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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#81

Post by shadowgovt »

notpachet wrote: post #49

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…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#82

Post by micromacrofoot »

wffurr wrote: post #66
Lambdanaut wrote: post #15

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.

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.

or pirates, of course... there are always pirates

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#83

Post by pietrovismara »

Clubber wrote: post #68
cowl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 gla…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#84

Post by js8 »

pjkundert wrote: post #39

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 theor…

> 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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#85

Post by webmaven »

nine_k wrote: post #70
sam0x17 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#86

Post by stdbrouw »

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#87

Post by spyckie2 »

Miner49er wrote: post #79
spyckie2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

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).

I meant the democratic socialism of many European governments.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#88

Post by pietrovismara »

hindsightbias wrote: post #52

“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 y…

> 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?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#89

Post by DFHippie »

_yid9 wrote: post #55
spyckie2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

Only in the "No True Scotsman" definition of Socialism. Because making everyone else to do what you want (eg. give something that they have to someone who you deem deserves it more) will always require force. So, decide right now: how much force are you willing to apply? The answer will have to be sufficient force to ensure they yield: lethal force.

The problem with this interminable argument about government and force is that it implicitly involves unreasonable people.

What allows the government to collect taxes? Lethal force!

But also...

What keeps people from driving on the wrong side of the road? Lethal force! What keeps people from dining and dashing? Lethal force! What keeps from using park benches as toilets? Lethal force!

For the most part people are reasonable and if you indicate that they need to do something or refrain from doing something, they go along. If they don't, you can write a law with some enforcement mechanism, and then they go along. If they still don't, you can increase the bite of the enforcement mechanism. Rarely do you have Bartleby the Scrivener types who simply refuse to cooperate, and even then, the consequence for them, like for Bartleby, is generally fines or time in state custody, not lethal force.

The government, through its agents, often does employ lethal force with tragic consequences, but this is usually the result of the agents enforcing their own special laws -- respect my authority or I will kill you -- not the actual laws and their legal enforcement mechanisms. Many nations have no death penalty. Many have police officers who vary rarely kill their citizens. These nations are often very nice countries to live in.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#90

Post by kijin »

Clubber wrote: post #62
nomdep wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average, middle class and below lives longer and more confortable than in the previous thousands of years.

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.

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.
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