Bill would allow tech companies to form local governments
reviewjournal.com
reviewjournal.com
"you're afraid to take the first step because all you see is every negative thing 10 miles down the road."
Again, if the population thrives the amount of space is hyper-limited. I don't know if there'd be gentrification per say, since it'd be gentrified from the start but the populace would grow fabulously rich off both stock in the company, increased land value and general prosperity for your entire community.
It also changes the incentive structure. You want you company to thrive, so your can community to thrive and vice versa.
I'm trying to picture a municipal fire department, or sewage facility, or street cleaning department, that runs "entirely on blockchain tech".
Response: Edge case, will never happen. Closed NOFIX.
Walt Disney was a proponent of company towns where the employees/residents would be completely dependent on the company. These ideas were expressed in his plans for EPCOT (the unbuilt town, not the theme park we have today). Some of these ideas were later revived in Walt Disney owned and controlled Celebration, Florida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Buena_Vista,_Florida
It strikes me that governments have a responsibility to handle and account for all of the edge cases (people with disabilities, etc.) which companies often tend to neglect in pursuit of a simpler and cheaper "at-scale" solution that works for 95% of people (but ignores the slightly more complex 5%).
Another is will they be required to follow certain laws that municipalities are required to operate under? For instance, here in NM it is illegal for a quorum of the governing body to meet without 72 hour advance public notification and agenda and no item may be considered if it is not in that agenda.
And of course the whole statement that the company will have significant say in the makeup of the 3-person board. What exactly does that mean? Can only company approved people run for office? Is this watering down representative democracy? I don't know because for stuff like this, the devil is in the details. (and what happens when the company becomes insolvent?)
I'm skeptical that single-issue regulatory exemptions will have any impact on long-term growth, particularly for areas like AI or block chains, where the level of regulation is already essentially none.
[Edit: I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm being taken as saying I'm in favor of this idea, despite only really saying it won't work.]
I doubt it has anything to do with wanting to make 'More money' as opposed to leaving a city as a legacy, under your vision, ideals, etc. I mean, what else do billionaires dream of?
Any “company government” would look no different than a dictatorship to the outside.
In India, there are blocks of corporate housing for contractors and employees of fortune 500s. If they lost their jobs, they lose their residence. If the company lets them go, they lose their residence.
Imagine for a moment, you’re a 10x dev working on a financial platform under contract. The contract is pulled due to funding. You are benched and told “we’ll find you something else to work on”, then a few months later they let you go and you have to move.
Government is for people, corporations are for profit, those two are not compatible.
Robocop 2 https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro
I realise that a lot of modern tech culture would rather re-invent the world from first principles while making 10,000 years of human mistakes at high speed in preference to acknowledging the existence of disciplines outside of STEM, but history, economics, anthropology, town planning, they're all right there with many of the answers.
Modern federal and state law already effectively prevents the worst sort of abuse that employees had to deal with in the worst company towns of the past, so I don't foresee the same kind of exploitation happening.
Sun City, Arizona is also a good example.
Gurgaon ,India - but note there are private (company) areas and public areas. In fact that may offer a nice comparison, but from my understanding the seed stage was 100% company-backed.
The Woodlands, Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas
I think Ciudad del Este gets pretty close although thats a FTZ charter city, not exactly a "company" charter city.
When you look at these cities you need to select local comps that make sense.
We've done both experiments already, and we should learn from the extant data rather than repeating unethical experiments.
If you live in a company town, your kids go to the company school, your spouse will either work for the company or be dependent on the company for their business.
If you're terminated, or simply want to negotiate for better terms - the company already has you beat. The company knows that you won't go home and tell your kids they have to move and your partner that they need a new job for a 5% raise.
More generally, there are two ways that people deal with dissatisfaction - "Voice" or "Exit". When things are bad, you can either try to reform them from within, or just leave and start a new system. Democracy is the former, freedom is the latter, and both are embodied in the U.S. system of federalism. Democracy tends to work better when things are "a little bad", freedom works better when things are "very bad", and I'd argue that the level of corruption and dysfunction in today's government might argue for the latter.
Is privileged thinking. There are large portions of populations that lack resources to move.
Democracy works when everyone at the table has their head about them, sadly lacking in today’s current affairs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
[2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-mo...
What stops this from happening is usually land-use restrictions and regulation - if your employees can't rent storefronts, then they can't compete with you. When those have been relaxed, this is in fact what happens: all the folks dissatisfied with working for you start food trucks and you get a vibrant foodie scene.
Because foreign work visas are already restricting to a specific employer, and do not seem relevant to this conversation
Representative democracies are the best we could have done before computers, but now we can replace institutions by autonomous networks taking care of the infrastructure.
Clay Shirky gave a great talk about “institutions vs collaboration” back in 2004 (Google it). As a left-libertarian I’d prefer gift economies and collaboration over competition, but either one would be better than the current Feudalism we have.
