you’ve read The Egg. I work with some folks who, like me, love it and we have adopted an “Eggist” mindset. Do unto others as you would (and will!) do unto your future self ;)
All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.
It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.
I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different.
I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.
I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.
I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is:
1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good. As underdogs, we can't afford to out-hire the banks, so the only way forward is to be more effective on a smaller manpower budget--which probably means leaning on crowd-sourced solutions mediated by software.
It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
I get where defi is coming from, and the regulations are onerous, but also those regulations were hard-fought for, and came about on the backs of real problems for real people, often by being exploited by people most accurately described as conmen. Caveat emptor, sure, but on the way from "investing your play money" to someone close to retirement's 401k, there's a much bigger pitfall.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
I truly don’t think DeFi is, at its heart, anti-regulation. I do think a lot of early proponents are armchair anarchists, but that’s just the scene. I think it’s anti corruption/abuse of power by institutions too large to fail—often due to lack of meaningful regulatory political power, across the board. (You’ll probably easily find people playing with web3 dns also advocating for personal data regulations, for example.)
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
Right, so wouldn't it be nice if they were using an L2 sub-chain (a bank) that rolled up transactions so that this transaction could have been flagged and rejected. The need for these intermediaries to help the general public not get fucked is clear. The existing tech just kinda sucks. There's a world where the root chain is objective and transparent and distributed but where for most any practical application people interface with the chain at layer 2 and subject to any sort of social restraints and regulations they want to put in place.
For tall the clamoring about the issues with Big Tech or Big Government, some HNers seem all too willing to sign over essentially everything important just because it's more convenient when those powers have a backdoor to right wrongs.
Folks very quickly forget that regulations are written in blood.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
These people likely do not know of the lives destroyed by the wildcat banking era of the mid-1800's in the United States, which is what DeFi seems to become.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
The historical consensus behind this idea is not there. Here's [1] a good example of some scholarly dissent. I'm pretty sure the truth is more complicated than advocates of the "Wildcat Banks evil" idea keep parroting.
Not all regulations are written in blood, and not all regulations have their intended effect.
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Correct that was the whole point of my post. Regulations need to be constantly rethought. The positions of "regulation good" or "regulation bad" are just too simple to be practical.
I agree with a lot of this. A lot of techies are used to software and customer environments where vendors and customers work together for shared success. Finance is not that sort of space. Much of it is fundamentally zero-sum and adversarial. It needs a different style of oversight than SAAS.
> Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
Oh yeah, it's not that the new kids on the block need to be better than the old guard on all dimensions, but if we're really going to switch (rather than just having the disruptors as the occasional mistress), the switch has to be worth it. This is why I don't worry that crypto is going to release some kind of monster that can't be put back in its cage.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
If the entire platform (gmail, etc) is funded by ads, then removing the ads destroys the platform. In that space, advertising is a necessary evil, and the best we can do it try to make it less onerous.
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely.
And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
Advertising clearly wont "go die in a fire", no matter how frictionless the payments are. There was a conversation on hacker news just a few days ago about 'smart' TVs all getting ads, spying on the user, etc.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
Frictionless payments are a relatively small part of it. The bigger part is figuring out who needs to be paid for what.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
The reason you can't fork it is because the copyright owner wants to maintain control. That means that the content will never be on a blockchain even if we see the 8+ orders of magnitude efficiency improvements which would be needed to do so and when you've built the systems which would be necessary to hold and authorize access you don't get anything except expense and support burden from a blockchain.
Oh, my point was that we can and already have (ok, a DHT is not a blockchain, but it's the same sort of deal). I pay for Prime for the shipping, so I could stream it, but I still torrent the content because it's just more convenient to have the file.
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Before internet advertising everyone was concerned with newspapers being all ads, subway ads, billboards, naming stadiums, ads on buses, flyers being put everywhere, mail advertising plus everything you see on tv.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a month. If the transaction costs are close enough to nil to make that worthwhile for everyone involved, that's a different web than we've grown up with, with 30-cent per-transaction fees being the industry standard for credit cards.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
We've already had actually nil transaction costs for micropayments to eliminate ads offered by Google and... nobody used it. If advertising is driving facebook/twitter/youtube/etc to prioritize content that angers people then micropayments to support some small blogger isn't what is needed. Instead, what is needed is for facebook/twitter/youtube etc to operate on micropayments.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
Micropayments are an interesting topic. I don't want to pay 5 cents per article I read, I'd much rather pay $10 a month for unlimited articles, even if I end up paying more than I would with the first scheme just because with the first one, I make a decision to spend money with every click. I know there are projects trying to streamline this, but it really should be as close to the UX of the latter as possible, pay a set amount and never think about how many things I can read.
I've been using Blendle for a long time now, and one interesting thing that I've noticed is that it doesn't make me think hard about the decision to spend money every time I read some article, even though that's technically what it is.
How many people even say they want micropayments? It seems like a relatively niche position even in my circles — most people seem relatively happy with the idea that their monthly costs are fixed and they don't need to think about how much it'll cost to open a link.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
Perhaps even more relevantly, how would any sort of decentralization help when the issue is an excessively unregulated market simply moving to the logical conclusion of its evolution?
I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.
I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.
Here is another version of that story, as told by Idries Shah. He attributes it to the Middle Eastern Mulla Nasrudin figure, and gives it a metaphysical interpretation.
What you describe reminds me of the (phenomenally successful) work of Douglas Englebart. He described his motivation as something similar to what you have, but of course with a more optimistic perspective.
I usually refer to the streetlight effect as the statisticians' error, or the economist's error---those being two major fields where the data you can get may only be a very poor proxy for the problem.
I think a better framing would be that the way to force society to fix itself is to use software to demonstrate how things could be different.
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
> That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks?
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
Processing data IS what thinking is. This literally what Turing intended to do: Find a way to automate thinking.
And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
Transparent to everyone able to read the code, perhaps. Those poor souls who have not learned to program in whatever defi language is hip this month will just have to accept that they will have no say in governance, nor even be able to discern what is happening and why. Bureaucracy is bad enough when it's made out of humans, let alone when you have unfeeling machines executing a (possibly buggy) script.
The point is that you CAN see the execution; wether you spend the time to learn to understand is your perogative. If you don't, you rely on experts, just like today. But unlike today, these experts can be independent of the process they explain.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
I don't think you can aggregate all of society's changes into a single "worse" or "better" metric. It's like trying to decide if cheese is a better food than apples.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
And even more confusing, the positive and negative impacts are quite likely to be second or third order phenomena. Managing unintended consequences of complex systems is no easy task, even in hindsight.
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down.
> Things are better than ever for all progressive issues.
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Our forests are growing, wetlands protected and lakes cleaned up. We've done a great job cleaning up some of the heavy industry and part of that is exporting those jobs to clean. China has a massive pollution issue but things in the western world have been getting cleaner. More new species are being found than we lose. Our ability to save a population has increased not to mention the possible of bringing back species might exist.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
Or is it getting worse because of how the software is used? I will grant that some software seems to only be usable in weaponized ways (e.g., biometric identification at scale), but something like Facebook could be used for _good_ purposes (connecting people) if it weren’t driven by the wrong metrics (e.g., advertising, surveillance, etc.).
I think there’s a nuance here in the sense that progress happens both inside the established system and outside it - grassroots campaigns, protests, local initiatives, etc. I think the key issue is that it seems like so many smart people are looking to solve things from the outside rather than involve themselves with the current system, and we need to move that pendulum back quite a bit.
I'd argue that all the things you are listing are also on the inside of the system. There's certainly an element of rebellion to protests for example, but it's also a consolation price. Elon Musk doesn't have to protest, neither does Jeff Bozos. They just call up their preferred politician and the system dances for them. Protests are an opium fed to the disenfranchised masses to keep them from fundamentally changing the system. It's the last pressure valve. Kept just out of reach so that people won't use it, but highlighted to make sure that you aren't allowed to change the system without first doing it.
I think the system is whack, and that's the reason people don't want to fight it. They've given up.
Grassroots campaigns and protests let you change the small stuff around the edges. The system provides you with just enough knobs to play with to keep you oblivious to all the ones you can't.
Occupy had a chance to maybe actually change something. Then one night, all the significant leaders were disappeared and nobody ever heard about it again, really.
and perhaps more frustrating to smart people looking to do good realize they are just one person. Huge, structural changes to society involve everyone.
This feeling of frustration is familiar. What helped me was shifting the way I approached the problem. Rather than tasking myself with manipulating social structures directly, I've found joy in teaching others to recognize the structures, recognize the processes by which their reality is maintained, and formulate tools to expose their weaknesses and dismantle them. Ideas spread like seeds in the wind. Our collective mental soil is so ready to accept them.
This is a strategy commonly known as "Dual Power" among the left, as named by Lenin. The far left have obviously thought a lot about how to change social systems and, if you are interested in doing so, there is a lot of good theory in their literature as some have thought very deeply about it.
There is so much out there that I really think it's best to find what works well for you, like something written in a style you could get into. Some punk anarchist type stuff might read cool and edgy or sound whiney to you, whereas reading original Lenin or Bakunin might sound dry or maybe you like the old timey aesthetic. Personally, I'd recommend Murray Bookchin's ideas of Social Ecology. They came out of an attempt to apply a more scientific approach to the problem of how to change society as a whole, including taking into account our lived and natural environment and the looming natural catastrophes. Bookchin tries to adopt the "best" parts of all the leftist ideologies and combine them into a framework for an ideology that can adapt with the times and with new understandings as they arise from each attempt at change.
Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.
With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".
So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.
(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)
Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason?
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
Having health care tied to employment is a corporate interest. Corporations need workers and everyone needs health care, so by making health care come chained to employment it keeps workers stuck in their jobs.
I think it's naive to call politicians stupid. It's clear it's the incentives, particularly the health insurance industry that blocks any effort for universal healthcare; and in the American system it's too easy for one senator to completely stonewall any legislation. For example, it was Joe Lieberman, a senate in Obama's own party, the completely gutted many of the socialized aspects of Obamacare.
It was one politician who blocked a full national health service back in the 70s despite bipartisan support for it - IIRC he used his position as ranking member on the Ways & Means committee to stonewall the whole thing. American political parties are probably some of the weakest in the world, they have almost zero ability to control what their members do or even who their members are.
Health insurance is what holds back universal health care, along with hospitals themselves. Both of them are incentivized to raise costs for consumers.
Johnathan Metzl explores it a bit in his book Dying of Whiteness[0]. Here's an example of something he described in an interview[1] about the book and his other work:
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
You lost the word “universal” in “universal healthcare” in the comment you’re replying to. There are many ways racism impedes the push for universal healthcare. One is the classic fact that it is a welfare program, and that spurs the comments and thoughts about welfare queens and “young bucks.”
When I hear "welfare queen," I think of a black woman. Because I'm racist (sadly).
From that, the racist idea that free services (e.g. universal healthcare) are unduly exploited by black people (or immigrants).
Reagan pretty much popularized the terms ("welfare queen", "strapping young bucks") with racist intent[1]: those were the images he wished to conjure-up in listener's minds, and not a creation of the media. Just as the word "thug" is currently used by certain personalities/networks today.
I didn’t say it was a creation of the Media. I said they use it that way. It’s good to trace it back to Reagan.
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
You write as if one's passive racism and one's past exposure to racist sentiments are entirely separate. I think the former largely reflects the latter.
I don’t think they are entirely separate. I do think that exposure to racist sentiments has a very different effect depending on who you are.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
Not OP, but I assume the argument is something to the tune of: healthcare should be universal to make progress, universal healthcare would disproportionally benefit the poor, the poor are disproportionally of color.
I interpret the events as Obama did pass the Heritage foundation version and it passed because it was more acceptable than any public option let alone universal healthcare.
I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)...
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
I mostly agree with you but there are certain useful functions. It’s an optional service the state provides to many many* people with negligible transaction fee, as with, for example, maintaining the roads, air traffic control, or food safety. Those things help you even if you never leave your home or never fly.
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
> It’s an optional service the state provides to many many*
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
> or some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government?
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
I think the difficulty is that for the vast majority of American history, marriages weren't really performed without any religious connotation. Hell, even legally, from what I understand, there was a time where marriages _had_ to be performed by a clergyman of some kind. Now, you're right, the religious association is technically optional, but it's worth remembering that for a very, very long time, marriage was as much a religious agreement as it was contractual.
There was once a time (and still some places) when religion played a role in regulating other aspects of society, like dietary regulations. Nobody says "keep religion out of my kitchen" when the local health department insists that you don't cross contaminate other foods with utensils used on raw meat.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
Got married in the '00s in the US and IIRC in that state it was still the case that, to be valid, you had to have an ordained minister or certain officials (a judge) sign the paper.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
No contract can contradict the law, so marriage is not unique there. Employment and purchasing are examples of other contract areas governed by shifting laws, that can be changed without any of the parties renegotiating terms.
Still, this is not different than other contracts. Negotiability is not an essential element of any other contract. Nor can other contracts contradict law.
But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses. I get that government, via the courts, has involvement when there's a dispute, but it's not like two companies wanting a contractural relationship have to file the contract with the government when it's created.
That's note quite true; the entire framework for those contracts is set (regulated) but the jurisdiction they are in. It's also why companies have lawyers on staff and/or retainer.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
Regulation is a different matter. Two companies can work under a non-legal contract for years - until there's a dispute, then the courts get involved and those regulations are enforced.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
Sure they do, in that the framework for writing those contracts is guided by the governments guidelines for what constitutes a valid contract. Just because a government isn't micromanaging the process doesn't mean it isn't "regulated".
> But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
Sure, there are regulated processes around some types of contracts. There are regulations about what's legal to put in a contract, but here's no government employee who shows up to the meeting to make sure it's all perfectly legal. You certainly can form a non-legal contract. The government may never become aware until there's a dispute and it goes to court.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
I'm with the McGuffin on this: Marriage existed long before Christianity, so if anyone gets to give up the word, it's the religionists. Or, heck, let's be generous and let them keep using the term, provided they use it with a qualifier: "Religious marriage", or something. As long as everybody knows that's not what actually counts for anything in the real world... But the word "marriage" in itself is part of language just like any other word, and there's no sensible reason to let the religionists co-opt even some small part of that.
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
That sounds politically dumber. "Marriage" has been normalized for centuries/millennia but now you think you can just quickly normalize another term before we solve this equal rights thing? You know, just a quick errand before we restore equal rights: change the prevailing culture and change definitions throughout a complex set of laws.
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
I'm just trying to be pragmatic that one side doesnt seem to be willing to cede any ground, we could just simply move the fight elsewhere.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
Yeah I'm saying it's not pragmatic, it's the opposite of pragmatic. Of course people want governmental recognition, many hetero married couples want it and already rely on it. Gay couples also want equal rights on top of that. They want both.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I think what seems really off is just that we've legislated a single concrete version of something instead of it's abstraction (a person capable of making good choices). It makes sense to give people a way to indicate they intend to give a person legal rights, but it doesn't make sense to imply (by the concrete choice of "marriage") that it's basically going to be a person that you're having sex with, or monogamous with, or that they're of a certain set of sexual pairings (ie heterosexual)... And before you suggest it's not about monogamy, see that in many states have laws around adultery and fault/no-fault divorce...
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
The people who fought gay marriage argued that expanding the institution to include same sex pairings would demean what they consider sacred and what they think all of their countrymen should consider sacred too. A common meme was "next you'll be saying we can marry X" with the clear implication that we should not be able to just marry X.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
i think somewhere along the conversation i either misrepresented myself or you missed something though...
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
> i think somewhere along the conversation i either misrepresented myself or you missed something though...
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
> I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate.
I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.")
I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.
I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.
Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
> I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.
I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.
Cash transactions, by definition, are pretty much always in-person. Thus, the risk of fraud or "significantly not as described" goods are significantly reduced. On the contrary, the modern world depends on being able to transact remotely.
Even then, there is still recourse if you pay for something with cash and the thing you buy ends up being non-functional (e.g. small claims court). And since the transaction was in person it's less likely you have no idea who the seller is.
Maybe it's just me, but we all place an awful lot of trust giving vendors essentially all credit card details possible AND where we live so that they're capable of skimming a self defined sum off by themselves. It's like an inherently insane system. We're supposed to be the one wiring the cash, not the vendor themselves with our data.
Because your contract here is with the subscription service, not the bank.
Just as you can’t cancel your brothers subscriptions, the subscription service has no reason to accept a cancellation request from your bank.
Even if the service was no longer able to charge your card, you would still owe the money. The debt you incurred monthly is separate from your choice of how to pay that debt.
By that notion, the fact that almost all home locks are easily pickable and glass windows breakable is also insane. There's tons of valuables behind almost all of these!
We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing theft, which turns out to be largely sufficient even in face of fallible security. The exact same applies to card data in the hands of merchants.
Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts believe in it.
The fact is that we can and do find ways around flaws in a system. Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
Credit card issuers and processors only grant merchant accounts to vendors who have shown themselves trustworthy. While the system isn't perfect it works pretty well. If a vendor has many charge backs then they will be subject to higher fees and then account termination.
> none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system
I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
Breton Woods and Visa/Mastercard were top level designs... But they were designed to make money. (For the US and Visa/Mastercard respectively.) Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
> Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
This is a really good point.
