100 years of whatever this will be
apenwarr.ca
apenwarr.ca
I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:
All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").
There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:
This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...
> Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code
https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640
As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.
If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.
I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am.
With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."
This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...
Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?
A recent example of the former would be some of the voting security laws that have been popular lately. A recent example of the latter would be disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentencing (I think this is no longer the case? God, I hope not. But was not that long ago) and that's just the de jure part—in all cases, the de facto enforcement is what matters.
Historical examples abound, obviously.
[EDIT] another example is mentioned by someone else in this thread, as abortion laws, but it's worth noting why those are an example: the rich never have trouble obtaining abortions, and there's a history of pro-life advocates doing so when they "need" to, for themselves or for family members (I'm sure their case is different, of course eyeroll). In fact a major factor in the Republican legislature of New York passing early abortion rights laws was precisely this disparity, which was that anti-abortion laws in effect only existed for the poor.
The law isn’t like to explicitly favor one group over another, but the the systems of law have shown they do favor one group over another.
Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them.
Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.
The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx
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 out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.
In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.
Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.
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 avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.
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.
That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by decentralizing, you make that domain smaller - and thus make consensus easier. Federation can be used to replicate this process on as many layers as needed for decentralized organization of larger societies.
Invite people to abandon their preferences and then organize those people so they show the world how many more needs it meets than not doing it. In particular, abandoning preferences allows the need for not to get met more easily.
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?
And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond?
You have three basic options:
1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no)
2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink)
3. Force people to say yes
The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.
Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.
I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want.
I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules.
Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.
5. Something neither of us have thought of.
You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
Submission and compromise may be similar in many cases, but they are not the same.
> That only works for up to N parties.
In the cases where it only works for N parties (which can vary wildly depending on the situation), agreed.
> You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.
That which is impossible is indeed impossible. However, that which is predicted does not always turn out so.
> You could also read 4 as an example of 3.
If you aren't concerned about accuracy, I suppose.
> If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.
Depends which meaning of the word you're using, this is the first hit on Google:
authoritarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".
Very nice!
Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?
And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.
> But you can't solve everything with consensus...
Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.
> ...and you're welcome to play word games...
As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.
> ...but forcing people is not "consent".
Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.
This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).
Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.
> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.
1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.
2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.
100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.
The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.
This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?
Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).
Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).
There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).
This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.
In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.
Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.
Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.
Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.
Tree falls on house, tree owner doesn't want to pay their liability, what happens?
My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.
Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.
WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.
> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)
I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy.
One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.
My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.
"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "
Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.
All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.
> We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions.
What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought.
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 disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.
The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.
i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf
video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY
Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.
> there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown
i'm seriously not sure if this is a GPT-3 generated response used to waste my time... lol
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.
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.
Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.
The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned 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 countries and private companies) exist to benefit those in power. When push comes to shove everybody else is expendable.
I don't know about the internal workings of Amazon specifically, but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within: selling their products and services within the company. There's still a market, not everything is determined centrally.
> 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.
China grew much faster after it instituted market reforms. I'm not as familiar with Soviet Russia, but I'd be surprised if it grew faster than similar market-based countries during the same time period.
The overwhelming majority of companies, including Amazon, does not allow different units, departments or teams to compete with each other by providing the same service.
Essentially each BU or even team is a little monopolist.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
Yes, that's my whole point.
> Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
...and why? The similarity is more than evident.
Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.
Countries engage in international trade and also go to war. If anything they compete more ruthlessly.
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524078
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.
"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!"
Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.
>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves
Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.
Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.
Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.
The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.
But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely:
>All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.
Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast.
Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.
I would argue that over the years, we have moved away from that. We now have a much more powerful national government, that is more ruler over the states. And I think in doing so, we have gained some things, but we have also lost some things.
I think there is merit to the idea of a multi-level hierarchy, where the higher levels have more restricted areas of power, but are also harder to change. But there's one other piece that's needed: Mobility between lower-level domains. If I don't like what California's doing, I can move to Texas, and we need similar things (hopefully easier than physically moving) in other systems.
No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work.
But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.
That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time.
you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are.
your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control.
in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"
From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.
While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.
A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).
Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.
This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.
It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.
If this is possible, then it is equally possible to just hit anyone you please with stick so that they are forced to do what you want.
Which means, the most violent eager person gets to rule. Which is what people who prefer court system don't want.
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.
https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/africas-top-10-dictator...
You need commanders for war.
Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.
Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.
and produce the court-based system we see today, with enforcement of the stick centralized to an authority that everyone agreed to (implicitly).
Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.
If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually
Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.
But that's not a society any of us want to live in.
Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.
It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.
Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.
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 larceny.
Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.
It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.
This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).
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 black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.
wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.
one more example to drive this home:
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."
-- Wendy Liu, https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
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".
well yes, that's what happens when the means of production are privately owned: workers have to sell their labor.
This is a naïve claim which is disproved by all available evidence.
Markets without central regulation are always exploited by participants with more knowledge. Regulations are required to keep the playing field level.
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 tyrannical.
People are going to disagree about where the boundary between tyranny and not-tyranny lies. If you have a very sizeable minority saying "this is tyranny", well, it probably is (but doesn't have to be).
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?
Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ )
Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.
> HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token
I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.
- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]
- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.
https://spec.filecoin.io/systems/filecoin_mining/sector/seal... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/
When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
72 million Ether were premined
One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.
https://i.ibb.co/54sS0NY/FFi-K9m-CVg-AETZNA-format-png-name-...
It holds 350K ETH at this point, or 0.3% of the ETH supply:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xde0b295669a9fd93d5f28d9ec85e4...
Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital.
most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'.
also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/)
anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/
think of Holochain like a Ruby on Rails framework, but for distributed applications instead of client-server: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[1] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
Are you certain of this?
Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.
pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0
How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?
> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.
Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?
But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/)
So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel.
Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible.
So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound".
You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets.
My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.
Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.
Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate.
This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.
apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.
Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.
If we don't ask these questions then technological approaches to money, like various cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies are unlikely to actually cause long lasting improvements. We have some serious monetary policy problems in the world right now and while some tech could help (in some cases) these aren't primarily technological problems.
> If a central monetary agency can go about unconventional monetary policy such as purchasing equities...
If that's a problem, prohibit it.
The other part though is that if money is corrupted it impacts the process of regulation itself. For example creating good regulation to tax companies is made far more difficult when there's fundamental differences between the nature of the money that those companies themselves have access to. I'm sure it would be possible with a large amount of effort to have regulations with non-fungible money but there's challenges there that would be substantially difficult to address and the complexity of that regulation would come with it's own non-zero costs to society.
If the problem is a regulation, let's remove or modify that regulation. Problem solved.
If your problem is there are too many regulations, let's get rid of 20 of them and simplify down to just this one. Problem solved.
Oh, that simplification created its own problems? Let's create new regulations covering those three scenarios. Problem solved.
But if we are much slower at creating regulations than we are at creating new situations that require regulation, it creates the perception that regulations don't work, which leads to rapid de-regulation of everything. Our current legal and political framework simply wasn't designed for this. It was designed for 13 small colonies writing paper letters back and forth, where waiting 3 months for a court to make a decision or 1+ years for congress to pass a bill was considered quite timely and fine. We now live in a society where there is probably a need for 2-3 new regulations per day, and 1-2 adjustments to existing regulations, per day, and an AI chat bot that will tell you whether something is legal based on current regulations.
Why bother with setting the price of bananas and everything else, when you can set one price and have a greater effect?
Heh, looks familiar. Usually goes between "Some people know..." and "...but the value of nothing".
All systems trend towards chaos eventually. The answer is always more or better regulation. Sometimes better means more, sometimes better means "take these 50 regulations, get rid of them, and replace them with one simple one that gives you better outcomes". We don't want a rulebook so large no one could ever read all of it (we already have that). We don't want the complexity of the regulations to spiral out of control along with the system -- regulations need to be adapted over time to handle the current (and near future) complexity of the system. And we don't want no regulations -- then the system itself will spiral out of control.
The whole idea of legal precedents works against this too -- the logic is inverted --- instead of constantly coming up with new takes and new rules to govern old and current situations, we hark back to a decision someone made 50 years ago and we say "this is set in stone", when we should be constantly updating and modifying those precedents to better fit the current state of the system. Eventually new laws get passed, but the judicial system itself is largely a damper on progress in this regard, dragging us into the past and making changes that could take 5 years take 50 years. We see this reflected in our astounding incarceration rate, and a number of other areas.
The pace of technological and societal evolution has grown to be much faster than the pace at which we upgrade our regulations. We are speeding towards a brick wall.
My point is, you see companies abusing bailouts and say "oh no, our fundamental concept of money is changing because bailouts". I see that same situation and say "oh no, our regulations are so antiquated that they are 50 years behind in terms of the abuses they are able to prevent, we need to update our regulations and create new ones, and create a framework for rapidly adjusting regulations going forward, because the current rate is untenable."
This problem extends well beyond money and touches every area of society. Society and technology are evolving faster than the legal frameworks that supposedly govern them. Limiting the scope of the discussion to just cover money would do just that, limit the scope of what should be a much wider discussion.
Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up rivaling anarchy. Risks can be taken only when the consequences can be predicted in advance. Without precedents, every single legal case would turn into a gamble. Only fools and the insane would ever stick their necks out; not far from where we are now, I suppose.
Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructurings that prevent the government from having the bad traits it currently has, or 2) the removal of existing regulations that are preventing the government from being better in your eyes.
If your statement is "I don't like the current state of the government" then you are simply for transforming it into something you do like. This can be done through a regulatory framework.
If you don't trust the government as it is, then you are one more voter for regulating X, Y and Z such that you do trust the government.
That sounds like the opposite of a risk to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk
Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.
We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.
Here in the US, we have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. One way we could deal with complexity is at the legislative level by writing extremely specific laws. So in your example the legal code expressly spells out in detail what constitutes breaking and entering, exceptions, etc.
Another way to deal with that complexity would be for the legislative branch to write a fairly broad set of laws and grant the executive branch power to write detailed regulations. So from that you end up with administrative agencies that write very detailed regulations, which, while not quite "laws" (since they weren't written by the legislature), nevertheless function in a similar way.
A third way would be at the judicial level. If the laws are fairly broad and there is no specific regulations, then edge cases end up in court and judges make the decision. So over time there ends up being a large body of case law that handles all the edge cases (or at least, all the edge cases that have been explored so far).
So there's really no way around it. You can put your complexity in the legal code itself, in administrative rule making, or case law, or some combination of all three. There are probably advantages and disadvantages to the different choices, but I don't think simplicity is an option.
But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.
The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".
We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).
Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.
Yes, corrupted a tad. :)
The financial system captured our society a while ago.
Yes! This is an incredibly important conversation and this conversation is already happening. You see MMT becoming mainstream. Because MMT is a description of how money works today. That it's a technology (and always has been) for governments to provision themselves.
In fact, I doubt you would have had the stimulus package we had with COVID without that conversation. And it helped millions of people. It also had the unfortunate side affect of growing inequality. We also have the euro, which is, in my opinion a bad implementation of money (central bank without democratic oversight). And of course bitcoin based on the idea of hard currency economics.
One discussion I don't see at the moment is a vision for society without money. That's a discussion the communists had over 150 years ago. It's a serious question because money IS a technology. Is the telephone the best communication technology? No, we moved on from the telephone. We should be asking the same thing about money. Because money is a technology designed around organizing economic activity. But is it the best technology?
Example, the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars. In fact people value things across many dimensions and have to come up with a price, a single value. Imagine playing a video game where, instead of 3d vectors, everything is represented as the length of the vector. That's a lot of information that is just thrown away.
In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
People need to have imagination if we are going to survive as a species.
Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is measured in units of USD say, and the latter is measured in units of kg CO_2(e), say.
Suppose I go to shopping to buy a new CPU. Vendor A offers CPU_A for ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)) while vendor B offers an equivalent product CPU_B for ($198, 50 kg CO_2(e)).
In the current economy, where externalities of global warming caused by market participants are not priced or regulated, I will purchase CPU_B, as it costs me $198, and I save $2 . I choose the product with the additional CO_2(e) footprint of (50 - 15) = 35 kg CO_2(e). The negative impact of that additional 35 kg CO_2(e) pollution is amortized over 8 billion humans [1], so everyone in the world pays the price of an additional 35 kg CO_2(e) / 8 billion = 4.375e-7 grams CO_2(e) per person. Myself as the end-user and the counterparties in the transaction (merchant, distributor, manufacturer, suppliers, etc) get to share in the value generated from the transaction, but most of the 8 billion people in the world do not get a cut of the value or utility, they only pay the cost.
As well as making the prices vectors, it would be necessary to add some other kind of limited resource into the vector-money economy, to constrain individuals from making decisions with large carbon pollution externalities, otherwise we're back to the same situation where we started, but with a lot more bookkeeping that nearly everyone will ignore.
One way to do this could be introduce regulation for a greenhouse gas pollution rationing system: for argument's sake, suppose we allocate each of the 8 billion people in the world an equal quota of kg CO_2(e) / year pollution they are permitted to emit [2]. Suppose there's roughly 40 gigatons of CO_2(e) pollution per year, and roughly 8 billion people in the world. That gives a quota of 5000 tons of CO_2(e) pollution allowance per year per person. Assuming humanity manages to hold the rate of carbon emissions steady and hold population steady, that gives a quota of 5000 kg CO_2(e) per person per year. Each time you purchase a good or a service, the carbon cost is deducted from your personal carbon budget. For efficiency, suppose we also allow carbon quotas to be traded between market participants. Now we have a carbon market where people exchange $ for CO_2(e) carbon emission allowance.
Now, arguably, we can go back to having scalar prices: Instead of the price of CPU_A being the vector ($200, 15 kg CO_2(e)), it can be the scalar $200 + carbon_price * 15 kg_CO_2(e) . Similarly for CPU_B .
If we assume a carbon price of around $200 / ton of CO_2(e) , as has been proposed in Canada for ~ 2030, that gives prices of $200 + 15 kg * $ 0.2 / kg = $203 for CPU_A , and a $198 + 50 kg * $0.2 / kg = $208 for CPU_B . So as a selfish individual trying to make choices that are good for me, now I am incentivised to pick CPU_B , which is also (relatively) a better choice for the rest of society.
[1] conservative working assumption that the current generation of 8 billion humans is the last generation, and no new humans are born. if we assume future generations, then there's even more humans to amortize the cost of pollution over.
[2] in the real world, not everyone is going to get an equal carbon quota. we don't have a world-scale regulator able to regulate a world scale problem. as has been demonstrated throughout human history, individuals and groups with more power will use that power to wrangle a better deal for themselves at the expense of others. we're not all in it together, even if it is a problem with a global pollution sink becoming full. e.g. i am an australian, in our country we have a per-capita carbon footprint of around 21,000 kg / CO_2(e) per person per capita. That's over four times higher than the pollution per-capita if everyone in the world polluted an equal amount. No domestic politician is going to get elected running on a platform of "unilaterally reduce everyone's carbon footprint by 75%" - the stakeholders who would benefit most from that are the 99.6% of humanity who live in other countries, and they aren't allowed to vote in Australian domestic elections. Dear reader, if you have read to the end of this rant, please lobby your government to put tariffs on your trading partners until they introduce carbon taxes -- particular us in australia.
that's a good point. there's definitely other societal goals that can be nudged toward through prices.
but on another hand, i'm not sure thinking about prices as vectors is that helpful. to change behaviour a regulator needs a way to internalise the external costs into prices, or some equivalent mechanism, and some enforcement mechanism for non-compliance.
but if you have all that, it isn't clear what use price vectors are. and if you only had price vectors but the extra components weren't reflected in the price, with no enforcement mechanism, then they won't change behaviour.
There are glints, Rainbow Gatherings, for example, are small transitory communities that function entirely without money. There are "intentional communities" that operate (in various ways) without money (althoug usually not without some formal accounting?) And things like Ithaca Hours, a "local currency".
The whole value of monetary prices is that they're fungible - rather than having to compare the value of things in x different dimensions, you reduce everything to that scalar concept of value.
> In fact, markets have a known flaw called externalities. This flaw is created partly from the fact that value is a scalar. This flaw is so severe that major pollution has been created by economic activity (global warming, ozone, etc) that risks all life on this planet.
On the contrary, having value be a scalar is the solution, because it allows us to make tradeoffs between value and pollution. Cap and trade works (it worked for acid rain); the missing part is the will to actually do it.
All that said, you might be interested in China's "social credit" system - that's the main example I know of this concept of "vector value", because it exists to impose a standard of behaviour on individuals that's not tradeable and fungible.
Historically, Western democratic states owned a significant amount of assets as measured as a percent of national income - it was only in the period 1970-2008 that the value of total state-owned assets shrunk to near-zero (or even became negative in some cases). So the large increases in value of states' balance sheets (and corresponding impacts) is not at all unusual. That being said, you're correct to point out that Central Banks heading these trends is a little concerning, mostly because it basically represents democracy outsourcing these important decisions to unelected bureaucrats.
