100 years of whatever this will be • Hacker News Board

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#251

Post by _yid9 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #78

_yid9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this different than getting everyone to adhere to capitalism or democracy? Lots of people die under this system, doing things they do not want to do.

Good question!

As with most choices, the level of force required to achieve compliance is more or less linearly related to the harshness of the choice.

Pay a small amount of taxes? Little force required.

Give full authority over your life to a faceless central planner? Great force required.

Give full authority, with no chance of escape? Lethal force required.

I'm not sure why this is a concept that seems to be a mystery to advocates of "Socialism", though.

"Socialism would work great, if only you pesky rich, free people would just give up and let the state take everything and let your children starve!"

:)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#252

Post by beambot » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #142

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…

> Tyranny No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work. But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.

> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost...

That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#253

Post by kevingadd » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #223

dmitriid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed : -…

It improves that process in a disintegrating third world country, which many of us may find ourselves in within our lifetimes.

How does it improve the process in a disintegrating third world country right now? Lay it out, which steps in the process does it improve or replace? Do you know anyone who's utilized it that way, or are there case studies?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#254

Post by davidw » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

beambot wrote: post #252

davidw wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tyranny No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work. But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.

> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#255

Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #169

colinmhayes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market failures are too common for unregulated markets to be free.

Regulation by a centralized entity, to restrict people's freedom to engage in voluntary transactions, doesn't fix market failures. It makes them worse.

How do you think externalities should be solved?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#256

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #102

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…

> Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins.

Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.

Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#257

Post by FpUser » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

>"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy. Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society."

It's been that way forever with some rare exceptions.

>"You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers"

Total baloney. Many do run Internet service without cloud providers, including yours truly. It is true that for some reason many do fall for that cloudy propaganda. Their loss. Not ours. Keep digging your own graves. Or if they big enough they might not care as they pass those costs down to end customer.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#258

Post by throwaway984393 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

  We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy,
  capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing
  actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

I think the author is looking at the past through the lens of the present. A lot of that paragraph is mixing so many ideas that a historian would be shaking their head. What we have is miles better than anything that came before. We botched "the dream" ? Whose dream?

Firstly, we don't live in a "true Democracy". The Athenians tried that, and some aspects of it were pretty nice, and some sucked (which was something of a trend... all political systems have pros and cons) and it lasted a couple hundred years. And when this new nation (USA) was founded, literally all the founders couldn't agree on how to set it up, because every way they could imagine sucked. So they all compromised a whole lot, and what we got is a Representative Democracy, in the form of a Republic (specifically a federal presidential republic). And today it's working exactly the way the founders intended 245 years ago. That's a huge deal! Not 100 years before our nation was born, the British overthrew the monarchy and tried to form a Republic, but that only lasted 20 years until it fell back to Monarchy and then evolved into Empire. We're doing pretty damn well today, I think.

Second, Capitalism comes in many forms. Which one is your dream? Because I'll guarantee you that the founders, and everyone since, have all had conflicting views about what kind of Capitalism we're supposed to practice, what its aims should be, and how to achieve them. But we still accomplish the broadest sense of Capitalism, and we do it so well that we're the richest nation in the world by far. If you can somehow convince everyone to agree on one form of Capitalism, with one specific set of goals, then maybe we can achieve that.

Third, Social Coherence can only work in a bubble, and we do certainly have many of those, so I'm not sure how that dream failed. You're never going to get 320 Million people to be socially coherent in all ways, all the time. Especially not when their political, cultural, and ideological history has evolved such that one half of them think the other half are maliciously immoral and virtually evil.

Finally, hooooo boy. Utopianism. What can you say about the dream of a literal perfect society? If that's what you're basing all of these complaints on, then I guess the rest make sense... If you believe in a perfect society, then of course you'd believe you can get politics and economics and social order perfect, too. But the most ridiculous part of this dream is that technology is supposed to reach a Utopia. Really? Technology? That stuff that's expensive and complicated and pollutes the earth and depends upon the "evils" of Capitalism and Globalism and Programming? That stuff that depends upon outsourced employment, unequal pay, and unfair labor to produce, and creates huge piles of toxic waste? That stuff that enables new technological business models that find new innovative ways to prey upon people to create money for a tiny few? That is what's gonna bring about your Utopia?

I am not embarrassed. We've accomplished a lot, and we'll keep accomplishing a lot. It won't be fast or easy, and we will never have a perfect society. But things do get better. If you want to feel less embarrassed, stop ranting into your blog and start creating change. Then you can rant into your blog about how difficult change is.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#259

Post by rewgs » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

As always, essays like these bring to mind the Prisoner's Dilemma. A thought experiment that, at scale, humanity consistently loses.

I'm not sure that there is a solution. Part of the overall system of..."all this," for lack of a better term...is the fact that we are always dissatisfied by the results of consistently losing the Prisoner's Dilemma and thus are always looking to solve it; our always-looking-to-solve-it more or less guarantees the fact that we will continue to lose it. Around and around it goes.

I ruminate on this stuff probably more than I should, and the only semblance of a conclusion that I can come to is that we only choose the objectively right choice within the Prisoner's Dilemma when we are given a reason to overcome our selfishness, i.e. during times when not working together presents a clear and present existential danger. Thus, war, breakdown of complex systems, death, etc, are all inherent parts of choosing that which keeps us going for just a little bit longer. Just as someone suffering from addiction might only finally turn the nosedive up once they've hit rock bottom, the New Deal was only possible in the midst of a world war and the Great Depression. Intelligent folks can see these problems coming from a mile away, as this essay makes clear, but actually mustering humanity together to walk in step to a degree in which we can actually address these problems either requires authoritarianism or a massive imminent danger to rally against.

Some are born during the spring, when we're coming out of one of those bad periods and have mustered the will to replace a part of society's roots with something better so that it might continue a little longer; almost immediately, those who benefit from it take advantage of it and begin dismantling it, thinking they can have their cake and eat it too -- retain the work society has done together, that rare thing, and use it to help boost themselves to a height far greater than might be achieved by simply contributing to the continued existence of society as a whole. Everyone being in its for themselves results in a breakdown, leading inexorably to some sort of collapse, big or small. Those born in winter do the hard work of setting things the pins back up so that their children can knock them down again. Around and around it goes.

The wild thing is that, as the interlocking mechanisms of society get more complex and consist more and more of complex interlocking systems themselves, and as globalization continues, those cataclysms shrink in scale and increase in number. 90 years ago it was a world war; today it's millions of little fires that need putting out, technical debt piling up, the odd sense of alienation brought upon by society looking at itself. The rock bottoms multiply, from one a generation, to one a minute somewhere in the world. Just juggling that and seeing how that all interacts becomes its own crisis of entropy.

I suppose I'm rambling now -- this kind of ruminating has a way of transforming from terse description into navel-gazing poetry. Around and around it goes.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#260

Post by blobbers » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

ro_bit wrote: post #195

> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card. What's this about?

I think this is a dig at the google bus. The daycare thing is way less true. The price of google daycare (bright horizons?) is nuts. I think it was like $2800/month per kid for googlers.