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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#811

Post by webinvest »

jolux wrote: post #29

How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value? How many other institutions in the US are tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of 300 million people and do it for less? It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in th…

M1 is the sum of currency held by the public (i.e., currency outside the Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions); traveler's checks of non-bank issuers; and transaction deposits at depository institutions.

The M1 Money Supply was $3.964 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted). Of that, $1.705 trillion was currency and the rest of the amount was deposits.

The M2 Money Supply includes M1 along with savings accounts, money market accounts, money market funds, and time deposits under $100,000. It does not include IRA or Keogh retirement accounts. $9.769 trillion was in savings accounts; $1.003 trillion was in money markets; $591 billion was time deposits; and the rest was M1.

M2 was $15.327 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted).

By the end of 2021, the federal government had $28.43 Trillion dollars in federal debt.

To answer your question: “How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value?”

I’d say not spending almost 2x the money supply would be a sign of better value.

One start is to download the budgets and spending bills of your country and others and see if you can balance the budget. The exercise of balancing the budget makes a good project for macroeconomics classes. I had to do it for my final macroeconomics project.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#812

Post by knownjorbist »

> 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. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.

You can tune out here.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#813

Post by knownjorbist »

dcow wrote: post #797
supernovae wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today there was a crypto hack that cost over 110 million because the website's cloudflare key was hacked/leaked apparently. With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins. You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.

Right, so wouldn't it be nice if they were using an L2 sub-chain (a bank) that rolled up transactions so that this transaction could have been flagged and rejected. The need for these intermediaries to help the general public not get fucked is clear. The existing tech just kinda sucks. There's a world where the root chain is objective and transparent and distributed but where for most any practical application people…

For tall the clamoring about the issues with Big Tech or Big Government, some HNers seem all too willing to sign over essentially everything important just because it's more convenient when those powers have a backdoor to right wrongs.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#814

Post by webinvest »

treespace8 wrote: post #392
jq-r wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've answered your own question. It is going to be a war. War is a great mallet which destroys most of the power structures and shuffles the cards a bit. But the price to pay is atrociously high. After the war everyone will swear "Never again!", but their children's children have no idea what that means, and have no problem going to war all over again.

I feel that nuclear weapons have made modern global war impossible. Because the powerful would not be able to escape the effects of such a conflict. So for the first time we must now work out our differences without war. This can't be a bad thing.

Maybe that’s why the billionaires are trying to hide in space.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#815

Post by antognini »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #321
voakbasda wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance. Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up…

I've been reading about the philosophy of Law, and how other cultures deal with legal codes. One of the most intriguing takeaways was critically examining our own system and just how verbose it is. American (and just about all Western Legal Codes) are extremely detailed and contain tons of clauses that are explicitly enumerated. Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's…

One thing I've been thinking about lately is that human behavior is inherently complicated and because legal systems need to account for human behavior there's no getting around the introduction of complexity into the system. There's just a question of where that complexity lives.

Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.

Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.

A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).

So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#816

Post by callmeal »

moffkalast wrote: post #362
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people wi…

> Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.

>Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.

Almost always. Re-implementing all the existing functionality from scratch will take much longer than you think or estimate. And attempting to remove/defer implementation of any will cause friction with business that rely on it.

There is a reason why we haven't replaced Excel/Word with google sheets/docs. It's true that most people only use about 60% of any software but everyone relies on a different set of 60%.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#817

Post by GVRV »

mrb wrote: post #786

It's fascinating to me that some commenters react to this essay saying it's "profoundly insightful" when my first reaction was it's very vague and fully of major inconsistencies. Here is just one example: he opens his argument calling Western societies a "systemic train wreck" and yet concludes toward the end: "As a society, we are so much richer, so much luckier, than we have ever been" Which is it? Are we a trainwr…

Yeah, this is what I'm not understanding as well. Like the reason I'm happy with people trying out all sorts of weird DeFi experiments now is because we've tried different regulations for literally hundreds of years now and it hasn't led to anything better. Why not try to fundamentally reinvent stuff? It might be a train wreck, but we already have that right now. And what if it's not?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#818

Post by waddlesworth »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #594
nfw2 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but I think focusing on one region over a limited time period can lead to incorrect conclusions. A single country is not a closed system. The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent. Howeve…

> 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…

I would argue it does matter. Not to say that absolute position doesn't matter, it does, and probably even more so, but relative position has some very real effects.

The main one that jumps out for me is power, and influence. As an example, it doesn't really matter if I can donate $100 to the EFF instead of $50 when a billionaire can outspend me 1,000,000:1 without even flinching.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#819

Post by firebones »

kleer001 wrote: post #341
zackmorris wrote: post #218

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?

One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point.

There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#820

Post by toiletfuneral »

generalizations wrote: post #240
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…

> 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…

I’m from a rural area and this is laughable bullshit
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