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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

#131

Post by mempko »

JanisL wrote: post #4

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 completel…

> 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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#132

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

"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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#133

Post by nouveaux »

ahtihn wrote: post #104
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others .

This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos.

"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."

This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#134

Post by vorpalhex »

nouveaux wrote: post #80
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…

"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 s…

> 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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#135

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#136

Post by thesuitonym »

>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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#138

Post by GavinMcG »

pdonis wrote: post #110

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 ch…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#139

Post by chmod775 »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #91
chmod775 wrote: post #64

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…

replace AWS with and every bullet point is still True. Every website (the Internet) needs to be hosted. If not on a cloud provider, you are going to have to host it yourself, which is a ton of more work and more points of failure. For cloud providers, point of failure occurs if you don't pay them. When you are hosting yourself, there are tons of points of failure (electricity, maintenance, etc.)

> replace AWS with 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).

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#140

Post by thegrimmest »

spyckie2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

> 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?

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