100 years of whatever this will be • Hacker News Board

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#101

Post by all2 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #77

lm28469 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Length of life and comfort don't mean much once you reached the bare minimum. If you have running water, central heating, a mattress and own any kind of motorised vehicle you live a more comfortable life than any medieval king. So yeah, sure, we have netflix, smart bulbs and food delivery. Can you sustain a family as easily as your grandparents ? Will you retire as early as them ? Will you acquire an house as easily…

There's an old bluegrass song called "I'll Fly Away," the music is very happy and upbeat. When you listen to the lyrics, you realize it's a slave song about how the narrator is looking forward to death so they can escape the horrible life they are living. The point of that is just because we live longer doesn't mean we live better.

For more on the song: http://www.trialanderrorcollective.com/collective-collab-blo...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#102

Post by delusional » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different.

I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.

I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#103

Post by lisper » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

This essay seems deep and profoundly insightful but I don't think it actually is. Its ultimate call for "better designed regulation" is the no-true-scotsman fallacy in sheep's clothing. How do you know if your regulations are "properly designed?" If they produce good outcomes. But the problem is that there is no consensus about what a good outcome is. Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite literally forced to bear children under threat of fine or imprisonment [1]. Of course, these people would not put it that way. They would say that they are not happy unless the systematic slaughter of innocent babies is stopped. That is the problem.

And this problem runs very, very deep. A significant contingent -- significant enough to swing elections -- of one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation on earth would prefer to literally deny the laws of physics than admit that anything said by a "liberal" might actually be true. They would prefer to literally have children shot in school on a regular basis than "give up their guns". Of course, they wouldn't put it that way, but that is the trade-off in point of actual fact.

In an atmosphere like that it is not possible to produce "properly designed regulation." In today's political environment, the instant you even utter that phrase, you lose.

---

[1] And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#104

Post by ahtihn » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

nouveaux wrote: post #80

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…

"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…

I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.

Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#105

Post by slibhb » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

We currently emphasize freedom or people making choices. The fact that greed and indifference often carry the day is an indictment of people and their choices, not "the system".

It has often been remarked that socialism and Christianity are similar. They both preach the gospel of love. The difference is that the Christians, whatever their faults, understand that good and evil is a question of something inside every person. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to have this legalistic idea that we can regulate away sin. It doesn't work. Regulatory bodies, like all institutions, are composed of people and so they cannot transcend the frailities of those people.

The defi people have this idea that we can regulate with clever algorithms. I don't think they will be any more successful than the socialists. If they succeed, they'll create a system without humans at its center which we will find even more intolerable than capitalism or socialism. If you want a preview of this system, consider the phenomenon of people begging on twitter for Google to unban their account.

When we complain about greed, we're talking about one of the oldest questions: how to make people good. We should pay much more attention to what religions have to say on that question than the world socialists or technocrats imagine they can create with the right regulations.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#106

Post by _9omd » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #81

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

If a financial system becomes widely-adopted, people will expect it to do things that benefit them. This is the question for most of the DeFi solutions I see these days. Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Becaus…

But there's no reason consumer protections, user friendly addressing, and other features can't be built on layers above the base crypto protocols. For the monetary system to be optimally flexible the base layer should be fully neutral and permissionless. Then there's nothing stopping people from building crypto banks on top of those base protocols, which could add in consumer protections like refunds. Think about the internet, it's powerful because the base layers are neutral, allowing for the free flow of information.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#107

Post by cblconfederate » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

stdbrouw wrote: post #86

It's worth considering whether the premise actually holds. * Yeah, there's a feeling of malaise, but if you look at e.g. surveys of trust in government (Pew, OECD, etc.), it's a fairly slow decline over decades and the end point is that most people are still fairly okay with how government, education, media, the judiciary etc. are run in many democratic countries and if you look at overall happiness (Eurostat etc.) t…

> we can't have everyone be artists so there has to be some way

Why not? The online attention economy is apparently worth trillions , why shouldn't creators be rewarded? Attracting the attention of other people is work even though it is all captured by BigTech Inc. We have automated so much of the workforce that it makes a lot of sense that being an 'artist' should be a job that more and more people will do.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#108

Post by zapataband1 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

nouveaux wrote: post #80

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…

"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…

I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#109

Post by mempko » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

gtsop wrote: post #57

Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who put them there, enjoy the benefits of those systems and make damn sure these systems keep benefiting them no matter what. As long as one doesn't acknowledge this very simple fact, they have…

Bingo. Those in power by definition can change the system, but they don't. Which probably means it's working pretty well for that cohort.

But one thing you are missing is that those in power are just like us. Deeply flawed people and what they build is flawed for their purposes too.

Global warming is a great example. They have absolutely no solution to it and it will decimate not just them, but everyone.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#110

Post by pdonis » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

The article lost me here:

"The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff."

Here's the problem: a "market" that is regulated this way is no longer a market. In order to have a market that works at all as a market, it has to be free in the sense that all transactions are voluntary. If you restrict people's freedom to engage in the transactions of their choice, you break the market; it no longer does what it's supposed to do.