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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

#601

Post by solveit »

andrewprock wrote: post #563
solveit wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Cash transactions are easily reversible. I'm not sure why we think they are not.

How do you reverse a cash transaction in a way that doesn't apply to crypto?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#602

Post by dcow »

fragmede wrote: post #542
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#603

Post by darawk »

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#604

Post by jacobr1 »

munificent wrote: post #505
shebek wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.

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 betwee…

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

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#605

Post by zepto »

mnhn1 wrote: post #423
throwawayboise wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost afraid to ask, but how is racism holding back health care?

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 Ten…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#606

Post by sradu »

goodpoint wrote: post #243
pitaj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.

People constantly forget that large multinationals like Amazon are bigger that many countries, are purely authoritarian structures and work as 100% centralized economies. > Central panning doesn't scale On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability. The problem is that dictatorships (both co…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#607

Post by fortuna86 »

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…

> Disintermediation is always always always a myth. It only means replacing a previous intermediary with another, supposedly more deserving one.

pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#608

Post by zepto »

mcbishop wrote: post #434
oivey wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost the word “universal” in “universal healthcare” in the comment you’re replying to. There are many ways racism impedes the push for universal healthcare. One is the classic fact that it is a welfare program, and that spurs the comments and thoughts about welfare queens and “young bucks.”

When I hear "welfare queen," I think of a black woman. Because I'm racist (sadly). From that, the racist idea that free services (e.g. universal healthcare) are unduly exploited by black people (or immigrants).

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#609

Post by Vaslo »

xondono wrote: post #525

> 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…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#610

Post by stevetodd »

htek wrote: post #516
generalizations wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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…

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.
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