[HN Gopher] 100 years of whatever this will be
___________________________________________________________________
100 years of whatever this will be
Author : mumblemumble
Score : 1101 points
Date : 2021-12-02 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apenwarr.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (apenwarr.ca)
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5002/economics/pros-and-c...
| pkdpic wrote:
| > Artists really don't get enough of a reward for all the benefit
| they provide.
|
| Love to see this in here. Wondering what the author's personal
| definition of artist is though.
| tolmasky wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Let's build what we already know is right.
|
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > Let's build what we already know is right.
|
| 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.
| david-cako wrote:
| vote cako
| debacle wrote:
| 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.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| 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.
| wilkommen wrote:
| 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.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| 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.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| 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.
| vrodic wrote:
| Hetzner is super affordable alternative to AWS, now with a DC in
| US, east coast.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies,
| oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad,
| libertarianism.
|
| Don't pull any punches, tell us how you _really_ feel...
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| "One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in
| an EC2 instance" - I did not know that!
| politician wrote:
| Not more regulation, not better regulation, but impartial
| enforcement of existing regulation.
| walterbell wrote:
| What's the technological equivalent of regulatory capture of
| trusted governance roles?
|
| 1. system control plane with security vulnerabilities, where the
| first attacker can lock out subsequent attackers?
|
| 2. corporate board without poison-pill, special class of shares
| with extra powers, or other defenses against hostile takeover?
|
| 3. corporate or IP acquisition due to debt, market failure or
| poor fiscal governance?
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| teucris wrote:
| > 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.
| mac3n wrote:
| > One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in
| an EC2 instance.
|
| is there a reference for this astounding number?
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| And what about when the EC2 instance is an M1 Mac with SSD?
| pjkundert wrote:
| This article is _profoundly_ insightful.
|
| 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:
|
| 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...
| js8 wrote:
| > 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.
| pitaj wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=35
| 24078
| pitaj wrote:
| > large multinationals like Amazon
|
| 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.
| archarios wrote:
| 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...
| int_19h wrote:
| Soviet Russia actually had to reintroduce markets
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy) to
| dig itself out of the economic hole it fell into under
| military communism
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism).
| sradu wrote:
| 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.
| archarios wrote:
| I wonder if the growth problems that SU came across was
| more due to external pressures than inherent systemic
| limitations of a planned economy
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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).
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| > The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely
| long time.
|
| Less than a century is not "an extremely long time," and
| its citizens majorly suffered under the central planning.
| There was nothing successful about the Soviet Union.
| sfink wrote:
| 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.)
| cmurf wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >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.
| thepra wrote:
| Seems nice in concept, but Rust and Node.js is a bad and
| limiting in execution
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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"?
| ggm wrote:
| > This article is profoundly insightful.
|
| 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?
| sva_ wrote:
| > https://holo.host
|
| > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token
|
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| Also:
|
| - 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.
| DenseComet wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://spec.filecoin.io/systems/filecoin_mining/sector/sea
| l... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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.
| almostkorean wrote:
| What makes you think Ethereum Foundation gave themselves the
| majority of Ether? I'm pretty sure it was 15% but I might be
| wrong
| sva_ wrote:
| https://etherscan.io/stat/supply
|
| 72 million Ether were premined
| davidw wrote:
| > Tyranny
|
| 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.
| beambot wrote:
| > 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.
| davidw wrote:
| That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are
| not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| that's half true.
|
| every actor in the system has its own ledger and they
| reconcile transactions at a given point in time.
|
| you don't need to know what others are doing or who they
| are.
|
| your bank authorize your transactions and then some other
| bank receives the order to deposit the money on another
| account they control.
|
| in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one
| true ledger to rule them all"
| davidw wrote:
| I was referring to 'larceny' in my comment as being a
| centralized rule.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary
| by jurisdiction so it's also decentralised in
| implementation.
| bduerst wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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).
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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).
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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.
| crdrost wrote:
| 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
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit
| them over the head with a stick._
|
| But that's not a society any of us want to live in.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| >Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit
| them over the head with a stick.
|
| If this is possible, then it is equally possible to just
| hit anyone you please with stick so that they are forced
| to do what you want.
|
| Which means, the most violent eager person gets to rule.
| Which is what people who prefer court system don't want.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| If you just hit people with sticks, they are bound to hit
| back. I don't understand your example.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| 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.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else
| to agree (global consensus)
|
| Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has
| been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-
| protocol-guide/ )
|
| Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.
| rektide wrote:
| 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_
|
| https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640
|
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "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.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > 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.
| nouveaux wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks
| about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus
|
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| generalizations wrote:
| > 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.
| htek wrote:
| >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.
| stevetodd wrote:
| 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.
| guntars wrote:
| > 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)?
| generalizations wrote:
| > Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an
| offense (like being gay)?
|
| That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made
| there.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "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.
| generalizations wrote:
| > 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.
| Frondo wrote:
| 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?
| georgewsinger wrote:
| > 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).
| nouveaux wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
| rkalla wrote:
| I love your last sentence here - so well stated.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > 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.
| nouveaux wrote:
| 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.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
|
| 5. Something neither of us have thought of.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| padobson wrote:
| _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.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "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.
| ahtihn wrote:
| 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_.
| nouveaux wrote:
| 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.
| DanHulton wrote:
| The rules on abortion have been around for decades.
|
| Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them.
|
| Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.
| pbourke wrote:
| > Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against
| changing rules.
|
| That doesn't ring true to me. Both liberals and
| conservatives want to change and preserve rules according
| to their viewpoints.
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| beebmam wrote:
| "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"
|
| https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-
| the-tr...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That is not the definition or description of
| "conservativism". That is a strawman.
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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?