There are some kinda exceptions[1] now and then, but there are many reasons why they tend to not work (not short term profitable being one of the main ones). Despite that, it seems we're pretty short even on good ideas lately, like our culture has lost the ability to dream big about positive things (we're excellent at doomsday dreaming, especially about our political outgroup members).
> Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.
I second what the other guy said: this is an interesting point. But I'd also second the point about not knowing their intent (more with Bretton Woods than Visa/Mastercard; the latter is obviously fair enough). Also, I think it's telling that you left out Dodd-Frank when making that point, because it pretty clearly undercuts it.
The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed.
Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo.
When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.
a legacy codebase can be structurally resistant to being fixed.
you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs.
no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
This captures the backwards compatibility and long range entangled dependencies aspect of change resistance. It misses the aspect of organizations that is agent like, capable of homeostasis. Unlike static code, when things change, such systems will actively seek policies and apply levers of control to maintain the present equilibrium.
Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
in a vacuum yes, the legacy system doesn't have any of those agent-driven issues. given enough time and freedom from interference, you can incrementally fix it or rewrite the whole thing from scratch. but if you leave out the context of users and management, it doesn't really matter how you choose to fix it or whether you do at all.
in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects, you have other teams mad because they are triaging a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor, and you have management wondering why the fuck you have spent multiple months working on stuff that has no clear connection to a marketable feature. you might also have a couple of seniors/principals who actively oppose your efforts because they benefit from being the only people who really understand the mess you are trying to clean up. and of course, all of that messy people stuff is probably a large part of why the system is so tangled up to begin with.
I certainly don't think political systems are exactly like computer systems, but it seems like a lot of the high-level lessons are applicable to both.
> in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects...a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor
That's what I meant to capture by agreeing there is overlap in terms of backwards compatibility and entangled dependencies.
The difference is entrenched social systems have greater agency that goes beyond change induced instability and into being able to actively predict and favorably mold their environment.
> Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
>Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
Almost always. Re-implementing all the existing functionality from scratch will take much longer than you think or estimate. And attempting to remove/defer implementation of any will cause friction with business that rely on it.
There is a reason why we haven't replaced Excel/Word with google sheets/docs. It's true that most people only use about 60% of any software but everyone relies on a different set of 60%.
> The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL . . .
It just isn't! It really isn't. It is the way it is for good and historically motivated reasons. Can you elucidate those things? If you don't understand the rationale for the system as it exists, you can't propose an alternative that has any chance of success.
>The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed.
The key point here then is that the engineers and maintainers of that original (legacy) system probably did not properly take scalability and structure into consideration. Maybe the system was pre-SDLC, which is an important consideration, but each system is usually a different case, and some tech is often labeled as "legacy" because it's simply not part of a "bright and shiny new money-making solution" marketing plan... ehem.
It's important to not create the same issues in redevelopment, and reducing complexity is a key step in ensuring future compatibility.
Some systems are not as "legacy" as others. This is also a vital point to the discussion.
Most clients aren't concerned with overall cost and lifetime of service on solutions from what I've observed; Most clients are people working towards raises and their retirement and just concerned about not exceeding their max budget and not generating embarrassment for themselves or for their company.
This is why one of the first questions I ask of my customers is how long they intend for the system to be in service for.
There are several factors of why a proper solutions architect is necessary throughout the development process of major and mission-critical systems, but too many PMs decide to just use the tech stack a team agrees upon, or what's cobbled together and patched to work, or what worked as an MVP during early demos.
We suffer from environmental factors, because budgets are under-cut, deadlines are always too short, and because people only care enough to prevent their own headaches. This does not meet a mark for vital systems though. As we ignorantly rush towards more and more software dependent operations, the failures will become more and more amplified in all aspects (cost, loss, recoverability, technical debt... you name it).
Keeping everything as simple as possible is now, and always has been, the better ideal.
Any process inscribed in the technology is part of a larger business process, and as such is also resistant to such change. You can do refactoring all you want, which by definition means not changing inputs and outputs. But you can't change the process without looping in business. And then it becomes about making a business case for spending the money and time and training and etc to make a change to the business process.
The "legacy financial system" exists in the way it does for specific reasons. Do you understand those reasons? It's a Chesterfields Fence situation: unless you can elucidate those things, you're not qualified to propose an alternative.
Working in finance myself, I totally agree with you on the regulators lint. Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority - not only from the outright criminals but also the slightly evil financial services companies (see the Wonga and payday loans debacle in the UK).
Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.
> Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority
I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results:
> Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.
I think you're missing a key point that because of the 2008 crisis the regulations were updated. Bank reserves are higher now than pre-2008. So in fact this is basically like the OP said, regulators regularly mess up, and then update the regulation.
I agree that it's similar to a hard fork (and has similar problems), but would argue that (due to the "interdisciplinary" nature of fintech) it's not incompetence or laziness but rather the blind spot/hubris of being a technical person looking at a social system.
An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.
Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.
I half agree. Yes I do think you have a bunch of technologists self-indulgently trying to apply the next shiny thing where bettering the world is second priority. However, I think changing the system from inside is largely a fool’s errand. There are indeed proven methods for political change. Unions, protest, organizing, these things. They’re unsexy and boring and tedious, much like you’ve described, but these do work.
This is why I generally only interview for jobs that are seeking work within my tech stack, or projects which haven't yet formed into a developed solution.
I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
Union membership is down drastically over 50 years which is why it isn’t accomplishing much. If you do an image search for ‘union membership wealth inequality’ you’ll find a graph of union membership imposed with a graph of income going to the top 10%. It’s incredibly negatively correlated.
> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom
Three years ago I bought an apartment.
I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly.
In the end, all of the following was guaranteed:
- I had the money
- money was transfered into the other person's account
- I was not a scammer
- that person wasn't a scammer
- I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address)
(a bunch of other stuff)
So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
All of those guarantees are under threat of legal punishment enforced through court systems.
All of those guarantees are given to you based on good standing with various institutions. The bank, the intermediary, the seller.
If you were a person who was not in good standing with a bank, but you still had the money, could you have completed the transaction?
Technology has a trend of destroying middleman industries, as they don't provide value and take a portion of the proceeds for themselves.
DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders. Does that mean this process is smooth? or ready for mass adoption? Not necessarily, but the destruction of banks by technology is inevitable. It's just a matter of when
If I'm a person who has money but is in bad standing with the banks, maybe I shouldn't be able to do financial transactions at all. It's that, or I'm imagining the wrong reasons why a person with money would have trouble with banks.
Could you get more specific about the reasons or the definition of a financial transaction? Not being able to do financial transactions seems like a slow-motion death sentence.
Totally agree, as long as the reasons the banks have are valid.
The problem is that that decision is made by people. Standards of conduct are not universal. What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
It is I think vastly better for people to make those decisions than for them to be made by smart contract. The institutions we discuss now are at their core social systems.
Even within crypto/defi, it's still people making the decisions. People wrote the algorithms. The only advantage I see there is that, in theory, you should be able to see what rules are encoded in that algorithm, so it's slightly more transparent in that sense.
On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
> Even within crypto/defi, it's still people making the decisions. People wrote the algorithms. The only advantage I see there is that, in theory, you should be able to see what rules are encoded in that algorithm, so it's slightly more transparent in that sense.
Agreed. People still create the system, but they have zero to little sway in each individual transaction. So, the system can be biased, but with increased transparency, that should become apparent.
> On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
> In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
At least in the US, this is not the case for payment processors. Banks may be under more strict regulation. Visa/Mastercard can revoke the ability for anyone to process transactions on their network, even if the activity is completely legal. E.G. OnlyFans/Pornhub recently.
> > On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
Could you elaborate how you think this problem will be fixed for mainstream adoption?
I wish I could. If I knew how, I would be implementing this as fast as humanly possible. The first person to fix this problem will make $1 billion, easy
That's nice and I hope it works out for them, given how difficult it can be to get physical objects properly tracked in a digital system when the people responsible for entering data into the system can be corrupt. But getting the third world digitized is the very opposite of the "very interesting innovation" that everyone else in this thread keeps referring to; it is just making some thing that already exists again. That is not innovation, that is an incremental improvement at best.
For those of us living in prosperous Western countries (and let's not kid ourselves, that is at least 90% of HN), the biggest attraction of cryptocurrencies seems to be "if you buy this, it might be worth more in the future". Which is nice, but hardly innovative.
If you wake up one day and find that your society is disintegrating with that speed, you're going to need food, water, ammo - all of which are tradeable - and a good support network - not a bunch of fake computer monopoly money tokens.
You don't wake up into a disintegrating society, you wake up into a society that's a little worse every day for decades. See: other highly developed countries that are no longer considered highly developed.
How does it improve the process in a disintegrating third world country right now? Lay it out, which steps in the process does it improve or replace? Do you know anyone who's utilized it that way, or are there case studies?
That is an exceptionally well designed purchase process. In my case, I had to go through 3-4 months of wrangling banks and other paperwork. I still don't understand my mortgage contract fully. I just hope it doesn't have any "surprises" in it.
Unfortunately very few people live in a democratic country with the rule of law like Sweden. For the rest, crypto can be a good place to keep their funds without the fear of losing.
The overwhelming majority of people live in countries with representative government and functioning legal systems. Yes, the US and Russia and China and India and Brazil all meet this description. Why do you believe otherwise?
The "kingdom" as you say it, involves instutions AND people that depend on it, if only, by habit, but also by trust. Be these habit and trust be misplaced or not is not much relevant: a new system just does not have a hint of these either just because it's new.
You make a good point about software development in general, but I don't think it applies to things as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto. Sometimes system _do_ have to be completely re-thought from the ground up. I don't believe it's possible for our current financial systems to morph into an open network for storing and transmitting value (the internet of money as some call crypto).
Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite.
I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
Interestingly enough, between 1933 and 1975, it was a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins.
I agree that gold and Bitcoin have some very key similarities, but gold and crypto in general are quite different. With regards to Bitcoin, yes they're both stores of value, but Bitcoin has the added ability to transact globally and be much more divisible. Bitcoin seems to have settled into two roles within the greater crypto ecosystem; store of value and reserve currency for the entire crypto economy. Now there are also things happening in the Bitcoin payments space using lightening, but I don't think there will ever be a large appetite for payments using a deflationary currency (It's your savings account, not your checking account).
But outside of Bitcoin there is a ton of cool stuff happening in the DeFi space which could have big implications for our financial systems. One example is stablecoins which has a much better chance of being used in payment systems than a store of value like Bitcoin. In general I don't see this stuff replacing the financial system so much as finance companies slowly adopting crypto on the backend. Just like companies adopted internet technology as it allowed them to run more efficiently.
Crypto blockchains are a technical boondoggle in a financial system that already has trusted institutions. The whole costly & complex system of blockchain transactions is designed to simulate trust without authorities, I don't see any technical reason why it would be more efficient than a simple encrypted packet + an optimized database that a regulated institution can implement when it doesn't need to simulate trust. Even Proof of Stake is totally unnecessary in a regulated financial system.
You'll still end up in the room regardless. Most governments are pretty interested in people who carry large amounts of gold through borders! They might make you forfeit that gold if they don't like your answers, or if you have too much.
Cryptocurrency's digital nature makes it much more useful than gold. It can be stored like gold in a vault, but it can also be transmitted over the internet like a bank transfer. It's pretty incredible stuff.
Not totally disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but we haven't had a gold standard for awhile now, and that’s the problem. Lifting fiat off gold lets institutions play games with fiat to increase their fiat with the appearance of being a good steward of fiat. This is what people don’t trust.
You're right, but it's because we made the conscious decision to not have a totally-open playing field after seeing how it went.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.
I don't think crypto will replace the financial systems we have or that we should burn down what's already there. I think the way it will play out is that it will increasingly get used on the backend of the legacy financial system. So the front end will appear similar to the consumer with the same usability and protections they're used to, while the backend will be settling transaction using a variety of crypto networks. The consumer will then have the option of using the centralized front ends or communicating directly with the decentralized crypto protocols.
The point makes sense since a lot of the complexity of the current financial system isn't because of the money, it's because of the /people./
The complexity comes from the rules enacted to shield people from bad actors, and that's just going to be re-applied to crypto in some way shape or form.
Well of course there's no way to prove it now. Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? You have to be open minded and extrapolate from the principles of the new system and its interactions with society at large to _guess_ how impactful it may be. I believe the fundamental principles of crypto (open, permissionless, decentralized, global, neutral, etc.) make it highly likely to revolutionize finance.
> This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort.
It isn't if you cared to at least read the link I provided
As to your use cases. First the obvious ones:
- event tickets. Have literally zero need for blockchain. NFTs are scam, and nothing but scam. All the fictional properties ascribed to ticketing via NFTs I've covered in my to responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
- synthetic assets, decentralized asset exchange, decentralized prediction markets. Require neither bitcoin, nor blockchains nor crypto. Used almost exclusively for trading fictional tokens, scams, and pretending it's innovation.
The less obvious ones:
- sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
"Let's convert our value into a fictional token that has no value outside the fictional world, and can't be used for anything but buying other digital tokens".
Buy food? Oh, you have to convert it to real money (because no one in the world, especially not in the world where government sucks, accepts these fictional tokens). Or if someone does accept it, oops, random transaction fees just doubled your cost.
Buy actual physical assets? "When your government sucks", people prefer dollars and euro to fictional tokens.
- permissionless payments
This is a very tiny part that is arguably useful, but it comes with a plethora of issues that make them unusable for wide adoption. Among them, reversibility, enforcement.
All of these are as interesting as working at a bank or at a stock exchange (and those can be significanty more interesting due to amount of data they process).
Unless, of course, you're interested in outright scams like NFT. Yup, those are "interesting".
I've worked, and still work, on large legacy codebases on a daily basis and I couldn't agree more that total rewrite is not the solution in most cases and a waste of time and money.
But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting.
Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.
This strikes me as one of the pivotal responsibilities of a lead developer. It isn't just about pushing new features as fast as possible, but about ensuring the entire development stack is (as much as one can be) a pleasure to work on and in.
Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive.
Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
Even considering the occasional refactor, it's still a lot less costly over time than this new throw-away microservices economy in many cases.
First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life.
The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness.
The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors.
Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.
You're totally right, but this mentality doesn't totally invalidate the concept of DeFi. Like the state of DeFi today functions alongside the systems of today-- it's utility isn't contingent on burning the entire system to the ground.
If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days.
Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.
But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the internet, it's powerful because the base layers are neutral, allowing for the free flow of information.
This DeFi thing is big, large, involves money, teh future; is probably bubbly. There's not a lot to understand IMO. It's a wave of emotions wrapped into "tech". It's wise to treat it like a ~thing and see how it evolves.
There's so much probabilities that I cannot help but see more dreams than reality so far. Even if some things manage to deliver .. who knows how it will evolve. Look at facebook, juggernaut, unstoppable.. already rotting. Then it's economy/finance tied.. there will be a lot of forces at play and few people that know who will influence the market more. Hence my message above.
I think you're probably right, however, it also seems like there's been value in those hard forks simply because we get to experiment with alternate ways to build the system. Often, it seems like the original project will take the best ideas from the fork and integrate them; those are ideas that might not have been created otherwise.
And you must ask: who is really driving the public debate to throw out centralized banks?
I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it.
There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?
>These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>, or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.
An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort.
Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.
> They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system.
You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence.
Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking.
It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it.
Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction.
It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life.
PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not
There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin.
I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often.
Considerations for a rewrite:
1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem;
2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and
3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag.
It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point.
> And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play.
I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").
> It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe.
It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.
>the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within
Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems).
In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.
Thinking deeply about the system and finding the changes you can apply with minimal disruption and maximal impact is the opposite of what the GP is talking about.
It's true that rewriting everything is not always the right answer and that fixing existing systems is underrated. However, there are very few instances in history of systems being indefinitely fixed and upgraded. Most societies were not gradually improved and reformed forever: eventually they fell and were replaced with new societies. The same is true of technology and companies: most technology is eventually completely replaced with newer, better technology that is inspired by earlier technology but that is still new. The cool thing about DeFi is that it has built-in ways of upgrading itself. In traditional systems, upgrades are more centralized and have a single point of failure: once that point of failure (eg the developer/maintainer) stops upgrading, the system dies.
>All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not...
>so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>
Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better.
In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today.
I find one exception to what you're saying. If you had a large role in building that legacy code base you are carrying around all the tech debt and repairs in your head. And if you're mindful of that, you can rebuild guided by what you have learned from the ground up and it will work. See John CarMmack's increasingly awesome series of 3D engines he wrote over the years.
But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on
To be fair, this argument is only valid when targeting people from outside of the areas of expertise / niches involved:
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system
The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.
Of course. And it's often the same people. Or at least the same kinds of people.
None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders.
As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous.
If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.
I agree but it's one of these crazy sounding ideas that could actually have a use case. Like the author says these are just distributed systems and 'decentralized' 'web3' is really just a sophisticated way of coming to agreement. I think there's a lot that people can build with tech like this, but it's no silver bullet.
Separate from the validity of your take, it shouldn’t surprise you.
People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.
