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Comment by justinmk | Hacker News Reader

That is how things are supposed to work. Communities and individuals should not expect "someone else" to manage their affairs.

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I'd like to understand more. Are you saying that communities and individuals should also manage communication platforms, public transport, law and order themselves?

Well, most do manage public transport and law and order themselves.

Individuals managing their own law and order is strongly frowned upon in most cultures.

Communities may provide their own training and personnel, but they're generally subject to the laws of their state/nation/etc.

That's a good point. I was thinking on a community level, and expanding the group size as necessary in order to provide these things... but it does tend to be a bottom up type of thing (as opposed to top down).

Law creation is probably the biggest outlier though

Local municipalities pass their own ordinances, laws, regulations, etc all the time. They just cannot contradict the laws of the state / federal. That is absolutely communities managing their own affairs, writing their own local policy.

Those services turn out better when managed by the city compared to when it's managed at the state or federal level. The problem is that rural towns usually don't have the resources to pull it off.

They don't. Federal regulation is vastly superior to state and local regulation of utilities. Remember, it's local governments that created telco and electric monopolies in the first place, a mess which Congress has spent decades trying to clean up.

Then by your logic, is global regulation superior to Federal regulation?

It's not a logical inference. It's an observation.

ISO standards are pretty good I would say.

But much less fun than going into the basement of the hall of records to see how long a foot is in this county.

Your comparison doesn't make sense. Local, state, and federal levels are all part of one country. There is no equivalent institution at the global level.

For global challenges like climate change, regulation at the global level seems like the right responses.

Yes, outsourcing law and order to local communities has never resulted in race biased enforcement of the law has it? Local communities to electing judges and DA's and Sheriffs to be tough on crime by minorities if vastly superior no doubt.

You are right. The sheriff that covers Ryegate, MT commutes in every day from New York City, and the school bus drivers commute from Seattle, likewise the mailman commutes in from D.C., and the garbage man from San Francisco.

Yes, or hire some entity to manage it. Which is quite different than waiting for it to be managed.

Not to mention the scale of rural communities makes the task proportionately less complicated. Scale matters very much. For example, if you are on the subway, how do you know who owns the magazine in your lap? There's a system of justice at work, it's very small in scale and you didn't need a lawyer to figure it out.

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