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| "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.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| wyre wrote:
| Nearly any instance of a cop interacting with a black man
| compared to interacting with a white man.
|
| The law isn't like to explicitly favor one group over
| another, but the the systems of law have shown they do
| favor one group over another.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Reminds me of this: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/Sc
| hwitzPapers/USAconsci...
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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_.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > Disintermediation is always always always a myth. It only
| means replacing a previous intermediary with another,
| supposedly more deserving one.
|
| pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0
| chmod775 wrote:
| 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.
| AlexanderTheGr8 wrote:
| 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.)
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > 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).
| stdbrouw wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| abbub wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty and
| https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
| which show that the world population is getting wealtheir
| and that is making them much happier.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| 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.
| abbub wrote:
| "...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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > 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.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| 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.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> * 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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.
| neuronic wrote:
| 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.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Also "at least we're not in WW3, life is good!" is such a
| crap argument I can't even.
|
| A guy writes a blog post on important issues to focus on and
| what this guy comes up with is: "shut up, be happy".
| cactus2093 wrote:
| 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.
| encoderer wrote:
| 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.
| thumbellina wrote:
| Perhaps the continual raising awareness of problems is a key
| part of progress.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| No, technical progress is key part of progress. Most
| innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other
| people.
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Yes of course - problems, needs, not complaints.
| nfw2 wrote:
| what is the difference? isn't a complaint essentially
| just stating that you have a problem
| kazinator wrote:
| "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.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| complaining is talking about needs. i dont understand
| your distinction
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _No, technical progress is key part of progress._
|
| 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.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Complaints may be communicating needs, so if you remove
| complaint then you stop the flow of communication about
| needs.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| >Innovators/Inventors are driven by their needs, not by
| other people's complaints.
|
| A need is the solution to a complaint, no?
| teawrecks wrote:
| So protesting is useless, and necessity is not the mother
| of invention?
| moffkalast wrote:
| If you keep complaining about the lack of water though a
| pipeline will eventually be built.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| No, if you collect money to pay for it it will be built.
| Or if the inventors themselves want the water and build
| it for themselves.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| If you don't recognize the problem i doubt you ll collect
| any money for it
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I didn't say anything about not recognizing problems.
| teawrecks wrote:
| You literally did.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| 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.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| You have never in your life been motivated to help
| someone else with needs you didnt have?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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).
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Families have and always should lookout for themselves first.
| That's the way things work and should work.
|
| You're assuming this axiomatically, at first blush this is
| simply nepotism which is typically a term w/ negative
| connotations.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| It outright states meritocracy is wrong...
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| A minor point but
|
| > Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.
|
| If you ran your database locally and with multiple reundant power
| sources, it wouldn't have this problem.
|
| That's of course a bad idea, however it shows it's not impossible
| to do it without a single point of failure.
| wffurr wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| or pirates, of course... there are always pirates
| strange_things wrote:
| Mods, please ban me. I can't stop checking this site but it keeps
| disappointing me. please just ban me
| verisimi wrote:
| "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.
| wilkommen wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| wilkommen wrote:
| You're right, my error.
| jq-r wrote:
| 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.
| wilkommen wrote:
| 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.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| 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.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Britain's move to representative democracy from a monarchy
| is somewhat of an example, although one could argue that
| power is still concentrated.
| s7r wrote:
| When I read this piece, I feel like a lot of these behaviors
| come back to rent-seeking. Here's a perspective on ways we
| might be able to transcend rent-seeking, to different ways of
| work:
|
| https://rebrand.ly/end-of-rent
|
| Jel imate neki contakt? Nisam Hrvat, ali tu sam u tvoj zemlju
| -- mozda mozemo se naci? Tu imas moj informacije:
| https://github.com/sbutler-gh
| treespace8 wrote:
| I feel that nuclear weapons have made modern global war
| impossible. Because the powerful would not be able to escape
| the effects of such a conflict.
|
| So for the first time we must now work out our differences
| without war. This can't be a bad thing.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| 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.
| wilkommen wrote:
| 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.
| Avernar wrote:
| "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.
| awinter-py wrote:
| > The major rework we need isn't some math theory, some kind of
| Paxos for Capitalism, or Paxos for Government
|
| the part time parliament
| https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (lamport
| 98)
| spyckie2 wrote:
| I think the US doesn't understand this enough: Mature capitalism
| IS socialism (democratic socialism, as seen in European
| countries).
|
| Mature capitalism is not what we have today. What we have today
| is capitalism that has not been allowed to evolve to its natural
| state.
|
| It's been recorded many times in history that in the late stages
| of a mature economy, wealth is accumulated by landowners / elite
| / nobles / ruling class / billionaires / whatever you want to
| call it this iteration.
|
| It's also known that as markets mature and competition becomes
| fiercer, it gets harder and harder to participate in it. In 1910,
| I could be a basketball player because the competition was that
| low. Now if I wanted to, I would not even make the tryouts. Apply
| this to every mature industry, which most all of them are
| (consolidated, hyper competitive, and dominated by a few
| players). The skill to participate in them has to be greater,
| which means that more and more people not gifted to be 2-3
| standard deviations above the mean are left out.
|
| Socialism is the natural, expected evolution of capitalism to
| maintain a high functioning society. It says, we ADMIT the above
| two things are happening (wealth is accumulated by the rich, poor
| people are left hanging). It also says, we KNOW that this is
| wrong, both morally as all human beings should be cared for under
| modern society, and societally, as if there are too many unhappy
| people (consumers in this iteration), it will up-end society as
| we know it (riots and revolts).
|
| Capitalism is the growth spurt of a healthy country, but
| socialism is the adult stage.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _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?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| He clearly indicated that he believes it leads to societal
| instability, violence, and collapse.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| 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.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Is the history of revolutions/social collapse really
| marked by despots, dictators and royalty _not_ using
| overwhelming force?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Most recent revolutions and social collapses have been
| marked by the idea that we should seize property from
| some and redistribute it to others.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| 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 75C/.
| 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?
