The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
You don't. The average person ought to do simple work and produce children, select few of which will have talent and integrity. These few have and always will make all the difference.
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
I didn't mention the housing market? I was talking about anyone who produces goods (digital or physical).
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
> There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
I think the problem is not with renting but with letting owners hoard property (real estate or other) to profit from renting them out en masse, depriving others from ownership options. Also owners considering their property as something to do with as they want (exploit) rather than a duty of care. Best of both worlds for them: e.g. charge each month for software to pay for "ongoing development" and spend it on shareholders and/or features for growth but cut costs on support and maintenance... Or you know, rent out a moldy, drafty studio to a desperate intern who must move to Paris to work and doesn't have rich parents.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
>from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
> Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
It's the producer of the software that has the property rights, not the user.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
Not much software is really all that useful, let alone necessary, though. And only a little bit of that isn’t provided by one vendor or another as part of delivering whatever other actual service you were after (e.g. banking apps).
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
Reputation is the usual solution. You build a community and you know who to trust, like humans have always done.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
The algorithm has replaced following out of necessity. The following paradigm made sense when social media was something where you mainly connected with people you were friends with IRL and where media came from a small number of channels that could be browsed by one person (even this was already overwheling by the time cable hit hundreds of channels). There is simply no way to navigate the billions of pieces of content generated daily without an algorithm. There could be the exact thing you want out there, but how would you ever discover it?
I think trust and identity are fundamentally intertwined, for sure. I think it's also why trust can be easily gamed by posing as certain identity groups. It's a dark path taken to the extreme.
I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.
Anonymous reputation can turn on those who trust the reputable entity. Easy, though facile, examples are the romantic schemes used to defraud, more intricate are spies and so on.
If I can build reputation somewhere, I'm going to use the same account, but that account may not have my real name. Reputation incentivizes identity, but not necessarily association to a real identity.
The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).
I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).
That remains to be seen. Studies purporting to show the harms of social media are shaky at best. It could very well turn out to be more benign like TVs or violent video games (remember the pearl clutching around those in the early 2000s?).
It’s what users are addicted to. I did that with TikTok first time I installed it. Just swipe swipe watch swipe. Those like 15-30 seconds hits are addictive as hell. I deleted my account after an hour and haven’t touched it since, except the occasional video a friends sends a link to. Their algo is way better than Twitter or Meta algos.
True trust is earned. "Default trust" is not the same thing. But the two are often confused.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
I think earning trust often requires significant personal sacrifice. Institutions are made up of people, and I think that one of the outcomes of the web era is that it seems that fewer high talented folks find the motivation to do unglamorous, lower-remuneration jobs.
No pain. No gain. That too applies in the earned / sacrifice sense.
Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).
Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
Doesn't really undermine your point, but as a fun aside: Trusting Trust style attacks on compilers were (theoretically) solved by David Wheeler with "diverse double compiling".
Yes, good point. That's pretty similar to scientific falsifiability at least!
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
I think of how I lost trust and it's more along the lines of: "Wow, with all of this new information, I can see how institutions/experts/officials have been lying to me all along."
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Unpopular opinion: It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world. There's so much freedom in having the faith to say "I trust you that I need those brake pads". If I get screwed for $200 it just means I have $200 less to spend on some other junk I don't need. The scammer won't survive in the long run.
...you can make rules to stop this? The Dominion election fraud was more or less cast out of mainstream discourse with commercial damages law. If you expand this a bit (ONLY A BIT) farther, you'd expect a roughly linear scale of results.
It's not a very good paper, even though the author has reasonable credentials in Europe.
She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation."
This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests."
The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players.
Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging.
IMHO, it's the companies AND the government against the people.
The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?"
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
This is not worth reading, because it was not generated as part of a deductive process, where you start with some facts and work your way to some entailments.
Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc.
The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there.
Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
>> If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
> Those countries exist?
Yes. The US is one, others exist today as well.
> Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests.
Start by voting for the least objectionable politicians in the general election (local, state, and federal).
If you do not like those choices, remember this and vote in the primary (or primaries where allowed) for the least objectionable politicians.
If you do not like the choices in primaries, remember this and get involved in the selection process for the least objectionable political party.
Note the recurring theme of involvement in the representation process. Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
>Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
You just contradicted yourself. Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
>> Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
> You just contradicted yourself.
