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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#681

Post by birdyrooster »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #597
ignoramous wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. An…

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.

Complaints may be communicating needs, so if you remove complaint then you stop the flow of communication about needs.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#682

Post by secabeen »

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 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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#683

Post by birdyrooster »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #600
cblconfederate wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't recognize the problem i doubt you ll collect any money for it

I didn't say anything about not recognizing problems.

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#684

Post by s7r »

Thorentis wrote: post #621

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 th…

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!

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#685

Post by birdyrooster »

streamofdigits wrote: post #668

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 ag…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#686

Post by haxiomic »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #532
haxiomic wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

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…

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

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#687

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

pjkundert wrote: post #507
beebmam wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

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?

"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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#688

Post by maerF0x0 »

nfw2 wrote: post #614
maerF0x0 wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#689

Post by verisimi »

"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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#690

Post by eadmund »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #288
robotresearcher wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 disincen…

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.

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