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| > 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?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| 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.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Good question!
|
| As with most choices, the level of force required to
| achieve compliance is more or less linearly related to the
| harshness of the choice.
|
| Pay a small amount of taxes? Little force required.
|
| Give full authority over your life to a faceless central
| planner? Great force required.
|
| Give full authority, with no chance of escape? Lethal force
| required.
|
| I'm not sure why this is a concept that seems to be a
| mystery to advocates of "Socialism", though.
|
| "Socialism would work _great_ , if only you pesky rich,
| free people would just give up and let the state take
| everything and let your children starve!"
|
| :)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not a strong proponent of socialism, but this seems
| like an outrageously loaded response to a genuine
| question.
| pjkundert wrote:
| It was a genuine answer.
|
| 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?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| >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.
| pjkundert wrote:
| And, most people are fine with it, and those that aren't
| are completely free to leave and pursue their lives
| somewhere with "better" rules.
|
| I think we're agreeing; perhaps I'm mistaken?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| Miner49er wrote:
| 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).
| spyckie2 wrote:
| I meant the democratic socialism of many European
| governments.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
| syndacks wrote:
| You had me except for the reincarnation/another life bit.
| Bedsides scripture, is there any evidence of this in science?
| I'm asking genuinely here.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.)
| padobson wrote:
| 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.
| efdee wrote:
| > 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.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| > 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.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| > 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.
| CTmystery wrote:
| > 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Utilizing data to continuous refine one's model of the
| world is the ultimate final authority.
|
| Some people call it science, some call it the scientific
| method, etc.
| mistermann wrote:
| And some other people call it delusion, hubris, flawed
| epistemology, ironic, etc.
| CTmystery wrote:
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| CTmystery wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| 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.
| padobson wrote:
| _Science is the only and ultimate final authority._
|
| Indeed, praise be to science.
|
| _It really is not a bad assumption._
|
| More like a leap of faith.
|
| _There literally can not be a higher authority than it
| by definition._
|
| How [onto]logical.
|
| _It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain
| from it._
|
| Amen, brother. We've got to repress those urges of
| curiosity to appease glorious science. Praise be to
| science! Amen.
| tinco wrote:
| Happy you feel that way ;)
|
| > 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.
| CTmystery wrote:
| 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?
| thanatos519 wrote:
| 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.
| deathcalibur wrote:
| There's not even evidence for reincarnation "on Earth" in the
| Bible anyways so not sure what the OP is going on about.
|
| I do think it is a useful exercise to imagine yourself in the
| future though. It's much easier when you have children to be
| connected to the future.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| 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?
| leafmeal wrote:
| No, there's no evidence in science of reincarnation or an
| afterlife.
| kleer001 wrote:
| > people are ok with being wealthy.
|
| 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).
| criddell wrote:
| > they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and
| learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits
|
| Speaking of first principles...
|
| Do you really believe that there's a purposeful reason why we
| are all here, or is that something you choose to live your life
| by?
| k__ wrote:
| Every time I questioned basic assumptions, my life got better.
| Not suddendly, but in the long run.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Interesting, I just got more depressed every time.
| suriyaG wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah I know this one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pX0
| iAKGzs&list=PLFE1QOlYmt...
| k__ wrote:
| How come?
| qez wrote:
| 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.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| 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.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| I dunno, sorta seems like trying to solve rentier capitalism from
| the tech side isn't really going to work.
| jedberg wrote:
| > 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.
| ralston3 wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| blobbers wrote:
| 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.
| seaourfreed wrote:
| 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.
| randallsquared wrote:
| This whole essay boils down to "This time, for sure!"
| WriterGuy2021 wrote:
| Freedom is slavery...
|
| 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.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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?
| jonstaab wrote:
| Great essay, but I think fundamentally wrong.
|
| 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.
| dirtshell wrote:
| 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.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Nature 's "design" is brutal, and is not compatible with
| the comforts we have grown to expect in our modern lives._
|
| Well, that's _some_ human-centric view.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| List of general malaises:
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| pippy wrote:
| 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.
| miguelazo wrote:
| 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.
| anarchy8 wrote:
| Anyone who thinks decentralized networks without moderation won't
| become cesspools is still living in a Silicon Valley-esque
| fantasy land. In fact, many of the proponents seem to be giddy
| about the lack of control. If they get their way, they will
| poison the idea of decentralized networks in the public mind.
| xipho wrote:
| 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.
| thumbellina wrote:
| > All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That
| means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
|
| XMPP fits this definition.
|
| Bulk activity occurs via decentralized federation.
|
| Regulation occurs via yearly updated XMPP compliance suites.
| https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/
| pshc wrote:
| The future will not be built on XML.
| tabtab wrote:
| 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.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Avery is such a treasure trove.
|
| 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.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "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.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I completely agree.
|
| 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.
| mrobot wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| I love this article so much.
|
| _> 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.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| "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.
| haxiomic wrote:
| > What are examples of good, helpful regulations
|
| 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
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| "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.
| haxiomic wrote:
| 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
|
| More immediately and on the nose, in the UK companies have
| been increasingly dumping waste in our rivers since a
| relaxation of rules after leaving the EU regulations
| https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2021/09/the-raw-
| sewage-...
