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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we had, rather than moving into the future.

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> We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years,

They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.

It is possible, but why do you believe this is a necessity? It's also possible that the US becomes an oligarchy dictatorship like Russia. All the assets are seized by a small group (crashing the economy, removing oversight, removing national park maintenance, etc. makes it possible). Then give people just enough money and fear not to revolt. Feed them propaganda all day, find some enemies to direct their hate towards. I mean, it's pretty much Vance and Thiel's playbook, rule by 'wise' tech CEOs.

I'm genuinely afraid of what we're doing to our childrens' futures.

We're already far too balkanized as a country for a central dictatorship to make much sense in the long run. Especially when the money tap starts running dry. I think we'll just have an extremely weak federal government (or perhaps we will finally split.)

A centralized dictatorship is what held the actual Balkans together...

How's that working in the long term?

What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.

I was hinting at building an alternative system that would be resilient to this kind of tampering. Decentralization fanatics might be of use right now.

Can you sketch out a bit more how this could work?

The only thing I can think of would be.... weakening the federal government and giving up on the idea of centralized control outside of the military and the dollar. Which is exactly what republicans are doing now.

On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.

Every citizen of age is entered into a lottery. From this pool you will be selected, at random, to be assigned into a government management role (eg: president, law maker, justice) supported by staff. Any citizen, randomly in roles of power. No voting. Then you serve your role for 4 years and never get another one. Now the incentive is to do the least harm?

With precision no, I'm a newb, but a distributed system ala DHT, or git so that there is no single path of access.

I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a technology problem, nor is it one where solutions can be usefully informed by technology.

Sorry if I misjudged the way to approach this, I still think that the 'method' (or technology) matters because it influence the social and political layer too. How would you approach it, genuinely curious.

Decentralization is not the answer. Centralization is the answer.

Our global influence and wealth will almost certainly never be this high again. I think that's probably a very good thing for the globe in itself, but we can wreak a lot of destruction on our way out of power.

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