This is why I’m bullish on Chia. Their philosophy is quite plainly: operate within the existing regulatory framework and existing social ground rules (i.e. as a traditional capitalist institution beholden to the SEC) to provide and be the steward of a better backend and tools for doing (as the article asserts) the fundamentally distributed operation of processing payments and supporting markets. There’s a pre-farm that supports the company, they’re going to make a lot of money for their investors (which you can participate in too if you want). That’s nothing new and so be it. That’s the world we live in.
It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia.
We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal.
If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.
I think Google has proven that you can change the system, dramatically. I am never going to try fixing an antiquated, broken software system. Just let it burn.
I think your point is stronger than you worded it, by saying junior developers, as the observation holds for developers period, when faced with a mess.
Then you're listening to the wrong people. The world's currencies are being weaponized against other countries and against citizens. It's a project decades in the making. You may not feel part of that yet, but if you express any opinion in public you may.
Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations.
There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
These are not new developments, and diplomacy has always been war by other means, including using currency as a weapon of war against external and internal enemies. Currency has always been a system of control and has frequently been weaponised in the past, it has certainly always been a tool of the ruling class.
To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain.
You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.
What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough:
- We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so.
- One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how new (human-designed) systems affect society. And that's not for lack of trying - economics, sociology, psychology - they are just insanely hard because people always lie, keep changing and are so damn inventive.
"To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so."
While I agree that it's not obvious our current systems will continue to work, I don't think the system is born out of luck. The system is largely based on trial and error in the pursuit of what the majority wants. Yes, there are those with outsized influences and corruption at every level. However, if we look at history, we are moving slowly towards what we all want.
Luck was not what created the current system, but luck was what left it working for so long. This idea is of course not new, it's the essence of "ages of discord" etc.
It's fascinating to me that some commenters react to this essay saying it's "profoundly insightful" when my first reaction was it's very vague and fully of major inconsistencies.
Here is just one example: he opens his argument calling Western societies a "systemic train wreck" and yet concludes toward the end: "As a society, we are so much richer, so much luckier, than we have ever been"
Which is it? Are we a trainwreck or are we rich & lucky?
Yeah, this is what I'm not understanding as well. Like the reason I'm happy with people trying out all sorts of weird DeFi experiments now is because we've tried different regulations for literally hundreds of years now and it hasn't led to anything better. Why not try to fundamentally reinvent stuff? It might be a train wreck, but we already have that right now. And what if it's not?
In practice, any distributed system that doesn't have an explicit hierarchy evolves to have an implicit hierarchy, because economies of scale and network effects favor the increasing concentration of resources and connectivity, respectively. The OP is right about that.
In any distributed system, those nodes that by luck or skill become more cost-efficient and inter-connected tend to become even more cost-efficient and inter-connected, because all other nodes want to connect via the most cost-efficient, most inter-connected nodes.
This dynamic is self-reinforcing. We are all familiar with it.
Without some form of regulation (historically centralized, and always imperfect), distributed systems like market-driven economies, modern financial markets, and information networks evolve to have growing inequality of resources and connectivity over time.
This happens with teams of humans as well. Without a formal leader, teams will naturally have one (or more) leaders emerge.
The ideal team doesn’t need leadership and consists of mostly self-sufficient members, but the de jure leader merely exists at that point to ensure some tyrant doesn’t come to power. Since this isn’t very time consuming, they are free to do other work haha.
The essay linked in the article is absolutely spot on when talking about the dynamics of groups with formalised structures vs those that are decentralised, it's well worth a read.
You know what makes a distributed system work? Failure.
Now and again, nature arranges for a catastrophe. An asteroid, too much oxygen, lignin building up, nature has cleaned up after and built on top of the rubble.
Over the last 20-odd years, we didn't let a real economic catastrophe happen. There are millions of people working the wrong job. Loads of people have a made a ton of money providing nothing useful at all. Without a periodic shakeup, the bullshit merchants take over the economy. People who talk a good game but are never held to account. Who is swimming naked? There is too much money to know.
Part of the reason is centralization. Unfortunately, we don't really have 200-odd governments. A lot of them think the same way about the issues that matter, and a very small group influence all the others.
what about the costs to global economic catastrophes outside of money? the livelihoods of millions are ruined, families slip into needless poverty, and people die. if those are the costs, I don't think just letting things "work themselves out" is worth it
Catastrophes are smaller if you let them happen now and again. And localized. And you will have planned for them, because the population isn't conditioned to think the government will bail them out.
It takes roughly about one generation for a population to get conditioned to think the government will bail them out. One great depression and the majority of that generation will make it their goal to get a government in place that will "bail" them out. It's humans being humans. There is no technology or legal or society you can build that won't degenerate in that way or get wholesale replaced because they are all built and used by humans.
How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value? How many other institutions in the US are tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of 300 million people and do it for less?
It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in this article to get to the real work of helping to solve these problems.
M1 is the sum of currency held by the public (i.e., currency outside the Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions); traveler's checks of non-bank issuers; and transaction deposits at depository institutions.
The M1 Money Supply was $3.964 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted). Of that, $1.705 trillion was currency and the rest of the amount was deposits.
The M2 Money Supply includes M1 along with savings accounts, money market accounts, money market funds, and time deposits under $100,000. It does not include IRA or Keogh retirement accounts. $9.769 trillion was in savings accounts; $1.003 trillion was in money markets; $591 billion was time deposits; and the rest was M1.
M2 was $15.327 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted).
By the end of 2021, the federal government had $28.43 Trillion dollars in federal debt.
To answer your question: “How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value?”
I’d say not spending almost 2x the money supply would be a sign of better value.
One start is to download the budgets and spending bills of your country and others and see if you can balance the budget. The exercise of balancing the budget makes a good project for macroeconomics classes. I had to do it for my final macroeconomics project.
"We are not doing the rework.
We are chasing rainbows.
We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation."
Really enjoyable article, and I love the way the author uses his networking experience to inform his understanding of the world.
The issue or possibility that the author misses, IMO, is that the lack or rework and general degradation, etc is BY DESIGN. The fail is coming and that is planned for.
I personally think that there are a parasitic elite, that harvest the energy and wealth from countries and situations, and have done so for centuries. We think in terms of months and years, but they think in terms of centuries. Eg Technocracy Inc was formed in the 1930s and even shared the same building as IBM.
The overarching idea here, is that Western society crashes somewhat, the lead is passed to China, and in reverse, we import their totalitarian infrastructure. We will be monitored everywhere, our governments will go, but (UN) technocrats will step in to micromanage our lives (water use, electricity use, travel, etc). The trick is to make us want that. And things will get so bad, that most of us will!
And that is the reason that we have ready excuses - such as never-ending viral or climate events, that somehow convince us to hand over authority in just the way that technocrats have always dreamed of, for example with bio-ids being required to do one's shopping or travel.
except it's not? the UN has like zero real authority over anything, and even since the pandemic started there have been hordes of people resisting the most basic of government asks like wearing a mask in public places - I don't think the technocrats will be micromanaging anyone anytime soon
It's worth considering whether the premise actually holds.
* Yeah, there's a feeling of malaise, but if you look at e.g. surveys of trust in government (Pew, OECD, etc.), it's a fairly slow decline over decades and the end point is that most people are still fairly okay with how government, education, media, the judiciary etc. are run in many democratic countries and if you look at overall happiness (Eurostat etc.) then that seems to be fairly stable or even going up a little bit.
* Most artists do get little reward for all the benefit they provide, but we can't have everyone be artists so there has to be some way to disincentivize people from becoming an artist, no?
* Big banks and big governments suck, fine, but compared to what standard or compared to what point in time?
* The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening. OK, that one's probably true.
* Software stacks keep getting more bloated, but in exchange programming has gotten a lot easier, which seems like a wonderful trade-off.
* Governments like the European Union are absurdly complex, but overall it seems to have been a net boon to the countries that have joined it: travel is easier, paying is easier, your rights as a consumer are better protected than ever, etc.
* App Stores are pretty great for most people, even though 30% is a bit absurd.
* The Bay Area is not the world.
There's probably a lot about modern society that needs solving, but the first step has to be to think really long and hard about precisely what does suck, why it sucks, whether it can be better.
> we can't have everyone be artists so there has to be some way
Why not? The online attention economy is apparently worth trillions , why shouldn't creators be rewarded? Attracting the attention of other people is work even though it is all captured by BigTech Inc. We have automated so much of the workforce that it makes a lot of sense that being an 'artist' should be a job that more and more people will do.
Yea I find it hard to believe there has ever been a better time to be alive than now. Obviously we've got a long way to go, but things have been continuously getting better overall, not worse.
I mean...based on what? We have more stuff, that's for sure. Our healthcare (when we can afford it) and nutrition is probably better and more consistent. Are we any happier? I'm not sure.
I honestly believe that if you remove social media from the equation, there is zero doubt that modern life makes you happier. There are so many awesome things you can do nowadays with modern tech, you have practically unlimited entertainment. But now you also have on-demand comparison, and as they say, comparison is the thief of joy. The sooner society realizes that social media is the REAL thing that is making people unhappy, the better.
"...you have practically unlimited entertainment."
This is a tangent, but I feel like I enjoyed things more when I didn't have practically unlimited entertainment. Video games before the digital era with Xbox Game Pass, PSNow / PSPlus, etc were limited to a few games that you bought and really invested in. Videos before streaming where you were limited to what was sitting in Blockbuster or in your physical collection. Music was limited to what the radio was playing (which you had no control over) or what you had in your tape/CD collection. Because physical media was something of an investment, it sort of led to a sort of 'automatic curation' that's much harder with having just about every game, movie, tv show, and album at your fingertips.
Maybe it's an age thing, but now I have 'back catalogs' for all of this stuff, and there's a constant feeling of 'missing out' if you choose one thing from your unlimited supply over another thing. It's exhausting.
Ignoring the first couple questionable true-isms, a lot of these bullet points are just choices the author locked themselves into. The author is painting a picture in which AWS is the internet, or somehow representative of pricing.
I don't have half of these problems. I have run services for $6,000/year on bare metal servers that would have cost $240,000/year on AWS at the time.
Likely the author is unwilling to make another compromise, because they already weighed their options and arrived at these which are the least bad thing they could choose; or maybe they just don't even see there are other options.
replace AWS with <cloud provider> and every bullet point is still True.
Every website (the Internet) needs to be hosted. If not on a cloud provider, you are going to have to host it yourself, which is a ton of more work and more points of failure. For cloud providers, point of failure occurs if you don't pay them. When you are hosting yourself, there are tons of points of failure (electricity, maintenance, etc.)
> replace AWS with <cloud provider> and every bullet point is still True.
No they're not. AWS is pretty much the most expensive, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more - especially for egress traffic.
> For cloud providers, point of failure occurs if you don't pay them.
"It's in the cloud" doesn't mean you don't have to think about reliability, redundancy, and backups. AWS, GCP etc all had outages.
All points of failure are exactly the same vs. buying bare-metal. In the case of "the cloud" they're just partly managed by other people.
But yes, as I said, there are choices with trade-offs. Overall I'm unsure what you're trying to tell me with your comment. Is your argument that not choosing the cloud isn't really an option? I have not chosen AWS for a decade and saved a seven figure sum in the process (just for my private projects - 500TB monthly egress alone already would be expensive).
It’s not really all that much more work. More like people who don’t know how to cook talking about how unreasonable making dinner instead of ordering it would be. Honestly the biggest benefit about the cloud is actually just hiding the details of how much things cost so that management can’t pinch pennies when it comes to the fine grained cost of operating tech and doesn’t have to spend the time making reports about it.
There are plenty of hosting options out there that just provide you with bare metal hardware and take care of the lower level maintenance.
Seriously where do all these people come from who think society is worse today that it was a few decades before. It's not. There has never been an opportunity for so many people at various levels. Artists have it the best now in the internet era where they have various streams to monetize their work. Case in point is Spotify. Ofcourse Spotify and other providers are going to make money off artists. But without them most artists worth their salt would stay poor.
If you don't see and appreciate the huge progress made across the world in social life and quality, you have been living under the rock.
the author recognizes and appreciates the successes we've had, but his point is that while things aren't as good as they could be using crypto instead of organizing and doing "the work" is not going to solve things. if nothing else because you'll end up with the same centralized control at some point or suffer while the system tries to self correct (if it even could). it is all a distributed system already so making another system, with higher built in costs, does not solve the problem.
It's inverse survivorship bias. The past looks great because we only remember and preserve the good things. The present looks like shit because the shit is still around.
I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2 and the widespread notion that the common American deserved to share in the post-war prosperity (that they had earned by fighting a world war!). That idea was so popular and widespread that it actually happened. But it took a World War to get to that point. I hope something will happen to walk back the concentration of power that has accumulated over the last 50 years or so, but my feeble mind can't quite imagine what that thing will be.
You've answered your own question. It is going to be a war.
War is a great mallet which destroys most of the power structures and shuffles the cards a bit. But the price to pay is atrociously high. After the war everyone will swear "Never again!", but their children's children have no idea what that means, and have no problem going to war all over again.
I think that the elites of the various countries have too much in common at this point to allow a war to happen. They would sooner team up and move to Elysium and abandon all the rest of us on earth than allow for global destruction. I think this is the future TBH, the wealthy will more and more take things into their own hands a la superyachts, NZ properties, fortified compounds, etc. The middle classes and below will face the unwelcome prospect of gradually decaying social institutions and economies until society eventually just breaks, and the wealthy wait it out then come in to sweep up the ashes, ushering in a new, far less populated golden age of humanity.
This possible outcome has occurred to me before, but it's hard to imagine a breaking of society which doesn't include the hunting-down of at least some of the rich. I don't know how they could truly escape the downfall.
Yeah I guess. I hope not. I wonder throughout history, has there ever been a "ruling class" which starts to see that unless they cede a significant amount of power, there will be a war, and they will lose it, and thus they proactively decide to cede a sufficient amount of said power? I guess that's more or less the dream scenario. Cause then things get a lot better without a war. But they wouldn't even let Bernie Sanders get elected president. So it seems like we're pretty far off from such a scenario.
Bernie lost because he got less votes and supports in the primary, twice. "Dem party leaders" were against him but the voters decided. My vote in the primary went to him, but it wasn't "secret them" who stopped him, it was voters. "Many party leaders" were against Trump but he won the first time bc he got more votes.
The Gilded Age was generally regarded to have ended about 1900. If you mean the term more broadly and less generally, it still ended in 1929, with the Depression, not with the war.
Its the worst of times, its the best of times. The digital revolution (or whatever this is) has degenerated into a bizarre mix of speculative frenzy, unprecedented concentration of control on a background of complete disregard for societal impact. Phoneyness and false representations abound - there are no repercussions. The "market" applauds.
Its time to go back to the roots of computing. Reinvent what the digital age means. Imbue it with soul and values in an inalienable way. 100% human-centric. Augmenting human ability, augmenting human society. There is enormous value in that. Not manufactured Ponzi value. Real value. Improving our lot. Solving the real problems of sustainability, persistent inequality, debilitating ignorance and suffering.
If you have talent now is the time to change the world. You know its not utopic because you have seen the extreme leverage of the digital toolkit.
Hey while you are all fixated on values, I’ll be over here on Mars enjoying my full self-driving car, playing multiplayer games with Earthlings via StarLink on my Tesla phone, and recreating with my Tesla conjugal visitation bot. You’ll be impressed by how much Marscoin I’ve accumulated to buy things at the commissary of this work camp where we are terraforming the red planet for future inmates, erm I mean residents.
The first step in solving a problem is realizing there actually is a problem. If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time. That thought really doesn't help much when you are fighting with a big bank about $261 in random fees, though.
>If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time.
That is such a vague statement it is essentially meaningless. Better how? How is it not better? What do you mean by humanity? How is your life better? How is it worse?
By every measurable metric, Humanity has gotten better. Longer lifespan, lower child mortality, better education, easier access to basic life neccessities and goods, (ironic to say at this time but yes even) better health, etc etc etc.
We live in an age where every problem is weaponised and we are hyperaware of the problems now so that we don't see all the progrees that is done.
https://www.openculture.com/2020/05/16-ways-the-world-is-get...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
Every measurable metric? How about median wealth? How about levels of debt? How about job satisfaction? How about median income per household? Per person? How about access to healthcare and cost? How about suicide rates? How about drug overdose rates? How about corruption? How about cost of higher education? How about homelessness? I mean cmon, you're looking at thing with rose colored glasses.
Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
Healthcare cost? Probably worse.
Suicide rates? Probably worse.
Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
Corruption? Probably better, though more publicized (maybe better because more publicized).
Cost of higher education? Worse if you go to an expensive school. But there's never been a time when it's easier to educate yourself, for free, if you don't care about the piece of paper.
Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
The very fact we are talking about this shows a great progress. 100 years ago, you had a job -> you were satisfied.
> Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.
It's better for the poorest too. in Planetary scale.
>Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.
this is a recent metric, can't be used to prove or disprove Humanity advancement.
> Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.
Not only is 1930 fair but when we are talking about Humanity progress, the comparison must go even further in 1800s...
Talking about humanity progress makes sense only in grand scale of time and planet. not on specific countries and 50 years...
