A house making more money than a person working a day job.
100 years of whatever this will be
21–30 of 924 posts
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#22I 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 completel…
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.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#23The first step in solving a problem is realizing there actually is a problem. If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time. That thought really doesn't help much when you are fighting with a big bank about $261 in random fees, though.
>If you think about it, humanity really is getting better and better over time.
That is such a vague statement it is essentially meaningless. Better how? How is it not better? What do you mean by humanity? How is your life better? How is it worse?
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#24Maybe 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.
What are you actually saying? You seem to be gesturing at something, but it's not clear what that thing is.
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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#25I'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.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#26I 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.
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.
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.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#27I 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 completel…
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.
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.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#28I 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 completel…
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S
Yes, corrupted a tad. :)
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#29How 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.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#30> 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.