Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things I like ranting about, so I'll try not to do that.

I also live in an area that will never see high-speed internet. We were sold out by both the feds and our state legislators. You can argue that perhaps these government officials were misled or uniformed, but I remain dubious.

We were able to construct an interstate highway system. We were able to wire this country with electricity. We were able to wire it for telephones. The only reason we can't wire it with fiber is because of poor government management of eminent domain. We should kick most of those responsible out of office. To see a bunch of yahoos on TV telling me we need the road paved when most of their constituents don't have enough bandwidth to get high-quality instruction over the web? Or to work over the web? It's the Information Age, bozos. Something is wrong somewhere.

The worst part? I do not expect this to get fixed any time in the next couple of decades. Not only is it broken and hurting, but there's no political incentive to fix it. In fact the incentives run the other way.

Woz doesnt expect it to change in the US either. He is applying for Australian citizenship to get better broadband.

http://afr.com/p/technology/wozniak_likes_nbn_so_much_he_app...

Have Australia's outbound links improved much? Between Telstra and the latency connecting to the US, I thought that they had sub-par internet.

But I don't live there, so maybe I've been misinformed.

It's not too bad. There are a couple of pipes and routes, not all go through Telstra. I usually get about 225 ms pings between west coast Aust to west coast US (~9,500 miles). It's fine for regular internet including downloads, but gamers don't like it (I guess much of that latency is just down to plain old distance rather than bandwidth).

We also have good pipes to the main POPs in Asia.

So you're saying that the government, either knowingly or unknowingly, made decisions that, in the long run, adversely affected its citizens? No kidding.

'Cuz all those other countries that got it better, did so with a pure, laissez-faire market, free of any government intervention.

Like France.

Can you provide a single example of such a country?

Regardless, free-market capitalism is not predicated on freedom from government intervention; in fact, a government is necessary in order to protect the freedoms of the individual. That should be the purpose of the government: protecting the freedom of its citizens. Creating an environment that allows voluntary trade of goods and services to exist. Not picking winners or losers. Not imposing regulations that create monopolies. Not encouraging bad behavior by banks. Not rewarding bad decisions by auto manufacturers. Not being in bed with unions and corporations alike.

Here's how I think about it: What can one corporation do to a person? Not much. What can one government do to a person? Take away his freedom, imprison him, and / or kill him. Would I rather have flawed, power abusing individuals the power to impose their will over an entire country, or just their company? Would I rather centralize power in a way that is not accountable to anyone, or would I rather have power be decentralized and much more accountable to me?

No one is arguing for no government. But we are looking at the present state of affairs and the reasons we got here, and then looking at the past and seeing what happened then and why... and we're realizing that, for the most part, more government is bad.

Get back to me when you can point out a single successful country in the entire history of the world that actually operated on "Libertarian" or "Objectivist" principles.

Can you name one that's tried either of them and stuck with it?

If we are going to experiment with completely unproven political and economic systems on our own society, I vote for a socialist anarchy. First order of business: eliminate corporations. Immortal amoral virtual people cause nothing but trouble!

I really don't think anarchy is something you vote for. Is more like the base state that exists already, as long as you can reliably avoid the people in silly hats.

And how are you going to eliminate corporations if you have anarchy? You would have to enact legislation backed by force, because a lot of people are not going to agree. Is a bit like some of the arguments I have with mates where they say they want to institute anarchy and ban money. To which I usually point out that firstly, banning money sounds a lot like an imposed law and that secondly, irrespective of my views on monetary systems and that they can probably be improved upon, if anyone tried to ban money, the first thing I would do is start a currency just to annoy them.

[edit] My view on money is that eventually it will be obsolete for acquiring many everyday goods, but remain for luxuries for a very long time, but the point at which I expect this to start to occur is still a reasonably long way off. The key technology that could start bringing this about is a fully automated farming and delivery chain driven off solar. I am mostly keeping a close eye on Brazil as the most likely candidate for schemes like this to be tried first, given the rapid economic development, political climate, and existing food security schemes like that in the city of Belo Horizonte. http://www.unesco.org/most/southa10.htm

Note, I am not against money per-se as I think that it was a vast improvement on what it replaced, I just think that it doesn't have the lowest economic friction for acquiring any abundant items that have negligible ongoing costs.

Here is one way:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

Anarchy does not necessarily imply a society with a lack of structure or law.

"how are you going to eliminate corporations if you have anarchy?"

I think that's a different issue. Corporations exist because of the law. Corporations shield the owners from personal liabilities, including debt. It is the law which prevents me from going after the owner of a failed company which owes me money.

So if there were no law, or no enforcement of the law, there would be no companies.

If there were no law, people with guns would make laws and enforce them. Without the government, the people with the most guns are likely to be companies as they already have the manufacture sorted.

All the ideas of trying to bring about anarchistic statelike systems seem to neglect the issues that sometimes hierarchy is very useful and can also be extraordinarily deadly if used aggressively.

I'm making a very limited point. Corporations exist only because we, through the law, allow them to exist. Groups of people (with or without guns) are not corporations. Pablo Escobar ran a drug trafficking organization. No one calls that organization a "corporation."