To actually have wasting energy as the base of a system must be the very definition of shitty engineering.
There's good reasons why people discuss these ideas, bitcoin, much like anything else is just part of the direction things can go in and it doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
Much of the world doesn’t own bitcoin but as long as you have a mobile phone and an internet connection, there’s a way to buy some. The technology’s been working for 12 years now and it can scale just fine, no need to tamper with anything. People don’t need to run full nodes, it’s already decentralized enough. I have one running off a raspberry pi and a 1TB hard drive, but it’s just because I want to and not because I think the additional node is needed for the network. Bitcoin is resilient against external actors by design, maximum decentralization and security. Remember when China finally cracked down on all bitcoin mining in May? The hashrate has recovered by now and China lost almost all of its 50% foothold on global bitcoin mining. The rest of the world’s bitcoin miners thanks China for its contribution.
It seems to me like Bitcoin is dismissed too easily by people who haven’t done enough unbiased research on it. For me, it’s not so much that Bitcoin is such an awesome invention and everyone should worship it like a cult. My question is what happens after fiat currencies collapse? Every single government backed currency has collapsed from hyperinflation in the past, and there’s still a good number of countries with hyper inflating currencies today. Historically, after chaos and war, some people’s debts are flushed away at the expense of everyone else and a new currency is issued by the affected jurisdiction. Do we just want to repeat that cycle when the USD collapses? I think that a free market currency that cannot be controlled by any organization (including governments) deserves more limelight.
Money is not some concrete thing that has some inherent value. It's never been that. It's always been a promise, an abstract thing backed by collective trust.
Fractional reserve banking was not a coup d'etat of an elite few performed to disenfranchise the 99% in order to ballast the 1%. It was a considered decision by rational actors and was necessary to enable economic growth since its introduction.
In many ways it's wonderful that the current generation is questioning the old ways of doing things. This is how progress is made. I'm down. But money, government, everything which is the product of historical trial-and-error is a Chesterson's Fence: you really do need to understand why it's there before you try to rip it out and replace it with something else. And it's just so clear to me that basically nobody trying to replace fiat currency with crypto or whatever actually understands why fiat came to be.
I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate mission.
But working from home for the past years I feel like I mercenary working among mercenaries. Working with people that have never met and will never meet and for whom work isn't about the mission or the customer. If I get work done early, I now just call it a day. Why bother with ad-hoc testing, documentation, checking in on that new hire, proposing a conference paper, investigating technical debt, etc. It's liberating but it's also depressing.
I mean there're only so many ways to effectively bullshit in standup, for one
Office workers can have this attitude as well. If you'd think poorly of others having this attitude in the office perhaps you should look at your own attitude with remote work.
I have formed bonds through remote work, and yes, they are different, but a lot of the difference you describe is because of you. That's ok, people are different, just don't assume everyone else is the same.
Getting a little sci-fi here, but imagine not even knowing the names of your coworkers, project, manager, or even employer in the future; the system is so well-designed that you just have to do the little mission and there are communication channels minimally restricted to just the questions you'd have. Once such a system got up and running it would be the closest thing to a genuine "AI" or rather the more general case of an emergent intelligence; emergent since none of the actors are directly cooperating with the other actors, and hypothetically such a system could independently evolve and evolve with nobody at the steering wheel.
For an example of a compartmentalized operation, see CIA, NSA. I'm not saying these organizations are anything like what I described above. Just examples of highly compartmentalized work systems.
Anyways, just got me thinking ;)
Work-life separation originally meant that you were done with work at 5PM, didn’t have to worry about staying late or answering e-mails at night, and your weekends were 100% yours.
This latest iteration of work/life separation has gone to an extreme where you’re supposed to suck the life out of work and pretend all of your coworkers are just faceless screen names instead of actual people.
Work/life balance is good.
Sucking the life out of work is not fun, IMO. I’d much rather work with people, collaborate, and build relationships than be reduced to a robot taking tasks from the queue.
I'm a remote worker and I spend a large chunk of my time every week helping other team members. I'm very, very good at it.
From now on, I'm going to ask everyone about their attitude towards remote work during interviews, and I'll be a hard NO on anyone with the attitude displayed here.
You can have employees who hate remote or you can have remote employees. You can't have both.
They do just the absolute minimum.
In some ways it is debatable if they arent right. Also: if you are the one who cares in a team of those who dont (which is the usual situation), then you are in a world of pain. Snafu.
People can live their lives how they want but I don't want such people on my team.
For markets the analogy is the same: a regulatory environment provides the substrate in which an efficient distributed system can rely on to prevent Byzentine faults.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault -- for all intents and purposes byzentine == malicious.
edit: I should have read the article to the end, literally the next paragraph where I stopped to comment said what I just said, but better.
"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination.
"The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening." The gap between rich and poor is not the correct target to optimize. The only problem you can reasonably try to solve is improving the quality of life for the have-nots. World-changing innovation (steam engine, electricity, printing press) always makes a few individuals exorbitantly wealthy, and the world is better off because of it.
The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent.
However, once you widen your lens to a global view, you will see poverty world-wide drastically improved over the same period of time. So the regression of wealth away from the middle class in the US might more accurately be considered as transfer of wealth to the rapidly-industrializing world.
If you are referring to something different that's been happening in Canada, I apologize. I am not very familiar with Canadian history.
Do you define regression as absolute position or relative position? For example does it matter if Jeff Bezos has 100 Ferraris if the middle class, on average, have .25 more cars per capital than 50 yrs ago?
I would love to put some data behind this discussion because it's long been mixed up as to which case is the ethical one (absolute vs relative growth).
Here is some data that compares the median income to the rising cost of living in the US. https://www.businessinsider.com/america-middle-class-living-...
I think the Bezos-Ferrari question is a good one. I feel it is personally unethical for Bezos to spend that amount of wealth on luxuries when the resources could alternatively be spent reducing the suffering of others.
However I also think it is impractical and misguided for a state to enact policies with the primary purpose of minimizing the number of Bezos Ferraris or to automatically attribute the lack of cars per capital to Bezos's excess of cars (although in some cases it might be)
I admit it's a difficult thing to measure and to discuss, but I also do think that the tide is rising, but being creatures who's feel good brain chemicals are related to relative outcomes (see the primates w/ cucumber vs grapes studies), we're also feeling a bad feeling because we see others doing better to a greater extent than we are...
To talk about the difficulties of implementing true socialism would be beating a dead horse, I think. But even if we could remove wealth inequality completely, people would still find ways to feel better or worse than others (sports, looks, social skills, intelligence, etc.). My high school in the suburbs was fairly homogenous from a socioeconomic standpoint, but that microcosm seemed more hierarchical than any other point in life.
I also would expect the good-or-bad feelings people get by making comparisons are more-or-less ordinal in nature, so I think people would manage to feel just as bad about small wealth differences (keeping up with the Jones's) if there were no more billionaires.
The main one that jumps out for me is power, and influence. As an example, it doesn't really matter if I can donate $100 to the EFF instead of $50 when a billionaire can outspend me 1,000,000:1 without even flinching.
I found this interesting on the topic: https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars
When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It's just more more! now now! to survive. So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
To me, what's wrong with the world is that people are ok with being wealthy. They're ok with rising to positions of power and then denying empowerment to others. They're ok with the law not being applied equally and fairly to everyone.
They haven't realized that inequity affects themselves in another life, that violence against others hurts themselves, that destroying the planet this century leaves no planet for their next life.
I can't prove any of this, but I know it's true, because I'm here now, just like you.
And they will never allow anyone to disect them because it will as per quote from my old friend "destroy the meaning of life".
And by all means - I sincerlly believe we should all set our own meaning for life, just never forget that every one of us is probably wrong.
Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term. It's not a bad idea to use tools like this, especially since all attempts so far to design a "science of morality" have been bloody, catastrophic failures.
At first glance things like this can sound good. However, religious ideologies like this are always double edged swords. In India, their caste system is heavily reinforced by the believe that people in a lower caste were "bad people" in a past life, and so there are no reservations about subjugating or otherwise discriminating against them.
This _always_ tends to happen to _every_ spiritual law scheme eventually, under different cultures. If a religion has enough followers, people have used its (seemingly good natured) ideology to kill and discriminate against those they don't like. This is the nature of humanity, I doubt there is any possible spiritual teachings that wouldn't eventually fall into this trap.
Science is the only and ultimate final authority. It really is not a bad assumption. There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition.
> but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
No it is not, science functions perfectly fine for complex processes. We can describe and draw actionable conclusions from the behaviours of fluids and gases even though they are made up of inconceivably complex interactions of billions of quantum effects.
We could easily model most of human behaviour if we really wanted to. It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain from it. We make do with observing humans in the wild, and the observations we make sometimes have enough significance to make weak statements about human behaviours.
If the belief in reincarnation could be used as a moral tool to help people think long term, that should be scientifically demonstrable if it's true. It would be a hard ethical argument though, as you're basically trading a persons ability to make correct judgements of their own safety and well-being for a larger "long term" better functioning society. Not saying it's definitely wrong, but it better lead to a much better world for it to be worth it.
Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.
I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.
Some people call it science, some call it the scientific method, etc.
You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision.
Regardless if there was junk science in the early 1900s (don't know much about it but wouldn't be surprised), it was people who decided to sterilize people. Just as it's people who decide to kill people for Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever excuse they come up with.
Even if the science were true, and some subset of Americans is less intelligent or more violent or whatever, it still wouldn't change the fact that now we've decided that eugenics is unethical. We embrace diversity because that's what aligns to our values. Maybe if we're in the middle of famine and war our values will shift again. The authority of science has nothing to do with it.
Indeed, praise be to science.
It really is not a bad assumption.
More like a leap of faith.
There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition.
How [onto]logical.
It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain from it.
Amen, brother. We've got to repress those urges of curiosity to appease glorious science. Praise be to science! Amen.
> We've got to repress those urges of curiosity to appease glorious science
No, it's to appease our desire to live in a society that aligns with our morality. If you'd read the religious books for what they are and respect them for their interpretation of what it means to be a kind and loving human being, instead of using them as tools to manipulate the minds of the unwashed masses into behaving as a cohesive unit, then maybe you'd understand.
Science is currently not ultimate or final because is it is changing. For science to be ultimate and final, it would mean that tomorrow's science is the same as today's science. Nothing new or different can follow that which is ultimate.
However, we need to assert social authority in order to defend a discourse against the fallacies like "argument from authority" or other unproductive disruptions.
I find this highly offensive. The people must be lied to so they can do the thing that's best for them, because they can't come to this conclusion in a way that doesn't involve lieing.
I do think it is a useful exercise to imagine yourself in the future though. It’s much easier when you have children to be connected to the future.
Anyways: I accept Kant's argument for the evaluation of philosophical maxims ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
... and it seems that one can adopt any maxim as guidance for one's behaviour, so I choose to take as a maxim: There is only one "subject" of reality, and that subject seems to be experiencing itself via this particular meatsack known as "me". Anything "I" can do to improve that experience via another meatsack known as "somebody else" is worth doing, because it is the very same "subject" experiencing that act. "Karma" means "action", because any action taken is experienced through another be-ing.
The truth of this is irrelevant, in the "will that it should become a universal law" sense: if everyone acted in this way, seeing each and every being as another aspect of their self, then we surely would all have fewer problems. That's how the categorial imperative applies.
To resort to argument by authority, there's always this:
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." — Carl Sagan
I don't always (or even most of the time) follow this, because I'm not sure that the "universal law" makes sense when surrounded by self-centred automatons, so I resort to an even higher authority, Douglas Adams:
Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. Well, that's where it all falls down, of course.
It is certainly true that the atoms that make up your body have been transformed from the atoms around you (the food you eat, for example) into what you call "my body". And they will not remain as "your body" forever. Hell, I think the majority of cells in your body do not even carry your DNA.
Same with your habits, with many of the thoughts we think. Would you be exactly the same person if you were born in a completely different culture?
Perhaps the point in talking about reincarnation is not to figure out "how it works", but taking a holistic view beyond the perceived boundaries of "self". Much of eastern philosophy appears to be, at least to me.
What happens when we die? I believe that our consciousness finds a way to continue somewhere else. There's no gap, because not being conscious is a non-sequitur. We just fade out and fade in seamlessly, across time, without our memories, like tuning into a new TV station.
I think that self-awareness stems from source consciousness, which is a universal force like gravity. At the most basic level, it's God experiencing itself through every possible contextual reality. Because what else is there to do? We explain it as emergent behavior arising from stochastic processes, but that's from an individual mindset. As a whole, our consciousnesses act more like waves interacting with one another and resonating at frequencies we feel subjectively as harmony and discord.
There are a number of basic operations that science could use to "prove" that reincarnation exists. We could merge and split minds, pause minds and unpause them, turn parts of them on and off, play minds at different speeds, put them in simulations, etc. Aliens probably have access to technology like this, and these ideas have been explored a ton in sci fi. But at the end of the day, would knowing the truth give us any more satisfaction than say, recreational drugs like psychedelics? I'm just not sure.
This wavy-stochastic-quantum aspect of reality may seem far-fetched, except it's looking like the wave equations that underpin quantum mechanics are nothing special, and in fact can be simulated classically on ordinary computers:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06787
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.04...
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/183
This lends a lot of credibility to the idea that reality is a simulation. And that we can (and probably are) interacting with our reality in macro ways that follow similar math to the micro. This New Age - quantum connection always seemed pretty out there to me, but now I'm having trouble finding a better model for reality.
One way to look at consciousness/life that I find interesting is as a quantum influencer. Life may direct probabilities around it to work in its favor. Reincarnation has a lot in common with multiverse theory. As in, if the observer always exists, then it exists no matter how improbable it is to exist. In other words, when an individual is born, a universe may get created for it. When it dies, it may go on living in its own reality in a separate universe, we just can't be with it anymore. ESP experiments suggest that life may influence "real" probability from quantum random number generators, choosing the reality most beneficial to life. So Schrödinger's cat may always be alive from its perspective, even if it dies from ours, although these experiments may be inherently impossible to replicate:
https://hackaday.com/tag/pear-study/
https://www.enigmaticdevices.com/replicating-the-princeton-p...
My favorite takeaway from all of this is that if we are all one, drawn from the same source consciousness, then each of our beliefs are no more or less valid than anyone else's. We can choose to see the miracle of life and the magic in each moment.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, this is just the best working theory that I've found so far.
Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs.
Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?
Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respect to the evolution of groups and cultures (meta groups).
Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity.
Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boomer with a printing press is doing. You have to worry about a government that runs with the emotion of a Millenial and the depth of understanding of a TikToker, making that affect your personal freedom, your wealth, and your life. I'm talking about the US in this case, but it's really a mess everywhere. No country has good governance at this point in time.
By all means, wealth is nice to have, but there is a function between increasing wealth and increasing time spent preserving it. At a certain point of wealth you realize that the most valuable things cannot be bought, and it becomes a chore rather than a source of comfort. We are also clearly bad at preserving wealth, otherwise Mesopotamia would be the richest place on the planet.
Being rid of wealth can be extremely freeing, but the communities that see it this way also play by completely different rules than society does at large. You don't see a lot of religious being held up as successes by the current global standards for example.
We see it in software development all the time. People are less interested in maintaining code they’ve inherited and are more interested in building their own.
I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. We’re creative optimistic creatures. We prefer green field because when we’re working on it, we feel great imagining the possibilities. When it’s older, “played out”, and to the point where we feel it’s something that’s to be administered, there’s less possibilities and we get bored. Time to try something else.
Everywhere you look, this pattern is present. We love building stuff. We don’t love administering stuff.
That's only for people high in "openness to experience". People low in openness are more than happy to plod along doing the same thing forever.
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/openness-big-five-perso...
One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point.
There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.
The devil's in the details.
I could never be a billionaire or even a millionaire, and then walk around and not see the countless people suffering all around me, and around the world.
Now, I imagine many of them feel that they are making a positive contribution to the world by employing people, creating products that help people, making charitable donations, etc.
But that stuff stems from the ego. I believe that true wealth is in divine things like the love between a parent and child. Stuff that doesn't cost money.
This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies. Science and technology's greatest failure is that there's still scarcity. A contrived scarcity now, that keeps people working so hard and distracted that they never get a chance to catch a breath and question the system. Just so that a chosen few can suckle on the priceless time of the poor, using them as human chattel.
In addition to my above recommendations you might also want to investigate your ideologies. It seems to me your view of the world and how it works, as presented here in your comments, is from a woefully low resolution representation of the extraordinary detail that goes into society and economic systems.
> around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies.
No. Not at all, in any way shape or form. You'll probably want to investigate, as well, human psychology, neurology, and the history of civilization. But start with the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Speaking of first principles...
