We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
erikmcclure.com
erikmcclure.com
Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.
"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
The government has very little graft. Politicians seemed to genuinely work for the benefit of their constituents [0]. I always attributed this to the fact that they lived in the communities they served, and the people they socialised with were affected by the decisions they made.
The UK has the problem that the politicians are insulated from the people they ostensibly serve. Especially the Tories. They have displayed contempt and arrogance beyond belief.
This is all, as you say, a problem of scale.
[0] One illustration of this is the Manx implementation of social security vs the UK. When the Manx government set up national insurance contributions, they paid them into a separate fund (https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-trea...) which is under control of the treasury. The UK just poured the national insurance contributions into the general taxation pool.
The Manx fund (and by extension their health service) is rolling in money. The UK NHS is broke. The Manx system is proof that there were more than enough contributions to the NHS to keep it adequately funded. But the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things, because they could.
Is your problem with Isle of Man the specific industries or businesses that drive revenue there, or the siphoning off of money/labor from other places?
Sleazeball havens like Isle of Man (and many others) by the merit of creating international legal loopholes.
West in general siphons off money/labor from other places.
Not a fan of these, but this wasn't really the point. The point was that Isle of Man has the advantage of not having to do much work of their own to keep the economy rolling so it's not necessarily comparable.
There are hoops they make people jump through - if you're a company wanting to relocate then you must have one Manx director. If you're a person then you must actually live there.
The Manx used to make their money from smuggling. This is cleaner.
[That's bad].
"But it comes with a FREE FROGURT!"
[That's good].
"But the frogurt is ALSO CURSED!"
[That's bad].
"But it comes with a FREE TOPPING!"
[That's good].
"The country has a long history of sociopathic ideation on its socioeconomic participation within a larger global economy, typically as a parasite to vice."
[...].
"That's bad."
[*] A bad take on Simpson's [did it, first!]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i73-lpVV-Jo
It is not just this. There are many small municipalities around the world where mayor/local council does not act like this. Most of things come down to voters. Their culture and breadth of views.
I'm pretty sure this is by design and the end result is as well.
Or is there a source of funds in the Isle of Man that is not applicable to the rest of the world? Like, if it was applied to the rest of the world the funds would stop going to the Isle of Man?
Is there also something not present in the Isle of Man that elsewhere is a sink for money? Something you would have to stop incentivising in other places if you want to have them "rolling in money", but that many people can't bring themselves to do?
I think this is self evident. How the hell US is heading to next Biden vs Trump. Again? How can anyone claim its that those are the best possible choices - or good choices? Trump is a fraud clearly claiming he is one and biden is barely capable to string two sentences together.
That's not to say the Democrats are saints, or even not also evil. Most of them are in it to line their own pockets. But at least they're doing that without actively trying to make things worse. So they're approximately adequate.
Voting third party introduces massive risk that the mustache-twirling, overtly fascist sympathizing party takes power, which isn't acceptable to most reasonable people. Which is why we need to get rid of first-past-the-post voting, but unfortunately those same parties that are currently entrenched in power are the only ones with the power to make that reform.
A speech impediment is not necessarily an impediment to governance ability. Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong (being a politician, I'm sure those are many), not for a life-long disability.
I don't know how people are unable to acknowledge basic fact you can see for yourself.
Would you like to be in a car driven by Biden? Or a company run by trump?
> Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong
Thats the thing. I don't believe biden is making any decisions, the show is run by whatever people around him (i presume leadership of dem party).
It is the similar story with trump. Plenty of evidence, testimonies and leaks from his office. Him complaining that the reports are too long and should include his name in it and point how given matter relates to him. He was also caught multiple times when his aderol was running off.
Difference is to manipulate trump you had to flatter him and appeal to his vanity or outright make him money (corruption).
I am not left or right. I am just stating what everyone is able to observe. The system is not run by people you pick. The choice is between two puppets and whoever can control them (some more some less directly).
The idea of big government used to be that presidents and parties are not able to enact changes as quickly due to bureaucracy and resistance of governmental agencies and institutions.
But now the presidents are not even interested (trump) or capable of that (biden).
Its suppose to be democracy not a cardboard cutout with democracy painted on it.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-flashes-extremely-simp... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg25440ledA
When I'm concentrating hard on a tricky problem, I often forget my surroundings. I've been known to get distracted mid-sentence, and I would love if somebody would discreetly interrupt me when I go off on unnecessary extended tangents. I write myself cue cards one might give a child because I learned how to write cue cards while I was a child, and it's a pretty good system that works for me – but, because my vision is good, I can write them small enough to palm discreetly. I would not want to be in a car driven by me.
None of these things render me unfit for governance, organising, leading people, or understanding laws. In fact, I dabble in all of these things and, where I'm practised, I'm not half-bad. (Not exceptional, mind, but mostly competent.) I can even give speeches that appear memorised, given a month to write and a week to rehearse.
I am not yet old, so nobody calls me senile. But if such attitudes are what I have to look forward to, even if I myself do not change at all, I think we should improve society somewhat.
> > Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong
> Thats the thing. […]
Thanks! This looks like it's about politics, not ableist ageism. (No comment on the validity of your criticism.)
First-past-the-post voting makes the 2 party system inevitable.
You could have FPTP but with more than two parties, like the UK does. The downside of this is that the reason there are more than two major parties in the UK is that the parties are much more closed off to outside influence, and due to the presence of a major independence movement (something banned by the Constitution). In the USA it's considered entirely normal and possible for complete outsiders to run in party primaries, take over that party and then become President. This cannot happen in the UK because none of the parties have open primaries. Small movements towards more internal party democracy by Labour have been rolled back in recent years, because they allowed in non-centrist types like Corbyn who were popular with the base but not with the electorate. Still, it could be implemented in the USA. "All" you need to do is end the system of party primaries and voting for President, to allow party insiders to select their own leadership. And if you want a big independence party then change the Constitution to allow cessation.
You could have PR, like most of Europe does. Then you'd have lots of parties. The downside of this is that it guarantees that politicians can never actually do any of the things they campaigned on doing, with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously. Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods, knowing that there's no point in having specific ideas as they'll all be mashed up in coalition negotiations anyway. Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses, and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality. Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum, and all the left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything.
Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily, and it means Americans are able to go in an "fix" the parties if they drift too far from what is actually wanted. A big part of the meltdown over Trump is that the party insiders were reminded of this against their will. A big part of the meltdown over Sanders vs Clinton was that Americans actually like this aspect of the system and the left felt it was being denied to them.
That's a bold and total wrong claim.
> with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously.
Ah that's why Europe is such a shithole and the US is an enlightened kingdom.
> Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods
That is just wrong. Parties often commit to specific things.
> Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses
That's why Angela Merkel was only in her position for 2 years.
> and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality.
Ill taking anyway, thanks very much.
> Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum
Again, that's just false. The represented views are way broader then what you get in other systems. Sure you don't have anarchist parties and Nazis but that's because those are minority views.
> left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything.
That's a very, very broad generalization. And even if its the case, its not necessarily wrong. If 25% are far right wing and 75% are strongly against that far right wing, then that should be reflected in the government.
> Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily
Having 2 parties is the outcome of an election process that is fundamentally broken and sometimes its a legally enforced duopoly. To claim that isn't fundamentally broken in terms of translating broad popular views into government is simply wrong. The European system are also broken in various ways but they are far better.
The USA is both richer and more democratic than Europe. You will need to accept this fact before mocking the Americans.
Europe is a place where most countries are partly run by Brussels, which is a totalitarian system. Consider the energy that Americans put into their Presidential elections vs the entirely secret and inexplicable process that led to von der Leyen being able to legislatively control Europe. People may not like Biden or Trump but they can at least explain the process through which they became President, and it is at least theoretically democratic. Nobody outside of Germany even knew who vDL was before she suddenly turned up as the most powerful woman in Europe.
> That is just wrong. Parties often commit to specific things.
Which nobody takes seriously because the best that can be hoped for is for the party to enter coalition, at which point everything is up for negotiation and they are guaranteed to have to discard many of their commitments.
>> Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses
> That's why Angela Merkel was only in her position for 2 years.
Merkel is an excellent example of the problem: after a deadlocked PR election she presided over an entirely mandateless caretaker government that lasted half a year, because German politicians couldn't form a workable coalition. In theory she was meant to do nothing during this time and simply preserve the status quo, but that is impossible to constitutionally enforce and in fact she continued to rule exactly as before, including signing Germany up for new foreign policy commitments.
The USA simply never has the problem of the previous president continuing to rule after losing support in an election. It is a problem largely unique to PR (the UK went through a coalition setup in 2010 but it only lasted 5 days).
> even if its the case, its not necessarily wrong.
The primary point of PR is to try and ensure the views of minorities are represented. If you disagree with that goal, you may as well just support the much simpler and more stable FPTP system.
> The USA is both richer and more democratic than Europe. You will need to accept this fact before mocking the Americans.
Politics and government organization has something to do with that, but not everything. If the US had the current government style after WW2 then they would be equally or more successful then they are.
If its more democratic is questionable on lots of fronts, specially comparing with individual countries and not the EU specifically.
And frankly GDP is one thing, I rather live in most places in Europe either way. And I much rather live in the richer parts of Europe then in the US and I much, much rather live in poor part of the Europe then the poor parts the US.
For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo, versus a much larger majority who actually do want to fix things but this majority has a political will that is diluted and disorganized and can't be concentrated into political leverage. So in practice the smaller group has the power.
Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy to change, then anyone can take power and mess it up for everyone else equally as fast.
A slow changing system is preferable if you want to self protect against it, even if some avoidable misery is sometimes around due to this lag it's way better than someone blasting through everything because they know better.
This seems like classic immature "but why don't we change everything and do a revolution" which does not take into account the negatives of that or that the revolution will go like someone else wants to, not you - and these things only work if "you can control everything" which is basically why communism has not worked. A battle of competing incentives seems way better than some guy deciding he knows better about everything and if he can only "coordinate everyone" he can "solve everything". That's called a dictatorship, which comunist states tend to.
It's like the author of this blogpost says. It's hopeless, because we already have the solutions, not because the problems are hard.
Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties. That would be heresy and the first years after the revolution in Russia 100 years ago show how it goes. Not communist parties are unthinkable by definition so yes, an ideological communist country sets the stage for dictatorship. A communist party in charge for only a few years in a democratic country, not much more than anything else.
Only when we are talking about marxist communism. Anarcho communism is (in theory) fine with alternatives by design.
I mean, i don't think this is a good example. Well im sure the homeowner class wanting to protect their investment does play a part, its not like there are obvious solutions to the problem just waiting to be implemented (or at least not ones that stand up to scrutiny)
I do think there is definitely an element of things being harder than they seem, but it's just an element. The vast majority is the for profit nature of our system, that does not reward making things better.
We're lucky we live in an environment that mostly provides us with the basics to survive. We hope that powerful tech like AI will give us the power to put us in control of our destiny.I think we need to be careful what we wish for because I don't think we actually know what we want.
We can't go backwards now anyway, so best of luck to us.
Cool article though, we seem too like to waddle around in our own shit.
And its still happening to this day.
I was staying in a tribe village in Thailand, a full day trek into jungle. They had a dirt road connecting them to the rest of thailand but were surrounded by jungle. I was sharing few drinks with people i traveled and locals, and there was small commotion. When asking about it, locals explained that someone saw monkey out in the jungle and people were discussing who should shoot it.
They explained that there is no animals in over 5km around the village as its hunted for the meat the moment its spotted. Basically a deadzone for anything that has enough meat to be worth a shotgun shell.
Its clear as day that everyone in the village would benefit from cooperation but they dont. Humans on average are not rational. And we are barely more advanced than the ancient people. We have better tech, and a bit more empathy. But the wiring is still the same.
More to the point, the word "tragedy" in context isn't saying that the end result is neccesarily a tragedy for the people involved. The "tragedy" is our (alleged) inability to have nice shared stable resources, not any specific outcome of any specific resource being exhausted.
Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke.
Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas.
Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash.
I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.
> It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.
That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the commons. And of course privatization can be done in a fair or an unfair way. Just like every other potential solution.
I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.
Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons. And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.
What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.
> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit
There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.
In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.
Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.
With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.
We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.
Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.
Ones that scale to more than a million people?
> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it
So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".
It also says:
> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing
... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:
The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.
... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.
Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L...
I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with.
The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.
How? The source wiki now cites for that claim contradicts it. It says lords owned/managed it but not really - they weren't able to control access or put anything on it (manage it), and none of the commoners were able to manage it either because none of them owned it. How do you think "scale of access" was restricted without basics like fences? Cows don't care about laws.
The point of the tragedy of the commons is that without private property rights, resources get wasted and misused. The common land in mediaeval England is described in the book abstract as having that exact problem - it's either overgrazed and destroyed, or abandoned entirely. The solution was Enclosure, i.e. restoring ownership and building fences around the common areas, which is exactly the solution you'd need to utilize land effectively and prevent overgrazing.
Nobody died from the UEFI custom image vulnerability.
And yet other societies in the present do the right things in a lot of areas even with comparable groups of people.
Not to mention today we have tools like the fast text, voice, and even video communications, the internet, roads, distributed power structures, an educational system, etc. to combat scale issues.
>Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
Is it really a wash? Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies?
>"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot
Which doesn't really matter, as it's a figure of speach. It means "most things" or even "a hell of alot of things".
The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
We can change this however to "we know that massively cheeper or free college to anyone in the appropriate high school track is better" and it becomes true.
Not sure which other countries you're thinking of, but each of then have their own issues. E.g. the UK has insane house prices and its rail is awful (I live here).
The ratio of hourly wage to meter of housing is from 2x to 10x worse in the UK than the USS.
That seems like it'd be a significant change to the game. At the moment, figuring out what someone's record is is still too hard even with sites that are trying to help. I can go to http://politicsthatwork.com/ and see a politician scored 12.8% on "Humane Immigration Policy" which tells me nothing [0]. My views are complex enough that no mass-produced title is going to break things down in a way I'm satisfied with.
But AI will allow that sort of summary where I can describe what sort of features a record should have, with examples of particular bills. I can think of other similar uses too; this'll be a wild era. One person can get through a lot of text all of a sudden. Maybe even fast enough to use it while arguing politics in real time.
[0] Does the dude hate migrants? Love migrants but prefers a welfare-heavy society and wants to try and make it sustainable? Loves migrants but the opposition is playing silly games with bill names? Loves high-skilled migrants? Are the bills being voted only tangentially related to migrants, or strategically entangled with migrant issues? Politics is best understood in context.
Once you get past Dunbar's number, whatever your system is, it'll start to run into challenges. Be it a company, an organization, or an entire country.
Objectives become diluted, misbehavior becomes possible, and steerability goes out the window.
Keeping a large group of people focused, well behaved, and capable of change is a huge challenge in any century, and is as ever highly underrated.
When doing research it seems like there's a lot of magical thinking in the field. Finding focussed sources tends to be tricky. Getting people to adopt even the most straightforward of practices even trickier. :-P
There are also plenty of countries with very close to somewhat different systems. Let's take France, where there are > 2 party - more like a dozen, of various sizes and shapes -, and where the president is a direct elect from the crowd.
Sounds far removed from the Lib vs Dem indirect US presidential election? Well, every single time when there's a new contender that does not alight with the typical left vs right mentality they're going to be derided as weasely opinion cherry-pickers with an agenda of selecting voters; "that one can't make up their mind, therefore they're shady: pick a side already!" unanimously shouts the crowd.
Some think it gets further emphasised by the two-round election system: vote for any candidate (who may or may not be tied to a specific party, but hey, guess show you get any reasonable amount of campaign funding), then vote for one of the top two of the previous round (the latter is basically intentional post-WWII design that assumes >50% of the population is sensible enough to kick out an extremist should they get enough of a share on the first round so that the neighbour's history doesn't repeat itself).
I'd argue that it would be essentially the same without it: there's only one winner, and for the winner to carry any weight through their term they need to have some backing in Senate and Parliament, which also gets us into "pass" vs "no pass" law- and decision-making, and so, deep down, a "us vs them"[0][1] situation.
It's not a two party system, yet ultimately it seems like "yes" vs "no" voting always crystallises things into one as an artifact.
Problems are only solved when they're solved, if we didn't fix a problem, either it wasn't a problem or we couldn't fix it just yet: it's not that some people are so mean they prefer the problem to persist because they gain something rather than fixing it to maximize problem solving numbers.
If you can't incentivize society to cure cancer, then THAT is the problem that is impossible to fix just yet, and that person should maybe focus on this ?
Look at cancer. I'm a regular smoker, I'll probably die a lonely death, of cancer, in pain, abandoned by everyone in my life who told me for years I should stop. Why don't I stop ? I can cure my own cancer but I don't, why ? The problem is way deeper, way more complex, than just some rich people abusing me for their profit I feel: I give way more money smoking to the government than I do any cigarette industrial, yet nobody seems to have found a way to cure my cancer, myself included, when we all know it will happen most likely.
Maybe we just can't yet find a way to rewire my brain to never need cigarettes anymore, and the problem is deeper than capitalist profit-seeking ? And if it wasn't a cigarette addiction I had, it would be another one, because what I need somehow is a dangerous vice and that is not an easy thing to make me not want ?
In the exact same way, any solution that would work “except humans” is a non-solution. Maybe it’s a near solution, or a solution for a different time. But it’s not one right now.
When you find yourself getting angry at the world, it’s worth considering that just maybe you’ve made the approximately easiest mistake in problem solving: underestimating the difficulty of the problem (especially someone else’s problem).
If I ranted and raved about how it’s a crime against humanity we don’t already have underground moon bases, you would just think I’m unhinged. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but problems don’t get solved at the speed of my imagination.
“But if we had perfect coordination…” yeah, well, if it didn’t take so much energy to leave Earth’s orbit, we’d do it more often. But it does, so we don’t. We also don’t have total software security and all cancers cured. I’m sorry. Everyone is doing their best.
The "solution" presented here is a first step in _mapping_ the problem and doesn't even begin to solve anything.
