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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I like this axis a lot, and think that it is probably the most important political axis at this moment in history (where I give great weight to my local and state politics, and to international concerns like climate change and global pandemic).

BUT I really hate the term "bulldozer" for the opposite of vetocracy, because bulldozers destroy and flatten, they do not build interesting and useful things. They might make room for something useful, but they may bulldoze something and leave it empty.

I'd prefer the term "Do-ocracy" in opposition to "vetocracy." Do I have the licenses to do things on my own, or is everything forbidden until explicitly approved by the vast majority of interested parties? That's the key concern that affects all sorts of governance from large corporations to startups to political organizations to actual zoning laws.

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There is a brilliant, literal bulldozer story about Chicago's lost third airport.

For years there was a busy and successful commercial airport in downtown Chicago right on Lake Michigan. At some point Mayor Daley decided he wanted it closed for his own agenda, but no one else would let it happen.

So, in the middle of one dark night in 2003, he got some contractor cronies to go out there and bulldoze the runway, damaging it beyond repair. This forced the closing of the airport.

>Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley forced the closing of Meigs in 2003 by ordering the overnight bulldozing of its runway without notice, in violation of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations.

To this day, the site of the former airport is an undeveloped "natural preserve" and most Chicagoans have no idea that it used to be somewhere they could fly out of.

Funny story.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field

It's not undeveloped, there's a park and music venue there now. I don't think it is a leap to say it is now used by many more Chicagoans than the airport for private jets ever was, even if most Chicagoans are unaware.

Daley's midnight move: Truly an example of "creative" destruction.

Today instead of X's the bulldozers could have engraved an acronym, and he could have argued it was for an immediate good cause. Aka acronym-washing.

BTW, I would suggest "levelers" as another label to consider, but then Wikipedia would need some disambiguation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers

Oh wow, that used to be the default starting airport in Microsoft Flight Simulator, I must have taken off from it a million simulated times as a kid...

Do you have a citation on "busy and successful"? I lived in Chicago in the 1990s and I remember Meigs Field as niche curiosity. The only airports I or anybody I knew used were O'Hare and Midway, both reasonable transit rides from downtown.

Reminds me of the story of Denver International Airport's unnecessary construction.

I watched a documentary about Jane Jacobs the other night, a woman who was involved in saving a neighbourhood I used to live in. I now live in a neighbourhood that was grazed (thankfully not razed) by similar development attempts and the city is now looking into restoring its former vibrance by undoing the damage that was done.

It should be clear from my sentiments that I should be screaming the virtues of the vetocracy and the evils of bulldozer politics, but I'm not. The reality is that these two poles have very different visions. Maligning one over the other, may it be with the term "bulldozer" or "veto", fails to appreciate that. It papers over that one side scaffolds their fear of the unknown with one set of arguments and the other side veils their ignorance of the consequences of their actions with another set of arguments.

I think bulldozer is a great term, because it also captures the 'creative destruction' that occurs when the new better thing replaces the old thing, like google replacing altavista / yahoo, facebook replacing myspace and so on, the iPhone replacing the iPod for the most part and so on.

Also all the other terms I've heard so far are not catchy.

I think it's reasonable because bulldozers are often used to level the ground when something large is built.

Also, the other end of the axis is also a negative term, so it's balanced.

I definitely would put myself far on the “just do stuff” side of the spectrum, but I think it’s fair that the names for both sides identify what opponents might not like. “Bulldozer” is a very apt name, because one of the key arguments in favor of local veto points is the big urban projects of the mid 20th century, when lots of interesting and useful neighborhoods were flattened to build highway interchanges.

I would also argue that it's nearly always legal to bulldoze things, and the vetocracy doesn't really care if I bulldoze my house. There are only a very very few jurisdictions where demolition permits are an impediment. So the vetocracy is generally just fine with bulldozers.

It's the actual building of things that the vetocracy wants to prevent. For example, check out this comment (whose factual basis is quite low based on my knowledge) which I think is great example of the vetocracy. If the luxury condos in SOMA were bulldozed, that would probably be a good result in their eyes!

> The housing market example is bizarre, because if you go look at San Francisco, the entire area of SOMA is dominated by skyscrapers and luxury condos that are 90% vacant. Office buildings are going vacant at an accelerated rate. Salesforce Tower has never managed to fill up on tenants. We don't need to build new housing, we just need to actually price the ones we do have so people can afford them. Stop bulldozing stuff built less than 20 years ago to replace it with even more shoddily built stuff you can sell for even higher margins. We already have the homes, just let people live in them.