Do you really believe that there's a purposeful reason why we are all here, or is that something you choose to live your life by?
What if the world is not wrong at all? What if we're failing? That's how humanity learns, by failing. Sometimes by failing big time. I think it's human nature to resist change for the large part, except for when the benefits of changing clearly outweigh the benefits of not changing. If that's true, then a large failure in any context is the breeding ground for change.
Why are people ok with being wealthy? Because having access to resources means more chances that your genes will be passed on - based on how it used to be in nomadic times. Maybe now that doesn't apply as much, but genes don't know it. For all our limbic brain and genes know, we're all still cavemen hunting, fighting for resources, foraging, etc. So yes, people will be ok with being wealthy.
Why is there no limit of wealth where people who have it say "ok that's enough, I don't need another one billion dollars"? Why do people keep hoarding absurdly until infinity? Because our genes are not used to infinity. It used to be that "the more the better". Famine would come. Let's save up as much as possible, let's get as many nuts as possible. There never was infinity of resources. We are not built to get it. This is what people need to understand about rich people that seem insane (besides possible trauma that drives other parts of their behavior). This is just how we are programmed.
Why is there so much political corruption and people stomp on top of each other to get more power? Why is it that morality seems to be such a fallible reason for people to act? Same. Exact. Reason. Evolutionary advantage based on millennia old hardware. If you kill my genes, yours go on, and mine don't. If you have more power, you have more access to resources. More chance of survival.
Asking someone to use their higher intellect and go against their instincts in favor of morality is often really hard. All of these are instincts. And unless we change humans' genetic code, or we somehow with AI merging change our intellect, we will continue being this way. We are the same guys that would burn witches, and chant "kill kill kill!" in gladiator coliseums. Just now the way we burn witches and chant that is different. More "sophisticated".
Having lived (and born into) all my life amongst followers of an eastern religion, I've observed that religious texts in my region of the world that specifically talk about re-incarnation attempt to 'make us go against our own instincts' (somewhat analogous to Puritanism). It's a clever way to make you 'regret your misdeeds' in past lives and be 'hopeful' about future lives (assuming you perform good deeds and don't rock the boat)-- if you learn to believe it. Call it Chicken Soup for the Primitive Soul.
Has all that attempt to promote 'Love thy neighbor, selflessness and self-actualization' from these religious texts been successful ? Mostly No. If anything, humans have used these same religious texts to rationalize their agenda of 'Hate thy neighbor, selfishness and materialism' covertly - Who would've guessed a several millenia old human genes would handily defeat a few thousand year old advice+propaganda disseminated in the form of these religious texts.
Anyone reading this might think I'm only bashing religious texts but as long as someone who cares to casually read any of those texts would realize - If you ignore the miracles & non-tangible stuff (propaganda) like immortality, re-incarnation, teleportation et al, these religious texts does include several down-to-earth advice for humans living in those eras - simple things like - living in the present moment, keeping a calm mind and eating a nutritious diet - stuff that seems so obvious now but is perhaps more relevant in the 21st century
It's strange to me that a lot of pragmatically-minded developers I know would point to the immediate problems with that kind of approach, but are nevertheless quick to embrace the equivalent approach when faced with society-scaled problems.
And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play. I myself am often tempted by the siren song of burning a legacy codebase to the ground and starting from scratch. I'm lazy and I know that it's going to suck to roll up my sleeves and do what's necessary. But I also know, from having done that enough times, that this impulse is often an abdication of my responsibility to actually fix what needs fixing instead of playing with new toys.
Fiat currency has all kinds of risks and weaknesses, but there are some strengths that I don't see, say, a Bitcoin addressing. The most immediate one to my mind is that if money is stolen, there is a central authority to make the victim whole. Because the authority owns the money supply, they can even do it via a back-door tax on the value everyone holds if the stolen property is not yet recovered (i.e. they can just print more money). If someone steals my BTC, it's just gone. There's no higher authority to appeal to to correct the theft.
It seems the centralization is unavoidable if people want the protections of our modern financial system...
I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypto and gold. Anyone can mine gold, there is no central authority creating gold or determining its value. Gold is just as decentral a currency as crypto. If gold was not the solution to the financial system, why would crypto be?
Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.
You will be just as effective doing that as someone who just runs the Bitcoin client at home.
Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and capital intensive operations in both gold mining and Bitcoin mining.
But outside of Bitcoin there is a ton of cool stuff happening in the DeFi space which could have big implications for our financial systems. One example is stablecoins which has a much better chance of being used in payment systems than a store of value like Bitcoin. In general I don't see this stuff replacing the financial system so much as finance companies slowly adopting crypto on the backend. Just like companies adopted internet technology as it allowed them to run more efficiently.
Try carrying a bar of gold across a border and you'll end up in an interrogation room.
Cryptocurrency's digital nature makes it much more useful than gold. It can be stored like gold in a vault, but it can also be transmitted over the internet like a bank transfer. It's pretty incredible stuff.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.
This is a huge claim, and needs to have just as huge of a proof.
However, all cryptos can offer is poof (as in poof, and gone) than proof.
Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made public you already had things like France's Minitel.
Blockchains? They still have zero use cases: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
> You have to be open minded and extrapolate
Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is blindly believe in it.
sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
permissionless payments (funding wikileaks)
private/anonymous transactions (Monero)
event tickets (good use of NFTs)
synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA)
decentralized asset exchange - AMM
decentralized prediction markets
DAO - a new way for people to organize and form internet native companies
Unless, of course, you're interested in outright scams like NFT. Yup, those are "interesting".
It isn't if you cared to at least read the link I provided
As to your use cases. First the obvious ones:
- event tickets. Have literally zero need for blockchain. NFTs are scam, and nothing but scam. All the fictional properties ascribed to ticketing via NFTs I've covered in my to responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
- synthetic assets, decentralized asset exchange, decentralized prediction markets. Require neither bitcoin, nor blockchains nor crypto. Used almost exclusively for trading fictional tokens, scams, and pretending it's innovation.
The less obvious ones:
- sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
"Let's convert our value into a fictional token that has no value outside the fictional world, and can't be used for anything but buying other digital tokens".
Buy food? Oh, you have to convert it to real money (because no one in the world, especially not in the world where government sucks, accepts these fictional tokens). Or if someone does accept it, oops, random transaction fees just doubled your cost.
Buy actual physical assets? "When your government sucks", people prefer dollars and euro to fictional tokens.
- permissionless payments
This is a very tiny part that is arguably useful, but it comes with a plethora of issues that make them unusable for wide adoption. Among them, reversibility, enforcement.
The complexity comes from the rules enacted to shield people from bad actors, and that's just going to be re-applied to crypto in some way shape or form.
Tell that to this Angular 1 app.
Three years ago I bought an apartment.
I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly.
In the end, all of the following was guaranteed:
- I had the money
- money was transfered into the other person's account
- I was not a scammer
- that person wasn't a scammer
- I received actual physical keys to an actual physical apartment (and not to an non-existent address)
(a bunch of other stuff)
So, tell me. What exactly does your crypto improve?
For those of us living in prosperous Western countries (and let's not kid ourselves, that is at least 90% of HN), the biggest attraction of cryptocurrencies seems to be "if you buy this, it might be worth more in the future". Which is nice, but hardly innovative.
A disintegrating third world country will not be able to enforce anything. So, you've transferred your money and got a key to a non-existent place.
Good luck with your "improved process".
Argentina is the only one that comes to mind.
Planning for the apocalypse isn't really planning, but I guess we all need hobbies.
All of those guarantees are under threat of legal punishment enforced through court systems.
All of those guarantees are given to you based on good standing with various institutions. The bank, the intermediary, the seller.
If you were a person who was not in good standing with a bank, but you still had the money, could you have completed the transaction?
Technology has a trend of destroying middleman industries, as they don't provide value and take a portion of the proceeds for themselves.
DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders. Does that mean this process is smooth? or ready for mass adoption? Not necessarily, but the destruction of banks by technology is inevitable. It's just a matter of when
The problem is that that decision is made by people. Standards of conduct are not universal. What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
The advantage to people is that they can more flexible.
The disadvantage to people is that they can be more irrational.
On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
> What if political affiliation or COVID vaccination status affects your ability to transact with a bank, even though those things have nothing to do with buying or selling real estate
In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
Agreed. People still create the system, but they have zero to little sway in each individual transaction. So, the system can be biased, but with increased transparency, that should become apparent.
> On the negative side, though, there's essentially no rule of law to prevent the people making the decisions in DeFi from doing things that are bad/illegal/invalid.
Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
> In the regulated finance world, these sorts of restrictions would be disallowed by the rule of law. You can sue them if they try to enforce those rules, and depending on your jurisdiction, you may win and indeed win damages. What's the equivalent in DeFi? Who do I sue? What court do I ask for relief?
At least in the US, this is not the case for payment processors. Banks may be under more strict regulation. Visa/Mastercard can revoke the ability for anyone to process transactions on their network, even if the activity is completely legal. E.G. OnlyFans/Pornhub recently.
> Very true, there's a lot of scamming going on. It's still very bleeding edge and not ready for mainstream adoption.
Could you elaborate how you think this problem will be fixed for mainstream adoption?
So, these middlemen that "don't provide any value" guarantee that: my money isn't stolen, that I get the apartment I was shown etc.
So, you've removed these middlemen. How exactly is your technology going to solve this?
> DeFi, in this case, is targeting the financial institutions because we now have technological means to replace banks and lenders.
No, you don't. With banks I can revert a fraudulent transaction (I paid, but the goods never showed up). How is defi solving this simple case?
You mean, the absolute vast majority of people in this world live in contries with more-or-less functioning governments. Not perfect, but functioning.
> or the rest, crypto can be a good place to keep their funds without the fear of losing.
Ah yes. The only use case is hoarding. Even though I specifically provided a different case that doesn't involve hoarding.
And on top of that, in this case, how will it help with the stolen house in Luton?
I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You can get into politics, but the forces that broke the current set of politicians will break you as well. You can try and win from within the system, but that entails doing exactly what you're against.
I want to write software, man. I like making the computer do stuff, and I also like it when that stuff is socially meaningful, but it's impossible. The set of incentives and rules we have set up means that I don't get to do that. I don't enjoy knowing that the people i rely on are treated like fungible garbage. In that light I understand how it can seem appealing to change the world by writing software. I just don't think it's going to happen.
Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights.
Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.
It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America back on that front. At this point it's clear that the people who stoked that anger and fear over decades no longer have control of how to direct it (if they ever did).
How does your racism cause you to equate welfare Queen with black woman? I’d have thought that was more connected to the media using it that way.
1. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistak...
What is not so clear is why the person I was responding to thinks it’s their racism that causes them to think of those images, and not just that they have been exposed to Reagan’s imagery through the media.
So indeed I think your personal racism is not a simple function of exposure.
I’m sorry you personally have been a victim of racism exposure, and have become a passive racist as a consequence. It is a shame that society has done this to you.
>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”
>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/
It’s not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.
It's mind boggling how some people see eye watering profits and political donations and think that the whole thing is driven by stupidity.
We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincentives?
Maybe its the armchair libertarian in me, but it seems like we should just remove any formal definition of marriage from the government and instead normalize more power of attorney style actions.
I, of course, agree with you in principle. However much of the controversy is around the religious aspect -- ie some religions have a narrow definition of marriage which we've codified into law.
part of me wonders if it would be smarter for us to cede the terminology to the religious and just remove "marriage" as a term from the government and instead normalize another term, perhaps but not necessarily "civic partnership". Once we recognize the part that government should be involved with we can start to remove all religious connotations because it's not the <term> that we're "attacking".
Christians want to say marriage is exactly a man and woman w/ a clergyman ? Fine they can do that inside their building because that's not a legal thing. But if a Christian wants to say "civic partnership" is a specific thing, well that's too bad because they dont get to define law (at least not directly).
This is exactly the junior developer mindset described in the thread parent: restoring equal rights to gay people is a problem but first let's spin our wheels inventing a different terminology and taxonomy for marriage and upending legal precedent and existing case law about marriage.
it is both equal rights if "everyone/anyone can get married" or "no one can because it's not defined" (in the eyes of the government).
If people aren't willing to accept the 2nd case then I'm guessing they dont actually want equal rights so much as public(governmental) recognition of their status.
This is cutting the proverbial baby in half and redefining the legal institution so no one gets what they want, that will go well in a democracy /s
I should be able to extend the same set of privileges (like can make decisions for me if I am unable to) to my grandmother, or roommate, neighbor, priest, or whomever I choose. It makes little sense how we've constrained the solution w/o adding any value by those constraints. This maybe just the software engineer in me, but we've codified the concrete instead of the abstraction.
This is actually something of high importance to single people too -- something like 30-40% of households are single person and do not have a simple way to elect a person who can make legal decisions for them besides a relatively expensive and difficult power of attorney... So I see it as win:win:win to distill todays "marriage" into a legal common ground and give that right to _all_ people. Then anyone, gay or otherwise, can claim "marriage" because there will not be a legal definition (kind of like "natural" in food labelling). Christians wont be able to claim a monopoly on an undefined term.
But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can include not just same-sex couples, but my grandmother or random roommate too"?
Of course it's about monogamy. Of course it's about who you have sex with. Why do you think we have laws around adultery and divorce? Our democracy wanted to govern adultery and divorce so much that it enshrined it into law, but also lol it should be easy to get support for repealing the whole thing because I don't think it makes sense /s
Fight for it if you wish, I think this can of worms is just about the furthest thing from a politically & legally pragmatic solution that you could possibly come up with in a Western democracy like majority Christian USA.
I'm reading your "software engineer" description of concrete vs abstraction as if that's remotely relevant to the law & politics of helping gays rightfully access a beneficial institution and I'm just thinking "holy shit if this is kind of attitude that crypto folks promise to bring into the political institution of finance, PLEASE KEEP THEM AWAY FROM IT".
The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.
Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)
I don't think you misrepresented yourself, nor that I misunderstood what you meant.
> The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person...
But I do think that's a bad idea. Language belongs to everyone, not any religion. If they want their own separate word for a societal concept that has no basis in any religion, let them come up with their own new word for it. Marriage existed long before Christianity or Islam, and I'd guess before Judaism too. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were married, weren't they? And I doubt even they came up with the idea. But society, and probably even "government" of some kind, existed even then. In fact, AFAICS at least "society" must have -- the whole idea of marriage makes no sense except in relation to the rest of society: "We're in a long-term exclusive relationship; please treat us, in many respects, as a single unit." If a couple are the only two people in existence, it makes no difference if they're "married" or not; it only starts to matter if there are other people around.
To extend the message I usually advocate giving to religionists: Just as you keep your pecker in your pants and out of my wife, you should keep your sexual mores in your bedroom and out of mine; your faith in your church and out of society as a whole; and [new addition] your ideas about marriage among yourselves and out of everyone else's language.
Who the fuck do those nutjobs think they "are,* to decide what everyone else understands as "marriage"? And why do you advocate ceding this power over what separates Man from the rest of the animals, namely language, to them?
(That's actually how it works, AFAIK, in traditionally deeply Catholic but legally wholly secular France: People "get married" twice. Once [usually first, AIUI] legally at the magistrate, and [then] optionally also in church, by a priest. But the latter is only "for show" -- for any deeply religious mothers and aunts who think that's "the real deal"; and, at a guess, in no small part to give the bride the grand show she's always been dreaming about.)
First it’s a default mechanism for saying things like “if I get hurt this person can come see me in / ask questions about me in the hospital”. Also “we have joint economic activity so friction should be removed”.
Second, kids can’t necessarily articulate for themselves so it’s a default way of saying “here’s a couple of people who are helping me and others can be disregarded by default”
And it acts as a dash pot for both entering into and especially leaving these set of default rights and obligations.
* Marriage should be universally available. I’ve never liked saying that I “supported gay marriage” — the correct phrase is that “I want us to stop discriminating against people in the case of marriage”
This is essentially the power of attorney portion of my post. Perhaps it would be more inclusive if we just had a way to grant certain checkboxes and options to certain individuals. eg I could grant financial decisions to my mother, friend, cousin, and could even give a time limited grant to a girlfriend like "For the next year you can make life and death medical decisions for me" or whatever.
Sadly i dont see it happening because our government is so archaic
The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.
Now, would anyone ever check? Nah. Unless litigation (divorce, inheritance, whatever) came up and someone thought invalidating the original marriage might somehow help their case, though even then, dunno if it'd really matter.
Just because we used to regulate these ideas with religion in the past doesn't mean that our current institutions are religious. Some people who are legally married also subscribe to religious meanings of marriage. Some people who have food handlers cards also follow religious food customs. They're related but independent concepts in the modern day. The modern legal construct of marriage in the US is secular.