I did not. Please re-read what I wrote dispassionately.
> Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
This is a false dichotomy[0]. The US has had free and fair elections for at least 40 years. I wish I could confidently state a longer period. Some might include the 70's but few would include much of the 60's.
What the wealthy do in attempt to convince people they do not have agency, or that their involvement in representative government does not matter, is orthogonal to having it. I humbly recommend contemplating the difference.
> You're begging the question with respect to what is "free" and "fair."
Free: there are no longer Jim Crow laws[0], such as voting poll taxes[1].
Fair: each eligible voter whom casts a vote in US elections has it included in the vote tally (see below).
> In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Every eligible voter has the ability to cast their vote in one form or another. In extenuating circumstances, some votes will not be included. I am neither a constitutional nor civil rights lawyer, so will not attempt to clarify those situations beyond acknowledging they exist.
I will not further engage in this thread as my interpretation of your replies thus far is they are not based in intellectually honest discourse.
> Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests
If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it.
Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
"Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.
> notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
You sound like a religious fundamentalist. Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote?
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
It's a good thing I don't advocate for nihilism. You haven't asked what I advocate, which illustrates to me you're a dull, incurious person. And if you're seriously bringing up the "woke mind virus," I think that says all I need to know about you. I haven't even brought up matters of social justice. Many of the things I think are rather "unwoke" in many respects; however, if that's your paradigm, your brain is hopelessly broken. I don't particularly care that you have gotten "language" into legislation. Do you also have some patents in your name?
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
You will be lambasted for it, but you're fundamentally correct. Recall that the question was "What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?" If your response to that question is "just vote," you have missed the plot entirely. It is truly pathetic how naive that statement is. It's akin to still believing in Santa Claus.
I would say the statement was "Well, at least vote". And in local elections, that does make a difference.
In general, I think far too much attention is paid to single election cycles at the federal level. And I'm not sure why. The state you live in has significantly more effect on your experience with government, outlay of benefits, taxes, education and environmental policies than who holds the presidential office, for essentially all issues that matter.
In the rare case that a federal change affects you (likely a court decision, thanks to lame duck congress), states routinely step in, as we've seen recently.
The one exception to everything is that if you want _other_ states to live like _your_ state, then yeah - you better try to get the federal government aligned with your virtues. But why any sane person would want that is beyond me.
This is just the galaxy brain version of the position I am criticizing. You are not any less naive than the person who said "just vote." You're fundamentally missing the point. Corporations manipulate state and local elections as well, and the scope of what is possible is shaped by this. If your impulse during this political moment is to rally people to vote, all you are demonstrating is that you do not fully understand the system you live in.
America is as broken as it is because explicit Republican policy for 50 years has been "Don't let the government interfere with company activities" and Americans voted for that with all their might. Millions of registered democrats voted for Reagan, with his loud and clear "I'm going to make the government do less" policy, and his history of narcing on coworkers and friends to the "Commies are bad" witch hunt.
Empirically, people who think the government has a duty to protect it's citizens from corporate raiding have not shown up to vote. The US has had 2 years of total democrat control during my entire life, plus a decade.
For the most part it's people who are politically apathetic, as if letting the choice be made by only the most rabid political fans is a better option than making your mild opinion known. Or they swear that "both sides are the same" despite Congressional votes not being secret and "both sides" being trivially not the same on many very important issues.
Elections have consequences. We got exactly what we voted for.
Nearly all of this happened before the citizens united decision.
We study history in order to understand the present moment. So your question presents a false dilemma in an attempt to cut off historical analysis and blindly continue what you're doing without question. How is society actually shaped? If you believe it's by people simply "showing up," you are delusional.
I humbly disagree, at least at the local level. Get involved and you'll be surprised at how much you can do. Local clubs, like an Optimist Club or Lions Club volunteering for your community builds relationships. Many people involved are part of the community: business owners, politicians, accomplished/connected individuals, etc. Much of what affects you in a democracy is local and can be changed if you get involved. It is not just about checking some boxes every couple years.
First you can have democracy. Then separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature along with property rights and the rule of law.
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few:
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
You are seeing the first two as "concluded"? Apple is known for playing long games, especially now that they need to be careful due to threats of regulation, and studies about long COVID take a long time - we really don't have enough research yet to be sure and we're barely 2 years out of the pandemic.