The former is a very twentieth century notion. The identification of government with society (“we”) went hand in hand with the idea that government should have power in every domain of human life and co-opt or liquidate every competing authority like academia or media or church. Here, it’s that “we” the government should take over healthcare (although regulatory approval of a cancer treatment was cited as one obstacle) and fiber-laying instead of leaving those to non-governmental authorities. Carl Schmitt in the early twentieth century had a great term for such a totalizing government: the Totalstaat. It’s not clear, however, that a Totalstaat is actually a good idea. Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind—-and it’s not clear that a government seeking to expand its power into previously non-governmental domains will serve its own interests best by solving problems rather than by providing treatments that abate problems without solving them. Treating a problem expands a state’s authority while preserving the problem as a reason for further government action; solving a problem would end that authority by ending the reason for it. Winning a war, for example, used to remove the need for a standing army until the twentieth century saw the invention of a “cold war” and “war on terror” and a perpetual standing army to treat the unsolved problem of a lingering threat. It’s not clear that this increase in government power was a good thing.
Secondly, the idea that “we” (government) “know” the answers is hubris. The author claims that “we” know it would be good to send everyone to college for free, but is that actually best for everyone? Or does that just turn college to more high school, lower the quality of education, waste a lot of people’s time, slow down the creation of families and negatively impinge on demographic trends, etc? “Knowing” the solution presupposes knowledge of second-order effects, and people are generally very bad at that. Thinking that a total state “knows” the best solutions to problems is a good way to impose lots of (potentially negative) second-order effects without much recourse to do anything about it, since this total state has all the authority and no longer has competing authorities to check its hubris.
These are beholden to themselves, their owners, and to a deity, while the government (in theory at least) is supposed to be beholden to the governed.
There are many problems solved by a government, it's easy to ignore them because we assume they are a given and only think about the marginal issues that ail us at present.
North Korean dissidents in South Korea disagree strongly with your claim: several of them publicly expressed their shame to see such a rich country failing to fulfill this very basic human need when their super poor communist country of origin had no such problem. Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare.
I think you are making the same mistake as the author of the article. Can you describe the steps necessary to solve homelessness, without resorting to "steps" that simply describe a condition that won't be fulfilled, such as "people have to..." or "the government has to..."?
Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?
This one is pretty simple if you can accept 98% as "every house". Reality is that not every house needs fiber.
I fully agree with the rest of your comment.
There are shades of grey between no coordination and perfect coordination, and every step in the right direction makes things better. Care, make changes locally, vote accordingly, and you will move the needle.
I'd extend that thought to be more narrow though. Local human political and economic factors need to be allowed for.
So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit.
Equally the "can't build nuclear energy" problem us solved in places where public opinion counts for nothing, and environmental concerns are, um, less concerning. [1]
If one focuses on the profit motive though, then the article is correct (it seems to be written for a US context) - we mostly don't fix the problem because someone is profiting immensely from the problem existing.
[1] avoiding for the moment the merits of said concerns, which -may- be over-described for other political reasons.
There are some differences, but doctors still need to eat, equipment needs to be purchased, etc. Making medicine non profit isn't going to cure cancer.
That is, the job of philosophers is not to solve problems, but to articulate a way of looking at problems which may lead to solutions.
Here’s where things go wrong. You’ve identified the next obstacle, and it is likely going to need time and attention to solve. It’s worthy of respect in a “respect your enemy” sort of way. But when the near-solution is engineering and the obstacle is social, people adopt this harumph attitude. Making glib statements like “we could, but we just don’t”. I don’t think that does anything to actually help solve the problem. It reduces a tremendous amount of someone else’s work to an annoyance.
This is the exact same as an idea guy coming in and expecting the engineers to “just implement it”. This is not an effective way to motivate people or enact a vision.
Fully agree. But we shouldn't confuse “we could solve the problem if it weren’t for X” with a solution. It is a starting point to understand the problem better, and a first step on the journey towards a solution.
> There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
Of course this isn't it. Warp drives and luxury space communism seem to be something we could only stumble into.
There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject.
Doing the work to improve society is boring and slow. It's talking to people in the community. It's local politics. It's generational shifts. It's a warm smile to the older person in the store, in the hospital, as we try to move the needle ever so slightly in the right direction.
Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could explain what kinds of barriers prevent them for going faster. From what I've learned so far, the barriers are usually institutional and political, they're rarely slowed down by technical reasons.
That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal:
> I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something.
The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority.
COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?
The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets.
The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2]
[1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
[2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
Put another way, the reason some schools spend twice as much money but have worse outcomes is because the children in those schools are starting from much farther back. There isn’t a reasonable amount of money you could throw at the problem school to solve the issue.
If they paid teachers more, they'd have better teachers, though.
of course I write the above as if we can objectivly evaluate teachers. I'm not sure if we can. I had my share of what I thought were good and bad teachers: in the end I'm a successful engineer which matters far more than how I felt about any teacher. What we really know is overall they were good enough, but not how any individual played a part
It can sound cheeky but perhaps the biggest thing you have to show for it is overall more free and less murdery world thanks to people wanting to prosper and stuff. Going to war is suddenly unappealing (unless you are very small and have nothing to lose, but then you do less damage comparatively).
It would be hard to argue that Afghanistan lost that much. Although I guess they "won" (if you call what happened winning. )
But the "war on terror" wasn't a "traditional war". It wasn't like some landing by foreign forces at Venice Beach. It was a manufactured political construct that served political purposes.
It handily created a jobs program called the TSA. Which is grossly over equipped to confiscate shampoo. All the world has airport security. Very few places have (or need) TSA levels of intrusion.
The "war on terror" was indeed lost. It was lost when the US became "terrified". In all of the troubles the IRA couldn't do that to the UK. Endless bombs just resulted in "carry on".
In the US the war continues all the time. The TSA bears witness to this.
But at this point it employs so many people, doing meaningless, unskilled work, that you may as well treat it as a jobs program.
It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.
To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important.
A single trillion is an absurd amount. Now make eight of these: https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-d...
> > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much.
No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000.
There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.
Not disagreeing with the rest, but if the other poster was correct it may be worth correcting the record on whether or not we actually did attempt to fund building fiber throughout America.
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Was it?