How much do you think it should cost a couple to form the contract for their marriage? Even a proper review of a contract with that complexity will likely cost a thousand or two, let alone making modifications. Times two, of course, as you would need independent representation.
I imagine that if we actually did this, fairly standard versions would start floating around and drop the costs - but the worst case of this is essentially the status quo with a few hundred in legal fees for review & education. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be terrible as it would reduce the amount of surprise in divorce.
On the other hand, it only really works in one jurisdiction so still problematic.
The government is not involved at the time of contract formation, there's not some government representative reviewing the contract. Nor do they enforce contracts (and related regulations) until there's a dispute.
Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)
Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.
That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?
The really interesting thing is that marriage is a contract that changes over time (as the government modifies law), without either party re-consenting to the new agreement. It's part of why I will probably never get married, it technically represents infinite risk.
This can also happen time with non-marriage contracts, which is why prudent drafters include severability clauses
yes, but we dont get to draft the law/contract that is marriage -- that's done by law makers. IIRC even a pre/postnup cannot contradict law.
a) Prenuptial agreements help some.
b) I hope your partner doesn't have a different view of what it represents.
c) this is actually a real interesting perspective I haven't heard. You're absolutely right and (like many things) the government could pass a law changing what it means, and who knows the affect. Actually, basically everything ever can change with government law changes (eg. taxes?) so maybe this isn't profound.
Some countries handle marriage as a religious thing. Israel works that way, and it's really complicated.
We haven't really codified the religious practice so much as codified the civil law assumptions around it.
It is weird in many ways, and it is the most complicated (and misunderstood) contract that many/most people will execute in their lives and it's done very implicitly.
On the other hand, if you didn't have the contractual side of marriage standardized, a whole other can of worms gets opened. If we didn't have a "standard contract" there are a crapton of things you would have to deal with individually.
Before gay marriage, some same-sex couples worked pretty hard to try and get as close to the marriage contracts as they could through contracts, which as I understand it was pretty expensive (5 figures typically) and ultimately not entirely successful especially as there are other implicit aspects that run counter to it.
Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out of that business.
Or just look at it the other (and IMO more correct) way around: It's actually family formation that is "marriage".
This truth used to be recognised by governments too, as witnessed by the ancient legal term "common law marriage".
If it's time for anyone to "get out of that business", it's everyone but the state.
Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.
> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government
It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.
> libertarian
Yeah, that explains it.
I think the system is whack, and that's the reason people don't want to fight it. They've given up.
1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin
A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.
"What have you lost, Mulla?"
"My key," said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?"
"At home."
"Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"
"There is more light here."
According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage.
It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure what Web3 can offer.
OTOH, reintroducing the friction of having to decide whether the next click is worth your time and attention (i.e. money) is where it's at.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be untraceable/unauditable).
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
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.
Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from misattribution of a people problem to tech.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
[1]: https://www.alt-m.org/2021/07/06/the-fable-of-the-cats/
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
How is software making society worse?
By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings.
By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours.
By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
If we're talking about a material object, there would be a more or less clear distinction between "what it is", "how it's made", "how it's used", etc.
If we're talking about software, I don't think that's the case any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...
And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress.
Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?
A: He works it out with a pencil.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
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.
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
Loosely speaking. Software in a computer, or in our brains.
With the "software in a computer" camp ascending rapidly, at the expense of the only alternative "software in a brain".
So we already need to solve all these problems with software soon. Or with a large amount of software as a required ingredient, anyway.
(I realize some people don't think machines will ever outthink biology (for ... hands and head waving around ... "Reasons! Man. Reasons!"). But, most of us probably agree that this is a loose goose first approximation of the long term trend we are in since the transistor, with no end in sight.)
I think the more likely explanation is that it's a way for people who own crypto to borrow and lend.
It's probably one of the first things to be built because there's a lot of people with crypto and banks don't want to accept it as collateral.
I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the old one, but conveniently ignores all the problems the original paradigm solved ("microservices make it easy to break up work so teams can release frequently and kinda-independently, but now you've got worse problems like transactional boundaries, coordinating cross-cutting concerns, alert escalation, etc.")
I see the same thing with crypto enthusiasts. They see "the code is the law, transactions can never be rescinded!" as a feature, but the broader financial system has concluded over centuries that that is a bug and that you need and want a human arbiter from time to time.
Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.
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 entire system (Bretton Woods, Dodd-Frank, Visa/Mastercard, &c).
This is a really good point.
There are some kinda exceptions[1] now and then, but there are many reasons why they tend to not work (not short term profitable being one of the main ones). Despite that, it seems we're pretty short even on good ideas lately, like our culture has lost the ability to dream big about positive things (we're excellent at doomsday dreaming, especially about our political outgroup members).
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.
How come our bank won't give us a dashboard with all of our monthly charges and cancel them at will?
Just as you can’t cancel your brothers subscriptions, the subscription service has no reason to accept a cancellation request from your bank.
Even if the service was no longer able to charge your card, you would still owe the money. The debt you incurred monthly is separate from your choice of how to pay that debt.
I wonder what happens if someone does that?
We found meaningful ways of disincentivizing theft, which turns out to be largely sufficient even in face of fallible security. The exact same applies to card data in the hands of merchants.
Take that logic and apply it to crypto and hopefully that'll help you understand why crypto enthusiasts believe in it.
The fact is that we can and do find ways around flaws in a system. Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
That's exactly the point of the article: You need some form of guardrail, and that has to be centralized.
> Crypto folks just think that a crypto foundation is better than the current foundation of our financial systems.
How so? I am not under the impression that current financial providers have significant issues in consistently exchanging numbers...
I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.
Even then, there is still recourse if you pay for something with cash and the thing you buy ends up being non-functional (e.g. small claims court). And since the transaction was in person it's less likely you have no idea who the seller is.
An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.
Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.
But, I have also witnessed projets that were poorly engineered and should have been rewritten or refactored in time to permit better integration of junior devs, prevent the burnouts and the people quitting.
Sometimes, when you don't make the good refactoring on time, you end up with nobody to maintain your software and you have to rewrite it.
Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive.
Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.
First and foremost, the problem should dictate the solution of course, but each cloud host service provider has their own unique brand of microservices that don't make a large distributed system easy/cost-effective to migrate after it's initial development as well. CSPs now do a lot to lock clients into their specific platform for life.
The monthly compute and storage bills alone are now converted to utility pricing also, so there are far too many ways in which those prices can rise and balloon unexpectedly over time that must also be considered also in all fairness.
The modern Internet is turning into a wasteland of scams, where only the rich make money after a huge buy-in, and it's sickening to see the scams and price gouging that occurs just to launch a simple web site, even with open source tools. Terms of service literally mean nothing, and they can't be enforced our upheld because of the massive financial wealth and lack of support monopolies grow into, and because regulators are also tech investors.
Major interests are working hard to raise the entry barrier and to shut out free and reasonably priced services that allow control. They are working hard to acquire highly useful tools as well so they can put a price tag on them. The more we give the wrong people vast sums of money the worse it will get, and the less options we'll have.
Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch.
Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people with powerful lobbyists and an enormous financial stake in the status quo.
When the amount of work it takes to fix the existing system is more than the amount of work it takes to build a new one, the answer changes.
you're afraid to change things because there's no test coverage. okay let's add some automated tests. oops can't do that either because the whole thing is a tightly-coupled pile of spaghetti with no interface boundaries. so you start by refactoring. but because there are no tests, you don't realize you are breaking a bunch of important business functionality and now people are yelling at you to stop whatever you are doing and fix these bugs.
no matter what you do, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. but hey, people are actually getting stuff done with your product/service in the meantime. as painful as it is, it's still probably better to fix what you have than to start over.
Like biological agents, I'd argue any persistent and stable organization of humans makes predictions and inferences about the future and takes actions which maximize the probability of their future existence as a coherent entity.
in reality, you have customers that are very upset about the sudden spike in observable defects, you have other teams mad because they are triaging a bunch of bugs introduced by your refactor, and you have management wondering why the fuck you have spent multiple months working on stuff that has no clear connection to a marketable feature. you might also have a couple of seniors/principals who actively oppose your efforts because they benefit from being the only people who really understand the mess you are trying to clean up. and of course, all of that messy people stuff is probably a large part of why the system is so tangled up to begin with.
I certainly don't think political systems are exactly like computer systems, but it seems like a lot of the high-level lessons are applicable to both.
That's what I meant to capture by agreeing there is overlap in terms of backwards compatibility and entangled dependencies.
The difference is entrenched social systems have greater agency that goes beyond change induced instability and into being able to actively predict and favorably mold their environment.
Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.
Almost always. Re-implementing all the existing functionality from scratch will take much longer than you think or estimate. And attempting to remove/defer implementation of any will cause friction with business that rely on it.
There is a reason why we haven't replaced Excel/Word with google sheets/docs. It's true that most people only use about 60% of any software but everyone relies on a different set of 60%.
It just isn't! It really isn't. It is the way it is for good and historically motivated reasons. Can you elucidate those things? If you don't understand the rationale for the system as it exists, you can't propose an alternative that has any chance of success.
The key point here then is that the engineers and maintainers of that original (legacy) system probably did not properly take scalability and structure into consideration. Maybe the system was pre-SDLC, which is an important consideration, but each system is usually a different case, and some tech is often labeled as "legacy" because it's simply not part of a "bright and shiny new money-making solution" marketing plan... ehem.
It's important to not create the same issues in redevelopment, and reducing complexity is a key step in ensuring future compatibility.
Some systems are not as "legacy" as others. This is also a vital point to the discussion.
Most clients aren't concerned with overall cost and lifetime of service on solutions from what I've observed; Most clients are people working towards raises and their retirement and just concerned about not exceeding their max budget and not generating embarrassment for themselves or for their company.
This is why one of the first questions I ask of my customers is how long they intend for the system to be in service for.
There are several factors of why a proper solutions architect is necessary throughout the development process of major and mission-critical systems, but too many PMs decide to just use the tech stack a team agrees upon, or what's cobbled together and patched to work, or what worked as an MVP during early demos.
We suffer from environmental factors, because budgets are under-cut, deadlines are always too short, and because people only care enough to prevent their own headaches. This does not meet a mark for vital systems though. As we ignorantly rush towards more and more software dependent operations, the failures will become more and more amplified in all aspects (cost, loss, recoverability, technical debt... you name it).
Keeping everything as simple as possible is now, and always has been, the better ideal.
I am beyond tired in working to convince teams about the adoption of simple solutions, everyone has their own opinions and skills, and people are too often difficult to change. I can quickly develop proof of concepts (much faster than my competition) because of the tools and methods I use, and I can run it all locally, or in the cloud. It's reliable and used across many prominent clients as well... If others can beat me to suggesting a solution, that's fine as well, but ultimately, what works efficiently based on the requirements wins, and that's what's fair.
Alas. Our smartest people are working on making people click ads ...
There are several different people that seem inclined to be attracted to crypto. This is just one and there's a huge crossover with gold bugs. There are also people who have made a lot of money or missed out on making a lot of money and have bought into the narrative that crypto is the future and/or they're desperately seeking to be in on day one of the next Bitcoin.
I agree about rewrites in general. Almost always, in fact. But I also believe in software entropy and it can reach a point where the current requirements are so far removed from the original requirements that subsequent changes can become increasingly expensive and risky to the point where a partial or total rewrite might make sense. But people also pull the trigger way too often.
Considerations for a rewrite:
1. Timeline. Will the current system stagnate for a year? If so, it's a problem;
2. Can a rewrite be partial and coexist with the current system? If not, huge problem. You reduce timelines and risk by planning for partial rewrites; and
3. Is a rewrite or migration reversible? If not, it's a red flag.
It's also why it's so important to build in the capability to upgrade the system cleanly in part. A good example (of what not to do) is Git's utter reliance on SHA1 hashes. At the time it came out I'm absolutely shocked there was no allowance for updating the hashing algorithm given that MD5 obsolescence was recent history at that point.
> And I do think that there are equal parts incompetence and laziness at play.
I think naivete plays a big part too. That and hubris ("this time will be different").
It is deliberately not, “burn the world we need a crypto revolution right now society be damned”. I don't like the term crypto and neither does Chia.
We need a modern ACH (you know the thing runs on FTP right?) and actual digital cash. And we need the people supporting the system to be “the people”. A decentralized ledger with a strong Eltoo (L2) ecosystem does serve this goal.
If you’re of the sane moderate opinion that we need better tools and that the ideas behind DeFi aren’t entirely worthless but still think society mostly kinda works but some parts need a refactor, check the chia community out. They’re thoughtful level headed players in the “DeFi” space. Refactor, not rewrite.
None of which tackles the real problem, which is that corporations, top-down oligarchies, monopolies, unregulated market economies, bureaucracies, and so on are all examples of the same problem - which is that hierarchies with wide power inequalities are mental illness factories. They enable and cultivate personality disorders.
As the power inequalities increase, everything turns to shit, because the people who have real power get more and more aggressively psychopathic, extractive, demanding, irrational, and dangerous.
If you add some negative feedback/oversight and apply some filtering to keep the crazies out - difficult, but possible - I strongly suspect you can eventually push any system back to stability and incline it towards producing whatever form of growth you're interested in.
Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
We don't necessarily need more regulation, but more of the right regulation would be good.
I agree. But a funny thing I wanted to remark on is that this dynamic makes defi (and any other esoterica) better (or less worse, depending on your POV) than it "deserves" to be. It essentially functions as a less-regulated side track for those savvy enough to use it, and this self-selecting population is one that does not need as much regulation as the general population. Of course, this is until defi gets packaged into nice, consumer-friendly products you can buy with a couple of swipes, which is already happening.
But I get your point; it is reasonable for savvy people to have a play ground for more risk.
> Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!
In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.
People from the field already have the tear it down and rebuild attitude. It’s only unlearned after hard experience. But that experience is never gained on society level problems because they are not making the decisions.
They are doing it for the same reason that the junior developers are doing what you describe.
It is difficult to understand why a full rewrite of a system isn't going to work, when you don't understand the simplest things about that system.
> All of the current histrionics that we hear from [[INSERT_ANTI_ESTABLISHMENT_TREND_HERE]]-- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system
The argument will become invalid if, say, a "Senior" in a field is defending the anti-establishment trend or movement within that field.
I saw a Winklevoss on Twitter saying something along the lines of "cash is trash; crypto is the future." Makes sense that he wants to pump up crypto, because he has a large financial stake in it.
There's always going to be someone on top of society making the rules. The question is this: who do we want it to be? How can we make sure it's well designed, and accountable to the people?
But that's not how it usually works in the tech industry where you inherit someone else's code who also inherited it from someone else as it was written by somebody they never met. And on that front you are dead-on
>so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in <new frontend framework>
Sometimes you hard fork. We used to compute ballistic trajectory by hand. Huge rooms of "human computers". We did this until a better way presented itself then we hard forked because actual computers did the job much better.
In addition most pragmatic project runners(Kraken, Coinbase, etc.) use the blockchain and the traditional financial system together. Many serious DeFI projects(e.g. stablecoins) do the same. I think its clear that anyone serious about DeFi knows they have to start with the financial system where it is today.
I think what you are stating is a bit reductive.
You're not wrong, but since you're on HN they should also remind you of the entire startup ecosystem and the reason for its existence.
Talented people often find they can't get anything done in huge, bureaucratic organizations. Cutting through layers upon layers of red tape and getting chains of approvals to build something new and better, is slow, frustrating, and life-sucking.
It's worse when there are people whose approvals are necessary who benefit in some way from the current status quo, and thus are incentivized to preserve and protect it.
Thus, talented people often leave and start startups primarily to get out of that environment, move fast, and build without permission or restriction.
It's the same for cryptocurrency, nobody in their right mind wants to try to fix the financial system from within, and there are too many incumbents who benefit from the status quo, it's just a waste of time and life.
PS - Disclaimer, I estimate only about 10% of DeFi projects are worth anything, but that's the nature of things - you can't have the signal without the noise.
Occasionally, this doesn't exist. Hence, for example, the American Civil War. You're making the mistake of assuming that software engineering design schema work for all real-world problems (or, rather, that that which would be foolish in approaching the redesign of software is necessarily also foolish in reforming other systems).
In fact, the "incremental change over time" approach is often the comfortable, irresponsible choice, in no small part because it allows bad actors the opportunity to adjust their approach to align with the new rules. This is especially true when the corrupt status quo threatens to collapse not only the system in question, but also many interrelated systems. The last thing you need when approaching a cliff is the car enthusiast in charge of the wheel and the child lock. Sometimes brakes aren't enough; you might need to just jump.
Since the invention of money our economy hasn't changed in essence, but a lot of cruft has been built on top of the basic underlying principle.
Centralization of money is "evil" because it sooner or later you're going to find yourself on the list of undesirables. When you do, centralization (and the technology that goes with it) makes it as easy as flicking a switch to economically banish you.
