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Comment by hyko | Hacker News Reader

The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument for one world government.

Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email.

Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually achieve anything IRL.

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Indigenous solutions typically develop differently for a reason. Building standards in a wet humid climate prone to flooding differ from those in the desert because they have different needs: if you make a standard set of guidelines that applies universally, it will inherently need to be more complicated than the guidelines adapted for a specific scenario.

Part of the brilliance of the internet is the way things are layered; you can have all kinds of different solutions for different layers while keeping things interoperable. If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.

While I understand the impulse to have some central body moderate unproductive standards wars, if you enforce overly strict standards by law you stagnate industries whether you’re trying to capture them.

Just imagine how much time and effort would be wasted trying to get every software engineer to use the same programming language. Arguably it would lead to way less duplicated effort, but you’re never going to get everyone to agree on all aspects of the language. And that’s as it should be; people should have the freedom to chose what works best for them.

If we’re smart and focus more on building base, opt in, very generic/low level infrastructure that can federate responsibility and adapt to differing higher level standards rather than getting everyone on the same set of high level standards, I think we’re better off.

I’m not sure exactly what the regulatory equivalent of a tcp/ip layer would be, but some sort of very basic, fill in the blanks kind of regulatory template would be better than enforcing various discrete world standards.

Good points.

I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.

“If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.” This would be great IRL! All digital protocols could be reduced to one; but then IRL is also made of physics, so I guess you’d need one physical standard too (USB-C is our obvious candidate), and one harmonised set of radio frequencies etc. It’s those physical properties that are hard to reduce to a virtualised layer.

Kind of impossible when it comes to driving on the wrong side of the road, unless you abstracted the interface in some kind of VR (so everyone is apparently driving however they please, while confirming to one physical standard).

Having worked in a lot of banks, I can appreciate the desire for standardization. But remove competing standards, and you will never innovate again. In any situation, whatever standard you prefer, it was originally created as a new-comer competing standard.

I think this perspective is very narrow minded, in the sense that it only really considers a very narrow category of problem. If you want regulations to be more effective, you need to bring the regulators closer to the people they’re regulating, not further away from them. If that means people end up doing things differently, fine. It’s better than having regulations the either work for nobody, or only a portion of all people. For an analogy, who would you rather be managed by, a manager with 4 direct reports, or a manager with 50 direct reports? (Or a manager with 7,500,000,000 direct reports...)

> I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.

This has been tried and it doesn't work. What ends up happening is that more and more people decide that their pet issue is more important than regional autonomy.

I think the analogy is a little short-sighted. Having a universal building code doesn't mean every building has to meet the same standard in every way. They can contain conditional logic. Flood-resistance would only be required if the building is in an area with a likelihood of flooding above some threshold.

My point is that you get increased complexity when trying to handle all of the various different situations local solutions were specifically adapted for. Adding the type of logic you describe in that particular example might seem manageable, but there’s a real risk of it ballooning and making what used to be simple rules for a given area require a lot more paperwork/checks/etc, much of which would be irrelevant.

Like with all things, you need balance; some standards can work universally while remaining simple. Others can’t. But in general I think trying to impose universal, robust standards leads to a lot of the over regulation the article and other commenters fault for the lack of building in the west.

Fewer, minimal standards decided by people on a local level seems generally better, imo. There will still be incentives to use universal, simple standards where appropriate, as that typically enables access to a wider range of products and services, and the complex logic of deciding when certain standards should apply vs when they shouldn’t can be distributed/allowed to be flexible and adaptive.

> Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc.

That's nice, but seeing how the wast majorities of crimes against humanity are made by too powerful nation states against their inhabitants I am not very exited to see what atrocities an even more powerful would do.

At least now if the local government are trying to kill you there's a small chance that you might manage to escape to a safer place.

one world standard is not the same as one world government.

one world full bureaucrats regulate-everything-to-death government is a dystopian nightmare.

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

--Ronald Reagan

> "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson

This wound up being completely false by the early 1900s. Turns out people like to eat and get paid consistently more than they like imagined freedoms.

> "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Ronald Reagan

Also pretty ironic coming from someone who raised taxes 11 times after fomenting a giant populist tax cut that the country couldn't afford.

That's great if you are Napoleon and have the power to just force the matter. EU comes to mind... But I don't want your rules. I want my rules. There's plenty of world to take from in order to do just that, without trying to impose yourself on the rights of others. In the end, Lidl didn't respect Norwegian conditions. Moreover, they didn't respect Norwegian customers and so most were quite happy looking the other way once things started to go badly for them. In the end, that's on them. Because they wanted to impose their rules, instead of respecting ours. Outside of that, I think we can come to an agreement on petty things like which side of the road to drive on (the Right side, of course ;) ), and what kind of electrical plug to use (I've noticed that the British one could seem a little safer). Perhaps we could come to a compromise?

Deal. The world will drive on the right hand side, and convert to using BS 1363 electrical plugs. See, we’re making progress already! :D

> EU comes to mind...

No it doesn't, any examples? EU laws are voted on by the member countries and some even have veto power.

> and what kind of electrical plug to use (I've noticed that the British one could seem a little safer).

They're not, they're more expensive and designed in a time when those safety features were still relevant.

1. First of all, they're not voted on by "member countries," but by representatives, who's only of secondary importance to peoples who already have to vote in local and government representatives in their respective countries. Second the EU processes are opaque to most EU citizens, and as such decisions made in the commission (where representatives aren't elected but hand picked, btw) and parliament are usually done under their nose, without their knowledge or input. That isn't democratic. That's bureaucratic, and many will agree it's even bad. The veto power complicates things further, only leading to more bureaucratic stand-still and indecision. The same goes for the so-called laws and regulations the EU passes, which are often so monolithic that they are more confusing than helpful. A great example is how trade in many instances simply broke down in Europe during the Corona crisis, due to different interpretations on common laws agreed upon in the EU parliament. 2. They are still relevant in countries who predominantly have older wooden buildings, just as one example.

I sympathise, but you don’t need one world government, just agreement and consensus between governments. That’s hard work though, it requires sacrifice and compromise, and recent history (Trump protectionism, Brexit) is against compromise or sacrifice.

Yeah, I guess what I envisage would be a very minimal federal government, rather than a central point of failure for decisions about every aspect of people’s lives. Very hard to get agreement at that scale though, as you say.

I look to Belgium as an example of the ideal world government. Trying to explain Belgium's government would require a wall covered in newspaper clippings and string, but the short form is that there are 6 independent governments with the same power as the federal government, with very long-standing cultural and linguistic strife between them. As a result, it is very hard to do much of anything on the federal level and instead, most decisions are made locally. As a result, despite Gent, Antwerp, and Brussels being about as far apart from each other as San Francisco and Palo Alto, each has a very different culture and regulatory environment regarding daily life. In Gent, it is completely normal to close one of the major roads into city center for a neighborhood festival. In Brussels, it requires weeks of fighting bureaucracy to legally block a side street for a few hours at 6AM with a moving van.

Even larger issues are handled locally. Until last year, even immigration and work permit issues were handled provincially. It would take 3-6 months to get my work permit renewed in Brussels, but after I moved to Gent, it took 2 weeks.

This all works because it is very hard to get national agreement on anything. Everybody knows that they're not going to be able to push their views on the country, so they work to change their local environment instead.

This is all despite the government being (IIRC) the largest employer in Belgium:

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