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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.
| haxiomic wrote:
| 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
| dirtshell wrote:
| 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.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| 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?
| amelius wrote:
| A house making more money than a person working a day job.
| vadfa wrote:
| It makes sense since there aren't enough houses for all the
| people who want to live in an area.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > 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.
| labratmatt wrote:
| 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.
| cardosof wrote:
| Inequality is something we can measure to some degree and it
| seems to be rising fast.
| notpachet wrote:
| 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.
| enchiridion wrote:
| 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.
| t2riRXawYxLGGYb wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| anon9001 wrote:
| Is it possible that DeFi is _not_ a wave of emotions wrapped
| into tech?
|
| I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for
| people who own crypto to borrow and lend.
|
| It's probably one of the first things to be built because
| there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to
| accept it as collateral.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| samhw wrote:
| > 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).
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
| frockington1 wrote:
| Wire transfers are next to impossible to reverse, that's
| why fraud is so rampant
| solveit wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| andrewprock wrote:
| Cash transactions are easily reversible. I'm not sure why
| we think they are not.
| solveit wrote:
| How do you reverse a cash transaction in a way that
| doesn't apply to crypto?
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's a pretty good point actually, cash worked
| perfectly fine without this feature for centuries.
| soco wrote:
| When a store charged me twice for the same item last month
| I was very happy to be able to reverse the transaction.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| 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.
| serverholic wrote:
| "We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing X".
|
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully
| that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts
| believe in it.
|
| That's exactly the point of the article: You need some
| form of guardrail, and that has to be centralized.
|
| > Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is
| better than the current foundation of our financial
| systems.
|
| How so? I am not under the impression that current
| financial providers have significant issues in
| consistently exchanging numbers...
| mcguire wrote:
| " _...they 're capable of skimming a self defined sum off
| by themselves._"
|
| I wonder what happens if someone does that?
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| I find it insulting how we are at the mercy of
| subscription services charging us for cancelled
| memberships.
|
| How come our bank won't give us a dashboard with all of
| our monthly charges and cancel them at will?
| kiklion wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| >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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
| cletus wrote:
| > 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").
| freddref wrote:
| The lava layer anti-pattern springs to mind, where the new tech
| becomes another quirk of the old tech.
| varelse wrote:
| 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
| moolcool wrote:
| 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| FooHentai wrote:
| >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.
| gaze wrote:
| 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.
| winternett wrote:
| 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.
| nprz wrote:
| If you look at wealth inequality over the past 50 years it
| would seem to indicate that those methods don't actually seem
| to accomplish much.
| wyre wrote:
| 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.
| jonstaab wrote:
| Broaden your historical context, and Keynes becomes the junior
| developer who thinks he can elegantly fix everything.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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).
| dmitriid wrote:
| > as fundamentally revolutionary as crypto.
|
| This is a huge claim, and needs to have just as huge of a
| proof.
|
| However, all cryptos can offer is poof (as in poof, and gone)
| than proof.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet
| would be in its early days?
|
| Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made
| public you already had things like France's Minitel.
|
| Blockchains? They still have zero use cases:
| https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-
| has-c...
|
| > You have to be open minded and extrapolate
|
| Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is
| blindly believe in it.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort. Here
| are some just off the top of my head.
|
| sovereign store of value (useful if your government
| sucks)
|
| permissionless payments (funding wikileaks)
|
| private/anonymous transactions (Monero)
|
| event tickets (good use of NFTs)
|
| synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA)
|
| decentralized asset exchange - AMM
|
| decentralized prediction markets
|
| DAO - a new way for people to organize and form internet
| native companies
| serverholic wrote:
| How a tech enthusiast doesn't think these are all
| extremely interesting is beyond me.
| Joeri wrote:
| 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?
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| jakub_g wrote:
| > Anyone can mine gold
|
| 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.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| Nothing is preventing you just going to a gold producing
| river and panning for gold.
|
| You will be just as effective doing that as someone who
| just runs the Bitcoin client at home.
|
| Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and
| capital intensive operations in both gold mining and
| Bitcoin mining.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
| zarzavat wrote:
| The fundamental difference between cryptocurrency and gold
| is that cryptocurrency can be transmitted whereas gold can
| only be carried.
|
| Try carrying a bar of gold across a border and you'll end
| up in an interrogation room.
| soco wrote:
| How about declaring it in the first place?
| alchemism wrote:
| That is why diamonds are traditionally used for that sort
| of transfer.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| curiousllama wrote:
| 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.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| What is the benefit of using crypto on the backend?
| icehawk wrote:
| 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.
| agallant wrote:
| 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.
| SassyGrapefruit wrote:
| >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 think what you are stating is a bit reductive.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> 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.
| amelius wrote:
| If what you say is true, we'd all be programming in COBOL
| still.
|
| Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in
| essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic
| underlying principle.
| pezzana wrote:
| 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.
| grey-area wrote:
| 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.
| pezzana wrote:
| > Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the
| powerful.
|
| You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was
| being weaponized. Examples:
|
| - currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries)
|
| - civil asset forfeiture (citizens)
|
| 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.
| moistrobot wrote:
| Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our
| broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom
| notpachet wrote:
| > Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it.
|
| Tell that to this Angular 1 app.
| Juliate wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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?
| moistrobot wrote:
| I'm glad it went well for you :)
|
| 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
| soco wrote:
| 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.
| marvin wrote:
| 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.
| moistrobot wrote:
| 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
| histriosum wrote:
| 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?
| moistrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > > 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?
| moistrobot wrote:
| 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
| preseinger wrote:
| 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.
| moistrobot wrote:
| I think that's a totally valid opinion.
|
| The advantage to people is that they can more flexible.
|
| The disadvantage to people is that they can be more
| irrational.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Are you suggesting that code is more rational than the
| imperfect people who implement it?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Technology has a trend of destroying middleman
| industries, as they don't provide value and take a
| portion of the proceeds for themselves.