There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at this point thanks (inflation and monetary repression) vs outright fraud and shills.
You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples:
- currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries)
- civil asset forfeiture (citizens)
These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The advent of the hydrogen bomb (1952) means that countries can no longer contemplate direct warfare and have been turning toward economic warfare increasingly in the last several decades.
To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfe...
You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.
An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort.
Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.
What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough:
- We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so.
- One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how new (human-designed) systems affect society. And that's not for lack of trying - economics, sociology, psychology - they are just insanely hard because people always lie, keep changing and are so damn inventive.
While I agree that it's not obvious our current systems will continue to work, I don't think the system is born out of luck. The system is largely based on trial and error in the pursuit of what the majority wants. Yes, there are those with outsized influences and corruption at every level. However, if we look at history, we are moving slowly towards what we all want.
Luck was not what created the current system, but luck was what left it working for so long. This idea is of course not new, it's the essence of "ages of discord" etc.
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 trainwreck or are we rich & lucky?
In any distributed system, those nodes that by luck or skill become more cost-efficient and inter-connected tend to become even more cost-efficient and inter-connected, because all other nodes want to connect via the most cost-efficient, most inter-connected nodes.
This dynamic is self-reinforcing. We are all familiar with it.
Without some form of regulation (historically centralized, and always imperfect), distributed systems like market-driven economies, modern financial markets, and information networks evolve to have growing inequality of resources and connectivity over time.
I'm not aware of any exception.
The ideal team doesn’t need leadership and consists of mostly self-sufficient members, but the de jure leader merely exists at that point to ensure some tyrant doesn’t come to power. Since this isn’t very time consuming, they are free to do other work haha.
Now and again, nature arranges for a catastrophe. An asteroid, too much oxygen, lignin building up, nature has cleaned up after and built on top of the rubble.
Over the last 20-odd years, we didn't let a real economic catastrophe happen. There are millions of people working the wrong job. Loads of people have a made a ton of money providing nothing useful at all. Without a periodic shakeup, the bullshit merchants take over the economy. People who talk a good game but are never held to account. Who is swimming naked? There is too much money to know.
Part of the reason is centralization. Unfortunately, we don't really have 200-odd governments. A lot of them think the same way about the issues that matter, and a very small group influence all the others.
It's a bit of a cliche to say that government is too complex, but I think it's worth considering that the problems that government is trying to solve are unique and incredibly difficult. I appreciate the call in this article to get to the real work of helping to solve these problems.
The M1 Money Supply was $3.964 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted). Of that, $1.705 trillion was currency and the rest of the amount was deposits.
The M2 Money Supply includes M1 along with savings accounts, money market accounts, money market funds, and time deposits under $100,000. It does not include IRA or Keogh retirement accounts. $9.769 trillion was in savings accounts; $1.003 trillion was in money markets; $591 billion was time deposits; and the rest was M1.
M2 was $15.327 trillion in November 2019 (seasonally adjusted).
By the end of 2021, the federal government had $28.43 Trillion dollars in federal debt.
To answer your question: “How do we judge that governments are not providing services at good value?”
I’d say not spending almost 2x the money supply would be a sign of better value.
One start is to download the budgets and spending bills of your country and others and see if you can balance the budget. The exercise of balancing the budget makes a good project for macroeconomics classes. I had to do it for my final macroeconomics project.
Really enjoyable article, and I love the way the author uses his networking experience to inform his understanding of the world.
The issue or possibility that the author misses, IMO, is that the lack or rework and general degradation, etc is BY DESIGN. The fail is coming and that is planned for.
I personally think that there are a parasitic elite, that harvest the energy and wealth from countries and situations, and have done so for centuries. We think in terms of months and years, but they think in terms of centuries. Eg Technocracy Inc was formed in the 1930s and even shared the same building as IBM.
The overarching idea here, is that Western society crashes somewhat, the lead is passed to China, and in reverse, we import their totalitarian infrastructure. We will be monitored everywhere, our governments will go, but (UN) technocrats will step in to micromanage our lives (water use, electricity use, travel, etc). The trick is to make us want that. And things will get so bad, that most of us will!
And that is the reason that we have ready excuses - such as never-ending viral or climate events, that somehow convince us to hand over authority in just the way that technocrats have always dreamed of, for example with bio-ids being required to do one's shopping or travel.
* Yeah, there's a feeling of malaise, but if you look at e.g. surveys of trust in government (Pew, OECD, etc.), it's a fairly slow decline over decades and the end point is that most people are still fairly okay with how government, education, media, the judiciary etc. are run in many democratic countries and if you look at overall happiness (Eurostat etc.) then that seems to be fairly stable or even going up a little bit.
* Most artists do get little reward for all the benefit they provide, but we can't have everyone be artists so there has to be some way to disincentivize people from becoming an artist, no?
* Big banks and big governments suck, fine, but compared to what standard or compared to what point in time?
* The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening. OK, that one's probably true.
* Software stacks keep getting more bloated, but in exchange programming has gotten a lot easier, which seems like a wonderful trade-off.
* Governments like the European Union are absurdly complex, but overall it seems to have been a net boon to the countries that have joined it: travel is easier, paying is easier, your rights as a consumer are better protected than ever, etc.
* App Stores are pretty great for most people, even though 30% is a bit absurd.
* The Bay Area is not the world.
There's probably a lot about modern society that needs solving, but the first step has to be to think really long and hard about precisely what does suck, why it sucks, whether it can be better.
Why not? The online attention economy is apparently worth trillions , why shouldn't creators be rewarded? Attracting the attention of other people is work even though it is all captured by BigTech Inc. We have automated so much of the workforce that it makes a lot of sense that being an 'artist' should be a job that more and more people will do.
This is a tangent, but I feel like I enjoyed things more when I didn't have practically unlimited entertainment. Video games before the digital era with Xbox Game Pass, PSNow / PSPlus, etc were limited to a few games that you bought and really invested in. Videos before streaming where you were limited to what was sitting in Blockbuster or in your physical collection. Music was limited to what the radio was playing (which you had no control over) or what you had in your tape/CD collection. Because physical media was something of an investment, it sort of led to a sort of 'automatic curation' that's much harder with having just about every game, movie, tv show, and album at your fingertips.
Maybe it's an age thing, but now I have 'back catalogs' for all of this stuff, and there's a constant feeling of 'missing out' if you choose one thing from your unlimited supply over another thing. It's exhausting.
I don't have half of these problems. I have run services for $6,000/year on bare metal servers that would have cost $240,000/year on AWS at the time.
Likely the author is unwilling to make another compromise, because they already weighed their options and arrived at these which are the least bad thing they could choose; or maybe they just don't even see there are other options.
Every website (the Internet) needs to be hosted. If not on a cloud provider, you are going to have to host it yourself, which is a ton of more work and more points of failure. For cloud providers, point of failure occurs if you don't pay them. When you are hosting yourself, there are tons of points of failure (electricity, maintenance, etc.)
No they're not. AWS is pretty much the most expensive, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more - especially for egress traffic.
> For cloud providers, point of failure occurs if you don't pay them.
"It's in the cloud" doesn't mean you don't have to think about reliability, redundancy, and backups. AWS, GCP etc all had outages.
All points of failure are exactly the same vs. buying bare-metal. In the case of "the cloud" they're just partly managed by other people.
But yes, as I said, there are choices with trade-offs. Overall I'm unsure what you're trying to tell me with your comment. Is your argument that not choosing the cloud isn't really an option? I have not chosen AWS for a decade and saved a seven figure sum in the process (just for my private projects - 500TB monthly egress alone already would be expensive).
There are plenty of hosting options out there that just provide you with bare metal hardware and take care of the lower level maintenance.
If you don't see and appreciate the huge progress made across the world in social life and quality, you have been living under the rock.
War is a great mallet which destroys most of the power structures and shuffles the cards a bit. But the price to pay is atrociously high. After the war everyone will swear "Never again!", but their children's children have no idea what that means, and have no problem going to war all over again.
So for the first time we must now work out our differences without war. This can't be a bad thing.
Its time to go back to the roots of computing. Reinvent what the digital age means. Imbue it with soul and values in an inalienable way. 100% human-centric. Augmenting human ability, augmenting human society. There is enormous value in that. Not manufactured Ponzi value. Real value. Improving our lot. Solving the real problems of sustainability, persistent inequality, debilitating ignorance and suffering.
If you have talent now is the time to change the world. You know its not utopic because you have seen the extreme leverage of the digital toolkit.
That is such a vague statement it is essentially meaningless. Better how? How is it not better? What do you mean by humanity? How is your life better? How is it worse?
IMO in the last 40 years it has become harder (more expensive) for those who have had it a bit better off to separate themselves both physically and culturally from those who are a lot worse off (regardless of why they are worse off).
All the while the cost and accessibility of erstwhile public goods that temper that desire for that separation, like safety and education, have skyrocketed.
That separation and the inequality behind it has doubtlessly been enabled by a heap of injustices. The effects of this are seen in situations spanning from police brutality to current refugee migration crises.
We haven't been able to as effectively outsource pain and chaos to others (whether in our own backyard or the other side of the planet) while shielding ourselves from the blowback like we once did.
Therefore people feel worse off, not because they are necessarily worse off, but because they fear that the nearing chaos will make them permanently worse off.
The richest <1% don't have to directly deal this problem, since they can easily still pay for that separation.
So yeah, sure, we have netflix, smart bulbs and food delivery. Can you sustain a family as easily as your grandparents ? Will you retire as early as them ? Will you acquire an house as easily and as early ? How meaningful is your job ?
The endgame of "length and comfort" is to live in some kind of coma pod like in The Matrix, you'd probably live to 150 years in absolute comfort
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
1) A ton of bluegrass sets grim, sad lyrics to bouncy major music - it's pretty much how the genre works
2) I'll Fly Away is a Christian song, so it's not exactly "looking forward to death" so much as "looking forward to heaven and communion with God". Granted, those two things are closely linked in the religion.
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 glasses.
And one more "how about testosterone levels in men?" These have been falling for the last 60 or 70 years. Men in the West will be impotent by 2040ish at current rates of decline.
You're being short sighted.
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 publicized).
Cost of higher education? Worse if you go to an expensive school. But there's never been a time when it's easier to educate yourself, for free, if you don't care about the piece of paper.
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.
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...
https://www.gwern.net/Improvements
I feel food is immeasurably better than in the 1990's when I grew up. I'd partially attribute that to faster and better communication -- i.e. if you take the Internet away from a chef or farmer, I think their universe of ideas and ingredients would be dramatically smaller.
Speakers you can get for just $500 have made a big jump since even 2015 (though this is a tiny niche; in general audio quality is worse than in the 1970's.)
Combat sports are also having a renaissance and many people attribute that to YouTube!
That said, I totally agree with this article, and with the premise. There is rising economic inequality, and regulation has a place in imposing values on the market. Markets where nobody trusts each other aren't efficient or useful.
I think the area where that really hits home and is made tangible is architecture. If you just let the market run wild with architecture, you're going to get really ugly boxy buildings that make everyone miserable. We live in a shared space, so you need cooperation to make good architecture. Unfortunately it does seem like that's been on the decline. Architecture is worse than it was in the past.
Related: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/wh...
I'd also agree that computing is worse than it was 20 years ago in many important ways. I wouldn't say it's worse overall, e.g. being able to handle video is a big improvement. Wireless is pretty good although there are many flaky incarnations of it. But I'd say both user interfaces and latency are worse, products are more user hostile, and the web is filled with ads and low quality information. Hardware is now proprietary software, so a Linux system is less open than it used to be.
We're not all in the same boat. If you want to change the system, you're going to have to fight the people invested in the status quo. Most people aren't interested in the "greater good," even though they may maintain this position publicly because it is considered antisocial to openly say "f** the plebs," but actions speak louder than words--by their fruits you shall know them. When we see things like rampant homeless and crushing debt, we know such things are being said in private.
It's time to put aside our idealism and don a cynical outlook. Our rose colored glasses are holding us back. We just need to make sure we don't become evil in the process.
I think the current vaccination discussions are a good example. It used to be that society would accept sacrifices for freedom. For example they would deem thousands of traffic accident deaths acceptable in exchange for mobility, or send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their death to fight for freedom.
Now many people seem to feel that every Covid death has to be avoided at all costs. Which is of course a valid opinion, but not a given truth, given that at other times, people were actually willing to pay the price of higher risk in exchange for freedom.
So neither group is necessarily wrong, in my opinion, they just thing different things are more important.
A good movie that illustrates it may be "I, Robot", when the robots tasked with protecting humans decide the best way to protect them is to lock them into their homes. Let's say we achieve that kind of technology, robots can take of everything, and humans are safest when locked away at home. Should we advocate locking everybody up?
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
There is a major contradiction in this line of reasoning that the author never addresses.
The only way to have successful regulation is to have a powerful regulator, a powerful governing organ. The government needs to be the most powerful "firm" in the market.
Otherwise, there will be a more powerful private firm or "trade association" (read: cartel) that is the de facto "shadow government" of one or more economic domains, that the de jure government cannot hold accountable. We see this a lot in America since the 70s, mainly expressed through regulatory capture.
Even if "governance" is "decentralized," there are still going to need to be people in the DAO, day to day, doing the work that no one wants to do, making decisions that no one wants to make.
It seems to me like a DAO is just a college group project but if you add crypto it solves everything?
Organizational behavior and its challenges don't go away because you've issued tokens.
Honest question, what the heck am I missing? It has to be something!
*DAO doesn't need to run on Ethereum blockchain, it can also be a sufficiently autonomous collection of ERP systems.
In particular I'm thinking about some of the procedures aboard nuclear submarines where automated systems were tried and eventually rolled back, because the automation would be fine 99.9% of the time but when it failed it would cause disaster at computer speeds instead of just at human speeds. I can definitely imagine a bug in a DAO being completely unacceptable in some domains even if it is more efficient than doing the same job with humans. (For example, in national voting)
Finally even for those cases where automation is desired and could be done by some autonomous entity, I'm not sure why you would specifically need a Distributed AO instead of just regular cronjobs on a server somewhere. Any real-world system is going to need regular updates anyway, so you end up centralizing trust in whoever can update the code for the (D)AO.
Very few people want a robot deciding how they spend their time, energy, and assets. Resource allocation will be the last unautomated job on the planet if we make it to post-scarcity. People want everything done for them except deciding what those things that need to be done are.
https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm
Their solutions may not and perhaps probably will not work because it's a hard problem.
The payoff for solving this problem is civilization without single points of failure. No more wheel of rising and falling empires that take all our progress and knowledge with them when they die. No more pretending to bow down to megalomaniacs and ideologues to achieve stability. No more vast centralized moral hazards that attract sociopaths like moths to a lamp.
I've taken to calling the zero-trust decentralization problem "computer science's fusion." It's perpetually N years away, but if we solve it the payoff is immense.
Edit: Proof of work sort of kind of solves it, but not really, and at tremendous cost. Nevertheless the fact that it gets close is maybe suggestive that the real solution is somewhere nearby.
Eliminating civilizational SPOFs would be a fairly large step.
It doesn't solve it, and it will never be close. If you ant just one reason, it's easy: enforcement. You smart contracts mean zilch if you can't enter a house some scammer just sold you.
EDIT: I am apparently too disconnected from the crypto crowd. Or depending on how you look at it, appropriately disconnected.
Advances in the ability to coordinate humans often leads to great advances in society and technology. Now where crypto is immensely useful, is that in the past a decentralized group of people would have still had to be tied to a specific nation for banking. Now with crypto, a group of people from all over the world can run a company that's fully internet native that relies on no single nation for it's banking needs. You may not see it, but to me that is a ridiculously powerful concept.
Our current neoliberal system allows for “freedom” as in freedom of the consumer, but in the most authoritarian, dehumanizing ways as possible. We have freedom as in which person to vote or what things to buy, but that freedom is frankly put, meaningless. The whole liberal framework of how we think about freedom has to be questioned and challenged, or else we are going to have more of those “freedoms” that rob ourselves more and more of actual human agency.
What do you envision as the alternative?
I really, really hate this argument. If it's true, why does the CIA feel the need to destabilize countries with centrally planned markets? Why has China been so successful despite what is widely believed to be a failed premise?
Central planning works as well as unplanned markets work: That is, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it mostly comes down to external factors.
> Why has China been so successful despite what is widely believed to be a failed premise?
They're successful as an economy, not as a society (obv, using my metrics.)
You 're going to have to give a definition of that. Subjective measures of success don't matter, that's why people have different morals. Maybe the west has produced the most "culturally dominant society" but it has also been boosted by a few centuries of economic dominance, while china has just come out of poverty. I'm not even going to ask why china is considered unsuccessful as a society since afaik the chinese neither commit suicide in droves nor are they running to exit as fast as possible.