As long as we're "howaboutin" let's talk about genetic diversity. DNA is self-replicating, self-repairing, etc. But what it doesn't do is create new information. With human procreation methodologies we lose bits of data, and just living life our data undergoes entropy. The outcome is less genetic information available every generation.
And one more "how about testosterone levels in men?" These have been falling for the last 60 or 70 years. Men in the West will be impotent by 2040ish at current rates of decline.
When people say that on HN I read it as: "as a young, healthy and well paid tech worker living in _tech hub of a western country_ life is really good and getting better". We have it really easy indeed, but you can't project that on "humanity"
I feel food is immeasurably better than in the 1990's when I grew up. I'd partially attribute that to faster and better communication -- i.e. if you take the Internet away from a chef or farmer, I think their universe of ideas and ingredients would be dramatically smaller.
Speakers you can get for just $500 have made a big jump since even 2015 (though this is a tiny niche; in general audio quality is worse than in the 1970's.)
Combat sports are also having a renaissance and many people attribute that to YouTube!
That said, I totally agree with this article, and with the premise. There is rising economic inequality, and regulation has a place in imposing values on the market. Markets where nobody trusts each other aren't efficient or useful.
I think the area where that really hits home and is made tangible is architecture. If you just let the market run wild with architecture, you're going to get really ugly boxy buildings that make everyone miserable. We live in a shared space, so you need cooperation to make good architecture. Unfortunately it does seem like that's been on the decline. Architecture is worse than it was in the past.
I'd also agree that computing is worse than it was 20 years ago in many important ways. I wouldn't say it's worse overall, e.g. being able to handle video is a big improvement. Wireless is pretty good although there are many flaky incarnations of it. But I'd say both user interfaces and latency are worse, products are more user hostile, and the web is filled with ads and low quality information. Hardware is now proprietary software, so a Linux system is less open than it used to be.
Length of life and comfort don't mean much once you reached the bare minimum. If you have running water, central heating, a mattress and own any kind of motorised vehicle you live a more comfortable life than any medieval king.
So yeah, sure, we have netflix, smart bulbs and food delivery. Can you sustain a family as easily as your grandparents ? Will you retire as early as them ? Will you acquire an house as easily and as early ? How meaningful is your job ?
The endgame of "length and comfort" is to live in some kind of coma pod like in The Matrix, you'd probably live to 150 years in absolute comfort
There's an old bluegrass song called "I'll Fly Away," the music is very happy and upbeat. When you listen to the lyrics, you realize it's a slave song about how the narrator is looking forward to death so they can escape the horrible life they are living. The point of that is just because we live longer doesn't mean we live better.
1) A ton of bluegrass sets grim, sad lyrics to bouncy major music - it's pretty much how the genre works
2) I'll Fly Away is a Christian song, so it's not exactly "looking forward to death" so much as "looking forward to heaven and communion with God". Granted, those two things are closely linked in the religion.
When you go back thousands of years, it's pretty easy assertion to make. How about the last 40? Are we really better off in totality or just different? I can think of some things that are better, but I can think of a bunch of things that are much worse.
> How about the last 40? Are we really better off in totality or just different?
IMO in the last 40 years it has become harder (more expensive) for those who have had it a bit better off to separate themselves both physically and culturally from those who are a lot worse off (regardless of why they are worse off).
All the while the cost and accessibility of erstwhile public goods that temper that desire for that separation, like safety and education, have skyrocketed.
That separation and the inequality behind it has doubtlessly been enabled by a heap of injustices. The effects of this are seen in situations spanning from police brutality to current refugee migration crises.
We haven't been able to as effectively outsource pain and chaos to others (whether in our own backyard or the other side of the planet) while shielding ourselves from the blowback like we once did.
Therefore people feel worse off, not because they are necessarily worse off, but because they fear that the nearing chaos will make them permanently worse off.
The richest <1% don't have to directly deal this problem, since they can easily still pay for that separation.
Why focus on the last 40 years as opposed to the last 4, 400 or 40000 years? Anyone can pick two convenient points on the timeline and argue that things got worse over that period, but larger trends are harder to overlook. Stock prices have fallen a bit this week compared to last week, and some stocks are doing worse than others. It doesn't mean the market generally hasn't been rallying for the last decade or so.
We're not all in the same boat. If you want to change the system, you're going to have to fight the people invested in the status quo. Most people aren't interested in the "greater good," even though they may maintain this position publicly because it is considered antisocial to openly say "f** the plebs," but actions speak louder than words--by their fruits you shall know them. When we see things like rampant homeless and crushing debt, we know such things are being said in private.
It's time to put aside our idealism and don a cynical outlook. Our rose colored glasses are holding us back. We just need to make sure we don't become evil in the process.
What if I think freedom is the greater good? Maybe people just differ in their goals and priorities?
I think the current vaccination discussions are a good example. It used to be that society would accept sacrifices for freedom. For example they would deem thousands of traffic accident deaths acceptable in exchange for mobility, or send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their death to fight for freedom.
Now many people seem to feel that every Covid death has to be avoided at all costs. Which is of course a valid opinion, but not a given truth, given that at other times, people were actually willing to pay the price of higher risk in exchange for freedom.
So neither group is necessarily wrong, in my opinion, they just thing different things are more important.
A good movie that illustrates it may be "I, Robot", when the robots tasked with protecting humans decide the best way to protect them is to lock them into their homes. Let's say we achieve that kind of technology, robots can take of everything, and humans are safest when locked away at home. Should we advocate locking everybody up?
> Big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
There is a major contradiction in this line of reasoning that the author never addresses.
The only way to have successful regulation is to have a powerful regulator, a powerful governing organ. The government needs to be the most powerful "firm" in the market.
Otherwise, there will be a more powerful private firm or "trade association" (read: cartel) that is the de facto "shadow government" of one or more economic domains, that the de jure government cannot hold accountable. We see this a lot in America since the 70s, mainly expressed through regulatory capture.
I think most sensible people had figured this out already. The people that don't and honestly believe everything will be fixed by a DAO or whatever... they're beyond reason.
Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem.
The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all our progress and knowledge with them when they die. No more pretending to bow down to megalomaniacs and ideologues to achieve stability. No more vast centralized moral hazards that attract sociopaths like moths to a lamp.
I've taken to calling the zero-trust decentralization problem "computer science's fusion." It's perpetually N years away, but if we solve it the payoff is immense.
Edit: Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive that the real solution is somewhere nearby.
There will never be a utopia because when you eliminate one set of problems you reveal new ones. The fact that we are even discussing this is because we are not dying of cholera, starving, or being eaten by lions. The goal is to advance one step at a time.
Eliminating civilizational SPOFs would be a fairly large step.
> Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive
It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement. You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.
I think part of the problem is that DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is simply a poor way to describe what these new orgs are. Yes they're decentralized, but they are not fully autonomous, as they still require people writing code, making proposals, voting, etc. I think a much better term is "decentralized open organization" DOO. This captures better the fact that this revolution is about a new type of human coordination, not automation, even if a lot is automated. I think it helps to frame this as a social revolution to understand the full power of it.
Advances in the ability to coordinate humans often leads to great advances in society and technology. Now where crypto is immensely useful, is that in the past a decentralized group of people would have still had to be tied to a specific nation for banking. Now with crypto, a group of people from all over the world can run a company that's fully internet native that relies on no single nation for it's banking needs. You may not see it, but to me that is a ridiculously powerful concept.
I think that eventually, anything that can be run by a DAO will be run by a DAO, just like with automation, any process that can be automated will, eventually, be automated.
I think I've given the concept of DAOs a good faith effort, but I cannot understand how anyone thinks they are going to work for anything substantial.
Even if "governance" is "decentralized," there are still going to need to be people in the DAO, day to day, doing the work that no one wants to do, making decisions that no one wants to make.
It seems to me like a DAO is just a college group project but if you add crypto it solves everything?
Organizational behavior and its challenges don't go away because you've issued tokens.
Honest question, what the heck am I missing? It has to be something!
So far this does not seem to be true though. There are a great many processes which we could have automated but have so far not done yet, often in domains where safety is very critical and/or are very human-involved. One particular example is the automation of train and aircraft piloting, where humans are required by law and due to public demand but not actually necessary for the job.
In particular I'm thinking about some of the procedures aboard nuclear submarines where automated systems were tried and eventually rolled back, because the automation would be fine 99.9% of the time but when it failed it would cause disaster at computer speeds instead of just at human speeds. I can definitely imagine a bug in a DAO being completely unacceptable in some domains even if it is more efficient than doing the same job with humans. (For example, in national voting)
Finally even for those cases where automation is desired and could be done by some autonomous entity, I'm not sure why you would specifically need a Distributed AO instead of just regular cronjobs on a server somewhere. Any real-world system is going to need regular updates anyway, so you end up centralizing trust in whoever can update the code for the (D)AO.
It's worthwhile to note that there are currently driverless metro lines in the world. We do seem to be moving in that direction for automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system... As always, the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
The thing people generally don't want automated is exactly the the thing money is intended to do: allocate resources.
Very few people want a robot deciding how they spend their time, energy, and assets. Resource allocation will be the last unautomated job on the planet if we make it to post-scarcity. People want everything done for them except deciding what those things that need to be done are.
I think this is right. The inevitable climate change-induced population crash will necessitate more automation, further accelerating an accelerating trend.
*DAO doesn't need to run on Ethereum blockchain, it can also be a sufficiently autonomous collection of ERP systems.
To put it in more clear terms, the problem right now we have with society is not centralization vs decentralization, global vs local, or even authority vs freedom. Rather, the configuration between the two opposites constitutes the totality of the whole system, and not just one side is either the poison or the cure. We need to change the whole system, both in terms of centralization and decentralization.
Our current neoliberal system allows for “freedom” as in freedom of the consumer, but in the most authoritarian, dehumanizing ways as possible. We have freedom as in which person to vote or what things to buy, but that freedom is frankly put, meaningless. The whole liberal framework of how we think about freedom has to be questioned and challenged, or else we are going to have more of those “freedoms” that rob ourselves more and more of actual human agency.
>Centrally planning a whole society clearly does not work (demonstrated, bloodily, several times).
I really, really hate this argument. If it's true, why does the CIA feel the need to destabilize countries with centrally planned markets? Why has China been so successful despite what is widely believed to be a failed premise?
Central planning works as well as unplanned markets work: That is, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it mostly comes down to external factors.
You 're going to have to give a definition of that. Subjective measures of success don't matter, that's why people have different morals. Maybe the west has produced the most "culturally dominant society" but it has also been boosted by a few centuries of economic dominance, while china has just come out of poverty. I'm not even going to ask why china is considered unsuccessful as a society since afaik the chinese neither commit suicide in droves nor are they running to exit as fast as possible.
I wouldn't say China is any more centrally planned than the US. The economy is highly controlled in some aspects, but in others it's a lot less regulated, which is how you get plastic in baby formula.
On a government level, every one is centrally planned. That's kind of the purpose of it. Democracies just happen to elect their centrally planned government.
I partially agree with the basic point here, but China's not a great example as its economy is not, in fact, centrally planned. It is more of a hybrid of private enterprise/capitalism and strong state influence. Back when Chinese central planning was more aggressive and comprehensive, you had worse outcomes like the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward.
The obvious issue is that centrally planning an economy to achieve our desired outcomes is very difficult--perhaps beyond our capabilities. Of course, an easy way of addressing this is to do what China has done and effectively concede that you can't centrally plan everything, but you can find an equilibrium where the necessary parts are controlled and the rest left to market forces, with a system of regulations to address distortions created where the two meet.
Of course, you might also say that it's not exactly trivial to create a market-oriented system that achieves the outcomes we want. I think history demonstrates that societies have had greater success with market-oriented economies than with centrally planned ones. But you may be right that we shouldn't be so quick to completely rule out the possibility of a centrally planned economy based on a small number of examples, each of which was actively sabotaged by other major powers--much less should we rule out the viability of hybrid systems. (In fact, basically all modern economies are some sort of hybrid between planned and unplanned systems, including that of the U.S.)
The author is mostly talking about Soviet Communism, China pre-1976, etc. in which the government owns everything there is to own. The China of today isn't "centrally planning a whole society". It's a society in which the government owns a much larger amount of assets, than, say, the United States (as measured as a percentage of the country's national income). On that metric, it's just further along the scale compared to Northern European social democracies (where the government also owns many more assets than in the United States). I think it's a great mistake to assume that just because the government owning everything doesn't work, the government owning anything is also bad.
> Central planning works as well as unplanned markets work: That is, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it mostly comes down to external factors.
I have first-hand, extended experience with a hard-core centrally planned economy. It most definitely doesn't come down to external factors. Everything I saw and experienced was self-inflicted. And things keep getting worse.
> Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone ....
Computers were hard to run when installing an OS meant you burnt CDs.
And medium tier "webhosting" meant an expensive control panel with no root access.
I'm amazed how easy things are today, you can setup and tear down operating systems in a minutes, and there's lots of medium tier server competition and a few big players for bigger projects.
There's more made up stuff on there. Like a claim that unregulated markets are quickly filled with monopolies etc. Yet the only monopolies I see today are set up and protected by the government. And those have abysmal level of service and are really hard to use.
For everyone reading this article who agrees with it, I would encourage you to start reading some history, especially ancient history, late 1800s history, and the history of colonialism.
Society, once you look at inputs and outputs, is predicated on "the masses" abdicating intellectual responsibility to leaders who leverage them for their own benefit. This has happened since before recorded history. It is codified into our mainstream spiritual ethos. We glorify it every day by simply perpetuating the system we exist in.
If history is any evidence, things will always continue to get worse in this part of the cycle, then we will experience a collapse and rebuilding period.
Agreed. Most people find it more comfortable to abdicate their intellectual responsibility and blindly trust than to seek individual awareness and evaluate their society independently. And for good reason! It's pretty painful and scary to think independently. I think it's at least a little painful and scary for everyone who is really doing it.
It's gonna happen this decade, I'm sure of it. Covid has completely screwed our hyperefficient society to the point where I think no human institutions can stem the massive tidal wave that is coming. I'd guess that the financial system, the higher education system, and the political system will all come undone during this period - there aren't many good bets, but I think being good with computers is reasonably safe, as computers are so efficient and eco-friendly that I am almost certain that they will be the centerpiece of whatever new system emerges.
I have the same gut feeling, but have come to the opposite conclusion: Being good with computers will be very low on the list of meaningful skills once things really start to break down.
This reminds me of all the tech people (from Bill Gates on down) who think society can solve its toughest problems by supposedly sidestepping politics, as if they were not political actors and their “solutions” devoid of political context.
Also, charter schools are the education equivalent of “greenfield” solutionism alluded to in earlier comments.
It seems to me that it's a little bit of hubris to have human's running the Federal Reserve and setting monetary policy.
It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.
I agree wholeheartedly with this piece. Have for years.
I've invested a lot of time into thinking and learning about these sorts of "big" or societal/infrastructural/cultural problems, and figuring out what are the very top problems (AFAICT), and prioritized them down to say the 2 to 5 biggest and most growing threats that need to be eliminated, mitigated or fixed. I've begun working in my free time on what I see is the 2nd most urgent and apocalyptic threat:
democracy vulnerabilities -- the risk of free peaceful democracies (like the US, most especially, and despite our obvious impurity in that regard) devolving and collapsing, and trying to mitigate the attacks and corrosive effects from the bad actors pushing for it (which in the case of the US includes some treasonous and misguided domestic folks but also certain foreign governments as well.)
I'd love to make a difference too on what I see as the #1 threat/risk (greenhouse gas emissions, climate shifts, ecosystem collapse, pollution of our land/water/bodies) but... its harder for me to see ways where my skill mix and resources can help there. compared to the #2 one (democracy collapse.)
they are inter-linked, because #1 can increase forces pushing #2 to happen. and if #2 happens its more likely to make #1 worse than better.
but yeah I'm done with the purely worrying, thinking & talking stage. I'm acting. With as much urgency as I can afford to invest, time-wise.
The way the article cites "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is slightly off base. The essay argues that lack of structure is not an effective way to dismantle hierarchies, because it merely masks them instead of dismantling them. It does not go as far to claim that hierarchies and power structures are inevitable (although many people citing it claim that it's making this argument).
Although I guess you could argue that the text itself is less important than the impression it made on people who read it...
The Tyranny of Structurelessness literally says power structures are inevitable and when a group has no explicit structure an elite will form from either a pre-existing network or an informal network of those who are good at networking and match whatever qualities the larger group deems as "good".
So quoting that seemed to be about making the point that in the absence of formal, structured regulation decided through a well-defined process what happen is that you get elite insiders exerting control for their own reasons which may or may not benefit the general group, and without any oversight at all.
Both articles were in favour of formal structures with accountability and open processes that allow for changes when required, and against unstructured groups that invariably wind up controlled by unelected elites.
Interestingly a friend and I had been discussing political threads and one thing that is interesting is how, in the US, a 2 party system has lead to some really awkward tribalism and many of us think we disagree on everything. But in reality there are some big group wins to be had if the "middle" block of people could somehow band together and agree to just do the intersection of their beliefs.
some examples were citizens united, the big money moving elections, lobbyists, government quid pro quo system is blatant corruption. and I believe a vast majority of the middle agrees corruption is bad.
