drewmcarthur

How is the on/offramp handled? That’s always been the biggest pain point of crypto from my perspective.

i just picked up an edition of “The Evolution of Cooperation” that has a foreword by richard dawkins. was cool to see his take, from writing the selfish gene, on axelrod’s contributions to the study of cooperation. by any chance, did your edition of his book mention those cooperation studies? dawkins said he updated a later edition in this foreward i just read

> democratic governance rather than ownership

yes and no, i’d call the distinction collective ownership. you can sell your shares (by quitting), or you can stay and participate democratically. but you can’t do both, and that protects your say in the company, preventing investors from overruling worker-owners.

> i have no influence

neither do the current workers. the issue isn’t retail investors, but the ones with board seats. if boards only had one seat for an investor, that’d be one thing, but usually workers only get a single seat, if any.

> protect current workers’ democratic governance

you could do this with preferred shares, voting shares, etc. investor shares are non voting, voting shares can only be owned by workers, etc. you still have to counter their concentration though.

the problem with comparing these things by their ticket prices is that markets don’t consider externalities. making and fueling a plane might allow me to sell tickets cheaper than a train, but only if we ignore the cost of the carbon output (since neither the flyer nor the airline pay for this, but society at large does)

i wonder how this comparison would shake out if you included a carbon tax that effectively measured the cost of these trips on the globe.

I would support patents that could only ever belong to the actual inventor.

> "Enshittification" describes the process by which something becomes degraded or corrupted.

I feel like many get this wrong, it’s not just “when things get worse”, the term was coined specifically around the phenomenon of investor-owned companies putting profit ahead of user values, leading to a degradation of service, combined with platform stickiness keeping users locked in.

That isn’t what’s happening here, if anything selling open source code without contributing back more closely aligns with enshittification, which is what these licenses prevent.

This is really a conversation around positive vs negative freedom. Is your freedom to profit off my code greater than my freedom to benefit from your modifications of my code?

this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.

that’s incredibly silly

signed, thank you for posting!

public means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use

exactly, the only reason to hire someone is because you’re making money off their work.

I appreciate this reply - you’re right direct democracy is inefficient, and that our governments aren’t exactly a model of efficiency either.

that being said, and I think you agree this is important when it comes to government, I think we deserve to have a say in decisions that affect us. Whether that’s direct democracy or a republic, not my point, although an important discussion to be had.

First step though, is pointing out that I don’t want to live in a top-down autocratic country, nor do I want to work for a top-down, autocratic company. Then we can talk about how a democratic workplace might work!

good point. why did all these countries become democracies in the first place? we should revert to autocracy /s

i agree companies shouldn’t have political sway, but why shouldn’t the place you spend so much time and effort for be democratically governed? what’s the argument that government should be, but industry shouldn’t?

that’s the whole basis of Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government”

well, only if you ignore the court rulings by the ICJ

> your corporate job isn’t a democracy

why not? shouldn’t it be?