I have first-hand, extended experience with a hard-core centrally planned economy. It most definitely doesn't come down to external factors. Everything I saw and experienced was self-inflicted. And things keep getting worse.
On a government level, every one is centrally planned. That's kind of the purpose of it. Democracies just happen to elect their centrally planned government.
The obvious issue is that centrally planning an economy to achieve our desired outcomes is very difficult--perhaps beyond our capabilities. Of course, an easy way of addressing this is to do what China has done and effectively concede that you can't centrally plan everything, but you can find an equilibrium where the necessary parts are controlled and the rest left to market forces, with a system of regulations to address distortions created where the two meet.
Of course, you might also say that it's not exactly trivial to create a market-oriented system that achieves the outcomes we want. I think history demonstrates that societies have had greater success with market-oriented economies than with centrally planned ones. But you may be right that we shouldn't be so quick to completely rule out the possibility of a centrally planned economy based on a small number of examples, each of which was actively sabotaged by other major powers--much less should we rule out the viability of hybrid systems. (In fact, basically all modern economies are some sort of hybrid between planned and unplanned systems, including that of the U.S.)
Computers were hard to run when installing an OS meant you burnt CDs.
And medium tier "webhosting" meant an expensive control panel with no root access.
I'm amazed how easy things are today, you can setup and tear down operating systems in a minutes, and there's lots of medium tier server competition and a few big players for bigger projects.
Society, once you look at inputs and outputs, is predicated on "the masses" abdicating intellectual responsibility to leaders who leverage them for their own benefit. This has happened since before recorded history. It is codified into our mainstream spiritual ethos. We glorify it every day by simply perpetuating the system we exist in.
If history is any evidence, things will always continue to get worse in this part of the cycle, then we will experience a collapse and rebuilding period.
Also, charter schools are the education equivalent of “greenfield” solutionism alluded to in earlier comments.
That is very well put. I'm stealing it.
It seems like the economy is this massive system with virtually infinite moving parts that no one truly understands and the people at the fed just continue to poke it with a stick.
I've invested a lot of time into thinking and learning about these sorts of "big" or societal/infrastructural/cultural problems, and figuring out what are the very top problems (AFAICT), and prioritized them down to say the 2 to 5 biggest and most growing threats that need to be eliminated, mitigated or fixed. I've begun working in my free time on what I see is the 2nd most urgent and apocalyptic threat:
democracy vulnerabilities -- the risk of free peaceful democracies (like the US, most especially, and despite our obvious impurity in that regard) devolving and collapsing, and trying to mitigate the attacks and corrosive effects from the bad actors pushing for it (which in the case of the US includes some treasonous and misguided domestic folks but also certain foreign governments as well.)
I'd love to make a difference too on what I see as the #1 threat/risk (greenhouse gas emissions, climate shifts, ecosystem collapse, pollution of our land/water/bodies) but... its harder for me to see ways where my skill mix and resources can help there. compared to the #2 one (democracy collapse.)
they are inter-linked, because #1 can increase forces pushing #2 to happen. and if #2 happens its more likely to make #1 worse than better.
but yeah I'm done with the purely worrying, thinking & talking stage. I'm acting. With as much urgency as I can afford to invest, time-wise.
Although I guess you could argue that the text itself is less important than the impression it made on people who read it...
So quoting that seemed to be about making the point that in the absence of formal, structured regulation decided through a well-defined process what happen is that you get elite insiders exerting control for their own reasons which may or may not benefit the general group, and without any oversight at all.
Both articles were in favour of formal structures with accountability and open processes that allow for changes when required, and against unstructured groups that invariably wind up controlled by unelected elites.
Interestingly a friend and I had been discussing political threads and one thing that is interesting is how, in the US, a 2 party system has lead to some really awkward tribalism and many of us think we disagree on everything. But in reality there are some big group wins to be had if the "middle" block of people could somehow band together and agree to just do the intersection of their beliefs.
some examples were citizens united, the big money moving elections, lobbyists, government quid pro quo system is blatant corruption. and I believe a vast majority of the middle agrees corruption is bad.
I just learned about https://www.forwardparty.com/team and it seems like an attempt to address such a thing, would love to hear from anyone who knows much more.
* 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 more art then ever before.
* We have computers... HOW are you complaining about one super amazing piece of technology that didn't exist 5 years ago compared to another piece of incredible technology. Seriously? Be more amazed with how far this stuff has come in such a short time.
And like... We're not even in world war 3. Life is pretty good on planet earth, idk where you've been but come on back down.
Maybe you could point out some inventors/innovators who were driven by complaints?
Having an amazing novel idea and then convincing people not having it in their life is a problem is way harder
If nothing is rooted in people's / society's / community's / government's wants and needs, then what incentives are left for progress?
> Most innovators are not driven by the constant complaints of other people.
I think you may be conflating inventors with innovators. Inventors, like innovators, are a product of their time. The leaps and bounds come from invention. And invention follows necessity, as an old saying goes.
Innovators/Inventors are driven by their needs, not by other people's complaints. Unless they need to stop their spouses complaining or something like that.
A need is the solution to a complaint, no?
Not sure if people complained about horses a lot before the automobile came along.
Jeff Bezos on learned helplessness, innovation, making decisions with data and despite data (2005): https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WhnDvvNS8zQ
A guy writes a blog post on important issues to focus on and what this guy comes up with is: "shut up, be happy".
But the article started and ended with completely unsupported claims about how the world is going to hell and "we all feel it".
The commenter you're responding to merely pointed out that, no we don't all feel it, most people actually have things very good these days. And that doesn't mean there aren't still major issues that we should be working hard on.
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 optimistic outlook, because at the end of the day that malaise is a result of one's wealth and power relative to others who occupy the same time and space.
You're assuming this axiomatically, at first blush this is simply nepotism which is typically a term w/ negative connotations.
Societies, over time, have gone up and gone down. So sometimes an optimistic perspective has proven right and sometimes a pessimistic perspective has proven right.
The article has a decent argument why a pessimistic approach is plausible. Your examples don't anything particular specific and so they don't really give a case that an optimistic perspective is appropriate. I mean, optimism might appropriate but "change your view to see the good" is just kind of manipulative (something very common now, a reason for pessimism, sadly).
We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.
Attacking "the establishment" is a common tactic of those who want to replace the existing somewhat democratic and somewhat accountable elite with their own unelected and unaccountable elite.
Love to see this in here. Wondering what the author's personal definition of artist is though.
What we need instead is the follow the principles of subsidiarity [1].
Local level markets, DeFi solutions, governance structures, communication platforms, etc that are capable of enforcing their own rules, but that are interoperable to some degree with other systems.
The Matrix project I think is a great example of this. Unfortunately, it looks like they might be making some bad decisions around global moderation, but in general the idea that local servers can exist with their own rules, but still send and receive content from other servers is great.
We don't want to end up in a future where Big Tech can automatically censor any video you upload, any message you send, or any call you make. This doesn't mean we need the Wild West, it means that you should be participating in a community where you all agree on the rules. And if you want to participate in somebody else's community, you need to follow their rules. This idea that some global all powerful entity can just banhammer somebody for something they said in a community that everybody in the community thought was fine, is totally unacceptable.
https://juststart.do/just-start and https://sambutler.us/localfutures
What's a way to contact you @Thorentis? Likewise, you'll have my contacts from these urls — would love to connect and introduce!
As human beings, we have an underlying need for belonging and connection. All of us are by default programmed to be connected to our own interests. For many that circle broadens to their friends and family and for a few that broadens to their immediate community. Fewer still feel connected to their country and only some of us will feel connected to the world.
This applies to countries also, not just individuals. If your country can't quite keep up with cutting edge manufacturing and services, you lose in the global trade competition and can't afford to give your citizens up-to-date college education, exacerbating the slide.
Which layers or pieces of the system we choose to anonymize and make fungible are an important architectural choice, and DeFi/crypto simply expand the scope of available choices in that regard. Prior to their existence, it was not possible to locate structurelessness in the layer that crypto does. Whether locating it there proves to be useful remains to be seen, but it is clearly an expansion of our capabilities, in the same way that Paxos and Raft are for databases. Yes, they still have structure, no, that does not make them useless.
XMPP fits this definition.
Bulk activity occurs via decentralized federation.
Regulation occurs via yearly updated XMPP compliance suites. https://xmpp.org/about/compliance-suites/
1. system control plane with security vulnerabilities, where the first attacker can lock out subsequent attackers?
2. corporate board without poison-pill, special class of shares with extra powers, or other defenses against hostile takeover?
3. corporate or IP acquisition due to debt, market failure or poor fiscal governance?
* First Wall Street used modern tech in 1980s and 1990s to make better markets
* BUT then corruption happened when Wall Street maxed out making money from tech in efficient markets. They then shifted to taking money via a rigged economy.
* Wall Street rigged economy is shown by high frequency firms front running trades (at least claimed and maybe proven in Flash Boys book)
* 2008 Mortgage Crisis shows Wall Street rigging the economy
* $3.5 billion per year flowing through lobbyists successfully causes congress to sell out.
* The economy has been rigged for the last 30+ years
* At least bitcoin and crypto are enabling those abused by a rigged economy to create competitors
* Creating a "bank account" has been blocked from entrepreneurs for 40 years. Crypto at least enables businesses to be created with crypto-bank-account equivalents, transfers, and financial transactions.
The establishment is the root of the problem. Entrepreneurship by good ethical people competing and winning must be a strategic part of the solution.
This seems to be the case with any control system, whether centralized or not. The difference is in the failure mode. Decentralized systems start failing earlier, but do so in a more gradual way. Centralized ones fail later, but much more abruptly and all-at-once. So it's really the question of which one you prefer.
Personally, I still believe that decentralized approach is preferable in that regard. Centralization gives the illusion that everything is a-okay (because things work!) even when the crash is already inevitable and in motion; then when it actually happens, it's a massive disruption all around. OTOH when bits and pieces start falling off in a decentralized system, it's readily obvious that a fix is needed, but there's still plenty of time to design and implement it; and, furthermore, since most of the system is still intact, it doesn't need to be recovered.
The other advantage of decentralization is that it's more politically viable to fix things in a more localized way. Fixes to centralized systems necessarily have to be centralized themselves, but that also means that you need a lot of buy-in from everybody affected to enact them. In areas where consensus is not established, this often means that problems in centralized systems don't get fixed at all, either because many people don't believe the issue at hand to be problematic, or because they can't agree on what the root cause it. In a decentralized system, local consensus is all that is needed to fix (or at least mitigate) an issue locally.
Some argue that this latter part is actually a deficiency because people end up fixing their own localized problems, instead of coming up with a single centralized solution that fixes it once and for all. But this assumes that such a single centralized solution always (or at least usually) exists and its implementation is viable - which is not at all obvious to me.
by whom?
And defining a concept in a way that means it can't exist makes no sense, so that criterion can't reasonably define this concept. (Was that a reductio ad absurdum?)
Get your UUCP maps up to date -- you'll be communicating through USB sticks transported by pirates before you know it.
Stop repeating this propaganda and start questioning your assumptions. You are saying that we need some kind of overall hierarchy and regulamentation. This is what the world is trying to do since decades with international organizations. Like the UNO, who is asking since almost thirty years to stop the embargo against Cuba.
Start complying with the international rules and the world's democratic institutions, then come back giving us a lesson about what we need to do.
It is a market economy with a very strong central regulator.
Writing software has never been more accessible.
But consumer standards have risen. The geeks are out there and will happily work from your source code if that’s all you want to share.
The old life is still available. It’s just that back then that was all that was available.
It turns out there are a whole bunch of superstar product designers out there. And now that the software nuts and bolts are easy, those guys are beating (in the market) all the guys whose skill was nuts and bolts.
That’s natural. It what comes from accessibility. That is good because the whole world is lifted by the fact that some fool can build a business on Zapier and Airtable.
It goes awry when you add mass media, mass culture and psychology into the mix. They encourage all kinds of irrational group behaviour which skews the markets in unpredictable ways.
It's been that way forever with some rare exceptions.
>"You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers"
Total baloney. Many do run Internet service without cloud providers, including yours truly. It is true that for some reason many do fall for that cloudy propaganda. Their loss. Not ours. Keep digging your own graves. Or if they big enough they might not care as they pass those costs down to end customer.
I feel this one. Having worked in security in the past, even I often feel overwhelmed keeping my own security going. I use the best defense in depth that I can, but I know that's not enough.
This is the key point. So many debates about "more X" vs. "less X" when what we mostly need is "better X". Anti-Covid measures; almost any sort of "security"; government programs of all sorts. And, yes, very much regulation.
Scott Alexander has had some nice riffs on this theme, though I can't come up with a specific link at the moment.
Incredible how people in developed countries have no idea or appreciation for the freedoms and opportunities they’re surrounded by.
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.
I really like this. The same goes for trust - we need to be able to trust more, not build a trustless system. Be able to trust medical advice from doctors, trust that the auto-repair shop will be honest, and trust that the plane we fly on is built to the correct safety standard.
* 20% - Arguments that we've deregulated too much, and need more economic regulation.
* 80% - The "old man yells at cloud" meme. Getting a zillion upvotes, simply because it happens to tap a lot of HN's particular old man buttons.
I understand why this is at the top of the page. It's just a little disappointing.
Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.
Sad but true.
> People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
Yes, yes, this 1000x yes. Every time someone on HN or Reddit blithely assumes deregulation will solve everything, I want to forcibly point out that the most important word in "free market", is not "free", it's "market". A free market operates within a structure that must be created and maintained not using the properties of the market itself. If you don't have anything with more power than the market maintaining the market, before long you don't have a market. And once you don't have a market, you don't have "free" either.
There's a reason professional sports matches have referees on the field. You need a structure more powerful than the game to preserve the game.
There are some important distributed systems he overlooks: the ones found in nature. Gas Laws, photosynthesis, and radiant energy are pretty great, it means I always have air to breathe. No one is regulating that, and to do so would only make things much worse.
The challenge is that humans suck at designing distributed systems. Nature is exquisitely designed (or, if you want, evolved). The solution then, is to root ourselves in nature rather than desperately, constantly trying to replace it. Bitcoin is the only new tech I can think of that does this (not sure if that's the 'most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system' the author refers to). Everything else: farming subsidies, AI, Keynesian economics, plastic surgery, vaccines, desk jobs — are all hopelessly out of touch with reality.
That's not to say technology is Bad, but it needs to be real, not manufactured.
Well, that's some human-centric view.
Is there really "public" transportation only available to FAANG employees ?!
The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.
I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.
[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.
What about we spend more time to study the problems, to study us.
All hierarchies are structures but not all structures are hierarchies. I'm not sure Jo Freeman argues for explicit hierarchy.
CTRL-F the article.
Structure - 92 Hierarchy - 0
> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
Just move to Europe lmao
What's this about?
I get it, I worked at a company like that. It started out as connecting everyone to the internet for free, and turned into connecting the wealthy so they could be more efficient. The wealthy tend to pay more than the poor.
Altruism is unfortunately a poor motivator in capitalism.
Perhaps we need to write out the tenets of western society to determine if the system trends in the right direction and determine which amendments need to be created in order for it to bend towards good.
Switching from a capitalist society to an altruistic society.
This is such an important statement. The hub of this article really.
People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
There's no universally or commonly accepted view of what is "right".
is there a reference for this astounding number?
> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."
It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way.
Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).
Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.
There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.
We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.
This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.
It has often been remarked that socialism and Christianity are similar. They both preach the gospel of love. The difference is that the Christians, whatever their faults, understand that good and evil is a question of something inside every person. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to have this legalistic idea that we can regulate away sin. It doesn't work. Regulatory bodies, like all institutions, are composed of people and so they cannot transcend the frailities of those people.
The defi people have this idea that we can regulate with clever algorithms. I don't think they will be any more successful than the socialists. If they succeed, they'll create a system without humans at its center which we will find even more intolerable than capitalism or socialism. If you want a preview of this system, consider the phenomenon of people begging on twitter for Google to unban their account.
When we complain about greed, we're talking about one of the oldest questions: how to make people good. We should pay much more attention to what religions have to say on that question than the world socialists or technocrats imagine they can create with the right regulations.
I can only guess that your experiences with both Christianity and socialism are starkly different than what I have experienced.
I'll give one example: patents. Right now there is a discussion about waiving pharma patents in order to help with vaccine production in other countries. This is framed as a government action against businesses, when in reality it is an act of deregulation of markets. Patents are an incredibly heavy handed government regulation that uses tax dollars to protect state-sponsored monopolies of "ideas" and "inventions", creating a huge drain in terms of legal resources (courts, judges, juries if necessary), have obvious regulatory capture dynamics as that is in fact the stated goal of a patent, as well as creating entire sectors of the "private" economy that exist solely to perpetuate this system (patent lawyers, patent trolls, etc.), not to mention create networks of "safe havens" of theoretically competitor companies that are actually "allied" in their accumulation of mutually-assured-destruction patent portfolios that make it almost impossible for new startups to enter a field since they hold no such cards.