|
| So, these middlemen that "don't provide any value"
| guarantee that: my money isn't stolen, that I get the
| apartment I was shown etc.
|
| So, you've removed these middlemen. How exactly is your
| technology going to solve this?
|
| > DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial
| institutions because we now have technological means to
| replace banks and lenders.
|
| No, you don't. With banks I can revert a fraudulent
| transaction (I paid, but the goods never showed up). How
| is defi solving this simple case?
| amelius wrote:
| It doesn't always work out well for everybody. Check this
| out:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-59069662
| dmitriid wrote:
| The key is: it works well _for most people_. So, the
| question remains: What exactly does your crypto improve?
|
| And on top of that, in this case, how will it help with
| the stolen house in Luton?
| whatshisface wrote:
| It improves that process in a disintegrating third world
| country, which many of us may find ourselves in within our
| lifetimes.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| That's still pretty fast.
| oblio wrote:
| There are very few highly developed countries that fell
| from that status without being at war.
|
| Argentina is the only one that comes to mind.
|
| Planning for the apocalypse isn't really planning, but I
| guess we all need hobbies.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > It improves that process in a disintegrating third
| world country,
|
| A disintegrating third world country will not be able to
| enforce anything. So, you've transferred your money and
| got a key to a non-existent place.
|
| Good luck with your "improved process".
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| No it doesn't and no you won't. Where is this fatalism
| coming from?
| fsflover wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Unfortunately very few people live in a democratic
| country with the rule of law like Sweden.
|
| You mean, the absolute vast majority of people in this
| world live in contries with more-or-less functioning
| governments. Not perfect, but functioning.
|
| > or the rest, crypto can be a good place to keep their
| funds without the fear of losing.
|
| Ah yes. The only use case is hoarding. Even though I
| specifically provided a different case that doesn't
| involve hoarding.
| preseinger wrote:
| 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?
| zapataband1 wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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.
| jdmichal wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| Vetch wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| Vetch wrote:
| > 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.
| winternett wrote:
| >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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| Software development is not always the best metaphor for
| everything.
| generalizations wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| 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?
| edot wrote:
| I want to be ruled by people who bought into Bitcoin in 2012
| or earlier. They know how to govern best.
| intuitionist wrote:
| I believe Plato says something very similar.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Be warned: any bitcoin post is deep within Poe's Law
| territory
| edot wrote:
| Haha, I sure hope no one takes my post seriously.
| amelius wrote:
| Your argument would make sense if the smartest people in the
| world were developing alternative, highly efficient systems to
| replace the current mess.
|
| Alas. Our smartest people are working on making people click
| ads ...
| mcculley wrote:
| https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| 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.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| 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.
| winternett wrote:
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Well everything _ALREADY IS_ software. :)
|
| 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.)
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > Like anything we could ever hope to try is already
| accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins.
|
| Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal
| health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.
|
| Don't forget about the very important real progress being
| made.
| noahth wrote:
| A very large fraction of DeFi supporters do not regard all
| of those as desirable progress.
| mcguire wrote:
| Are you talking about the same Decentralized Finance?
| thebean11 wrote:
| What is "very large"? What fraction of legacy bankers
| regard all of those as desirable progress? That's a
| pretty silly ad-hominem.
| pydry wrote:
| Part of the reason you got gay marriage but not universal
| healthcare is that gay marriage doesn't threaten corporate
| interests.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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).
| nemothekid wrote:
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| 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.
| wyre wrote:
| 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.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Health insurance is what holds back universal health
| care, along with hospitals themselves. Both of them are
| incentivized to raise costs for consumers.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Is it possible to de-capitalize heathcare? Not in this
| economy.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Almost afraid to ask, but how is racism holding back
| health care?
| mnhn1 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1]
| https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/
| zepto wrote:
| Is it clear that the guy really believed that Obamacare
| would benefit _him_?
|
| It's not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that
| the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.
| lvh wrote:
| 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.
| oivey wrote:
| 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."
| mcbishop wrote:
| 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).
| zepto wrote:
| I'm sorry you are a racist.
|
| How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen
| with black woman? I'd have thought that was more
| connected to the media using it that way.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-
| mistak...
| zepto wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| I think governments generally want to impress their own
| values onto the people. Marriage is often part of that.
| eadmund wrote:
| The reason that the State has historically cared about
| marriage is family formation. That's all.
|
| Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with
| family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out
| of that business.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| How would _that_ increase government power? It 's like
| you aren't even trying to grow government.
| Animats wrote:
| _I 've never understood the reason we even have marriage
| defined in government at all_
|
| Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing.
| Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Marriage is not a religious practice. Proof: non-
| religious people get married all the time.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Yeah and neither are Christmas or Easter!
| handrous wrote:
| Kinda true. Especially Christmas.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Marriage is not a religious practice.
|
| 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).
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| 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"
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 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
| lupire wrote:
| You are describing civil unions. Legal marriage is just
| religous baggage.
| ska wrote:
| > 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| Marriage is a contract. Governments regulate the
| enforcement of contracts. That's why they're involved.
|
| The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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".
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Marriage is a contract.
|
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > without either party re-consenting to the new agreement
|
| This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts,
| which is why prudent drafters include severability
| clauses
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > prudent drafters include severability clauses
|
| yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is
| marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a
| pre/postnup cannot contradict law.
| kube-system wrote:
| Still, this is not different than other contracts.
| Negotiability is not an essential element of any other
| contract. Nor can other contracts contradict law.
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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!")