I just learned about https://www.forwardparty.com/team and it seems like an attempt to address such a thing, would love to hear from anyone who knows much more.
All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years...
* Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history.
* Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work.
* Society is able to support more art then ever before.
* We have computers... HOW are you complaining about one super amazing piece of technology that didn't exist 5 years ago compared to another piece of incredible technology. Seriously? Be more amazed with how far this stuff has come in such a short time.
And like... We're not even in world war 3. Life is pretty good on planet earth, idk where you've been but come on back down.
If nothing is rooted in people's / society's / community's / government's wants and needs, then what incentives are left for progress?
> Most innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other people.
I think you may be conflating inventors with innovators. Inventors, like innovators, are a product of their time. The leaps and bounds come from invention. And invention follows necessity, as an old saying goes.
I wasn't talking about needs, I was talking about complaints.
Innovators/Inventors are driven by their needs, not by other people's complaints. Unless they need to stop their spouses complaining or something like that.
They sure did complain about slow transit. Of course, the key isn't listening to customer's solutions but to their problems, and then inventing on their behalf. This is what Amazon calls "customer obsession".
A lot of (most?) innovation is driven by problems that need solving. It's a lot easier to start a company if there is already a large audience that really wants a problem solved and are willing to pay for the solution.
Having an amazing novel idea and then convincing people not having it in their life is a problem is way harder
"Complain" sometimes takes on the nuance of unproductive whining (repeatedly bringing up problems that others in the situation cannot fix), entitled attitude (why aren't things such and such: everyone around me should accommodate to me), excessive focus on minor things (I hate this whole situation that I can't change, and I can make that constantly known by harping on minor aspects) and such.
You did because you stated there is no utility in communicating needs via complaint. I think you are digging a hole and instead of realizing how deep you have dug, you just keep going hoping to find yourself on the winning side of this silly semantic debate.
>> * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history.
Back in the day slaves had to transport ice from mountains so that the king could have his chilled wine every evening, whereas today most people in the West have fridges at home.
This does not mean that those who have fridges should just put aside their feelings of malaise and adopt an optimistic outlook, because at the end of the day that malaise is a result of one's wealth and power relative to others who occupy the same time and space.
Yep, agreed. For instance, you have more bandwidth and CPU power today than in the 90s but the number of rent seekers you and walled gardens you have to use are much bigger. So the topology has changed.
Most of the time "parents caring for children" is considered a good thing. It only is an issue when there's societal pressure to do otherwise, which is also a good thing.
Yea live is good on Earth with a massive climate catastrophe rolling in. But sure, the technocrats just believe some Silicon Valley tech is gonna fix it.
Before antibiotics, birth control and ICEs there was germ theory, virtuous celibacy and steam engines. Pointing out and analyzing issues in the world is part of innovation.
Some expectations are pessimistic, some are optimistic.
Societies, over time, have gone up and gone down. So sometimes an optimistic perspective has proven right and sometimes a pessimistic perspective has proven right.
The article has a decent argument why a pessimistic approach is plausible. Your examples don't anything particular specific and so they don't really give a case that an optimistic perspective is appropriate. I mean, optimism might appropriate but "change your view to see the good" is just kind of manipulative (something very common now, a reason for pessimism, sadly).
Than anytime in human history is such a dumb way to characterize it. I mean, do we really expect the world to go backwards? It has happened in the past for sure, but regressions have not been a thing in the modern world for quite a while. So “than anytime in human history” has, is and will likely be true and that makes the characterization pointless.
I think the author invited this though. Half the article is a well thought out discussion of important problems. There is some nuanced thinking about markets and capitalism that addressed both the pros and cons.
But the article started and ended with completely unsupported claims about how the world is going to hell and "we all feel it".
The commenter you're responding to merely pointed out that, no we don't all feel it, most people actually have things very good these days. And that doesn't mean there aren't still major issues that we should be working hard on.
Well, we are living through one right now. Empty shelves and stores that close early and restaurants out of business and schools that are hardly teaching our kids.
Regulation is fine, life requires it. Your whole body is one big regulatory system, centralized in various ways, making sure everything in you is aligned. It's a fundamental part of (your) Life, and we (evolved apes) require other simularly regulated Life forms to persist. I often wonder if those who don't like regulation fail to grasp this. I also wonder if those tuning regulation should look more for clues in evolutionary biology. There are no easy answers, but evolution has produced some truly incredible things. Go to then ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.
> I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.
We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.
> We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.
Attacking "the establishment" is a common tactic of those who want to replace the existing somewhat democratic and somewhat accountable elite with their own unelected and unaccountable elite.
The missing key here in my opinion is subsidiarity. Decentralisation works up to a point, but many decentralised solutions assume that everybody is the entire system must reach a concensus e.g. Blockchain. And that concensus usually involves some kind of "majority rules". Which means that in practice, 49% of people might be left unhappy. That is not the sign of a healthy society.
What we need instead is the follow the principles of subsidiarity [1].
Local level markets, DeFi solutions, governance structures, communication platforms, etc that are capable of enforcing their own rules, but that are interoperable to some degree with other systems.
The Matrix project I think is a great example of this. Unfortunately, it looks like they might be making some bad decisions around global moderation, but in general the idea that local servers can exist with their own rules, but still send and receive content from other servers is great.
We don't want to end up in a future where Big Tech can automatically censor any video you upload, any message you send, or any call you make. This doesn't mean we need the Wild West, it means that you should be participating in a community where you all agree on the rules. And if you want to participate in somebody else's community, you need to follow their rules. This idea that some global all powerful entity can just banhammer somebody for something they said in a community that everybody in the community thought was fine, is totally unacceptable.
"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."
As human beings, we have an underlying need for belonging and connection. All of us are by default programmed to be connected to our own interests. For many that circle broadens to their friends and family and for a few that broadens to their immediate community. Fewer still feel connected to their country and only some of us will feel connected to the world.
The "network effect" seems to be affecting everything: The rich get richer, and everybody else fights for scraps. It's winner-take-all.
This applies to countries also, not just individuals. If your country can't quite keep up with cutting edge manufacturing and services, you lose in the global trade competition and can't afford to give your citizens up-to-date college education, exacerbating the slide.
Here’s an exercise to think about if we’re living in the best or the worst of times: pick a year to be born in. But you can’t choose where, not the conditions: assume a typical human life at that point in time, considering the whole world. This might require some research, of course, and a lot of unknowns (How was South America in the 450’s?), but working with what we can know, try to choose this date.
I think this take on decentralization and structurelessness sort of misses the point. Of course it's true that all systems that do anything useful have structure somewhere. The point of various movements for "decentralization" are where to locate that structure. Jo Freeman's essay correctly points out that "structurelessness" in activist movements locates that structure in social influencers and insiders, which is probably not desirable for most action-oriented purposes.
Which layers or pieces of the system we choose to anonymize and make fungible are an important architectural choice, and DeFi/crypto simply expand the scope of available choices in that regard. Prior to their existence, it was not possible to locate structurelessness in the layer that crypto does. Whether locating it there proves to be useful remains to be seen, but it is clearly an expansion of our capabilities, in the same way that Paxos and Raft are for databases. Yes, they still have structure, no, that does not make them useless.
Watch the corruption in Wall Street, Congress (w/Lobbyists) and the Establishment:
* First Wall Street used modern tech in 1980s and 1990s to make better markets
* BUT then corruption happened when Wall Street maxed out making money from tech in efficient markets. They then shifted to taking money via a rigged economy.
* Wall Street rigged economy is shown by high frequency firms front running trades (at least claimed and maybe proven in Flash Boys book)
* 2008 Mortgage Crisis shows Wall Street rigging the economy
* $3.5 billion per year flowing through lobbyists successfully causes congress to sell out.
* The economy has been rigged for the last 30+ years
* At least bitcoin and crypto are enabling those abused by a rigged economy to create competitors
* Creating a "bank account" has been blocked from entrepreneurs for 40 years. Crypto at least enables businesses to be created with crypto-bank-account equivalents, transfers, and financial transactions.
The establishment is the root of the problem. Entrepreneurship by good ethical people competing and winning must be a strategic part of the solution.
> the control system itself, inevitably, goes awry
This seems to be the case with any control system, whether centralized or not. The difference is in the failure mode. Decentralized systems start failing earlier, but do so in a more gradual way. Centralized ones fail later, but much more abruptly and all-at-once. So it's really the question of which one you prefer.
Personally, I still believe that decentralized approach is preferable in that regard. Centralization gives the illusion that everything is a-okay (because things work!) even when the crash is already inevitable and in motion; then when it actually happens, it's a massive disruption all around. OTOH when bits and pieces start falling off in a decentralized system, it's readily obvious that a fix is needed, but there's still plenty of time to design and implement it; and, furthermore, since most of the system is still intact, it doesn't need to be recovered.
The other advantage of decentralization is that it's more politically viable to fix things in a more localized way. Fixes to centralized systems necessarily have to be centralized themselves, but that also means that you need a lot of buy-in from everybody affected to enact them. In areas where consensus is not established, this often means that problems in centralized systems don't get fixed at all, either because many people don't believe the issue at hand to be problematic, or because they can't agree on what the root cause it. In a decentralized system, local consensus is all that is needed to fix (or at least mitigate) an issue locally.
Some argue that this latter part is actually a deficiency because people end up fixing their own localized problems, instead of coming up with a single centralized solution that fixes it once and for all. But this assumes that such a single centralized solution always (or at least usually) exists and its implementation is viable - which is not at all obvious to me.
Markets have existed without empire overlords thoughout history though. Egyptians did not have to enforce trade rules to their neighbours, and despite whatever clashes everyone traded with each other in the mediterranean. It is exogenous rules that required the protection of an empire, such as the raids of pirates, or the threat from another empire. Since our current world order started after WW2, the governments have grown, but so have the monopolies, and we ve never seen them split, we just take them for granted after a while (e.g. mastercard/visa). In fact, if anything, government's role has been to pick the winners that better cooperate with them in order to ensure their mutual survival. It may be true that markets eventually do grow their own hierarchies, but this does not mean that imposing rules externally a priori is any good.
There absolutely was regulation in Bronze Age markets. There were taxes and tax breaks for favored merchants, there were embargoes and wars fought over goods.
If that's your criterion for what constitutes a regulated market, then there can be no such thing as a regulated market, because you can always sell elsewhere.
And defining a concept in a way that means it can't exist makes no sense, so that criterion can't reasonably define this concept. (Was that a reductio ad absurdum?)
The fact that our awkwardly exploitative synthetic systems depend on elegantly balanced natural systems which are now inexorably collapsing renders this otherwise-interesting discussion entirely moot.
Get your UUCP maps up to date -- you'll be communicating through USB sticks transported by pirates before you know it.
Man: if you weren't able to design a big, centralized system that works, don't repeat the same propaganda you were fed with for years: that is, that central state-level planification don't work. Look at China, and tell them their system is going to crash. They will laught at you, and you deserve it.
Stop repeating this propaganda and start questioning your assumptions. You are saying that we need some kind of overall hierarchy and regulamentation. This is what the world is trying to do since decades with international organizations. Like the UNO, who is asking since almost thirty years to stop the embargo against Cuba.
Start complying with the international rules and the world's democratic institutions, then come back giving us a lesson about what we need to do.
Bro, literally none of this stuff is inherent in the system. You can still make a Beowulf cluster. You can still network a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Computing has never been more accessible.
Writing software has never been more accessible.
But consumer standards have risen. The geeks are out there and will happily work from your source code if that’s all you want to share.
The old life is still available. It’s just that back then that was all that was available.
It turns out there are a whole bunch of superstar product designers out there. And now that the software nuts and bolts are easy, those guys are beating (in the market) all the guys whose skill was nuts and bolts.
That’s natural. It what comes from accessibility. That is good because the whole world is lifted by the fact that some fool can build a business on Zapier and Airtable.
The real problem is not the technology but the mindset. Simply follow the twin principle of live and let live AND do no harm to others. Have a moral compass. You don’t need to be religious or even spiritual for this. Just understand that this is best for you in the long run.
Markets can be seen as regulatory institutions in themselves, though they exhibit many undesirable side effects. The inherent "decentralisation" in Western societies is enabled by markets. Producers meet consumers in a constant feedback loop, production follows demand. Some producers are weeded out, new classes of products and their corresponding market types appear. Consumers can choose what, when and where to buy. What would be political decisions in a centralised society are market mechanisms in a market society.
It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.
>"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy. Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."
It's been that way forever with some rare exceptions.
>"You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers"
Total baloney. Many do run Internet service without cloud providers, including yours truly. It is true that for some reason many do fall for that cloudy propaganda. Their loss. Not ours. Keep digging your own graves. Or if they big enough they might not care as they pass those costs down to end customer.
I suspect I do not agree with many of the political opinions of this writer. Yet, I find myself strongly agreeing with the general conclusions. Of course, specificity and implementation is probably where the civil war breaks out.
Maybe there is already a better alternative that is enjoying meteoric success along many dimensions. Maybe that alternative already dominates the supply of physical goods and supply chains. Or maybe not.
China. Though I am no fan of the system, the trend line is clear. This author lumped their system in with central control and dismissed them in the service of making their point. I suggest they are not some outlier to be excluded from the dataset.
So aside the link to "the tyranny of structurelessness" (which I am about to read) the article is basically supporting it's own premise: distributed systems always go awry. I hate to be that guy but there's no proof of this at all. I can see it theoretically, you can never predict all behavior in a system, chaotic systems are unpredictable, etc. But there's no proof of the claim, and the article basically argues that it is true because it is true.
> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.
I feel this one. Having worked in security in the past, even I often feel overwhelmed keeping my own security going. I use the best defense in depth that I can, but I know that's not enough.
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
This is the key point. So many debates about "more X" vs. "less X" when what we mostly need is "better X". Anti-Covid measures; almost any sort of "security"; government programs of all sorts. And, yes, very much regulation.
Scott Alexander has had some nice riffs on this theme, though I can't come up with a specific link at the moment.
Wait until the free money stops. Then you’ll have real problems on your hands. If folks are whining now in an economy with a rate of inflation higher than most long term debt, and the biggest market rally since the 90s, wait until the party stops. Then you’re actually going to have something to cry about.
Incredible how people in developed countries have no idea or appreciation for the freedoms and opportunities they’re surrounded by.
You see what you want to see. These are not true in my daily life,
1 "Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy."
2 "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."
3 "Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up."
Dial back the doom and gloom mindset. It's an abundant world.
In 2018, the 26 richest people in the world held as much wealth as half of the global population (the 3.8 billion poorest people), down from 43 people the year before.
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
I really like this. The same goes for trust - we need to be able to trust more, not build a trustless system. Be able to trust medical advice from doctors, trust that the auto-repair shop will be honest, and trust that the plane we fly on is built to the correct safety standard.
The author seems to be confusing distributed systems with market systems. Cloud services are a market system, but it isn't distributed... it's all in central servers. The technologies that are "simply never going to be able to achieve their goals" are trying to be market systems and distributed systems.
Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.
> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.
> People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
Yes, yes, this 1000x yes. Every time someone on HN or Reddit blithely assumes deregulation will solve everything, I want to forcibly point out that the most important word in "free market", is not "free", it's "market". A free market operates within a structure that must be created and maintained not using the properties of the market itself. If you don't have anything with more power than the market maintaining the market, before long you don't have a market. And once you don't have a market, you don't have "free" either.
There's a reason professional sports matches have referees on the field. You need a structure more powerful than the game to preserve the game.
There are some important distributed systems he overlooks: the ones found in nature. Gas Laws, photosynthesis, and radiant energy are pretty great, it means I always have air to breathe. No one is regulating that, and to do so would only make things much worse.
The challenge is that humans suck at designing distributed systems. Nature is exquisitely designed (or, if you want, evolved). The solution then, is to root ourselves in nature rather than desperately, constantly trying to replace it. Bitcoin is the only new tech I can think of that does this (not sure if that's the 'most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system' the author refers to). Everything else: farming subsidies, AI, Keynesian economics, plastic surgery, vaccines, desk jobs — are all hopelessly out of touch with reality.
That's not to say technology is Bad, but it needs to be real, not manufactured.
What is a well designed system, especially in nature? What values does nature maximize for? Nature is just a bunch of distributed systems that have chaotically learned to work "together" in vicious harmony. Nature's "design" is brutal, and is not compatible with the comforts we have grown to expect in our modern lives. If nature had its way we would mostly die around 50 years old of a cold.
This post had so much potential, only to start going off the rails by making a straw man of libertarianism [0] and then crash and burn by ignoring that so many of the listed gripes are due to centralized authorities being themselves corrupt. The regulators he's referencing for the solution have also been corrupted by their own incentives - they create ever more bureaucratic restrictions on small-scale actors for the appearance of doing something, while failing to police large scale misbehavior because of too big to fail. Joe Businessman sells psychoactive substances? Make sure to prevent his access to the banking system! Golden Mansacks creates financial logic bombs to loot retirement accounts? Print trillions to bail out the metaindustry!
The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.
I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.
[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.
There are many negative top-level comments here. I wonder what a good survey of developers would say about their feelings on the different bullet points from the article.
I was recently on sick leave and had some time to concentrate. I read William Gibson's Neuromancer finally. Glad that we aren't in that dystopic future.