It's unfortunate that the "deregulation" discussion has been largely co-opted by these corporations as opposed to focusing on these IMO much more pertinent issues that could actually have a dramatically more positive effect.
Many of those philosophies espouse hopelessness and despair. Making your enemy despair is a transparent and brazenly obvious tactic, and fundamental psyops. You are giving away your power, which is considerable, for nothing. The nutcases are vastly outnumbered. Why are people so stupid as to not see that, and to buy into it? Are you kidding me?
Another thing I've long believed is the disparagement of humanities and 'post-modernism' is disarmament. These are the tools that will win, not more algorithms. The bad guys embrace and use those tools, disparaging them all the while, and most people I know again implicitly accept that and unilaterally disarm themselves. Brilliant!
Why does everyone do this stupid sh-t? IMHO: The pressure of social norms. Look at the widespread use of contempt, for example - a great tool for enforcing social norms, and but which serves no rational, productive purpose. Open-mindedness, humility, respect, and reason are the productive tools - but I can sense the contempt coming for mentioning those things
Some examples:
> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.
We've made cowardice a social norm. If you think the situation is serious, 'giving up' because you are tired or due to social pressure is very weak. People regularly have risked their freedom, lives, fortunes, and honor (reputation) for to give us what we have, generation after generation. We are the stewards and leaders now; what will we give the next generation, or will we just be parasites and throw it all away. Nothing we face is worse than prior generations - if you think it's tough now, imagine advocating for women's rights, for example, facing millennia of history and widespread reactionary outrage; success didn't look assured at all.
> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.
Democracy is the tool, the place everyone gets a vote regardless of their wealth, status, power. By despairing, you again abandon the field of battle to the other side, which certainly has not despaired. It's incredible to watch people surrender unilaterally, for no reason, other than telling each other to despair.
> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
democracy: one person, one vote (egalitarianism)
capitalism: money is power, and capital is used to accumulate more of it (competitively and socially)
if you base your society on those two contradictory ideas, it seems inevitable a competitive system that encourages commodification and selling anything and everything to make increasing profits will cause all sorts of havoc on society and warp institutions to support those who "have" vs "have not"
> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation.
I'm not sure that there is a solution. Part of the overall system of..."all this," for lack of a better term...is the fact that we are always dissatisfied by the results of consistently losing the Prisoner's Dilemma and thus are always looking to solve it; our always-looking-to-solve-it more or less guarantees the fact that we will continue to lose it. Around and around it goes.
I ruminate on this stuff probably more than I should, and the only semblance of a conclusion that I can come to is that we only choose the objectively right choice within the Prisoner's Dilemma when we are given a reason to overcome our selfishness, i.e. during times when not working together presents a clear and present existential danger. Thus, war, breakdown of complex systems, death, etc, are all inherent parts of choosing that which keeps us going for just a little bit longer. Just as someone suffering from addiction might only finally turn the nosedive up once they've hit rock bottom, the New Deal was only possible in the midst of a world war and the Great Depression. Intelligent folks can see these problems coming from a mile away, as this essay makes clear, but actually mustering humanity together to walk in step to a degree in which we can actually address these problems either requires authoritarianism or a massive imminent danger to rally against.
Some are born during the spring, when we're coming out of one of those bad periods and have mustered the will to replace a part of society's roots with something better so that it might continue a little longer; almost immediately, those who benefit from it take advantage of it and begin dismantling it, thinking they can have their cake and eat it too -- retain the work society has done together, that rare thing, and use it to help boost themselves to a height far greater than might be achieved by simply contributing to the continued existence of society as a whole. Everyone being in its for themselves results in a breakdown, leading inexorably to some sort of collapse, big or small. Those born in winter do the hard work of setting things the pins back up so that their children can knock them down again. Around and around it goes.
The wild thing is that, as the interlocking mechanisms of society get more complex and consist more and more of complex interlocking systems themselves, and as globalization continues, those cataclysms shrink in scale and increase in number. 90 years ago it was a world war; today it's millions of little fires that need putting out, technical debt piling up, the odd sense of alienation brought upon by society looking at itself. The rock bottoms multiply, from one a generation, to one a minute somewhere in the world. Just juggling that and seeing how that all interacts becomes its own crisis of entropy.
I suppose I'm rambling now -- this kind of ruminating has a way of transforming from terse description into navel-gazing poetry. Around and around it goes.
the part time parliament https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (lamport 98)
this part feels real
integrating with things is a tax in a lot of ways
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
His conclusion is that the only thing that could ultimately defeat the god Moloch (basically a personification of the problems described in the OP) is if we install a different god Elua (basically the personification of a human-friendly machine intelligence) to do the job. And if that sounds like hubris, the notion that we could overcome these problems ourselves is an even bigger form of hubris.
The article's thesis is so obvious that it's amazing it needs to be argued in this particular way.
Two thoughts here:
1) It's often problematic when people take absolutist views on things, i.e. "government regulation is ALWAYS bad." The optimal amount is never zero.
2) After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.
The linked essay explicitly makes the point that in the absence of formalised structures, power will accrue into an implicit elite from either pre-existing social networks or the formation of in-groups of those who can network and who tick the boxes of qualities the group views as good. Libertarians want to remove the formal structure of government in favour of a new unelected and unaccountable elite arising from whichever group they feel part of. At least the ones that aren't just dupes do.
100 years ago:
- They would sometimes shoot strikers - Strikers and owners faced off in literal violent battle - There was no socialized healthcare, fire or emergency services - College was for the ultra elite, even by 1960 only 7% were going to Uni. - A lot of workers just died. Colorado River was dammed at the cost of dozens of lives to 'Keep It On Schedule' - Blacks used the back entrance, and their grandparents were literally slaves - 'Art' was something people did in their spare time, and there were very, very few opportunities for true artists. - People didn't travel for vacations etc. that was for the rich only. - The legal system was much more classed than even it is today. - 'The Rich' 100% controlled the news. It's why they owned papers.
The material standard of living for regular people has increased immensely for everyone, to the point that people now live in general relative abundance and safety which would have only been the privy of the 0.1% before.
I also don't buy at all the notion that 'decentralization' is in any way some kind of magical advantage for the commons.
We have Health Officers and International Orgs like the WHO and academic institutions in order to do things, like coordinate and understand the impact of things like COVID.
Note that in most of those systems, there is some degree of 'Centralization' but also 'Decentralization' -> Universities may have some authority, but there are many of them.
For information for example, 'full decentralization' means the absolute most ridiculous concepts becoming the most popular (i.e. QAnon) and semi-fabricated ideas about all sorts of things. Especially those that target 'out groups'.
There is no substitute for thoughtful, conscientious and legitimate leadership across all elements of society.
Although there's probably some room for decentralization in some areas, maybe currency, as long as currency is managed within some reasonable range by the Central Banks, and you don't hold a lot of cash (cash was not meant to be a store of value), then even then, the Central Bank is not that-that bad.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5002/economics/pros-and-c...
Plus you can carry the phone anywhere, e.g., somewhere no internet access, but you need internet access to reach a timeshared cloud instance.
Have been experimenting with running servers on "phones" personally and think we need computers in this form factor that are not "phones".
"One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance."
Same. Can carry Macbook anywhere.
"Computers are so hard to run now, that we are supposed to give up and pay a subscription to someone - well, actually to every software microvendor - to do it for us."
All under the guise of "making things easier". Anything is easier if you do not have to do it yourself. This does not mean the thing itself is becoming easier to do. IMO, microvendors are, intentionally or not, effectively building "complexity moats". When DIY becomes exceedingly more difficult, then we know that no one is "making things easier". They might be deliberately doing the opposite. If the thing isn't any easier for the microvendor, then we are just transferring the burden to someone else, not making the thing easier.
"We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous.""
There is usuallly an HN comment along the lines of "I am thankful that Apple screens apps for me" as if it is some kind of service. However the "service" is not solving problem of "dangerous apps". Someone still has to look at the program and ask, "What is this app doing". Of course, many users do not need to be paying for this "service" because they can select "safe apps" just as well as Apple can. But it isn't optional. Pay up.
"IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware."
Maybe this is, to some small extent, the result of trying to delegate 100% of our responsibilities when using a computer. "Let someone else take care of it."
Not to say I enjoy having to know how to do everything in order to compile and install an OS, a server, and configure it, but I know if I don't then there are consequences.
No problem with running software on a computer in "the cloud" so long as I own the computer. There are consquences if I don't.
Make the choices the marketers want us to make, enjoy the "convenience" (and the expense), but accept the consequences. Take personal responsibility.
When no one knows how to do anything for themselves, then the problem of "gatekeeping" can only become worse.
Let me say it again: Compared to buying servers from Dell (or whoever) and driving them down to the local COLO and plugging them in yourself, the cloud:
- Costs more (between 5x and 20x more over the course of a 4 year depreciation for hardware).
- Is more work in the end, by a large factor (you are going to do a ton of stuff you don't need and are never going to use with the cloud. When something goes wrong you are going to spend days or months trying to fix it. Performance is so bad that you have to build very complex solutions to problems that it is very easy to just throw hardware at, like having a db server with millions of IOps, which is extremely easy if you rack hardware and basically unreasonable due to cost and hard limits in the cloud (Well over $10K/month for Postgres at 80,000 iops, which is the most you can provision).
- It's more work up front, even if you have no idea how to do anything to start with. For your deployments to be secure you have to know what you are doing either way, in AWS you just have less choices of how to set things up. Most things in AWS are at least as hard or harder than doing them yourself, and you can't fix problems you run into. Their tier 1 and tier 2 support are completely useless and just do keyword matching against their scripts.
- It costs WAY more. You pay for more than the cost to buy much better hardware and the cost to colo that hardware every 4 months. Yes that is right, if you go buy a pile of servers from dell and rack them in a colo, or buy the same capacity from EC2, the EC2 capacity you get will be far lower. Far far far lower. And you can't customize it or redeploy it for other uses as it gets older.
- When things break, you can't fix them. You just have to live with it or stop caring. IO to disk stalls randomly leaving processes in uninterruptible IO wait status for 100ms? Get fucked, they not only won't admit it's a problem, they will also hide this fact from you in all their cloudwatch metrics, and deny it is happening. Maybe it's a noisy neighbor, maybe it's their terrible networking stack, who knows, you'll never figure it out and you probably can't fix it even if you do. I have weird failure scenarios in AWS all the time that I have never seen or even contemplated as reasonable to consider on my own hardware.
- Cloud deployments are stupid. K8 is an awful system built by children who don't what is important. I don't even directly deal with K8 as my actual job, but I spend more time worrying about K8 to get code shipped today than I ever spent maintaining deployment scripts when I had to own deployments end-to-end.
You can tune out here.
The hubris required to decide that you know better than others how they should live their lives, and your ends justify the means, always astounds me. Treating people as components in a system, to be regulated and managed, is in opposition to treating them as beings with agency, entitled to choose how and when to engage with others.
Don't pull any punches, tell us how you really feel...
Ah, I guess the anarcho/libertarian crowd is stepping back from the abyss. But how is that going to make your EC2 SSD go faster? Cheapen your egress fees? Make you write software that actually has less exploits? Pay artists better?
As with many ideas here, how about a concrete suggestion? Here’s mine: software security education for all developers. 1 year of it. Mandatory. Financial penalties for developers and their employers.
You don’t get to call yourself a professional and punt on responsibilities. We don’t let doctors or lawyers do it, why should we let coders?
Either you offer it completely free to anyone in the entire world, or this is just another barrier to prevent access to the developer "elite".
And btw, often it's not the developer that cuts on security features, but an executive that wants to get to market faster. How about we give compulsory security training to every manager/executive/ceo/etc AND we hold them legally responsible when damages are caused by their eagerness to cut on costs?
> Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy.
> The most reasonable daycare and public transit in the Bay Area is available only with your Big Tech Employee ID card.
Seriously? These problems are not remotely in the same ballpark.
I don't even know what is the point of this article. A handwavey call for better regulation of "Western society, economics, capitalism, finance, government, the tech sector, the cloud". Oh, and free daycare too. Gee thanks doc, I'll get right on it.
I feel as if the author seems to somewhat misunderstand the relationship between those who have less and those who have more. There's a fundamental lack of trust (which really erupted in 2008) that kicked off this whole crypto/web3 thing.
We tried the "trusting people" route and it didn't work. The incentives are just too misaligned for "trust" to ever work (in my opinion). So, techies basically said "Fu$k it, I'll build my own system to do what you (those who have more) _should_ be doing".
This articles seems to say that we don't need all these complex solutions to problems that can fundamentally be solved by just...being better people? But that has never, and will never happen. We all wish we lived in a perfect world where everyone does the right thing - but that is just not the reality we live in. So these "decentralized/distributed systems" (e.g., Bitcoin) are our way of removing the human component from the equation.
o' lord, please bless us and protect us from thy holy hells of capitalist economic centralization. please let there be upon us deliverance for all, from this century of hellfire and brimstone, consolidation of silicon and machine code... deliver us with the great gifts of modern encryption for mesh networking with centralized administration, all for a very reasonable monthly price. praise be thy software as a service, so thou may centralize thy administration, simplify thy budgeting and leave thy key rotation to thy pros so thou may fight thy wars for not only a good, but for the ultimate good, against thy centralizing powers of capital that seek not only to enslave us, but divide us for eternity as every man, woman and child pays thy holy rent on thy proprietary servers, enslaved to a permanent life of indignity and servitude to those who own not only thy physical real estate, but thy ethereal real estate in thy metaverse as well..
to whom do we owe for this great beacon of light which shall deliver us all?
the only true antidote to the ills of today's modern capitalist society where technology has supercharged capitalist centralization past the point of no return is obviously the application of platonic ideals to the practice of ip networking for the purposes of optimizing hybrid cloud connectivity for critical business operation environments.
now.. imagine if plato were the senior cloud engineer charged with migrating the walmart.com of ancient greece to the cloud from truly legacy on premises datacenters. how might he complete said migration with zero downtime?
well. one option would be to configure a virtual private network that spans both the legacy datacenter and the vpcs in the new environment and then slowly move services one by one, but then that means that any legacy security issues will be carried directly into the new environment. plato would never have that!
how about encrypted mesh networking? well, that's actually quite wonderful, but that sounds a little too much like messy and complicated democracy for our friend plato. all those machines with their own configurations, the demos of the datacenter, running around talking to each other willy-nilly... plato's skin would crawl at the thought of that! he knows that at first it's all fun and games, but then the next thing you know, one of those machines with a slight orange hue and a bunch of real estate wealth would start taking political potshots and broadcasting them to everybody... that machine would then be able to leverage widespread discontent with the state of the environment to ascend to power only to then nearly bring the entire system down in a giant ball of flames. plato knows better than that!
no, plato would make the smart choice. plato would choose to consolidate management to a centralized city on a hill inhabited by saas philosopher kings. the kind and benevolent inhabitants of said citadel would be tasked with managing his mesh network, carefully controlling which tunnels are permitted and which tunnels are disallowed, periodically rotating keys on a meticulous and well-planned schedule making use of automation that minimizes downtime and administration headaches.
plato also would ask himself about vendor lock-in, and fairness in pricing. plato would not accept solutions that are tied to proprietary service providers or non-open codebases. plato would demand open source underpinnings and fair dealings.
so. when you're tasked with redesigning modern networking environments that span both on-premises datacenters and cloud environments, and you want to stay true to making good choices which support your general dissatisfaction with the post-optimistic technology fueled hyperdrive self-cannibalization of capitalism, remember to ask yourself...
how would plato maximize uptime, minimize costs and simplify management of his secure hybrid network with no long term commitments or fears of vendor lock-in?
I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.
And this problem runs very, very deep. A significant contingent -- significant enough to swing elections -- of one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation on earth would prefer to literally deny the laws of physics than admit that anything said by a "liberal" might actually be true. They would prefer to literally have children shot in school on a regular basis than "give up their guns". Of course, they wouldn't put it that way, but that is the trade-off in point of actual fact.
In an atmosphere like that it is not possible to produce "properly designed regulation." In today's political environment, the instant you even utter that phrase, you lose.
---
[1] And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.
In other words, properly designed regulation might not be a deep and profoundly insightful solution, but it might seem that way at first glance because our political discourse is so screwed up these days.
The best regulations come as a balance of the competing interests. But that requires the different interests recognize each other as legitimate, or at least as needing to be met halfway as a practical matter. It can't be done in a scorched-earth atmosphere - all that can come out of that is regulation that is differently bad.
That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow the supporting statements, though I agree with your overall sentiment.
The regulations constrain the system in such a way to produce two huge opposing parties, and encourage corruption of their members.