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
| posix86 wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| That reminds me of an old joke:
|
| Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?
|
| A: He works it out with a pencil.
|
| 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.
| theduder99 wrote:
| haha nice modern version! I originally heard the first
| version as a mathemetician instead of an engineer.
| darawk wrote:
| 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.
| shebek wrote:
| What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that
| society seems to be getting worse largely _because_ of
| software.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
|
| How is software making society worse?
| shebek wrote:
| By concentrating power in the hands of unelected,
| unaccountable institutions.
|
| By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human
| beings.
|
| By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
|
| By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor
| towards largely useless endeavours.
|
| By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing
| fraction of all social interactions.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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
| halostatue wrote:
| 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.).
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| mesozoic wrote:
| The new AR/VR reality will become as shitty as the
| current one and assuredly do it much faster.
| akolbe wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin
|
| _A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for
| something._
|
| _" What have you lost, Mulla?"_
|
| _" My key," said Nasrudin._
|
| _After a few minutes of searching, the other man said,
| "Where did you drop it?"_
|
| _" At home."_
|
| _" Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"_
|
| _" There is more light here."_
|
| According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin
| (1882-1948) used to act the story out on stage.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin
| Shorel wrote:
| Except: Law is code. And we run these programs. We are the
| processors.
|
| And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress.
|
| Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep
| these laws.
| mavhc wrote:
| Real laws are maths, slightly real laws are physics.
| Lawyer laws are just written to cause you to have to hire
| lawyers
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| supernovae wrote:
| Today there was a crypto hack that cost over 110 million
| because the website's cloudflare key was hacked/leaked
| apparently.
|
| With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one
| poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins.
|
| You're not going to replace people problems with tech.
| Period.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> You 're not going to replace people problems with
| tech. Period._
|
| Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from
| misattribution of a people problem to tech.
| secabeen wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| How would decentralized finance affect the advertising
| driven business model of web applications?
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| DenseComet wrote:
| 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.
| shebek wrote:
| I though the point of personal computing was to make it
| _easy_ to think, not to make it _unnecessary_?
|
| If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait
| needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure
| what Web3 can offer.
|
| OTOH, _reintroducing the friction of having to decide
| whether the next click is worth your time and attention
| (i.e. money)_ is where it 's at.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| yao420 wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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?
| indigochill wrote:
| > 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| > 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).
|
| How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my
| POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be
| untraceable/unauditable).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| colonelxc wrote:
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| >This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV
| already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads?
|
| Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play
| the fucking film you bastards
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Too bad we can't just fork a copy without ads and use
| that instead.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phi
| l...
| teucris wrote:
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| But grassroots campaigns and protests do result in
| change. Not quickly enough for many people, but if your
| alternative is burning everything down....
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Nonviolent protests don't seem to get much change.
|
| People get angry over years of absolute no change.
|
| It seems like there's a happy medium, as long as no one
| is killed.
|
| (The media usually sensationalizes the protest too. Hell
| ---CVS planned on closing 200 California stores years
| ago. How do I know? I just know. I heard a spokesman for
| CVS claim that theft was the reason. When asked about
| which exact stores were hit hard--she didn't have an
| answer.
|
| When there's a violent protest, and the disenfranchised
| guys break a window and steal. The tv stations play the
| same isolated incident over, and over again.)
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Construct an self-reinforcing reality aimed at
| dismantling the current enabling structures. That's
| exactly as hard or as easy as it sounds.
| kiliantics wrote:
| 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.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| Interesting, that reminds me of psychohistory from the
| Federation series by Isaac Asimov. Where would I find
| that literature?
| Zoo3y wrote:
| and perhaps more frustrating to smart people looking to do
| good realize they are just one person. Huge, structural
| changes to society involve everyone.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
| s7r wrote:
| Really appreciate this sub-thread, including @Zoo3y and
| @teucris' comments. I share a similar perspective. In the
| case of this article, I feel like a lot of the behaviors
| come back to rent-seeking -- here's a perspective that
| might resonate with you:
|
| https://rebrand.ly/end-of-rent
|
| If this interests, send me a note and let's
| connect/introduce!
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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.
| ErrantX wrote:
| 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.
| tcgv wrote:
| 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.
| dkasper wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| IIRC the Fed is currently removing reserve requirementa
| because they don't believe they are useful.
|
| Banks have reserves now because the government printed so
| much money to give them that they can't put it to any
| use.
| solveit wrote:
| > 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.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Well yes true. Arguably the whole NFT thing is an example
| of that already.
|
| But I get your point; it is reasonable for savvy people to
| have a play ground for more risk.
| tcgv wrote:
| 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.
| notpachet wrote:
| Honestly in fairness to junior developers, I should have left
| the "junior" label out of my original post. We're all guilty
| of this by varying degrees.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| This comment is AWS-blessed and AWS-sponsored
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| twofornone wrote:
| >Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto
| banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in
| consumer protections like refunds
|
| It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want
| the protections of our modern financial system...
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| "Dying is easy young man, governing's harder." Something like
| that.
| beebmam wrote:
| Certainly the Taliban is finding that out in Afghanistan. And
| there is tremendous suffering among people who don't deserve
| that situation.
| oblio wrote:
| Maybe they wouldn't be there without almost 5 decades of
| foreign invasions...
| _alex_ wrote:
| It's not a coincidence that a lot of cryptocurrency projects
| are started and maintained by relatively young and
| inexperienced programmers.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Yes, yes, and yes again. This goes for _every_ "revolutionary"
| thing, from a new codebase to DeFi to an actual revolution.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| People don't want to break free of regulators, they want to
| break free of visa and mastercard playing moral judge on who
| you can send money too.
| rland wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function
|
| [2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > regulation
|
| by whom?
| colechristensen wrote:
| The local king / mayor
| cblconfederate wrote:
| sure but what about inter-kingdom trade (and even, not
| all cities belonged to an empire)
| colechristensen wrote:
| You taxed and regulated at ports of entry
| cblconfederate wrote:
| That's not a regulated market, you can sell elsewhere
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 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).
