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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#911

Post by LordDragonfang »

beckman466 wrote: post #779
LordDragonfang wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces. Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this: > Capitalism has become a "success disaste…

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, s…

> What's wrong with socialism?

Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#912

Post by LordDragonfang »

InertBrake wrote: post #810
beckman466 wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, s…

I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overw…

I think it's rather disingenuous to complain about vague and un-named "internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world" in a thread about explicitly enumerated problems that capitalism has directly led to.

The internet didn't become capitalist because socialism is inherently bad. The internet became capitalist be we live in a society run by capitalists and they realized they could exploit it.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#913

Post by beckman466 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #911
beckman466 wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now). i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, s…

> What's wrong with socialism? Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.

true, there are subtler ways!

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#914

Post by samhw »

whatshisface wrote: post #438
samhw wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system I agree to some extent with the view that we should see systems as emergent phenomena arising from countless participants none of whom understands or intends the entire thing, but you can go overboard with that. There are clearly some participants who have taken a 'God's eye view' and tried to re/design an ent…

Breton Woods and Visa/Mastercard were top level designs... But they were designed to make money. (For the US and Visa/Mastercard respectively.) Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.

> Nobody has ever taken the "god's eye view" with the intent to be nice.

I second what the other guy said: this is an interesting point. But I'd also second the point about not knowing their intent (more with Bretton Woods than Visa/Mastercard; the latter is obviously fair enough). Also, I think it's telling that you left out Dodd-Frank when making that point, because it pretty clearly undercuts it.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#915

Post by jspaetzel »

enraged_camel wrote: post #458
jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

>> * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. Back in the day slaves had to transport ice from mountains so that the king could have his chilled wine every evening, whereas today most people in the West have fridges at home. This does not mean that those who have fridges should just put aside their feelings of malaise and adopt an o…

Sounds great, nobody should ever have anything nicer then anyone else. Please try to create that and get back with me about how it goes.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#916

Post by jspaetzel »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #557
jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

> Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. You're assuming this axiomatically, at first blush this is simply nepotism which is typically a term w/ negative connotations.

Most of the time "parents caring for children" is considered a good thing. It only is an issue when there's societal pressure to do otherwise, which is also a good thing.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#917

Post by cryptonector »

jazzdev wrote: post #900
cryptonector wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of how much we all have to agree to. Agreeing to contract law is fine, for example. It's possible to go too far. If you're going to use force to get people to do things they don't want to, you might be going too far. Naturally, there are such things that aren't tyranny: taxes for example. Even with taxes there are levels of taxation that are tyrannical. For example, a 100% property tax would be tyrannic…

The notion of "using force" to get someone to agree is interesting. If someone wants to pay me $X for Y. Then you think there's force involved there somewhere? If is X is too large, is that force? If I'm very poor and will accept a really low X, is that force?

As long as you're free to say no, and as long as your poor circumstances aren't caused by the person or entity offering you $X for Y, then no, that's not force.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#918

Post by cowl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #344
Clubber wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By every measurable metric Every measurable metric? How about median wealth? How about levels of debt? How about job satisfaction? How about median income per household? Per person? How about access to healthcare and cost? How about suicide rates? How about drug overdose rates? How about corruption? How about cost of higher education? How about homelessness? I mean cmon, you're looking at thing with rose colored gla…

Median wealth? Better today. Levels of debt? Probably worse today. Job satisfaction? Probably worse. Median income per household? Better. Per person? Better. Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest. Healthcare cost? Probably worse. Suicide rates? Probably worse. Drug overdose rates? Probably worse. Corruption? Probably better, though more publicized (maybe better because more pu…

> Job satisfaction? Probably worse.

The very fact we are talking about this shows a great progress. 100 years ago, you had a job -> you were satisfied.

> Access to healthcare? Better for the median person, not sure about the poorest.

It's better for the poorest too. in Planetary scale.

>Drug overdose rates? Probably worse.

this is a recent metric, can't be used to prove or disprove Humanity advancement.

> Homelessness? Not sure; it's more publicized now, but it's been bad off and on for decades. It's probably better now than in the 1930s, but that may not be a fair comparison.

Not only is 1930 fair but when we are talking about Humanity progress, the comparison must go even further in 1800s...

Talking about humanity progress makes sense only in grand scale of time and planet. not on specific countries and 50 years...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#920

Post by posix86 »

munificent wrote: post #654
posix86 wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks? What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with tra…

Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them. If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might…

Processing data IS what thinking is. This literally what Turing intended to do: Find a way to automate thinking.

And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.

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