I’m envisioning the currency, monetary and fiscal policy, energy grid, telecommunications being run by an autonomous network determining prices. The community would democratically vote on how much UBI to give, and how much insurance to give.
In fact, I have literally been BUILDING this kind of thing with my company since 2017, and the code is all open source. This is exactly what it would look like and how it would work; Take a look and tell me what you think...
https://intercoin.org/applications
UBI: https://intercoin.org/ubi
VOTING: https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontr...
PS: In my experience this kind of comment gets heavily downvoted by people who say nothing. I have posted all the materials backing up my points, including HOW it would work, and even the source code for you to try. Why don’t you actually engage with the substance of the topic and add your perspective below!
What the article seems to be talking about is a government that is a lot like existing governments, except it is run by a company. The company would, according to the article, "carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties".
So, 21st century feudal fiefdoms?
At this day and age, the contrary to unchecked tyranny is by far the norm, and the trend is clear.
In less than 100 years we have moved from sweat shops and pinkertons to foosball tables, on-site chefs, and summer fridays.
I do not see how you can interpret this trend and assume this will reverse 180 degrees, because companies want to offer even more benefits now under the company county model.
Sweat shops and the Pinkertons still exist, and high paying jobs had perks a hundred years ago. This isn't a trend.
Please lets not extrapolate from outliers though.
Either way, though working class conditions have improved over the past century in the US, the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers. As a source, ask your McDonald's server about their generous benefits package.
As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
it matters a great deal because competition for labor is different by country. If you have no competition, I would agree with you, its a very bad situation for the worker.
>>>>>if they're still exploiting their workers when given the opportunity?
People are not exploited because there are companies. People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit. At the extreme, you have slavery, which was at the root a govt directive. Opportunity is not the natural state of things in free societies. Societies decide how much opportunity to exploit they want to give the powerful. That's why people still flee China to come to the US
>>>> the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers. Yes, but many companies do. My only point is that the trend is pointing to a healthy society, not that society is perfect. Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind. This is much better than it was even 20 years ago.
>>>> As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example.
Its a very bad example. I just read about it - Pinkerton at its height of power was the largest private security force world.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)#c... This only reinforces the observation that the general trend is to move away from such services, at least in the USA
Then why would you want to replace local government with a company that has a clear incentive to limit competition?
>People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit.
I don't think having the opportunity forgives their exploitation, but they also can actively create more opportunity.
>Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind.
Companies completely dwarfed by Amazon and Walmart's continued exploitation. There were good factories a century ago too.
>Its a very bad example
Yes, for some reason the company you immediately associated with past corruption isn't thriving. The domestic industry hasn't declined, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police_in_the_United_S... and the US has further embraced the idea with private contractors like Blackwater.
Let them experiment, crash and burn. Or maybe they will surprise you. Let the explorers and the innovators take the first step and innovate.
If we based our execution of ideas on conventional thinking, America would have never been discovered.
The beauty of this is that no one is forcing anyone to participate in any dictatorship.
Don't "company towns" already exist? Were they illegal somehow? Would it be illegal to build one now (in Nevada, without this bill)?
Or is this proposing something besides a regular "company town" model (i.e. a regular municipality where everyone who lives there is an employee of company X; and there are municipal elections, but all the options on the ballet are, of course, employees of company X; and where the elected government contracts out many services to... company X)?
Is the idea here that the corporation itself would be the municipal government, rather than the municipal government being a regular elected body consisting of company-X employees?
If so, would that not make the election for the corporation's board of directors, a municipal election; and somehow create a link between landholding within the incorporated land area and shareholding in the corporation?
The article states they are talking about a bill that will provide existing undeveloped barren land that has no citizens on it.
> Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.
I previously worked for Jeff Berns prior to their relocation to Sparks, NV, while this plan was being formulated.
Giving control of local government to Blockchains and Jeff Berns is... not a good idea. Jeff Berns is borderline delusional, off in the clouds, thinks ETH and blockchain are the solution to every problem, whether it exists or not, has awful business ideas, and treated his employees pretty poorly. Well, I mean, he was nice in person when he visited every 3 months. But the comp was flaming garbage, the office was crap, the management imcompetent and ineffective, he didn't give a shit what his employees thought. Everything in Jeff's company was complete and utter chaos. The products themselves were straight up idiotic, to be frank. The fact that Jeff had us abandon products after 3 months to start working on his next "big thing" didn't help, either.
Lastly, Jeff berns has spent a fortune hyping crpyto, because his real fortune IS crypto. The dude owns boatloads of BTC, BCH, ETC, ETH, and many more, and has since ETH was < $1. He is not altruistic. He is a man who believes that under his "guidance", humanity (his friends, really) can make great steps and he is using the crypto community to further his wealth and influence.
TL;DR: Jeff Berns and Blockchains, LLC belong as far away from political/governmental power as possible.
What happens if your town account is opaquely closed?
... said no one ever ...