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Here is some data that compares the median income to the
| rising cost of living in the US.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/america-middle-class-
| living-...
|
| 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)
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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...
| pphysch wrote:
| > 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.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| >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.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| These arguments are not helpful because their metrics and
| criteria for what constitutes "works vs. does not work" are
| different from yours.
|
| > Why has China been so successful despite what is widely
| believed to be a failed premise?
|
| They're successful as an economy, not as a society (obv, using
| my metrics.)
| endisneigh wrote:
| By which criteria are they not successful as a society?
| xbar wrote:
| The ones that measure the success of a society. WEF's
| Global Competitiveness Report and Amnesty International,
| for example.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > successful as an economy, not as a society
|
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| 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.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| 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.)
| dsign wrote:
| > 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.
| whakim wrote:
| 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.
| awinter-py wrote:
| author is describing a system of taxation based on compatibility
| rather than on the need to pay for roads + armies
|
| this part feels real
|
| integrating with things is a tax in a lot of ways
| cs702 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'm not aware of any exception.
| deathcalibur wrote:
| 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.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| 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.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " The whole liberal framework of how we think about freedom has
| to be questioned and challenged"
|
| What do you envision as the alternative?
| int_19h wrote:
| > 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Data Access Objects are going to save us all?
|
| EDIT: I am apparently too disconnected from the crypto crowd.
| Or depending on how you look at it, appropriately disconnected.
| api wrote:
| They're trying really hard to solve a problem that hasn't been
| solved yet, which requires placing oneself beyond the "reason"
| of skeptics.
|
| https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm
|
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm really sorry, bud, but I count you as one of my "beyond
| reason" group. Sure, your technical solution will bring in
| utopia!
| api wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| none of this is a computer problem, they're all people
| problems
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| Yup. Cheap slogan: noone has yet decentralized the gun.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| 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.
| sorethescore wrote:
| 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.
| aarondf wrote:
| 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!
| politician wrote:
| 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.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| timerol wrote:
| 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/Lis
| t_of_automated_train_system... As always, the future is
| already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| ro_bit wrote:
| > The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area
| is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
|
| What's this about?
| codezero wrote:
| Monthly Caltrain passes cost (last I used them) cost ~
| $200/month. Tech companies usually give such passes away, or
| heavily subsidize them.
| blobbers wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| 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.
| darawk wrote:
| 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.
| willhinsa wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sad but true.
| xondono wrote:
| > 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.
| Vaslo wrote:
| 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.
| rewgs wrote:
| 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.
| vslira wrote:
| 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.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault -- for all
| intents and purposes byzentine == malicious.
|
| edit: I should have read the article to the end, literally the
| next paragraph where I stopped to comment said what I just said,
| but better.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| ausbah wrote:
| 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
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| zaphar wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The summary is that in any system, if you don 't have an
| explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one._"
|
| That is very well put. I'm stealing it.
| snewman wrote:
| > 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.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| "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?
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > 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?
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| Veelox wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| thurn wrote:
| I assume you'd also have felt this way about e.g.
| segregation? An equally controversial issue in its time?
| Veelox wrote:
| "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.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> the other view is necessary._
|
| So necessary that fake opposition becomes necessary to
| legitimize totalitarian policy, if organic opposition has
| been silenced or removed.
| [deleted]
| GavinMcG wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| > 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.
| thurn wrote:
| (also the person, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott
| Stewart, does not to my knowledge identify as a woman)
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| I totally missed that! You're right, I was just more
| focused on the logic.
| notron wrote:
| He wouldn't be a woman even if he tried to identify as one.
| Everyone else would still identity him as the man that he
| actually is.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| 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.
| dsign wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| > And it's not even on-topic.
|
| 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.
| Joeri wrote:
| 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.
| heurisko wrote:
| > 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.
| id02009 wrote:
| 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.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| 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.
| hairofadog wrote:
| _> 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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| 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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area
| is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
|
| Is there really "public" transportation only available to FAANG
| employees ?!
| jolux wrote:
| 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.
| ericls wrote:
| I don't think it's a good idea to make more and more solutions to
| problems that we don't understand.
|
| What about we spend more time to study the problems, to study us.
| Hakashiro wrote:
| Some arguments there are ok but:
|
| > The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area
| is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
|
| Just move to Europe lmao
| JanisL wrote:
| 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.
| whakim wrote:
| > 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.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Debt is >50% of advanced economies, and it's price fixed.
|
| Why bother with setting the price of bananas and everything
| else, when you can set one price and have a greater effect?
| JanisL wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| > 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.
| shoo wrote:
| > 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace
| them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes_
|
| But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach,
| implemented sanely.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> 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.
| [deleted]
| JanisL wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| voakbasda wrote:
| 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.
| tjr225 wrote:
| > Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be
| predicted in advance.
|
| That sounds like the opposite of a risk to me.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Risks can only be intelligently taken when the odds of
| the different outcomes are at least approximately known
| in advance.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| Voting is a blunt tool. It destroys too much nuance and
| freedom of choice.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S
|
| Yes, corrupted a tad. :)
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I think the article would argue you're making the mistake it
| criticizes: you're ignoring the role of regulation.
|
| > If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional
| monetary policy such as purchasing equities...
|
| If that's a problem, prohibit it.
| JanisL wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| la6471 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway803453 wrote:
| * 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.
| servercobra wrote:
| 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > 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.
| Thorentis wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
| s7r wrote:
| Love this comment! You can see some of my explorations on
| subsidiarity:
|
| https://juststart.do/just-start and
| https://sambutler.us/localfutures
|
| What's a way to contact you @Thorentis? Likewise, you'll have
| my contacts from these urls -- would love to connect and
| introduce!