How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines?
Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.
All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.
To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method.
I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.
If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!
I have a few friends like this, though to a lesser degree as their worries have disappeared by now.
> I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.
I wasn't trying to frame it as "all covid deniers just don't care unless it impacts their family" or something similar. It more subtle than that. And what I said was not supposed to be a generalization at all. It was specifically about my family members.
I do think some portion of all people fall into this group though. Yes, they might truly believe the covid vaccines do more harm than good. But also yes, they would immediately line-up for a covid vaccine if a close family member became hospitalized and visually looked bad. Nothing about the dangers of the vaccine changes in this scenario, and covid didn't suddenly become more dangerous to them. It just became more emotionally visceral. That's not desperation. It's straightforward emotional persuasion, and is the "feeling the pain" as originally commented about.
I do think there is many more social dynamics at play, but I don't feel confident in articulating my scattered thoughts on them well. How people adjust how they act based on social groups, or with very little information people form very strong opinions, how information bubbles impact what topics you see or how they're presented, etc.
When it hits your loved ones, you start to take it more seriously. Wearing a mask and socially distancing doesn’t matter if it means not losing another family member. Conversely, if you experience just a minor cold, you start questioning all the media you’ve seen about the death rates and this and that which can definitely lead you to thinking everyone’s exaggerating the whole thing for a reason unknown to you.
I’m not anti vax at all (studied biomedical science) but I do see how people can be pushed towards having those views, even subconsciously, through highly manipulated algorithms that can use emotions to extract content in the form of comments, reaction videos, memes etc from real people. Come to think of it, AI has been milking humans for content for years.
Again, you’re portraying people as “dumb and emotional” without addressing the substance of their concerns or reasons. You’re also refusing to ponder if that’s how you reached your conclusions.
But the director of the NIH during COVID now admits those people were right the whole time — COVID policy failed to weigh its costs, and as such, didn’t strike the right balance for public health.
And yes, the loudest ones about it in the family are dumb and emotional. That tends to be the case for most people who do less thinking and more repeating their point louder and louder.
Is it though?
Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home?
To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.
Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we?
Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else.
Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else.
Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything.
So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING
It can probably be done profitably to every home, but it's even more profitable to do it to only the easier homes.
Collective action could make a law that only allows companies to lay fiber if they do it to every home.
Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.
Or to put it another way - think of how much the government could save in taxes if it built no infrastructure at all. You want electricity? Get a generator. You want roads? Pay a new toll every 1km as you go through various private lands.
The utility for the users is the same.
The lobbying power trying to make that choice is completely different.
In one example it cost something like $200M for a population of 150,000. That’s $1.3k per person. Good luck getting the taxpayer to sign up for that without a clear revenue model.
It’s being done, but not as some kind of blind “hey you know what would be great” leap.
Assuming 50k households and 85% uptake and 50 per month is 510M 100 is about a billion.
There are certainly some remaining connection gaps in remote rural communities, but universal fiber coverage is the least cost-effective solution to that problem.
https://itif.org/publications/2022/12/05/state-of-us-broadba...
While slightly slow walking the process and explaining the disadvantages of this I manually shut down the connection to the modem without actually disconnecting the internet service. Her kids had successfully vetoed the operation before we could complete the disconnection.
Pew says of those who rely only on a smartphone rather than a broadband connection only 45% feel a phone does everything they need was true and only 23% said that was the most import reason. Other popular reasons included unacceptable speed, cost, and perhaps most relevant the 22% that said other options simply weren't available.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-techn...
I don't think its a stretch to imagine that uptake of fast fiber might be slightly higher than the 73% (not 62) with Home Broadband internet given that many have options that are both piss poor and expensive.
For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth...
Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution.
Part of making a solution is finding something that works in the real world and not an idealized world.
As for “other societal concerns” there are always societal concerns with anything. There were societal concerns with Social Security and free education for kids. Turns out those are good ideas despite the fact that they’re not free. In fact if you suggested them today a lot of people would shoot them down as infeasible. I don’t have any kids but I pay for other kids to learn to read. I’m not retired but I pay into social security.
For example, it is much more profitable to sell recurring treatments than it is to sell cures. You can only sell a cure once per instance of disease, after all, whereas selling a recurring treatment means you have an indefinite stream of revenue. (Similar logic applies to selling software as a subscription instead of as a one-off license.)
When something is "not profitable", that does not mean it costs too much. It means that the thing is not as profitable as other options, which is sometimes a result of excessively costly processes, but is at other times a result of having "do nothing" as an option (which by definition costs nothing, and depending on the field can make quite a lot of money).
Another example of something being "not profitable", but not because it costs more, is public goods. Public transportation, for instance. It is undeniable that good public transportation is a boon to society, but public transport is often framed as a business rather than a public good, and in the context of a business, public transport is simply not as profitable as something like a toll road. Running a toll road is close to "do nothing" compared to running a bus line or train line, since everyone brings their own car instead of using the publicly-provided transportation. The catch is, this is actually MORE costly overall--because many more vehicles have to be fueled and maintained, and cars are relatively inefficient compared to trains. But, because the cost is distributed to the users of the road, the toll road is "cheaper" for the people operating it, and thus more profitable--so if you run government like a business, the toll road is the thing you go with.
Problems are not purely technical, they always have a social component.
If you have a solution but its too expensive, that's not a full solution, that is half a solution. Maybe the other half is government grants or whatever, but you can't just talk about it as if the problem is solved. The social factors are just as much a part of the problem to be solved as the scientific part. Someone needs to figure them out. It is hard work that needs to be done and is how problems actually get solved.
When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions.
Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
> unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide
The vehicle for this is the WTO, or at least, it used to be, before the US decided to take its teeth away. Giving it teeth requires moral leadership. It doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with licensure, then working through the WTO to establish new rules and tariffs for violators.
I'm not so sure about this. The world is slowly realizing heavy dependence on exports of autocratic countries was not exactly the brightest idea - and this superficially polite wording is very intentional here, because that's how it goes. Even the war hadn't stopped trading - worse, on the contrary, Russian trading boomed after the invasion. And it's not something unique that money beats anything - oil deals are advertised at climate conferences, and somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. And I think WTO also wouldn't do a thing that won't benefit its stakeholders - not the consumers. There's barely any global consensus about anything important, and international institutions like UN look dysfunctional at best.