We could, if we wanted to, and through the law, eliminate corporations. In that case, you could still have organization run as partnerships or other means. This does not require anarchy in order to achieve.

If there were pure anarchy, with no government, then we would de facto have no corporations. That because we wouldn't have property ownership, limited liability, contract enforcement, and the other aspects which make corporations "exist."

That's why I suggest that getting rid of "immortal amoral virtual [corporations]" can be done without anarchy.

If there were pure anarchy, I'd give it less than ten minutes before someone sets up a state. States are ideas, and are as hard to get rid of as anything from Pandoras box. You cannot truly ban things, you can only ever hope to make them temporarily unfashionable.

Mostly agreed. Somalia shows that isn't always so easy.

Icelandic Free State

Hmm, that's actually very interesting, but it sounds like it was much closer to a socialist anarchy, rather than libertarian capitalism.

The US between 1800 and 1824.

The forcible enslavement of human beings was permissible and enforced by law in multiple states until 1865. Although you could quibble about whether the seceding states counted as part of the US from 1860-1865, slavery remained legal in Maryland until the passage of its 1864 Constitution, and it remained legal in Kentucky until the passage of the 13th Amendment. There were also some states, like New Jersey, in which the acts of enslaving a person and importing an enslaved person were illegal but the manumission of existing slaves was not required.

And it wasn't just chattel slavery. A whole lot of the non-chattel laboring class consisted of indentured workers and debt peons, as well.

But, as David Graeber put it, that's the point. The people who invented the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of self-ownership, or natural ownership of one's "liberty", mainly did so because they wanted to explain how one could trade away that very liberty for money.

I wouldn't call a pseudo-feudal slave economy "successful".

Did I mention Objectivism? No. If you would like me to put words in your mouth let me know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia

Estonia (relatively) recently adopted policies supported by Milton Friedman. Along with that and being freed from the USSR, Estonia's economy is growing rapidly. Estonia adopted a flat tax rate that has been decreasing steadily over time. Estonia has extremely low public debt, free trade, a budget surplus, and had, in 2011, 5x the GDP growth of other EU countries (although they recently adopted the euro :( ). Estonia is doing quite well compared to the rest of the EU, despite all their damn economic freedom.

Regardless, how is "not many have tried it, therefore it doesn't work" an argument? On the other hand, one doesn't have to look very far back in history to see where too much government involvement into the economy (and therefore every day life) leads.

> Regardless, how is "not many have tried it, therefore it doesn't work" an argument? [...] If you would like me to put words in your mouth let me know.

You just did!

Demanding even a shred of evidence for a dubious claim is not the same as claiming that it doesn't work. It's a request for evidence, rather than just hot air.

As to Estonia, it's GDP per capita, is only 67% of the EU average and 17% of that of Norway, a socialist country. It does have high internet speeds, though, so you gotta get 'em props.

Sorry, that should read "39% of that of Norway".

> As to Estonia, it's GDP per capita, is only 67% of the EU average and 17% of that of Norway, a socialist country.

Estonia was annexed by the USSR. It's only been a free economy since 1990. Norway didn't have to deal with that.

More importantly, oil. Norway has oil. Being one of the largest exporters of oil in the world gives it a huge boost.

So I don't really get your point. Estonia still has one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, which is what really matters.

See, I want to agree with you, but I'm not sure.

I think that the future really is in wireles communications. What's the point of laying down fiber if in 10 years we can get wireless at the same speed?

Of course I'm assming that telco will actually compete in tthat domain... but considering how easy it is to switch serfices, I think it can only get more disruptive.

Wireless is a shared medium. There is a limit to how much you can push through the air.

Laying fiber once is long enough to last at least 100 years (based on what we know now). Should we not lay fiber just because wireless may eventually be as fast?

A good decision now is better than the best decision later.

And in those 10 years the amount of data you can mux into fiber pairs will have increased at an even greater pace. What do you think your wireless carriers are using as a backbone? fiber. The fact that speeds of wireless providers have caught up to the average speeds of landline ISPs in most areas is just a sign of the corruption of the cable companies, not that wireless is a superior medium for data transfer.

What's the point of laying down fiber if in 10 years we can get wireless at the same speed?

Sunspots.

Wireless will never be able to match the bandwidth of fiber. Today fiber can transmit close to 10 Tb/s through a single line. This is orders of magnitude more than will ever be possible with wireless.

Why are you expecting the rest of us to subsidize your internet service?

You could say that about every service in rural areas.

If you tried to go all the way with your argument, only a few urban centres would be left with decent infrastructure. And of course infrastructure needed to support those (parasitic) centres (what with food and the like).

A rather gloomy picture of society, if you asked me.

It would be a return to the Ancient Greek style of city-states which employ or enslave their surrounding rural population to feed the city-dwellers.

>You could say that about every service in rural areas.

Well, I do ask that question about every service in rural areas. There are advantages to living in the countryside - traffic, clean air, cheap housing. If I'm expected to subsidize rural broadband, why aren't rural people expected to subsidize my housing costs?

If cheap, fast broadband is really important to you, why don't you move somewhere it's available?

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