> I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.
All hierarchies are structures but not all structures are hierarchies. I'm not sure Jo Freeman argues for explicit hierarchy.
I think this is a dig at the google bus. The daycare thing is way less true. The price of google daycare (bright horizons?) is nuts. I think it was like $2800/month per kid for googlers.
Sounds like this is a generalization that the "don't be evil" motto slowly disappears and turns into "get money".
I get it, I worked at a company like that. It started out as connecting everyone to the internet for free, and turned into connecting the wealthy so they could be more efficient. The wealthy tend to pay more than the poor.
Altruism is unfortunately a poor motivator in capitalism.
Perhaps we need to write out the tenets of western society to determine if the system trends in the right direction and determine which amendments need to be created in order for it to bend towards good.
Switching from a capitalist society to an altruistic society.
People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.
That's a great way to stall any progress towards anything worthwhile. Everything in moderation. There's always a way. More often, it is right down the center.
Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:
> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way.
There's one line in there which is very important.
Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).
Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.
There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.
We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.
This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.
We currently emphasize freedom or people making choices. The fact that greed and indifference often carry the day is an indictment of people and their choices, not "the system".
It has often been remarked that socialism and Christianity are similar. They both preach the gospel of love. The difference is that the Christians, whatever their faults, understand that good and evil is a question of something inside every person. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to have this legalistic idea that we can regulate away sin. It doesn't work. Regulatory bodies, like all institutions, are composed of people and so they cannot transcend the frailities of those people.
The defi people have this idea that we can regulate with clever algorithms. I don't think they will be any more successful than the socialists. If they succeed, they'll create a system without humans at its center which we will find even more intolerable than capitalism or socialism. If you want a preview of this system, consider the phenomenon of people begging on twitter for Google to unban their account.
When we complain about greed, we're talking about one of the oldest questions: how to make people good. We should pay much more attention to what religions have to say on that question than the world socialists or technocrats imagine they can create with the right regulations.
> The difference is that the Christians, whatever their faults, understand that good and evil is a question of something inside every person. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to have this legalistic idea that we can regulate away sin.
I can only guess that your experiences with both Christianity and socialism are starkly different than what I have experienced.
The article mentions that we incorrectly use the term "free market" to describe the optimal market system, but I'd argue we do a similar thing with regulation. We use "regulation" to describe the "ideal regulation", and both these term misuses divide people that might otherwise agree.
I'll give one example: patents. Right now there is a discussion about waiving pharma patents in order to help with vaccine production in other countries. This is framed as a government action against businesses, when in reality it is an act of deregulation of markets. Patents are an incredibly heavy handed government regulation that uses tax dollars to protect state-sponsored monopolies of "ideas" and "inventions", creating a huge drain in terms of legal resources (courts, judges, juries if necessary), have obvious regulatory capture dynamics as that is in fact the stated goal of a patent, as well as creating entire sectors of the "private" economy that exist solely to perpetuate this system (patent lawyers, patent trolls, etc.), not to mention create networks of "safe havens" of theoretically competitor companies that are actually "allied" in their accumulation of mutually-assured-destruction patent portfolios that make it almost impossible for new startups to enter a field since they hold no such cards.
It's unfortunate that the "deregulation" discussion has been largely co-opted by these corporations as opposed to focusing on these IMO much more pertinent issues that could actually have a dramatically more positive effect.
Like many people, much of the OP implicitly accepts as its premise the philosophies that create this problem. When you do that, the battle and debate are already over. The assumptions determine the outcome.
Many of those philosophies espouse hopelessness and despair. Making your enemy despair is a transparent and brazenly obvious tactic, and fundamental psyops. You are giving away your power, which is considerable, for nothing. The nutcases are vastly outnumbered. Why are people so stupid as to not see that, and to buy into it? Are you kidding me?
Another thing I've long believed is the disparagement of humanities and 'post-modernism' is disarmament. These are the tools that will win, not more algorithms. The bad guys embrace and use those tools, disparaging them all the while, and most people I know again implicitly accept that and unilaterally disarm themselves. Brilliant!
Why does everyone do this stupid sh-t? IMHO: The pressure of social norms. Look at the widespread use of contempt, for example - a great tool for enforcing social norms, and but which serves no rational, productive purpose. Open-mindedness, humility, respect, and reason are the productive tools - but I can sense the contempt coming for mentioning those things
Some examples:
> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.
We've made cowardice a social norm. If you think the situation is serious, 'giving up' because you are tired or due to social pressure is very weak. People regularly have risked their freedom, lives, fortunes, and honor (reputation) for to give us what we have, generation after generation. We are the stewards and leaders now; what will we give the next generation, or will we just be parasites and throw it all away. Nothing we face is worse than prior generations - if you think it's tough now, imagine advocating for women's rights, for example, facing millennia of history and widespread reactionary outrage; success didn't look assured at all.
> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.
Democracy is the tool, the place everyone gets a vote regardless of their wealth, status, power. By despairing, you again abandon the field of battle to the other side, which certainly has not despaired. It's incredible to watch people surrender unilaterally, for no reason, other than telling each other to despair.
> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
maybe i'm crazy, but it just seems weird to lump these all together like they are expected to work well together
democracy: one person, one vote (egalitarianism)
capitalism: money is power, and capital is used to accumulate more of it (competitively and socially)
if you base your society on those two contradictory ideas, it seems inevitable a competitive system that encourages commodification and selling anything and everything to make increasing profits will cause all sorts of havoc on society and warp institutions to support those who "have" vs "have not"
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
this sounds good at first, but we used to have "good regulation" and obviously we are where we are because those "good" regulations were torn down.... running the clock back on regulation will just put us back in the same place again because those with power and influence (monetary and social capital) will warp them for their own ends
As always, essays like these bring to mind the Prisoner's Dilemma. A thought experiment that, at scale, humanity consistently loses.
I'm not sure that there is a solution. Part of the overall system of..."all this," for lack of a better term...is the fact that we are always dissatisfied by the results of consistently losing the Prisoner's Dilemma and thus are always looking to solve it; our always-looking-to-solve-it more or less guarantees the fact that we will continue to lose it. Around and around it goes.
I ruminate on this stuff probably more than I should, and the only semblance of a conclusion that I can come to is that we only choose the objectively right choice within the Prisoner's Dilemma when we are given a reason to overcome our selfishness, i.e. during times when not working together presents a clear and present existential danger. Thus, war, breakdown of complex systems, death, etc, are all inherent parts of choosing that which keeps us going for just a little bit longer. Just as someone suffering from addiction might only finally turn the nosedive up once they've hit rock bottom, the New Deal was only possible in the midst of a world war and the Great Depression. Intelligent folks can see these problems coming from a mile away, as this essay makes clear, but actually mustering humanity together to walk in step to a degree in which we can actually address these problems either requires authoritarianism or a massive imminent danger to rally against.
Some are born during the spring, when we're coming out of one of those bad periods and have mustered the will to replace a part of society's roots with something better so that it might continue a little longer; almost immediately, those who benefit from it take advantage of it and begin dismantling it, thinking they can have their cake and eat it too -- retain the work society has done together, that rare thing, and use it to help boost themselves to a height far greater than might be achieved by simply contributing to the continued existence of society as a whole. Everyone being in its for themselves results in a breakdown, leading inexorably to some sort of collapse, big or small. Those born in winter do the hard work of setting things the pins back up so that their children can knock them down again. Around and around it goes.
The wild thing is that, as the interlocking mechanisms of society get more complex and consist more and more of complex interlocking systems themselves, and as globalization continues, those cataclysms shrink in scale and increase in number. 90 years ago it was a world war; today it's millions of little fires that need putting out, technical debt piling up, the odd sense of alienation brought upon by society looking at itself. The rock bottoms multiply, from one a generation, to one a minute somewhere in the world. Just juggling that and seeing how that all interacts becomes its own crisis of entropy.
I suppose I'm rambling now -- this kind of ruminating has a way of transforming from terse description into navel-gazing poetry. Around and around it goes.
His conclusion is that the only thing that could ultimately defeat the god Moloch (basically a personification of the problems described in the OP) is if we install a different god Elua (basically the personification of a human-friendly machine intelligence) to do the job. And if that sounds like hubris, the notion that we could overcome these problems ourselves is an even bigger form of hubris.
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
The article's thesis is so obvious that it's amazing it needs to be argued in this particular way.
Two thoughts here:
1) It's often problematic when people take absolutist views on things, i.e. "government regulation is ALWAYS bad." The optimal amount is never zero.
2) After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.
> After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.
The linked essay explicitly makes the point that in the absence of formalised structures, power will accrue into an implicit elite from either pre-existing social networks or the formation of in-groups of those who can network and who tick the boxes of qualities the group views as good. Libertarians want to remove the formal structure of government in favour of a new unelected and unaccountable elite arising from whichever group they feel part of. At least the ones that aren't just dupes do.
Only on hacker news would someone post about a very good take on the problems of our society and then everyone's comment is arguing over semantics. Happens every time on here.
Most of his assertions about 'trends' are just wrong.
100 years ago:
- They would sometimes shoot strikers
- Strikers and owners faced off in literal violent battle
- There was no socialized healthcare, fire or emergency services
- College was for the ultra elite, even by 1960 only 7% were going to Uni.
- A lot of workers just died. Colorado River was dammed at the cost of dozens of lives to 'Keep It On Schedule'
- Blacks used the back entrance, and their grandparents were literally slaves
- 'Art' was something people did in their spare time, and there were very, very few opportunities for true artists.
- People didn't travel for vacations etc. that was for the rich only.
- The legal system was much more classed than even it is today.
- 'The Rich' 100% controlled the news. It's why they owned papers.
The material standard of living for regular people has increased immensely for everyone, to the point that people now live in general relative abundance and safety which would have only been the privy of the 0.1% before.
I also don't buy at all the notion that 'decentralization' is in any way some kind of magical advantage for the commons.
We have Health Officers and International Orgs like the WHO and academic institutions in order to do things, like coordinate and understand the impact of things like COVID.
Note that in most of those systems, there is some degree of 'Centralization' but also 'Decentralization' -> Universities may have some authority, but there are many of them.
For information for example, 'full decentralization' means the absolute most ridiculous concepts becoming the most popular (i.e. QAnon) and semi-fabricated ideas about all sorts of things. Especially those that target 'out groups'.
There is no substitute for thoughtful, conscientious and legitimate leadership across all elements of society.
Although there's probably some room for decentralization in some areas, maybe currency, as long as currency is managed within some reasonable range by the Central Banks, and you don't hold a lot of cash (cash was not meant to be a store of value), then even then, the Central Bank is not that-that bad.
Most of the items read like specific 2nd order effects of Capitalism 101. We were always aware of the pros/cons and the cons have overtaken the pros in our current incarnation.
"Your phone can run mapreduce jobs 10x-100x faster than your timeshared cloud instance that costs more. Plus it has a GPU."
Plus you can carry the phone anywhere, e.g., somewhere no internet access, but you need internet access to reach a timeshared cloud instance.
Have been experimenting with running servers on "phones" personally and think we need computers in this form factor that are not "phones".
"One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance."
Same. Can carry Macbook anywhere.
"Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone - well, actually to every software microvendor - to do it for us."
All under the guise of "making things easier". Anything is easier if you do not have to do it yourself. This does not mean the thing itself is becoming easier to do. IMO, microvendors are, intentionally or not, effectively building "complexity moats". When DIY becomes exceedingly more difficult, then we know that no one is "making things easier". They might be deliberately doing the opposite. If the thing isn't any easier for the microvendor, then we are just transferring the burden to someone else, not making the thing easier.
"We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous.""
There is usuallly an HN comment along the lines of "I am thankful that Apple screens apps for me" as if it is some kind of service. However the "service" is not solving problem of "dangerous apps". Someone still has to look at the program and ask, "What is this app doing". Of course, many users do not need to be paying for this "service" because they can select "safe apps" just as well as Apple can. But it isn't optional. Pay up.
"IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware."
Maybe this is, to some small extent, the result of trying to delegate 100% of our responsibilities when using a computer. "Let someone else take care of it."
Not to say I enjoy having to know how to do everything in order to compile and install an OS, a server, and configure it, but I know if I don't then there are consequences.
No problem with running software on a computer in "the cloud" so long as I own the computer. There are consquences if I don't.
Make the choices the marketers want us to make, enjoy the "convenience" (and the expense), but accept the consequences. Take personal responsibility.
When no one knows how to do anything for themselves, then the problem of "gatekeeping" can only become worse.
Like 1/3 to 1/2 of the problems in this list are just problems with using AWS or other cloud providers. I say this all the time, and nobody takes it seriously: Don't use the cloud. The cloud costs more, requires more work to set up, and provides you with machines with broken IO and 1/50th the capacity you would get if you just racked servers yourself.
Let me say it again:
Compared to buying servers from Dell (or whoever) and driving them down to the local COLO and plugging them in yourself, the cloud:
- Costs more (between 5x and 20x more over the course of a 4 year depreciation for hardware).
- Is more work in the end, by a large factor (you are going to do a ton of stuff you don't need and are never going to use with the cloud. When something goes wrong you are going to spend days or months trying to fix it. Performance is so bad that you have to build very complex solutions to problems that it is very easy to just throw hardware at, like having a db server with millions of IOps, which is extremely easy if you rack hardware and basically unreasonable due to cost and hard limits in the cloud (Well over $10K/month for Postgres at 80,000 iops, which is the most you can provision).
- It's more work up front, even if you have no idea how to do anything to start with. For your deployments to be secure you have to know what you are doing either way, in AWS you just have less choices of how to set things up. Most things in AWS are at least as hard or harder than doing them yourself, and you can't fix problems you run into. Their tier 1 and tier 2 support are completely useless and just do keyword matching against their scripts.
- It costs WAY more. You pay for more than the cost to buy much better hardware and the cost to colo that hardware every 4 months. Yes that is right, if you go buy a pile of servers from dell and rack them in a colo, or buy the same capacity from EC2, the EC2 capacity you get will be far lower. Far far far lower. And you can't customize it or redeploy it for other uses as it gets older.
- When things break, you can't fix them. You just have to live with it or stop caring. IO to disk stalls randomly leaving processes in uninterruptible IO wait status for 100ms? Get fucked, they not only won't admit it's a problem, they will also hide this fact from you in all their cloudwatch metrics, and deny it is happening. Maybe it's a noisy neighbor, maybe it's their terrible networking stack, who knows, you'll never figure it out and you probably can't fix it even if you do. I have weird failure scenarios in AWS all the time that I have never seen or even contemplated as reasonable to consider on my own hardware.
- Cloud deployments are stupid. K8 is an awful system built by children who don't what is important. I don't even directly deal with K8 as my actual job, but I spend more time worrying about K8 to get code shipped today than I ever spent maintaining deployment scripts when I had to own deployments end-to-end.
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.
Falling somewhat into the category of a libertarian, I fundamentally disagree that "all useful discourse terminates forevermore". My issue is with the presupposition that it's OK to force people to cooperate effectively. All of the named problems are there basically because people aren't interested in solving them voluntarily. It absolutely does not follow that therefore it's okay to use force.
The hubris required to decide that you know better than others how they should live their lives, and your ends justify the means, always astounds me. Treating people as components in a system, to be regulated and managed, is in opposition to treating them as beings with agency, entitled to choose how and when to engage with others.
“We don’t need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.”
Ah, I guess the anarcho/libertarian crowd is stepping back from the abyss. But how is that going to make your EC2 SSD go faster? Cheapen your egress fees? Make you write software that actually has less exploits? Pay artists better?
As with many ideas here, how about a concrete suggestion? Here’s mine: software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
You don’t get to call yourself a professional and punt on responsibilities. We don’t let doctors or lawyers do it, why should we let coders?
> software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
Either you offer it completely free to anyone in the entire world, or this is just another barrier to prevent access to the developer "elite".
And btw, often it's not the developer that cuts on security features, but an executive that wants to get to market faster. How about we give compulsory security training to every manager/executive/ceo/etc AND we hold them legally responsible when damages are caused by their eagerness to cut on costs?
> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.
> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
Seriously? These problems are not remotely in the same ballpark.
I don't even know what is the point of this article. A handwavey call for better regulation of "Western society, economics, capitalism, finance, government, the tech sector, the cloud". Oh, and free daycare too. Gee thanks doc, I'll get right on it.
To me, this reads as "If we, as a society become better people, we don't need other solutions to address how not great of people we are". In other news, water is wet.
I feel as if the author seems to somewhat misunderstand the relationship between those who have less and those who have more. There's a fundamental lack of trust (which really erupted in 2008) that kicked off this whole crypto/web3 thing.
We tried the "trusting people" route and it didn't work. The incentives are just too misaligned for "trust" to ever work (in my opinion). So, techies basically said "Fu$k it, I'll build my own system to do what you (those who have more) _should_ be doing".
