> Mine was a comment on the failure of systems.
Which is a huge interest of mine as well. I have no formal training in "systems" but have picked apart quite a bit about them just from observation.
> Government systems seem to be these old school, monolithic systems who are pretty resistant to change. And, to be honest, a large part of that seems to come from the populace.
Right, the larger the system, the more slowly it evolves. I think a lot of this comes out of the requirement for stability. Evolution requires testing of theories and sometimes just the act of trying something breaks other parts of the system. It's hard to determine how one thing affects another until it's actually done, so things tend to be conservative.
> I don't really care if it's capitalism, socialism, or communism; once a system reaches a certain size, it becomes unstable and corrupt and starts to fold in upon itself through manipulation by people or groups who survive solely through that manipulation.
Completely agree. I always roll my eyes when people on HN blather on and on about cryptocurrencies, but I actually think government is a perfect candidate. If all government holdings and all government buying/selling happened on a public ledger, the amount of corruption and "back scratching" would likely decrease significantly. I'm not naive enough to think it would solve all problems of corruption (of course, there's always a way to navigate around it) but it would certainly combat it more significantly.
I think one of the biggest problems with corruption in large systems is the lack of transparency. Corruption generally occurs around money, so if you make the flow of money transparent, you at least shine a light on the inner operations of the government.
But good luck getting the federal, or even a municipal, government to implement this!
> But, people are weird, machines are easy.
Yeah, true. It would be incredible if changing the world was as easy as forking it and changing whatever variables you wanted to try out and running it in a new test. Maybe one day we'll have the computational power to do something like this.
You saying that ("machines are easy") reminds me of a strange computer I had. It always froze whenever I shut it down (like, hung before the Windows 98 "It's now ok to turn off your computer" message). Over time, I made a number of changes to it. I replaced all the hard drives. I reinstalled the OS. I installed a new motherboard, new CPU, new video card. New memory. New power supply. In essence, the only thing about the machine that was the same after years of changes was the case. But it still froze whenever I tried to shut it down.
It made me wonder if even machines have an essence, and maybe are also corruptable. Who knows.