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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

801–810 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is if you solved a problem, you can sell the solution for USD Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.

> Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution. well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow ( https://github.com/holochain/holochain ). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping i…

There's no such thing as an ethical ICO.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#802

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

> people are ok with being wealthy. Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs. Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respe…

> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?

Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity.

Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boomer with a printing press is doing. You have to worry about a government that runs with the emotion of a Millenial and the depth of understanding of a TikToker, making that affect your personal freedom, your wealth, and your life. I'm talking about the US in this case, but it's really a mess everywhere. No country has good governance at this point in time.

By all means, wealth is nice to have, but there is a function between increasing wealth and increasing time spent preserving it. At a certain point of wealth you realize that the most valuable things cannot be bought, and it becomes a chore rather than a source of comfort. We are also clearly bad at preserving wealth, otherwise Mesopotamia would be the richest place on the planet.

Being rid of wealth can be extremely freeing, but the communities that see it this way also play by completely different rules than society does at large. You don't see a lot of religious being held up as successes by the current global standards for example.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#803
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you but there are certain useful functions. It’s an optional service the state provides to many many* people with negligible transaction fee, as with, for example, maintaining the roads, air traffic control, or food safety. Those things help you even if you never leave your home or never fly. First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask…

> It’s an optional service the state provides to many many* This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death me…

The point is that marriage is a default bundle, which is easier than tracking individual contracts.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#804
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is liability -- which can only kick in after some damage has been done, possibly displacing someone from their home -- a better solution than a process by which dying/dead trees can be compelled to be removed? This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken peo…

> Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place? Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner). Deontological reason: yo…

> FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner

This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.

In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.

Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.

Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#805
post #748

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…

Incredible. > There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.

The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live.

Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#806
post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can certainly get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, if the premise is that there's no lunch at all until they agree on what to have. There will be some compromising involved, so not everybody might get the dish that is their first choice, but the more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate . That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by…

> more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate. but what if there's only a limited set of choices, and at least one person in the group would hate one of the available choices? What then?

Then you split the group.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#807

"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 p…

except it's not? the UN has like zero real authority over anything, and even since the pandemic started there have been hordes of people resisting the most basic of government asks like wearing a mask in public places - I don't think the technocrats will be micromanaging anyone anytime soon

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#808

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…

> This article is profoundly insightful.

Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#809
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.

A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?

Is it a hosting marketplace or did they also secretly break the CAP theorem and forget to mention it on the front page?

Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces. Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this: > Capitalism has become a "success disaste…

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, s…

I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overwhelming those who valued the open culture and structure which came before.

Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.

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