Judging office tower vacancy during a mass pandemic that encourages work from home seems harsh.

And the salesforce tower is only 3 years old. It takes time to fill those up.

The original WTC took 30 years (early 2000’s) to achieve full occupancy[1]. The new WTC was at 90% right before the pandemic, 6 years after opening[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_(1973%E2%80...

2: https://www.breakinglatest.news/world/the-occupancy-rate-of-...

> There are only a very very few jurisdictions where demolition permits are an impediment.

Really? I would have assumed that any city required a demolition permit, but I've never really thought about it.

The opposite to "vetocracy" would be "probocracy" from the Latin probo, I approve. Bulldozers vs vetocracy doesn't seem quite right to me as a political axis.

Though, to effectively adapt infrastructure and structures to cope with climate-change-enhanced weather, we're going to have to allow governments to become bulldozers.

The idea is that bulldozers bash through obstacles. You could also use a battering ram as metaphor. The point is that they get crap done regardless of what's in the way.

Some red tape exists for good reasons. We always have to balance thalidomide vs housing crisis.

Isn't the point that they could potentially do either and its any third-party concerns that get flattened?

So something more like a permissive-cracy.

I understand where you’re coming from, but in my experience, “Do-ocracy” implies a kind of passive consensus mechanism. Let’s say we all have collective ownership of a garden, and it’s starting to need weeding, but nobody’s taken the initiative to fix it yet. In do-ocratic fashion, someone announces that this coming Sunday is Weeding Party day, and that catalyzes action.

It’s tricky. “Weeding Party Day” will succeed if everyone has been made to see this is desirable, and if the person has charisma or a track record or seems well organized. But it’s a dance between collective will and individual will.

With “bulldozery” I think Vitalik is describing an extreme case where some entity is completely unfettered. A dictator decides it’s Weeding Party day, or an all-powerful council, or even a single individual goes and pays for a weeding crew and reaps the rewards themselves. So at this extreme point we find everything from The Great Leap Forward to the enclosure of the commons by capitalists or the seizing of lands by colonists.

Action and will for its own sake have long been associated with fascism; many people long for a strongman to clear away all the objections to “greatness”. But the tendency exists in all kinds of people, I think, it’s just that their desires for sweeping reform aren’t as violent.

Autonomo-cracy?

Carte blanche seems like the appropriate descriptor, but impossible to shoe-horn in.

We could use the terms conservative and progressive, but then someone's head might explode when Bitcoin gets called a progressive attack on conservative institutions.

Bitcoin certainly is an attack on institutions, but not progressive in character. All the institutions it (claims to) bypass like regulators, the state, central banks, the tax system and so on, with the exception of borders maybe are quite liberal in the broad sense of the term.

^ Example of it making people's heads explode.

Financial regulations are profusely conservative. They're all about stability and preserving existing power structures. And mass financial surveillance, not least surveillance of dissidents and anti-establishment movements.

In principle Bitcoin unlocks some of the chains. The government pressured payment processors to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks, so they used Bitcoin.

And it's no more an attack on taxes or the state than cash ever was.

my head isn't exploding, this is just a one-dimensional understanding of what conservatism and progressivism are. Institutions aren't conservative just because they're stable or preserve existing power structures. Progressives can be in power and conservatives can be out of power.

When it comes to crypto in the US this is is largely the case. It's politically clearly a tool of a self-perceived dissident (libertarian) right that attempts to 'exit' from what they see as progressive establishment institutions.

Banking regulations are conservative regardless of which party controls the government.

The banking regulations proposed by Democrats are actually more conservative than the ones proposed by Republicans, because it's the libertarian wing of the Republican party which is in favor of liberalizing banking regulations. But even when Republicans are in power, that doesn't mean libertarians are, so that generally doesn't happen.

Or we get awful "compromise" garbage where no challenge to existing banking institutions is permitted but the incumbents get more latitude to abuse the public in new and creative ways.

> this is just a one-dimensional understanding of what conservatism and progressivism are.

I think @AnthonyMouse trying to create a label for that axis (necessarily one dimensional), so that’s not really a strong argument against what he’s saying.

I think it’s a bad choice of label because — even if I get people to accept that the terms associated with parties are not descriptions of those parties[0] — the opposite of conservative is “dynamic” and the opposite of liberal is “authoritarian”.

[0] and indeed the actual party names: the party opposite of “Republican” may be “Democrat” in the USA, yet in Northern Ireland there is no single party with that name and the block opposite the group collectively described as “republican” is the block collectively called “loyalist”, while the historical opposite of “republican” is (IMO) “monarchist”.

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