And in terms of money, cheap junk beats consistently anything else out of the market. The homeostasis of price-regulation-quality is very hard to maintain, and consumer products either fall down towards cheap junk extremum, or towards regulatory capture extremum (but still junk under the hood - just see how banking and medical apps are doing).
Sorry to be this pessimistic - I really wish I'd be wrong here. But unless somehow there's bigger money in making changes than in maintaining the status quo, I doubt anything would happen.
That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
We can't even agree that these things are in fact good ideas.
Singleton is a design pattern, generally considered a bad one but it has important uses when used correctly.
Clean code is good but only when done the correct amount, when done in a zealous manner just slows down development and adds extra overhead which will again cause mistakes.
If anything I feel design by contract will become more of a standard, look at the JPL recommendations, they don't explicitly call it design by contract but it's build into the spec.
Not enough "software engineers" even know what invariants need to hold, what preconditions need to be true and what postconditions need to be in place.
Don't believe me, look for the equivalent of:
try {
// some code
} catch(...) {
// Handle all these errors we didnt know about and handle explicitly
}
Magic fairy dust!
Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.
I'd suggest that you are judging the effectiveness on the wrong criteria here. It's impossible to foresee all distasters - the goal is to enact mechanisms to mitigate the human cost of distasters, and even more importantly, prevent the second and third occurrences of the same distaster... (which we seem decently good at)
Engineering projects are usually performed by businesses, often across jurisdictional boundaries. Licensing is usually a monopoly within a jurisdiction.
Avoiding accidents requires solutions at the level of a business activity: and it needs to cover all the aspects of the activity (not just the coalface of engineering, but the management and sales and every other aspect that can affect safety).
If software engineering requires licenses then open source cannot be used. Good luck starting from scratch and introducing other risks of proprietary solutions!
An example: a Lambourghini tractor has a fault in the steering software that causes the tractor to overturn and kills a farmer in Nabraska. How do you expect software engineering licensing to prevent that?
The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site.
Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change.
The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".
There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks.
I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.
I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
The actual reality - that these "solutions" are not as simple or effective as he thinks and that's why we're not doing them - is a lot less gloomy than the thesis he proposes.
His call to "build social systems that cooperate" basically just amounts to "All you people need to start doing what I say". Join the club, dude.
I got a feeling that in the political space we are given a binary choice between two dudes. The winner is then being courted by big-something to make a decision that benefits said dude.
All the nuance and actual say about pressing questions has been removed.
Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were.
In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.
And even if there was agreement on a set of aspects, measuring them is not the holy grail. You can rarely measure the effect directly. You have to measure some proxy (operationalize it). And the definition of that proxy is going to cause problems.
That, plus --of course-- vested interests, makes that you can't fix everything. The best you can hope for is gradual improvement, and a change of direction when the plan doesn't work out as hoped. Those are political choices, not technical.
I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is
Things that are not capability based security, but people seem to think they are, include:
App Permission flags on your smartphone
Windows 8 UAE
SELinux
AppArmor
Group Policies
(That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
Unfortunately capabilities have long been misunderstood as equivalent to access control lists, and therefore ignored or misnamed due to the difficulty of building working capability-based systems Vs ACL-based systems. (ACL-based systems should be built on top of a capability-based core, and only apply to a smallest possible domain of objects - a single global namespace with an ACL-based access control mechanism is where the common security vulnerabilities of modern operating systems begin.)
Smartphone permissions are also ambient privileges, but that's not the reason they get hacked: they get hacked because the operating systems are not designed around capabilities from boot and up, and have shared critical global namespaces with an ambient authority access control mechanism. Capabilities provide defense in depth, they don't make a system automatically unhackable but they do make it so that a critical attack path is highly unlikely to exist.
Whereas in my mind, an ambient permission is scoped to a broad category, like a user or group.
So if an image viewer is given permissions to access your photos, it includes a broad swath of permissions, including the ability to just corrupt them all.
With a capabilities based system, the image viewer would get access to a single photo, or a folder of them, and perhaps read-only access, decided by the user at run time, instead of the system administrator at some earlier time, or the manufacturer as a category choice.
Permission flags just flags, not capabilities.
Capabilities also don't magically stop your app containing buffer overflows, SSO login problems, they don't make your users phishing-proof and in general they don't do a lot of anything. They're a useful API pattern that every OS already provides and has done for decades, but they're very far from a silver bullet.
This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclea...
Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time?
My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash.
It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network.
No punting people with ping of death anymore.
Isn't the increase in attack surfaces for ransomware actors an indication of decline in software quality?
Software has become incredibly complex and interdepended.
Social engineering has also been a problem since human communication was invented.
Thought about CVE counts, but that has methodological problems too.
It would be nice if apps were developed as software for satellites: updating satellite software in flight is expensive, so constant updating isn't an option.
Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides.
For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course.
Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore.
So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on.
I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with
Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed.
I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now".
If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article.
Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.
I'm part of a small group who are working on algorithms for achieving that. We're applying system's thinking, game theory, bayesian statistics, computer science to find an algorithm that creates collective intelligence.
Latest creations: https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/
Contributions welcome
I can also offer to jump in a call to discuss.
I go the extra mile to do that. I do because I hate the commingle inventory, and because I think is getting to big.
I see no impact at all on my behaviour. My friends, avid amazon consumer see me like a strange person for not buying there. I don't evangelise neither I go the extra mile to explain the situation more than "Jeff Bezos doesn't any more of my money".
I could repeat this situation with any single measure that we as individual can take. They are basically worthless.
Development pace is set by the competition.
Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.
Like a desk, you get one layer of crap and clutter. More than that and everything begins to teeter and fall.
That said - you definitely have to ask yourself (as a developer) or your engineers (as management) "is there a simpler way?". But "simpler" is not the same as "rushed", even if both are "faster" - it's just a question of "on what timeline". Faster today? This week? This month? This quarter? This year?
I think "faster" has been replaced by "profit". Is there a more profitable way of doing it. Etc. Hence things such as AI/CoPilot and the rest.
