Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the breach/link you tried to share?
You can click their profile and see it
I can't see anything?
And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
51–60 of 447 posts
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…
You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much.
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things. Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. T…
People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopp…
Throwing something out to look at in the US at least--
Interpersonal trust might be decreasing: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
But dwarfed by the trust decrease in institutions: https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee...
But maybe it's overstated, because trust seems sort of stable according to this group: https://www.edelman.com/trust/25years
>We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
I think this might be too doomer for people, but I think it raises the concern often called two-tier policing or 'anarchotyranny', where such collective action to reform a society is viewed as a threat by the ruling organization and systematically attacked and dismantled. In contrast, petty crimes or even serious interpersonal crimes pose no threat to the ruling organization and receive disproportionately low effort relative to the collective action movements.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#54> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state. The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central…
We need large nation-states to make the modern world possible. The internet isn't just bits; everything depends on stuff that has to be shipped by sea. It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open. Navies are super expensive and a collection of small states wouldn't be able to build ships that could operate around the world.
If anything, technology is making possible for states like Yemen and Iran to shut off chokepoints. It might take multiple powers working together to keep things open.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough. I am reminded of a story I read lately of a woman who was shocked when her passport and purse were stolen from the beach while she was swimming. Somehow she had the perception that she was in a high trust worth…
Sounds very binary, I don’t see the continuum. More like a steep cliff of shocking betrayal.
In the same society, some people personally experience that others are capable of robbery & much worse within days and some learn it within decades, and everything in between. Some may never have to confront this, all within the same city/state/country.
We could represent time-to-reality on a number line.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#56Technology is, of course, downstream of society. We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious. Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unl…
The patriot act expired and was never renewed.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the breach/link you tried to share?
You can click their profile and see it
In esseph's submissions, I see only one, from 2025. This does not match their "a few days ago". So, no, I can't click their profile and see it.
Could you provide a link to what you see?
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero. This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety. There are plenty of ways to implement…
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”) To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#59> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state. The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central…
> In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county.
Assuming a rectangle of 30 by 50 kilometers, and no organized military for defense, it would take the Russians about 30-45 minutes to reintroduce the imperial subject experience on your proposed utopia.
The reason states are required are that other people are organized in states. Now I am guessing you are from the US, the standard of your living is only made possible, by millions of men and women working seriously to guarantee it, and thousands of nuclear weapons. Take either out of the equation, and your standard of living will very quickly become untenable.
Hell, the internet that you believe can solve all the problems, is only operational because hundreds of thousands of people are continuously working on it, many of them government employees.
Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points. My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process. And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (…
You do understand that the communist party of China has very different ideas about networks, vetting and voluntary processes than you do right?