Regulations like the voting system(s) in use, the regulations on who can donate how much to whom, or how corruption and other rule breaking by politicians is investigated and punished (or not punished, as the case may be).
And I'm not just talking about the US here - although US politics is a giant dumpster fire in this regard.
"better designed regulation" is all that is needed in some cases, when it is possible at all. I also know of plenty of places where the only option people have, if at all, is to vote with their feet.
Some people can throw money and time at changing the system from within, and that's okay. But for those many cases where it is futile, if I had a bag of money of a pertinent size and wanted to throw it at philanthropy, I would think of ways for people who want to vote with their feet to be able to do so systematically.
Yes some people view abortion as a right, others view it as murder. The process shouldn't be to gain enough power to force everyone to follow what you want. It should be to establish rules we can all live by and then live and let live. Mississippi wants strong restrictions after 15 weeks. Let them. New York wants on demand until birth. Let them.
Honestly, if I know your opinion on abortion I shouldn't be able to guess your opinion on taxes. It would be good to allow more diversity in options and long term we can see which ones work.
You can make really good arguments from our established principles for and against most controversial issues. There is a clear method to add rights to the Constitution. I would say that happened for segregation and it took awhile to be enacted. If someone wants to change something for abortion or gun control let's amend the founding document otherwise let people live within the rules we have set.
The process isn’t about forcing everyone to follow what you want. It’s to force everyone to permit everyone else the fundamental rights protected by the Constituiton. We know for a fact that when you let people organize into autonomous groups based on their own preferences, some will tend to organize into a group that is at stark odds with the idea and ideals of America. We’ve seen it before with disastrous consequences.
Then you started on a partisan diatribe about how the other side of politics is wrong (and stupid).
What I think you've failed to realize, is that the other view is necessary. A single party state is totalitarian by definition if not by fact. There must be other views, and there must be a struggle for dominance among ideas. The struggle for dominance is natural, and healthy, and we should embrace it, even though it might sometimes be painful, it's the only way to grow personally and as a society.
Yes. In fact, so necessary that fake opposition becomes necessary to legitimize totalitarian policy, if organic opposition has been silenced or removed.
And it's not even on-topic. This is an off-topic tangent (there's no particular connection between the specific issues mentioned and the article - they were picked because they're partisan issues that the author wants to bring up, not because of any relevance) that looks like an attempt to start a political flamewar, and I don't believe that it belongs on HN.
It's an illustration of how we as a society cannot agree on what a good outcome looks like. If we can't agree on that, then there is no hope of agreeing on what "better designed regulation" looks like.
Speaking specifically to pro choice vs pro life both of the viewpoints have merit, but because people in the culture war are so entrenched in their “side” this can no longer be admitted. Back in reality though everyone agrees there is a time past which the child has a right to exist that trumps the mother’s right to choose, even if for some that is at 8 months of pregnancy and for others it is at conception, and everyone agrees that it is wrong to force a woman to carry a child she does not want. So, in a sense, everyone is both pro choice and pro life. All we’re talking about is at what point in the pregnancy one gets priority over the other. This can be negotiated like anything else, and the usual principles of negotiation apply. But, because of the culture war, people have stopped negotiating and are trying to get the rules (supreme court) to protect their point of view, which as a rule cannot provide a lasting solution. People have got to learn again how to talk with each other.
But one thing you are missing is that those in power are just like us. Deeply flawed people and what they build is flawed for their purposes too.
Global warming is a great example. They have absolutely no solution to it and it will decimate not just them, but everyone.
Well, if you define "work" as benefiting as many people as possible, then no they don't work. That's obviously the point the author was making.
Instead this a world-wide, centuries-old conflict for power and wealth. The kind of thing that people live and die for.
Calling for more regulation by an entity that needs to be regulated itself is a modern paradox.
I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:
1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.
2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.
3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.
4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.
Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.
Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.
None of this is evil or bad faith. Its simply very hard problems that are hard to solve individually. We try to organize or build systems to fix these things, but its a very hard problem.
I'm not denying that there are powerful people doing evil things to benefit themselves, and that this is huge part of why everything is bad. Im just saying we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that a lot of our troubles come down to our problems being extremely complex and human nature doesnt interact that great with that kind of complexity. Our biggest problem i think is not nefariouss badguys, but the immense scale of our issues and our inability to tackle them at the proper level.
An economy (any kind of economy!) is just a feedback control system.
Generally, when you're choosing a feedback controller, you have two options: PID, where you have a set of 3 "dumb" rules, and all you have to do is tune the gains on those dumb rules. Or MPC, where you need to actually build a model of the system you are controlling, and then you can optimally plan to control it the future.
In general, MPC is quite good, much better than PID, if you have a great model of your system. It fails when the model is bad, or when you can't determine your state with accuracy.
PID can be very good -- for systems with very fast dynamics and response times, it is better than MPC, because you don't spend a lot of time in the feedback loop evaluating the model, and you don't need to worry about modeling at all ("model-free")
I think of an economy (very broadly) the same way. The mythical "free market" that everyone talks about is like a PID controller over the whole economy. It's a simple rule, supply and demand, and you can keep prices under control quite well with just a PID controller. But PID can fail spectacularly, too, and cause instability.
In general, you know when instability is happening when you look at a graph of your state variables and it looks like an exponential with a positive coefficient [1]. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: every single chart we can draw about our economy right now looks like an exponential. Energy, probably the most base measurement, looks like an exponential. This is bad [2] and everyone knows it, which I think is the source of a lot of the modern ennui.
Our old MPC models failed spectacularly, because we didn't have a good way of modeling the whole economy, we only had very granular and incomplete information about the markets, and we didn't have a way of actually solving the optimization problem. The obvious missing link here is the computer.
I agree wholeheartedly with the author, and I think it's really valuable to bring up that we already have central planning going on in the form of the corporation. There are thousands of people whose work is completely decoupled from profit and who engage in long term planning at a scale larger than the market they operate in.
What he describes is like a cascade controller, where the inner loops occur in the linear supply/demand region and the outer loops are a smarter model-informed controller. Rather than pretend like the outer loops are just like the inner loops (a pie-in-the-sky libertarian view) or pretend like the inner loops are just like the outer loops (the anti-capitalist view) we should be thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of both. Right now we're very good at the inner loop but we're basically randomly flailing about with the outer loop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function
[2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Everyone is getting richer, as for greedier..
> Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society.
The socially responsible company movement is now a thing. Most companies now care about the environment and their employees to a point that was unheard of decades ago, even if only because of PR.
> Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up.
And yet there’s a market for doing good things. The number of NGOs is in all time highs.
> Artists really don't get enough of a reward for all the benefit they provide.
What? Artists have never had it easier. From spotify to patreon, or even youtube. Distributing and monetizing has never been easier.
> Big banks and big governments really do nonspecifically just suck a lot.
Suckness is non-surprisingly tied to government. The closest a market is to government the more it sucks.
> The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening.
The statistics say otherwise
> You can't hope to run an Internet service unless you pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers, just like you couldn't run software without paying IBM and then Microsoft, back in those days.
On premise is still a thing.
> delivering less per dollar, gigahertz, gigabyte, or watt.
Except compute has never been more efficient.
> We even pay 30% margins to App Stores mainly so they can not let us download apps that are "too dangerous."
We pay them for curating and maintaining a system that’s working for millions of people.
> IT security has become literally impossible: if you install all the patches, you get SolarWinds-style supply chain malware delivered to you automatically. If you don't install the patches, well, that's worse. Either way, enjoy your ransomware.
When wasn’t it that way? Were you around the days of the “ping of death”?
> Everything about modern business is designed to funnel money, faster and faster, to a few people who have demonstrated they can be productive. This totally works, up to a point.
Citation needed
> But we've now reached the extreme corner cases of capitalism. Winning money is surely a motivator, but that motivation goes down the more you have. Eventually it simply stops mattering at all.
Call me crazy, but once I’ve covered my expenses and built a safety net, I’d rather slow down, enjoy my life, spend time with my family… That you see a negative there somehow is baffling to me.
We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy,
capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing
actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
Firstly, we don't live in a "true Democracy". The Athenians tried that, and some aspects of it were pretty nice, and some sucked (which was something of a trend... all political systems have pros and cons) and it lasted a couple hundred years. And when this new nation (USA) was founded, literally all the founders couldn't agree on how to set it up, because every way they could imagine sucked. So they all compromised a whole lot, and what we got is a Representative Democracy, in the form of a Republic (specifically a federal presidential republic). And today it's working exactly the way the founders intended 245 years ago. That's a huge deal! Not 100 years before our nation was born, the British overthrew the monarchy and tried to form a Republic, but that only lasted 20 years until it fell back to Monarchy and then evolved into Empire. We're doing pretty damn well today, I think.
Second, Capitalism comes in many forms. Which one is your dream? Because I'll guarantee you that the founders, and everyone since, have all had conflicting views about what kind of Capitalism we're supposed to practice, what its aims should be, and how to achieve them. But we still accomplish the broadest sense of Capitalism, and we do it so well that we're the richest nation in the world by far. If you can somehow convince everyone to agree on one form of Capitalism, with one specific set of goals, then maybe we can achieve that.
Third, Social Coherence can only work in a bubble, and we do certainly have many of those, so I'm not sure how that dream failed. You're never going to get 320 Million people to be socially coherent in all ways, all the time. Especially not when their political, cultural, and ideological history has evolved such that one half of them think the other half are maliciously immoral and virtually evil.
Finally, hooooo boy. Utopianism. What can you say about the dream of a literal perfect society? If that's what you're basing all of these complaints on, then I guess the rest make sense... If you believe in a perfect society, then of course you'd believe you can get politics and economics and social order perfect, too. But the most ridiculous part of this dream is that technology is supposed to reach a Utopia. Really? Technology? That stuff that's expensive and complicated and pollutes the earth and depends upon the "evils" of Capitalism and Globalism and Programming? That stuff that depends upon outsourced employment, unequal pay, and unfair labor to produce, and creates huge piles of toxic waste? That stuff that enables new technological business models that find new innovative ways to prey upon people to create money for a tiny few? That is what's gonna bring about your Utopia?
I am not embarrassed. We've accomplished a lot, and we'll keep accomplishing a lot. It won't be fast or easy, and we will never have a perfect society. But things do get better. If you want to feel less embarrassed, stop ranting into your blog and start creating change. Then you can rant into your blog about how difficult change is.
> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. The fundamental mechanism of the capitalist model.
This article would benefit from being more specific. Take on that un-named "decentralized" system directly rather than side-swiping it as is done here. It's a cop-out.
It looks like the author is thinking while writing, which is fine. But that alone is not going to change people's minds. I'd look forward to an article where the author, after having gotten thoughts in order, comes back to write an article talking about something specific.
The author is probably just trying to avoid attacks from the cryptocurrency proponents.
> Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.
If you ran your database locally and with multiple reundant power sources, it wouldn't have this problem.
That's of course a bad idea, however it shows it's not impossible to do it without a single point of failure.
Maybe if you set up on an abandoned oil platform and called it Freedomtopia, but that only lasts until your own money runs out and your equipment breaks down.
Is he not aware that regulators in many places work towards making that impossible?
What are examples of good, helpful regulations, does he cite any? Or is it just a vague feeling that regulation is good, and governments are good and for helping people?
All I read is "bla bla power bad" - all those leftists have is "power theory". Power this, power that - power somehow explains everything. It is almost esoteric.
Even the bad things he claims happen without regulations (monopolies) are not proven to happen without regulation, and also not proven to be automatically bad things.
And his first sentence:
"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy."
How does everyone feel so exploited? Who is greedy? Why are you in their power? How do they make it so that you don't have a choice? Goods for consumption generally get better and more affordable over time. So are the producers really so greedy?
What is stopping you from creating a better bank, better health care, better what not? The "rich, powerful, greedy" people are just people like you and me. You are not forced to use their products. With one exception, the government, whose power you can't escape - but that somehow is the one thing lefties like?
I mean some people did and created a better financial system. But now this leftie hates them, too. Guess it is just unbearable if people are independent and not victims like everybody else. And without asking him for permission to boot.
There's some fairly obvious ones: we had a problem where a chemical we were using in many products (CFCs) was destroying a critical part of our atmosphere – ozone. CFCs were cheap, so in free market competition, companies were optimizing for short term success with the unaccounted for externality of increasing skin cancer rates in humans and other animals. Regulation is brought in to patch that externality – successfully helping the world transition to alternative technologies
You can see regulations as part free market capitalism, you just have to zoom out from individual corporations and consider the system patching out local minima with regulations to help achieve global minima.
I mean there's a sliding scaling from sophisticated regulations like CFCs and basic ones like laws against theft (despite it being cheaper to simply steal products from other people). I'm not sure you'd call laws against theft a regulation but it's in the same spirit as the CFCs example
Of course, regulations without careful thought and planning don't lead to optimization either – but the point is, from experience we've learned systems with 0 global regulations tend to have issues and enter in to local minima – so the trick is working out the right level and quality of regulation
I don't think regulations is synonymous with basic laws in such discussion. And therefore the CFC example is also not a good one, as it is obviously an externality. Nobody claims it should be legal to pollute the environment for free.
So a solution could be global regulation, where we all unilaterally agree to transition to better energy sources, however this has massive resistance and is the battle of our time
This sort of regulation is certainly more subtle than don't steal or shoot people but ultimately leads to a system that's better for all the players
More immediately and on the nose, in the UK companies have been increasingly dumping waste in our rivers since a relaxation of rules after leaving the EU regulations https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2021/09/the-raw-sewage-...
It is of course nonsense, even without regulations industries have an incentive to save on energy, as it is a cost factor.
Or think about cars - people would prefer to buy cars that use less energy, so that they have a wider range. Therefore there already is an incentive for car manufacturers to develop more energy efficient cars.
Also people can decide they only want to buy products that adhere to certain production standards, even without centralized government.
Overall, nobody claims externalities should have no price.
Where this causal disconnect occurs is where regulation is most effective
I think we agree, you want to price in your externalities, but pricing externalities _is_ regulation, so we're saying the same thing. Perhaps we're crossing wires somewhere
The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand.
Nobody argues that there should be no laws, so that is a pretty useless discussion.
But you can not say "without regulations, people would be free to murder each other, therefore all regulations are good". Some laws can be good, some can be bad.
"The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand."
The more regulations you get, the further down you are on the path to centrally planned society. Regulations are central planning. Like demanding a minimum wage is central planning, it is literally planning economy, setting prices for things with disregard of the markets.
So if the author is in favor of that, he is a leftist, plain and simple.
Look at the way he writes: he laments that "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." - and you want to tell me he is not following a collectivist, leftist ideology, yearning for a socialist utopia?
"The job of market regulation - fundamentally a restriction on your freedom - is to prevent all that bad stuff."
Here's the problem: a "market" that is regulated this way is no longer a market. In order to have a market that works at all as a market, it has to be free in the sense that all transactions are voluntary. If you restrict people's freedom to engage in the transactions of their choice, you break the market; it no longer does what it's supposed to do.
I said no such thing. I have no idea where you are getting that from.
Unregulated markets lead to exploitative and destructive outcomes 100% of the time. This isn't even a controversial statement, it's just a pithy summary of all relevant history.
The only way to solve them is the way suggested by Coase's Theorem: reduce transaction costs to the point where voluntary trades will internalize the externalities. Of course this solution is not always possible, but that just means that in cases where it's not, no solution is possible. There is nothing that requires the universe to always make solutions possible for whatever issues we humans perceive. Certainly it does not follow from the fact that voluntary trades cannot always solve externalities, that government interference in markets does solve them. It doesn't; as I said, it makes them worse.
Since government interference with markets involves people making rules who are not parties to any of the transactions in the market and who suffer no penalties when their interference causes harm, government interference itself is an externality. So the claim that government interference can somehow solve externalities is obviously false on its face.
If markets under all the regulatory schemes we have were actually "functioning", we would not have all the economic issues we have. For example, we would not have the supply chain issues that are currently making the news. We would not have had the crash of 2008, or the Great Depression for that matter. I could go on and on.
> there's no credible way to claim that there aren't any functioning markets these days.
I made no such claim. You're attacking a straw man.
You said for a market to work "at all" as a market, it must have voluntary transactions, and people must be able to engage in the transactions of their choice. But nearly all markets do not have those features. Ergo, nearly all markets are not able to work at all, under your premise.
Accepting that most markets do work to a substantial degree, your premise must be wrong.
This is not true. Many markets do have those features. They just don't make the news because there are never any newsworthy issues with them.
You're free from the threat of murder, which means that I am not free to murder you. Giving freedom always means taking away some other freedom.
The point of regulation is to say that some freedoms are more important than others. The freedom from murder is more important than the freedom to murder. The freedom to get a fair price is more important than the freedom to rig the market. And so on.
Markets work well when the regulations are right. They work badly when the regulations are wrong, or when the regulations are missing.