This articles seems to say that we don't need all these complex solutions to problems that can fundamentally be solved by just...being better people? But that has never, and will never happen. We all wish we lived in a perfect world where everyone does the right thing - but that is just not the reality we live in. So these "decentralized/distributed systems" (e.g., Bitcoin) are our way of removing the human component from the equation.
o' lord, please bless us and protect us from thy holy hells of capitalist economic centralization. please let there be upon us deliverance for all, from this century of hellfire and brimstone, consolidation of silicon and machine code... deliver us with the great gifts of modern encryption for mesh networking with centralized administration, all for a very reasonable monthly price. praise be thy software as a service, so thou may centralize thy administration, simplify thy budgeting and leave thy key rotation to thy pros so thou may fight thy wars for not only a good, but for the ultimate good, against thy centralizing powers of capital that seek not only to enslave us, but divide us for eternity as every man, woman and child pays thy holy rent on thy proprietary servers, enslaved to a permanent life of indignity and servitude to those who own not only thy physical real estate, but thy ethereal real estate in thy metaverse as well..
to whom do we owe for this great beacon of light which shall deliver us all?
the only true antidote to the ills of today's modern capitalist society where technology has supercharged capitalist centralization past the point of no return is obviously the application of platonic ideals to the practice of ip networking for the purposes of optimizing hybrid cloud connectivity for critical business operation environments.
now.. imagine if plato were the senior cloud engineer charged with migrating the walmart.com of ancient greece to the cloud from truly legacy on premises datacenters. how might he complete said migration with zero downtime?
well. one option would be to configure a virtual private network that spans both the legacy datacenter and the vpcs in the new environment and then slowly move services one by one, but then that means that any legacy security issues will be carried directly into the new environment. plato would never have that!
how about encrypted mesh networking? well, that's actually quite wonderful, but that sounds a little too much like messy and complicated democracy for our friend plato. all those machines with their own configurations, the demos of the datacenter, running around talking to each other willy-nilly... plato's skin would crawl at the thought of that! he knows that at first it's all fun and games, but then the next thing you know, one of those machines with a slight orange hue and a bunch of real estate wealth would start taking political potshots and broadcasting them to everybody... that machine would then be able to leverage widespread discontent with the state of the environment to ascend to power only to then nearly bring the entire system down in a giant ball of flames. plato knows better than that!
no, plato would make the smart choice. plato would choose to consolidate management to a centralized city on a hill inhabited by saas philosopher kings. the kind and benevolent inhabitants of said citadel would be tasked with managing his mesh network, carefully controlling which tunnels are permitted and which tunnels are disallowed, periodically rotating keys on a meticulous and well-planned schedule making use of automation that minimizes downtime and administration headaches.
plato also would ask himself about vendor lock-in, and fairness in pricing. plato would not accept solutions that are tied to proprietary service providers or non-open codebases. plato would demand open source underpinnings and fair dealings.
so. when you're tasked with redesigning modern networking environments that span both on-premises datacenters and cloud environments, and you want to stay true to making good choices which support your general dissatisfaction with the post-optimistic technology fueled hyperdrive self-cannibalization of capitalism, remember to ask yourself...
how would plato maximize uptime, minimize costs and simplify management of his secure hybrid network with no long term commitments or fears of vendor lock-in?
> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.
This essay seems deep and profoundly insightful but I don't think it actually is. Its ultimate call for "better designed regulation" is the no-true-scotsman fallacy in sheep's clothing. How do you know if your regulations are "properly designed?" If they produce good outcomes. But the problem is that there is no consensus about what a good outcome is. Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite literally forced to bear children under threat of fine or imprisonment [1]. Of course, these people would not put it that way. They would say that they are not happy unless the systematic slaughter of innocent babies is stopped. That is the problem.
And this problem runs very, very deep. A significant contingent -- significant enough to swing elections -- of one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation on earth would prefer to literally deny the laws of physics than admit that anything said by a "liberal" might actually be true. They would prefer to literally have children shot in school on a regular basis than "give up their guns". Of course, they wouldn't put it that way, but that is the trade-off in point of actual fact.
In an atmosphere like that it is not possible to produce "properly designed regulation." In today's political environment, the instant you even utter that phrase, you lose.
---
[1] And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.
At first I was agreeing with you - it's hard to find consensus when asking "what is good?" It's a problem as old as politics. You hit the nail on the head!
Then you started on a partisan diatribe about how the other side of politics is wrong (and stupid).
What I think you've failed to realize, is that the other view is necessary. A single party state is totalitarian by definition if not by fact. There must be other views, and there must be a struggle for dominance among ideas. The struggle for dominance is natural, and healthy, and we should embrace it, even though it might sometimes be painful, it's the only way to grow personally and as a society.
Yes. In fact, so necessary that fake opposition becomes necessary to legitimize totalitarian policy, if organic opposition has been silenced or removed.
Almost all of the stuff said in this comment ranges from misrepresentation ("A significant contingent -- significant enough to swing elections -- of one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation on earth would prefer to literally deny the laws of physics than admit that anything said by a "liberal" might actually be true.", "Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite literally forced to bear children under threat of fine or imprisonment") to outright falsehoods (the challenge to Roe in the context of the above statement).
And it's not even on-topic. This is an off-topic tangent (there's no particular connection between the specific issues mentioned and the article - they were picked because they're partisan issues that the author wants to bring up, not because of any relevance) that looks like an attempt to start a political flamewar, and I don't believe that it belongs on HN.
It's an illustration of how we as a society cannot agree on what a good outcome looks like. If we can't agree on that, then there is no hope of agreeing on what "better designed regulation" looks like.
> And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.
That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow the supporting statements, though I agree with your overall sentiment.
My mistake apparently. I remember reading yesterday amongst all the coverage that the person arguing for Mississippi was a woman, but now I can't find that story. (Maybe it was retracted because it wasn't true.) I'd edit my comment but the deadline has passed.
You seem absolutely certain you are right about certain issues. One of the big draws of America originally was that is was huge and open and you could join a community that agreed with what you mostly.
Yes some people view abortion as a right, others view it as murder. The process shouldn't be to gain enough power to force everyone to follow what you want. It should be to establish rules we can all live by and then live and let live. Mississippi wants strong restrictions after 15 weeks. Let them. New York wants on demand until birth. Let them.
Honestly, if I know your opinion on abortion I shouldn't be able to guess your opinion on taxes. It would be good to allow more diversity in options and long term we can see which ones work.
"All men are created equal" is a pretty compelling reason to end segregation. "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is a pretty compelling reason to end gun control. "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" is a pretty compelling reason to require a trial to have an abortion.
You can make really good arguments from our established principles for and against most controversial issues. There is a clear method to add rights to the Constitution. I would say that happened for segregation and it took awhile to be enacted. If someone wants to change something for abortion or gun control let's amend the founding document otherwise let people live within the rules we have set.
IMO the actual big draw of America was that it was a nation of laws and ideals, rather than a nation of men. Those ideals are that there exists a fundamental right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for every person. The problem with the idea that we can all join a community that agreed mostly with ourselves, is that some people mostly agree that some humans can be considered property based on the color of their skin. Or that women should be subservient to men. Or that the final solution to their problems is that one religion or ethnicity should be excluded from their society. These people exist today, they were not defeated in the Civil War or WWII. See: Charlottesville.
The process isn’t about forcing everyone to follow what you want. It’s to force everyone to permit everyone else the fundamental rights protected by the Constituiton. We know for a fact that when you let people organize into autonomous groups based on their own preferences, some will tend to organize into a group that is at stark odds with the idea and ideals of America. We’ve seen it before with disastrous consequences.
This is not a problem with a simple solution or only a few dimensions.
"better designed regulation" is all that is needed in some cases, when it is possible at all. I also know of plenty of places where the only option people have, if at all, is to vote with their feet.
Some people can throw money and time at changing the system from within, and that's okay. But for those many cases where it is futile, if I had a bag of money of a pertinent size and wanted to throw it at philanthropy, I would think of ways for people who want to vote with their feet to be able to do so systematically.
You could say that the distributed system of politics has bad regulation.
The regulations constrain the system in such a way to produce two huge opposing parties, and encourage corruption of their members.
Regulations like the voting system(s) in use, the regulations on who can donate how much to whom, or how corruption and other rule breaking by politicians is investigated and punished (or not punished, as the case may be).
And I'm not just talking about the US here - although US politics is a giant dumpster fire in this regard.
It might not be deep and profoundly insightful, but if it sets things up in such a way that it can credibly utter the phrase "properly designed regulation" then it's moving in the right direction.
In other words, properly designed regulation might not be a deep and profoundly insightful solution, but it might seem that way at first glance because our political discourse is so screwed up these days.
That's a really hard problem though. There are too many powerful interests, on too many sides, all trying to influence the regulations to give them a leg up.
The best regulations come as a balance of the competing interests. But that requires the different interests recognize each other as legitimate, or at least as needing to be met halfway as a practical matter. It can't be done in a scorched-earth atmosphere - all that can come out of that is regulation that is differently bad.
The call for better regulation is not inherently in conflict with this being a people / culture problem. There is no set of rules that cannot be subverted from within if those enforcing the rules wish to subvert them. Presently the U.S. is experiencing a culture war where a significant group of people are “the ends justify the means” types. No system can withstand that sort of attack indefinitely. On top of that, I notice a fatalism in U.S. politics which results in reasonable people bowing out of trying to make things better. You single out the conservatives, but I see plenty of reason as an outsider to also point fingers at the liberals.
Speaking specifically to pro choice vs pro life both of the viewpoints have merit, but because people in the culture war are so entrenched in their “side” this can no longer be admitted. Back in reality though everyone agrees there is a time past which the child has a right to exist that trumps the mother’s right to choose, even if for some that is at 8 months of pregnancy and for others it is at conception, and everyone agrees that it is wrong to force a woman to carry a child she does not want. So, in a sense, everyone is both pro choice and pro life. All we’re talking about is at what point in the pregnancy one gets priority over the other. This can be negotiated like anything else, and the usual principles of negotiation apply. But, because of the culture war, people have stopped negotiating and are trying to get the rules (supreme court) to protect their point of view, which as a rule cannot provide a lasting solution. People have got to learn again how to talk with each other.
Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who put them there, enjoy the benefits of those systems and make damn sure these systems keep benefiting them no matter what. As long as one doesn't acknowledge this very simple fact, they have no hope of drastically changing society, not even conceptualize a solution IMHO
I dont know. I think you underestimate how difficult it is to make big organisations work well. As soon as any organisation grows large enough (say, a large municipality), it becomes an incredibly difficult task to run it perfectly. Everyone trying their best, but still people from office A have no idea what people in office B does, bosses make the wrong decisions because they dont have access to correct knowlegde and are overworked, employees stop taking responsibility because their bosses are overworked and the decicions making structures are opaque and feel futile.
None of this is evil or bad faith. Its simply very hard problems that are hard to solve individually. We try to organize or build systems to fix these things, but its a very hard problem.
I'm not denying that there are powerful people doing evil things to benefit themselves, and that this is huge part of why everything is bad. Im just saying we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that a lot of our troubles come down to our problems being extremely complex and human nature doesnt interact that great with that kind of complexity. Our biggest problem i think is not nefariouss badguys, but the immense scale of our issues and our inability to tackle them at the proper level.
I think the acknowledgement is implicit in this piece - current structures have allowed this "power capture" and need to be improved. The point the author makes is that blockchain has very obvious avenues for the same power capture and that for this reason, it's not a better option than the difficult work of improving existing and well-explored systems of power/political order.
If the people in power are always 60+ years old with access to lots of money and airplanes, then no, global warming will not decimate them. They can just hopscotch around to wherever the climate is fine. Global warming really only affects people who lack mobility.
Money and airplanes only really work when there is a highly organized stable society. I think it's a mistake to assume that will be always the case at the extremes.
> Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed?
I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:
1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.
2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.
3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.
4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.
I agree with this, well put. Are people evil, or are our structures and systems so complex that we are unable to find best solutions?
Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.
>Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.
I agree with your point. Systems like governments get "too fat" and there are many issues with holding them accountable or at least creating more transparency around their actions.
Calling for more regulation by an entity that needs to be regulated itself is a modern paradox.
It's interesting to look at things from a controls perspective.
An economy (any kind of economy!) is just a feedback control system.
Generally, when you're choosing a feedback controller, you have two options: PID, where you have a set of 3 "dumb" rules, and all you have to do is tune the gains on those dumb rules. Or MPC, where you need to actually build a model of the system you are controlling, and then you can optimally plan to control it the future.
In general, MPC is quite good, much better than PID, if you have a great model of your system. It fails when the model is bad, or when you can't determine your state with accuracy.
PID can be very good -- for systems with very fast dynamics and response times, it is better than MPC, because you don't spend a lot of time in the feedback loop evaluating the model, and you don't need to worry about modeling at all ("model-free")
I think of an economy (very broadly) the same way. The mythical "free market" that everyone talks about is like a PID controller over the whole economy. It's a simple rule, supply and demand, and you can keep prices under control quite well with just a PID controller. But PID can fail spectacularly, too, and cause instability.
In general, you know when instability is happening when you look at a graph of your state variables and it looks like an exponential with a positive coefficient [1]. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: every single chart we can draw about our economy right now looks like an exponential. Energy, probably the most base measurement, looks like an exponential. This is bad [2] and everyone knows it, which I think is the source of a lot of the modern ennui.
Our old MPC models failed spectacularly, because we didn't have a good way of modeling the whole economy, we only had very granular and incomplete information about the markets, and we didn't have a way of actually solving the optimization problem. The obvious missing link here is the computer.
I agree wholeheartedly with the author, and I think it's really valuable to bring up that we already have central planning going on in the form of the corporation. There are thousands of people whose work is completely decoupled from profit and who engage in long term planning at a scale larger than the market they operate in.
What he describes is like a cascade controller, where the inner loops occur in the linear supply/demand region and the outer loops are a smarter model-informed controller. Rather than pretend like the outer loops are just like the inner loops (a pie-in-the-sky libertarian view) or pretend like the inner loops are just like the outer loops (the anti-capitalist view) we should be thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of both. Right now we're very good at the inner loop but we're basically randomly flailing about with the outer loop.
> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.
Everyone is getting richer, as for greedier..
> Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society.
The socially responsible company movement is now a thing. Most companies now care about the environment and their employees to a point that was unheard of decades ago, even if only because of PR.
> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.
And yet there’s a market for doing good things. The number of NGOs is in all time highs.
> Artists really don't get enough of a reward for all the benefit they provide.
What? Artists have never had it easier. From spotify to patreon, or even youtube. Distributing and monetizing has never been easier.
> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.
Suckness is non-surprisingly tied to government. The closest a market is to government the more it sucks.
> The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening.
The statistics say otherwise
> You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers, just like you couldn't run software without paying IBM and then Microsoft, back in those days.
On premise is still a thing.
> delivering less per dollar, gigahertz, gigabyte, or watt.
Except compute has never been more efficient.
> We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous."
We pay them for curating and maintaining a system that’s working for millions of people.
> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.
When wasn’t it that way? Were you around the days of the “ping of death”?
> Everything about modern business is designed to funnel money, faster and faster, to a few people who have demonstrated they can be productive. This totally works, up to a point.
Citation needed
> But we've now reached the extreme corner cases of capitalism. Winning money is surely a motivator, but that motivation goes down the more you have. Eventually it simply stops mattering at all.
Call me crazy, but once I’ve covered my expenses and built a safety net, I’d rather slow down, enjoy my life, spend time with my family… That you see a negative there somehow is baffling to me.
I think this is a group of views by a San Francisco California liberal. The art comment kills me as well. If anything, the overexposure of people on YouTube, Twitch, etc shows just the sheer volume of people who all want to be artists and exactly why not everyone should be paid for their art.
We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy,
capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing
actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
I think the author is looking at the past through the lens of the present. A lot of that paragraph is mixing so many ideas that a historian would be shaking their head. What we have is miles better than anything that came before. We botched "the dream" ? Whose dream?
Firstly, we don't live in a "true Democracy". The Athenians tried that, and some aspects of it were pretty nice, and some sucked (which was something of a trend... all political systems have pros and cons) and it lasted a couple hundred years. And when this new nation (USA) was founded, literally all the founders couldn't agree on how to set it up, because every way they could imagine sucked. So they all compromised a whole lot, and what we got is a Representative Democracy, in the form of a Republic (specifically a federal presidential republic). And today it's working exactly the way the founders intended 245 years ago. That's a huge deal! Not 100 years before our nation was born, the British overthrew the monarchy and tried to form a Republic, but that only lasted 20 years until it fell back to Monarchy and then evolved into Empire. We're doing pretty damn well today, I think.
Second, Capitalism comes in many forms. Which one is your dream? Because I'll guarantee you that the founders, and everyone since, have all had conflicting views about what kind of Capitalism we're supposed to practice, what its aims should be, and how to achieve them. But we still accomplish the broadest sense of Capitalism, and we do it so well that we're the richest nation in the world by far. If you can somehow convince everyone to agree on one form of Capitalism, with one specific set of goals, then maybe we can achieve that.
Third, Social Coherence can only work in a bubble, and we do certainly have many of those, so I'm not sure how that dream failed. You're never going to get 320 Million people to be socially coherent in all ways, all the time. Especially not when their political, cultural, and ideological history has evolved such that one half of them think the other half are maliciously immoral and virtually evil.