We as developers have lost the craftsmanship that coding once was. Crafting a good bit of code that might just be a single line but which has elegance and conciseness to get the job done just right.
That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle.
Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree.
There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures.
Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important.
Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.
It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth.
And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam”
Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules.
Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them.
But humans … oh well
Here they just say that we need better voting algorithms, which is a necessary but not sufficient fix — we’re not stuck with this bad electoral system because we couldn’t figure out a better one, we’re stuck here because it benefits those in power.
Also this essay could do with a bit more “and AI is going to exacerbate this injustice” but that’s my bias lol
At one point they appeared to contribute to the social good.
There was some shift and now everything is about eking out every last penny of profit.
My dad use to tell me about going to Woodstock in 1969. It seemed somewhat spontaneous.
I had a friend that went to the Woodstock concert in 1999. He described it as a complete hell hole. Everything seems to be turning to crap for the sake of profit.
I too remember the good old days when software used to be written without security vulnerabilities, especially in media format parsers.
Oh wait, that never existed. In fact in the old days people cared even less about security.
stop thinking. just consume product and get excite for next product.
> We know that automation is chipping away at low-skill jobs, which means our workforce needs to be better educated, and that providing free college to everyone would be a good idea, we just don’t.
University education is primarily a signalling mechanism. Getting a degree in English literature doesn't actually make you a better oil market analyst to an appreciable degree, it just signals the ability to do work with minimal supervision.
And if higher education is indeed a positional good then funding everyone to do it is just setting money/time on fire.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The title is indeed clickbait, but it is not scambait. Clickbait is when you want the reader interested in reading things, which is normal, scambait is when you do that but you have no points behind made after that.
Here are the points made by the article and what I think of them :
- Much more things can be improved than we think possible (100% true - obviously we can't to them all at once, but we don't need to.)
- We don't need a new plan, we already have plans (True, for example you can take the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations as a starting point).
- Coordination matters (And is possible, the UN had lead the historic achievment to eradicate fucking polio)
- We have enough resources to act in the real world, but the way we make decisions is broken (True, Elon Musk spent an insane amount of money to make a dumb website worse, while US Foreign Aid #1 top priority is to help the government of Israel commits more crimes with no accountability)
- Things will not change until a determined group of people take action (100% true, this is how every progress ever has worked out)
Supply and demand (priority driven) affect the medical treatments available, and the a single cure is a stepping stone to greater efficiency.
For example, take COVID immunisation, due to priority we had multiple companies work on these, and the best won, these delivery mechanisms are now updated with new viral variants, but they don't charge as though it's a totally new disease or drugs. In fact the cost is absorbed by the sale of the original and not in the sale of the updated vaccine which is at the same price point or less.
Which leads me back to the point, if you run socialised medicine, and you have to choose which medicines offer the greatest return, why would you choose a 1st gen treatment curing one person when a older treatment, which you have infra for, and costs thousands not millions cures in 50% of cases?
If you want to fix anything with 1st gen, we need to subsidise the research cost using the same priority as the needs of patients - that gives the demand.
Misalignment is just going to cause articles such as this being written, where you don't actually hear about the other things that are a priority being cured. Did you know we have 3 successful treatments for COVID now for example, or in the UK we've started using proton beam therapy after it was famously denied treatment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case a few years ago, and now I believe also available within the UK?
These are both consequences of a change of priority and normal process, the worry in the article is that a cure isn't being used, which is both 1st gen and probably due to disjoint with the needs of the NHS/socialised medicine, but this would be expected to happen if a company (a single university) wants to carve a well paid niche in an area that has lower priority/demand.
A mistake only possible from someone with extremely poor subject matter expertise, or by text predictive AI?
Or, am I totally out of whack and have no idea what the author is writing about?
Is it? How many large-scale elections are decided by one vote?
I'm well aware that that the 2000 US Presidential election was officially decided by 537 votes (in Florida, though recounts were not allowed). Nonetheless, 537 votes is not 1 vote. If one person had changed their vote, it wouldn't have made a difference. If two people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. If three people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. You could try to coordinate all of your friends and family (in Florida), and it still wouldn't have made a difference.
Realistically, the chances of your vote changing the outcome of a large-scale election with millions of voters is practically nil. You have better odds of winning the lottery; as proof, people do actually win the lottery! But buying lottery tickets is not generally considered to be rational behavior.
Admittedly, there are a number of smaller, local elections that have been decided by one vote. In general, though, I would consider strategic voting to be irrational, indeed delusional.
If you want to significantly influence the outcome a large-scale election, then become ultra-wealthy and throw your money at politics. (Or you could just ignore the elections and buy off whoever wins.) The irony is that in a democracy, every vote is equal, which means none of us individually has any power as voters.
You don't need "ranked choice voting" or any other convoluted system in order to "vote your conscience", as it were. You could just do it, but we just don't.
I'm not suggesting that you ought to vote your conscience, by the way. It really doesn't matter one way or the other. But that's precisely why you could if you wanted to. From a kind of Kantian moral framework, you might vote as you would want everyone else to vote, and in that case, if you truly hate the two major political parties, then why would you vote for them, and want everyone else to vote for them? I don't believe that makes sense either strategically or morally.
> "When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former."
> [...]
> "If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but really any radically different technological future at all. There’s a kind of contradiction here. It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive. It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms."
The system we are in is inert and we need more than ranked voting to fix it.
(And also https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/)
> Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.
> Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.
> In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
EDIT to be more topical to the submission:
> So for example, Gurri examines some of the sloganeering where people complain about how eg obesity is the government's fault - surely the government could come up with some plan that cured obesity, and since they haven't done so, that proves they're illegitimate and don't care that obesity is killing millions of Americans. Or homelessness - that's the fault of capitalism, right? Because "we" could just give every homeless person a home, but capitalism prevents "us" from doing that. Or if you're a conservative, how come the government hasn't forced the liberal rot out of schools and made everybody pious and patriotic and family-values-having? Doesn't that mean our lack of strong values is the government's fault? The general formula is (1.) take vast social problem that has troubled humanity for millennia (2.) claim that theoretically The System could solve the problem, but in fact hasn't (3.) interpret that as "The System has caused the problem and it is entirely the system's fault" (4.) be outraged that The System is causing obesity and homelessness and postmodernism and homosexuality and yet some people still support it. How could they do that??!