| pezzana wrote:
| > 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.
| drclau wrote:
| > 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.
| Juliate wrote:
| He critiques decentralized systems taken as an independant
| solution in general, based on their working principle, not a
| specific decentralized system.
| ploika wrote:
| > 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.
| gtsop wrote:
| Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing
| his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"(tm)
| 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
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| > No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who
| put them there
|
| Well, if you define "work" as benefiting as many people as
| possible, then no they don't work. That's obviously the point
| the author was making.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Phrasing it as "things don't work" misleads people into
| thinking that it's just a matter of reforming a couple of
| regulations.
|
| Instead this a world-wide, centuries-old conflict for power
| and wealth. The kind of thing that people live and die for.
| badrequest wrote:
| Defining it this way indicates a misunderstanding of the
| purpose of these systems.
| HappyKasper wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"(tm)
| 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.
| rustmachine wrote:
| 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >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%.
| munificent wrote:
| I would happily take that bet. I'm sure it's higher than
| the percentage of general population, but I'd bet money
| it's still less than 20%.
| rustmachine wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| Bingo. Those in power by definition can change the system, but
| they don't. Which probably means it's working pretty well for
| that cohort.
|
| But one thing you are missing is that those in power are just
| like us. Deeply flawed people and what they build is flawed for
| their purposes too.
|
| Global warming is a great example. They have absolutely no
| solution to it and it will decimate not just them, but
| everyone.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| 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.
| practice9 wrote:
| 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.
| _greim_ wrote:
| I immediately thought of Scott Alexander's "Meditations on
| Moloch".
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
|
| 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.
| DonnyV wrote:
| 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.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| 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.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| 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.
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| What are you actually saying? You seem to be gesturing at
| something, but it's not clear what that thing is.
| exodister wrote:
| I believe they are gesturing at socialism or some kind of
| centrally controlled market which has helped companies like
| Amazon and Walmart excel.
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Zaskoda wrote:
| This piece seems to use "decentralized" and "distributed"
| interchangeably. These are not entirely the same concept.
| dtaht wrote:
| sometimes... I hate how popular avery's posts are. (he's my
| former boss). I simply can't write like that. Or think like that.
| good show, ex-boss!
| indymike wrote:
| 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| >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?
| chubot wrote:
| Good list:
|
| https://www.gwern.net/Improvements
|
| 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.
|
| Related: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/20
| 21/10/wh...
|
| 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.
| nomdep wrote:
| On average, middle class and below lives longer and more
| confortable than in the previous thousands of years.
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| kijin wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Le
| t...
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| NateEag wrote:
| A few point out that
|
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| For more on the song:
| http://www.trialanderrorcollective.com/collective-collab-
| blo...
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Relevant African American Folktale: "The People Could
| Fly"
|
| https://www.wheelcouncil.org/stories/the-people-could-
| fly/
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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"
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Global poverty has never been lower, things are not just
| improving for white collar workers.
| krmboya wrote:
| What counts as global poverty in the course of human
| history?
| cowl wrote:
| 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
| Clubber wrote:
| >By every measurable metric
|
| 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.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Life today is so much better than at any other time in
| history, because washing machines! And because I'm middle
| upper class, almost forgot that.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| By every single one of those metrics the world in
| aggregate is better than 100 years ago. Go back 250 years
| ago and it's not even arguable.
|
| You're being short sighted.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Median wealth? Better today.
|
| Levels of debt? Probably worse today.
|
| Job satisfaction? Probably worse.
|
| Median income per household? Better.
|
| Per person? Better.
|
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| xibalba wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| 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.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| That's why we have automatic stabilizers like ngdp targeting,
| which the Fed has recently embraced.
| pdonis wrote:
| The article lost me here:
|
| "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.
| preseinger wrote:
| All useful markets are regulated.
| pdonis wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| So you don't even believe that externalities are possible?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> So you don 't even believe that externalities are
| possible?_
|
| I said no such thing. I have no idea where you are
| getting that from.
| preseinger wrote:
| No, by central authorities.
|
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Market failures are too common for unregulated markets to be
| free.
| pdonis wrote:
| Regulation by a centralized entity, to restrict people's
| freedom to engage in voluntary transactions, doesn't fix
| market failures. It makes them worse.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| How do you think externalities should be solved?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> nearly all markets do not have those features._
|
| This is not true. Many markets do have those features.
| They just don't make the news because there are never any
| newsworthy issues with them.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > Let's build what we already know is right.
|
| There's no universally or commonly accepted view of what is
| "right".
| ignoramous wrote:
| 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.
| marksbrown wrote:
| Relevant : https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
| moloch/
| g_sch wrote:
| 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...
| andrekandre wrote:
| > 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
| mindslight wrote:
| This post had so much potential, only to start going off the
| rails calling a straw man of libertarianism a market failure mode
| [0] and crash and burn by ignoring that so many of the listed
| gripes are due to centralized authorities being themselves
| corrupted. The regulators he's championing are also responding to
| their own incentives - they create ever more
| procedures/bureaucracy on small-scale actors to appear to be
| doing something, while failing to police large scale misbehavior
| because of too big to fail. Joe Businessman wants to sell
| psychoactive substances? Put him on a list to prevent access to
| the banking system! Golden Mansacks created financial logic bombs
| that blew up? Print trillions to bail out the industry!
|
| 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, 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.
|
| There's definitely wisdom in here and we're never going to change
| things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in
| many different paradigms. But I feel this 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 a setup for failure,
| but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized
| authority is not.
| samirillian wrote:
| > 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.
|
| CTRL-F the article.
|
| Structure - 92 Hierarchy - 0
|
| https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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