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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#111

Post by jq-r »

wilkommen wrote: post #65

I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2…

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.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#112

Post by notpachet »

moistrobot wrote: post #98
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…

Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it. Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom

> Code doesn't actively resist your attempts to improve it.

Tell that to this Angular 1 app.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#113

Post by potatolicious »

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 don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.

At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees.

This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees.

I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.

In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#114

Post by zapataband1 »

JanisL wrote: post #4

I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completel…

Exactly. I watched read about 2009 watched the Big Short and watched all these USELESS tech companies thrive on empty promises and venture caps where rich people are basically playing the lottery.

The financial system captured our society a while ago.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#115

Post by hairofadog »

slibhb wrote: post #105

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 p…

> 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.

I can only guess that your experiences with both Christianity and socialism are starkly different than what I have experienced.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#116

Post by preseinger »

pdonis wrote: post #110

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 ch…

All useful markets are regulated.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#117

Post by pastacacioepepe »

_yid9 wrote: post #55
spyckie2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

Only in the "No True Scotsman" definition of Socialism. Because making everyone else to do what you want (eg. give something that they have to someone who you deem deserves it more) will always require force. So, decide right now: how much force are you willing to apply? The answer will have to be sufficient force to ensure they yield: lethal force.

Or use subtle force, like it is done today in capitalism. You just need to leave people with no choices.

Pay the rent, or you and your family end up on the streets. Pay your insurance, or you will be left to bleed out and die. You have no other choice but to take any job, no matter how bad it may be.

Then foster a culture that gives everyone the hope that they also have a chance to get a good life, but only on the condition that they must only think for themselves and compete with the other poor to ascend the social pyramid. That's meritocracy.

This is how the rich (the capitalist ruling class) gets everyone else to do what they want, which is to trickle up enormous amounts of value from everyone to a handful of people.

Then if we want to talk about lethal force, capitalists used overwhelming amounts of it troughout recent history, in order to preserve the status quo that advantages them. It's not a secret and it just takes some honest study to know it.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#118

Post by colinmhayes »

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…

Yea I find it hard to believe there has ever been a better time to be alive than now. Obviously we've got a long way to go, but things have been continuously getting better overall, not worse.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#119

Post by cmurf »

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…

What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them.

Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.

>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves

Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.

Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.

Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.

The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.

But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.

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