The 'economic race to the bottom' is exactly how we can all afford microwave ovens in the first place.
Of course, you can make a special case for microwave ovens, and we could afford them to be slightly more expensive. But we need the general cost cutting and optimization in the economy to drive progress.
Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?
Just not as useful as it used to be.
The pro- and anti-capitalist sides both have a point.
The latter has worked really well against acid rain. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program
No need to intervene further to prevent some 'evil' race to the bottom. Just narrowly address exactly the externality in question, and stop there. Compare https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/
I can confirm that some KitchenAid microwaves use a sound sensor instead of humidity.
“What's the deal with the popcorn button?” https://youtu.be/Limpr1L8Pss
Great video and channel, good stuff.
What??
College is a colossal waste of resources for most jobs, terrible ROI.
Given the utter confidence in being wrong, I'm not sure how seriously I can take the rest of the argument.
I don’t think Socialism is the answer, which is simple Capitalism with bits of Communism sprinkled in to soothe over the more egregious failures (or to pretend to do, which is even worse).
We need something truly new.
To use a line from the Economist, we have to tame capitalism's excesses in order to get the most benefit to society.
Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another.
Capitalism stays out of stuff just fine. Few people organise their family or friendships or their bowling club along capitalist lines.
Even companies themselves are usually structured as quasi-socialist command economies, and the market mostly only is for interaction between companies.
Isn't that just because its an abstraction we view the world through? As an abstraction it often doesn't fully work. E.g. is taiwan a nation state? Are the parts of lebanon that have effectively been taken over by hezbolla really part of the state of lebanon if the state isn't fully in control anymore? Is belarus really an independent state or does russia have so much control that it isn't really anymore? The state abstraction makes for neat boxes but the reality on the ground in many places isn't really that clear cut.
Compare that with the state of eg Europe a thousand years ago, when things were organised differently. Or have a look at most of the rest of the world back then.
Historically, one big change was the spread of gun powder. Fielding armies powered by gun powder required a lot more state capacity and organisation but provided huge military advantages. A tribal or feudal society couldn't cut it on the battlefield anymore, so they were outcompeted. (The whole process is a lot messier and complicated, of course.)
People can succeed under a system and still acknowledge it is a bad one for a big part of the population.
Of course they are. I am, you are, everybody is.
If you actually knew anything about the history of classical liberalism you wouldn't perpetuate this nonsensical stereotype. Classical Liberalism is not the same as Objectivism.
Why love communism so much? We're practically communist already. Why not blame that?
Compare the early years of reddit with now, too.
A culture of bottom up independent & responsible creators would be a freedom-oriented alternative. Perhaps things are not fixed because the majority of the population is nudged & habituated to give up their responsibility to governments, corporations, & "experts". This includes the responsibility to hear all information in a pure uncensored & unnarrated form...And the responsibility to make decisions based on all available information. Also, the responsibility to take action based on the information & decisions. Convenience & irresponsibility comes with a great price.
If you let let them take your responsibility away from you, they will have sole determination of your conditions...Feudalism & Fascism has historically not ended well for the subjects, including the subjects that profit from these governance models.
I think Bukele in El Salvador has been a great example of changing this. Decades of murder and mayhem and having the highest murder rate in the world, and the guy makes it the safest country in Latin America in just a few years by calling B.S on the government's entire approach to criminal justice. It's one of the greatest examples of turning a country around in recent memory. We shall see if Melei can do it in Argentina with his approach to radically changing an economy that has been a basket case for decades.
In the Elon Musk biography, the power he has to so effectively build a manufacturing company is he knows enough about all the aspects of the business that he can call B.S on people in any part of the company who aren't performing. It's the ability to go into power structures that are stagnant and tear out the parts that need tearing out.
Also, something I am wondering from the article. If socialized healthcare is the best system ever, and the only problem in curing cancer is the lack of proper incentives which the socialized healthcare provides, why the cancer is not cured yet? We have billions of people living under various fully or partially socialized healthcare systems. Any of them should have all proper incentives to cure cancer. Why China didn't do it yet? Why anybody in Europe didn't do it yet? Why Canada didn't do it yet? I mean I get it, capitalism is bad, profit is bad, profit motives are bad (even though I don't get how curing cancer wouldn't be fabulously profitable beyond anybody's wildest dreams, but let's assume that's the case). But there are a lot of countries which have socialized healthcare systems. What are those people waiting for? Or maybe curing cancer is not about finding proper incentives after all?
Not everyone should get free college, and not every house should have fiber optic cable. We have the opportunity to fix all easily fixable issues if we let go of our ego, and admit how our conceited actions have caused the coordination failures we see today. We absolutely will not achieve a better future by continuing the exact same self-aggrandizing approach to problem solving that brought us here, where we think every problem is simple, that our morality is above reproach, and that by the stroke of a pen we can alleviate any ill.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." - Hayek
Price is arguably #1 in info-symmetric non-urgent elastic demand situations.
Which portions of health care function this way is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not sure what the solution is either, but the status quo ain't it.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
> Health spending per person in the U.S. was nearly two times higher than in the closest country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea.
That not to see that such a system would be better then some other systems, we don't really have good evidence as no major country has developed this way. There were some early interesting developments for patterns of care in the US before the current system became the dominate re-enforced system.
Its also not really clear if the US switched system to something like those countries, that it could achieve the same costs. Such a reorganization would be monumental in scale requiring an US bureaucracy of a scale only matched by the US Armed Forces.
Its not a problem I would want to be in charge of solving.
By definition if government runs a sector, there can be no pricing mechanism. Otherwise the government isn’t running it; it’s just a market.
Plenty of US states have an effective duopoly of healthcare insurers, which is no different in effect from having a single payer.
The main difference is with for profit insurers, some % is skimmed off the top as profit instead of going into patient care.
The problem with price signals in health care is that they compete with survival signals, and the survival signals sometimes win out.
This makes health care an example of a situation where (traditional) markets become distorted and fail to operate efficiently. A little external help is needed.