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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

791–800 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#791

You see what you want to see. These are not true in my daily life, 1 "Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy." 2 "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." 3 "Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up." Dial back the doom and gloom mindset. It's an abundant world.

Inequality is something we can measure to some degree and it seems to be rising fast.

What is the rate of change?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#792
post #786

It's fascinating to me that some commenters react to this essay saying it's "profoundly insightful" when my first reaction was it's very vague and fully of major inconsistencies. Here is just one example: he opens his argument calling Western societies a "systemic train wreck" and yet concludes toward the end: "As a society, we are so much richer, so much luckier, than we have ever been" Which is it? Are we a trainwr…

Are those mutually exclusive? Modern society can be a systemic trainwreck and still be better than what came before.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor. It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant. In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larcen…

> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour) yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public. whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more…

> people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of

the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all. From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making: > The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and…

There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance".

As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is:

majority agree

minority disagree...

but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?

No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man. This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.

> inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

and produce the court-based system we see today, with enforcement of the stick centralized to an authority that everyone agreed to (implicitly).

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

You can certainly get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, if the premise is that there's no lunch at all until they agree on what to have. There will be some compromising involved, so not everybody might get the dish that is their first choice, but the more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate . That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by…

> more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate.

but what if there's only a limited set of choices, and at least one person in the group would hate one of the available choices? What then?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#797
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly don’t think DeFi is, at its heart, anti-regulation. I do think a lot of early proponents are armchair anarchists, but that’s just the scene . I think it’s anti corruption/abuse of power by institutions too large to fail—often due to lack of meaningful regulatory political power, across the board. (You’ll probably easily find people playing with web3 dns also advocating for personal data regulations, for examp…

Today there was a crypto hack that cost over 110 million because the website's cloudflare key was hacked/leaked apparently. With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins. You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.

Right, so wouldn't it be nice if they were using an L2 sub-chain (a bank) that rolled up transactions so that this transaction could have been flagged and rejected. The need for these intermediaries to help the general public not get fucked is clear. The existing tech just kinda sucks. There's a world where the root chain is objective and transparent and distributed but where for most any practical application people interface with the chain at layer 2 and subject to any sort of social restraints and regulations they want to put in place.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People constantly forget that large multinationals like Amazon are bigger that many countries, are purely authoritarian structures and work as 100% centralized economies. > Central panning doesn't scale On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability. The problem is that dictatorships (both co…

Take Walmart as an example. If a country, it would rank 25th economically (above 188 other countries and the likes of Austria, Argentina, Norway, Ireland, and South Africa).[1] Walmartian central planning scales at least that far. 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524078

Nobody is claiming the central planning doesn't produce value - i think the language is ambiguous as to the meaning of "doesn't work".

Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages).

Central planning in a communist regime is exactly the same - it enriches the regime, at the expense of the people.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#799
post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take Walmart as an example. If a country, it would rank 25th economically (above 188 other countries and the likes of Austria, Argentina, Norway, Ireland, and South Africa).[1] Walmartian central planning scales at least that far. 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524078

Nobody is claiming the central planning doesn't produce value - i think the language is ambiguous as to the meaning of "doesn't work". Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages). Central planning in a communist regime is exactly t…

Central planning is the ultimate version of monopoly. It is what happens when a single company owns the entire country and no longer has to compete for anything. It is the only employer and the seller of goods, for every good. They banned the import of other goods, so they are all you get. Also they make the laws, so you can't even protest without having tanks moving you down.

"I really hate these corporate overlords, what can we do to fix it? I know, what about giving the corporate overlords all the power in the entire country? Yeah, that will fix it!"

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#800
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.

A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?

Yes
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