Finally, hooooo boy. Utopianism. What can you say about the dream of a literal perfect society? If that's what you're basing all of these complaints on, then I guess the rest make sense... If you believe in a perfect society, then of course you'd believe you can get politics and economics and social order perfect, too. But the most ridiculous part of this dream is that technology is supposed to reach a Utopia. Really? Technology? That stuff that's expensive and complicated and pollutes the earth and depends upon the "evils" of Capitalism and Globalism and Programming? That stuff that depends upon outsourced employment, unequal pay, and unfair labor to produce, and creates huge piles of toxic waste? That stuff that enables new technological business models that find new innovative ways to prey upon people to create money for a tiny few? That is what's gonna bring about your Utopia?
I am not embarrassed. We've accomplished a lot, and we'll keep accomplishing a lot. It won't be fast or easy, and we will never have a perfect society. But things do get better. If you want to feel less embarrassed, stop ranting into your blog and start creating change. Then you can rant into your blog about how difficult change is.
> as all human beings should be cared for under modern society
Why on earth would you conclude that? What's wrong with Darwinian processes? Why must people be protected from the cost of their own misfortune, failure or inadequacy? Why must this cost be born by others?
Basically that people cannot be expected to accept their own fates with dignity? I would make the case that overwhelming violence is an appropriate consequence for violating the peace. Good policing techniques are very effective in maintaining social order, in spite of economic inequality - see Japan.
Why do you think the only weak people that deserve protection are the wealthy? The idea that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the status quo is strange, and in a world where everything is assigned an owner is a maxarchism not a minarchism.
In a real Darwinian world, rich people wouldn't be able to walk the streets without a huge amount of security, and eventually that security force would kill them, take what they have, and pass it to their children. The idea that the people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions of the world is a version of the efficient market hypothesis within a idealized police state whose only duty is to keep these people from falling to their level. It's really just a neofeudalism that will result in neohapsburg lips in 100 years and infant kings.
I'm saying that "society" is basically an agreement to peacefully coexist, using due process to resolve disputes. It's not an agreement to cooperate. Just because the processes by which some some succeed and some fail are non-violent doesn't mean that those successes and failures shouldn't be total.
> people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions
They're not, and I never said they were. All I said was that if they acquired their wealth through legitimate means (ie without the use of force), then they are entitled to keep all of it and do with it what they please.
Say we live in a society with 10 people, each with one dollar. Now say one member of this society invents something useful and sells it to the other nine for 75¢. The wealth gap in this society will have grown dramatically. What exactly entitles the other nine to any of their money back? What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?
Since two other commenters answered your question, I’d like to add to your 10 person society example.
What if a government taxed every one of their transactions by 25%, spent or redistributed 80% of those dollars within the society, and uncharitably donated 20% of all dollars away to another society. How long would it take for that society to have a rounded $0 and the other society to have a rounded $10?
> What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?
Lets take your scenario one step further. The entrepreneur now uses his newly gotten weatlh, buys up some neccessary infrastructure that everyone relies on (for sake of argument lets the food supply) and raises the price to 26ct, everyone in the society but him starves to death and no violence was used. At what point, if any, should a hypothetical state step in?
Nowhere? If you sell your only milk-giving cow, don't be surprised if the prices of milk increases. You're using "buys up" like the people selling had no choice. They have plenty of choices: they can refuse to sell, they can refuse to cooperate with the new owner, they can go and build new infrastructure. Ultimately, a property owner is not a monarch, and can't force anyone to do anything. These techniques have been used in to remarkable effect in the past to peacefully compel good behavior. See Charles Cunningham Boycott or Mahatma Gandhi.
This is an orthodox Marxist view that wasn't borne out by history. There was the objection that was foreseen: that socialism in one country was impossible because capitalism in other countries would just destroy it. There was also the one that wasn't: the ability of domestic capitalists to collaborate and collectively give concessions when society seemed as if it were about to upend, then to withdraw those concessions as the crisis died down and gradually replace them with violence.
There's no inevitable historical process that results in utopia. Nominal "socialisms" tend to combine the political outlook of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism with the Whig history of liberalism, resulting in the worst of both worlds; the belief that 1) all answers have already been discovered, and 2) that they will inevitably be implemented as the people recognize these answers to be truths and decide that in the world of technologically provided abundance created by capitalism, there's no reason to wait.
They believed that the ultimate expression of history is democratic socialism, and that capitalism is a necessary step to get to there from feudalism. To believe that democratic socialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism itself is very strange - capitalism has no moral center that needs to be expressed. It's a physics metaphor that believes that the greater good can be emergent without a moral center.
Democratic Socialism, as seen in European countries, is a system granted and implemented by the US after the devastation of WWII, intended to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. It was funded by the intense military expenses of the US which allowed Europe to ignore military expenditure (for social expenditure), and regulated in the beginning through intense covert operations in Europe using the stick of assassinations to break up parties and eliminate influential people ambivalent about or friendly towards the Soviets, and the carrot of employing well-known socialist intellectuals through unprofitable foundations and public expenditures on their weirdest art and expressions as counter-programming to a Nazi-redolent (i.e. degenerate art) Socialist Realism and Stalin's hatred of modernism.
European democratic socialism was a strategy of capitalism to suppress change, not to encourage it.
What does socialism mean to you, because it seems to me that you aren't talking about the same socialism I'm thinking of (social ownership of the means of production). It sounds like you are talking about the opposite of that (tyrannical control of the means of production).
Only in the "No True Scotsman" definition of Socialism.
Because making everyone else to do what you want (eg. give something that they have to someone who you deem deserves it more) will always require force.
So, decide right now: how much force are you willing to apply?
The answer will have to be sufficient force to ensure they yield: lethal force.
The problem with this interminable argument about government and force is that it implicitly involves unreasonable people.
What allows the government to collect taxes? Lethal force!
But also...
What keeps people from driving on the wrong side of the road? Lethal force!
What keeps people from dining and dashing? Lethal force!
What keeps from using park benches as toilets? Lethal force!
For the most part people are reasonable and if you indicate that they need to do something or refrain from doing something, they go along. If they don't, you can write a law with some enforcement mechanism, and then they go along. If they still don't, you can increase the bite of the enforcement mechanism. Rarely do you have Bartleby the Scrivener types who simply refuse to cooperate, and even then, the consequence for them, like for Bartleby, is generally fines or time in state custody, not lethal force.
The government, through its agents, often does employ lethal force with tragic consequences, but this is usually the result of the agents enforcing their own special laws -- respect my authority or I will kill you -- not the actual laws and their legal enforcement mechanisms. Many nations have no death penalty. Many have police officers who vary rarely kill their citizens. These nations are often very nice countries to live in.
Or use subtle force, like it is done today in capitalism. You just need to leave people with no choices.
Pay the rent, or you and your family end up on the streets. Pay your insurance, or you will be left to bleed out and die. You have no other choice but to take any job, no matter how bad it may be.
Then foster a culture that gives everyone the hope that they also have a chance to get a good life, but only on the condition that they must only think for themselves and compete with the other poor to ascend the social pyramid. That's meritocracy.
This is how the rich (the capitalist ruling class) gets everyone else to do what they want, which is to trickle up enormous amounts of value from everyone to a handful of people.
Then if we want to talk about lethal force, capitalists used overwhelming amounts of it troughout recent history, in order to preserve the status quo that advantages them. It's not a secret and it just takes some honest study to know it.
How is this different than getting everyone to adhere to capitalism or democracy? Lots of people die under this system, doing things they do not want to do.
Is force not linearly related to the gravity / undesirability of the mandate?
Are increasingly draconian mandates not rebuffed by more and more people?
Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?
If people are allowed to leave such systems for ones more to their liking, do they not flee, unless forced not to?
If those who don't "give their fair share" try to leave and are forced to stay, and staying means that they or their children may die, will they not fight to the death to escape?
>Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?
You mean like if you don't pay taxes you go to jail? or if you don't work you live on the street?
There are certainly harsher places to be, but the US is not friendly to people who do not "give their fair share." It's already mandatory.
I guess, but "completely free to leave" is a bit of an illusion... it's not at all easy to do so, and even if you do... you still owe taxes until you renounce citizenship.
I also don't really see barring people from leaving as an inherent requirement to socialism, if that's what you were saying.
> Everyone seems to have an increasingly horrifically misguided idea of how distributed systems work.
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.
This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
It looks like the author is thinking while writing, which is fine. But that alone is not going to change people's minds. I'd look forward to an article where the author, after having gotten thoughts in order, comes back to write an article talking about something specific.
> This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
The author is probably just trying to avoid attacks from the cryptocurrency proponents.
The Old Major we desperately need. Now we need only a "Beasts of England", to claim the farm, and be watchful of the Napoleans in our midst.
Sign me up for whatever revolution this is.
Or skip paying your utility bill. Or your property tax.
Maybe if you set up on an abandoned oil platform and called it Freedomtopia, but that only lasts until your own money runs out and your equipment breaks down.
"I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. [...] As long as the regulators are doing their job."
Is he not aware that regulators in many places work towards making that impossible?
What are examples of good, helpful regulations, does he cite any? Or is it just a vague feeling that regulation is good, and governments are good and for helping people?
All I read is "bla bla power bad" - all those leftists have is "power theory". Power this, power that - power somehow explains everything. It is almost esoteric.
Even the bad things he claims happen without regulations (monopolies) are not proven to happen without regulation, and also not proven to be automatically bad things.
And his first sentence:
"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy."
How does everyone feel so exploited? Who is greedy? Why are you in their power? How do they make it so that you don't have a choice? Goods for consumption generally get better and more affordable over time. So are the producers really so greedy?
What is stopping you from creating a better bank, better health care, better what not? The "rich, powerful, greedy" people are just people like you and me. You are not forced to use their products. With one exception, the government, whose power you can't escape - but that somehow is the one thing lefties like?
I mean some people did and created a better financial system. But now this leftie hates them, too. Guess it is just unbearable if people are independent and not victims like everybody else. And without asking him for permission to boot.
There's some fairly obvious ones: we had a problem where a chemical we were using in many products (CFCs) was destroying a critical part of our atmosphere – ozone. CFCs were cheap, so in free market competition, companies were optimizing for short term success with the unaccounted for externality of increasing skin cancer rates in humans and other animals. Regulation is brought in to patch that externality – successfully helping the world transition to alternative technologies
You can see regulations as part free market capitalism, you just have to zoom out from individual corporations and consider the system patching out local minima with regulations to help achieve global minima.
I mean there's a sliding scaling from sophisticated regulations like CFCs and basic ones like laws against theft (despite it being cheaper to simply steal products from other people). I'm not sure you'd call laws against theft a regulation but it's in the same spirit as the CFCs example
Of course, regulations without careful thought and planning don't lead to optimization either – but the point is, from experience we've learned systems with 0 global regulations tend to have issues and enter in to local minima – so the trick is working out the right level and quality of regulation
"Free market capitalism" does not mean there should be no laws whatsoever. It is a trivial realization that markets have to operate within their given environment, including laws. Nevertheless you can aim for as much freedom as possible. You can make it illegal to shoot people, without having to set prices for goods and labor in law.
I don't think regulations is synonymous with basic laws in such discussion. And therefore the CFC example is also not a good one, as it is obviously an externality. Nobody claims it should be legal to pollute the environment for free.
A more complicated challenge is climate change, which is like the CFC example taken to the extremes. Since every company uses energy the responsibility is spread among everyone. However, every group, from countries to companies stands to lose competitively from using more expensive but less damaging sources of energy – the market pressures drive towards companies that take advantage of externalities like this
So a solution could be global regulation, where we all unilaterally agree to transition to better energy sources, however this has massive resistance and is the battle of our time
This sort of regulation is certainly more subtle than don't steal or shoot people but ultimately leads to a system that's better for all the players
That is a common trope, supposedly free running capitalism would just waste as much energy as possible without regulation.
It is of course nonsense, even without regulations industries have an incentive to save on energy, as it is a cost factor.
Or think about cars - people would prefer to buy cars that use less energy, so that they have a wider range. Therefore there already is an incentive for car manufacturers to develop more energy efficient cars.
Also people can decide they only want to buy products that adhere to certain production standards, even without centralized government.
Overall, nobody claims externalities should have no price.
For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive waste in the river for as much as it costs to transport it, but the cost is then payed by the people downstream. Now as you say if this is tightly causally linked, the people downstream will fight back against you and then it's not so cheap. But the problem comes when the causality gets foggy; it takes decades before there's enough data gathered to connect the high cancer rates with the waste dumping miles upstream. By that time the people who made that decision made bank and exited and are beyond accountability
Where this causal disconnect occurs is where regulation is most effective
I think we agree, you want to price in your externalities, but pricing externalities _is_ regulation, so we're saying the same thing. Perhaps we're crossing wires somewhere
Its sort of a given to learned people that regulations are good. The fact you don't live in a factory town bartering cigarettes for Amazon Coin you use to buy your meals with is a testament to this. Or that your company isn't forcing you to work at gunpoint. The US allowed corporations to run free during industrialization for just 60 years and they managed to exploit people to such an extent that even the hands-off US government stepped in and started pushing regulations. When able to relentlessly pursue profits, companies will stop at no length to increase profits, and we have seen this all across the world. I believe your partisanship is clouding your judgment.
The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand.
So you just use regulations synonymous with laws? Like the example of "no regulations" is that you can just shoot people that bother you?
Nobody argues that there should be no laws, so that is a pretty useless discussion.
But you can not say "without regulations, people would be free to murder each other, therefore all regulations are good". Some laws can be good, some can be bad.
"The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand."
The more regulations you get, the further down you are on the path to centrally planned society. Regulations are central planning. Like demanding a minimum wage is central planning, it is literally planning economy, setting prices for things with disregard of the markets.
So if the author is in favor of that, he is a leftist, plain and simple.
Look at the way he writes: he laments that "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." - and you want to tell me he is not following a collectivist, leftist ideology, yearning for a socialist utopia?
"The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff."
Here's the problem: a "market" that is regulated this way is no longer a market. In order to have a market that works at all as a market, it has to be free in the sense that all transactions are voluntary. If you restrict people's freedom to engage in the transactions of their choice, you break the market; it no longer does what it's supposed to do.
Here's someone trying to rig the stock market. Regulation means that they aren't free to do that. Regulation means that I am free to get a fair market for my stock. I'm more free, and they're less free. (I mean, I also am not free to rig the market, but I wasn't going to do that anyway.
You're free from the threat of murder, which means that I am not free to murder you. Giving freedom always means taking away some other freedom.
The point of regulation is to say that some freedoms are more important than others. The freedom from murder is more important than the freedom to murder. The freedom to get a fair price is more important than the freedom to rig the market. And so on.
Markets work well when the regulations are right. They work badly when the regulations are wrong, or when the regulations are missing.
That's just not borne out in looking at the many markets already functioning under various regulatory schemes for decades now. Lots and lots of markets work as markets, and have fundamentally voluntary transactions, even though certain kinds of transactions are restricted. We've been living in that world for a long time now, and while there's room for debate about what's most functional, there's no credible way to claim that there aren't any functioning markets these days.
> That's just not borne out in looking at the many markets already functioning under various regulatory schemes for decades now.
If markets under all the regulatory schemes we have were actually "functioning", we would not have all the economic issues we have. For example, we would not have the supply chain issues that are currently making the news. We would not have had the crash of 2008, or the Great Depression for that matter. I could go on and on.
> there's no credible way to claim that there aren't any functioning markets these days.
I made no such claim. You're attacking a straw man.
No, I'm attacking the logical implication of your statement. It's a reductio ad absurdum.
You said for a market to work "at all" as a market, it must have voluntary transactions, and people must be able to engage in the transactions of their choice. But nearly all markets do not have those features. Ergo, nearly all markets are not able to work at all, under your premise.
Accepting that most markets do work to a substantial degree, your premise must be wrong.
All useful markets are regulated by the free choices of the market participants of which transactions they will and will not engage in, yes. The idea that a free market, with the definition of "free" that I gave (all transactions are voluntary) is "unregulated" is simply wrong. In a free market, you can't force other people to do things they don't want to do; you have to get them to voluntarily trade with you. That regulates the behavior of all market participants. And it does it better than any regulation by third parties, who have no skin in the game and suffer no penalty if their regulations cause harm, can possibly do.
Unregulated markets lead to exploitative and destructive outcomes 100% of the time. This isn't even a controversial statement, it's just a pithy summary of all relevant history.
Regulation by a centralized entity, to restrict people's freedom to engage in voluntary transactions, doesn't fix market failures. It makes them worse.
> How do you think externalities should be solved?
The only way to solve them is the way suggested by Coase's Theorem: reduce transaction costs to the point where voluntary trades will internalize the externalities. Of course this solution is not always possible, but that just means that in cases where it's not, no solution is possible. There is nothing that requires the universe to always make solutions possible for whatever issues we humans perceive. Certainly it does not follow from the fact that voluntary trades cannot always solve externalities, that government interference in markets does solve them. It doesn't; as I said, it makes them worse.
> How do you think externalities should be solved?
Since government interference with markets involves people making rules who are not parties to any of the transactions in the market and who suffer no penalties when their interference causes harm, government interference itself is an externality. So the claim that government interference can somehow solve externalities is obviously false on its face.
I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:
The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").
There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:
https://holo.host
This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...