I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
For the first, the prediction was "in the next few years." If we take "a few" as three, that would bring us to 2024-10-02, which was earlier this month. It could still happen someday, but didn't in the time frame of this prediction.
For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention.
And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?
>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables.
I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in.
Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares.
We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract.
Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar.
I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present.
As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid?
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
The insidious take over of security by the smart phone is what worries me the most. I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed.
Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
>I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
Where is this? For instance the IRS still allows you to file by mail[1], and it's unclear why you'd need a phone to go to a hospital or walk in clinic. As for needing a phone to access your company networks, I don't how it's deserving of outrage anymore than needing a laptop to do a modern desk job.
That's why I asked OP for where he lived, and qualified my point about the IRS with "for instance". I'm not going to do an exhaustive search of all countries to validate the claim.
I understand your concern, but I think it's overly simplistic to frame this as a zero-sum tradeoff between convenience and security/freedom. Smartphones have undoubtedly made interacting with government services more accessible and efficient - especially for marginalized communities, rural populations, and individuals with disabilities.
That being said, I'm not convinced that access to government services has been "completely privatized" as you claim. Governments often partner with private companies to develop and provide these services, and there's usually some level of regulatory oversight in place. This collaboration has led to some really valuable innovations, like online portals for tax filing and telemedicine.
The Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security is still relevant, of course. But maybe we should also consider the flip side: by resisting technological change, we risk getting left behind. Finding a balance between convenience, security, and individual rights is the real challenge.
Rather than sounding the alarm about an "insidious takeover," perhaps we should focus on the practical steps we can take to ensure our rights are protected. Advocating for open standards, strengthening regulatory frameworks, and investing in digital literacy programs would be a good start. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion about this, rather than resorting to hyperbole.
I stand by the idea that it is insidious. It’s one thing for our governments to ensure access is secure, it’s entirely another to assume we all have smartphones and have aligned ourselves with Apple or Google. Being a digital serf is our new reality and we did it willingly. If we had to start up our Ford to access a government website it would be ridiculous but having to have your phone at hand is just as bad. Google and Apple both know exactly when and where you accessed a government service and stand as a gatekeeper to doing so. It is by definition insidious.
Plenty of people when I lived in Texas 25 years ago who would be pretty easy to get onboard with privatizing access to government services. Complaints about the DMV, for instance, are eternal. School vouchers were and continue to be hot in many influential circles, with people wanting to get rid of the government services entirely in favor of privatized ones. Pro-privatization, small-government ideas have been WILDLY popular since at least Reagan.
Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
>And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
> Governments are increasingly outsourcing all kinds of processes to tech companies. And if a tech company operates in the name of a government, it should be as accountable as the government. I call this “the public accountability extension.” It sounds simple, but it would be a huge game changer. Right now, as governments outsource more and more critical governmental functions to tech companies, they also offload governmental accountability.
I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet.
In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.
If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.
Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.
For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
I would generally agree - but effectively, government does have control of the internet, at least the cables that run underground in their portion of the world, and even moreso the bits and bytes that travel along those wires that travel into and out of their territory.
Wireless and satellite shoots a rather big hole in that ownership model, but not completely, the concept of air space is a thing, as well as maritime. Things get muddy when you extend out into space of course, but most internet is distributed by wire + signals on the ground rather than from satellite, might not be able to argue that to much of an extent.
Then there's the arguability of whether or not government(s) own their people - I think governments today worldwide truly believe in that position wholeheartedly. I certainly don't think they do, and government(s) ought to think twice about that position if you were to ask me.
> For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.
Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued.
>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere.
Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed?
The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.
Why not? The EU has some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet and they seem to be the only coalition that are actively legislating against big tech.
Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.
So, the question is: "What can be done to put democratic entities back in charge" - supposedly wrestling control from the hands of "companies". And as an answer, she talks about war in Ukraine, as performed by US government. It's not even tangentially related to the question asked, how does it makes any sense?!
Then, in the next question: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information." What are "independent experts", where would the come from? Academia? NGOs? How really "independent" will they be? WHo will establish this independence and ensure it? It looks like quest for power - those guys do not deserve power, take power from them and give it to us, because we're the Experts, we deserve it!
Then: "There are no standards or reporting obligations requiring companies to say how much energy or water they’re using or plan to use." - why should they? It's their private business, why should they disclose this data to anyone?
Then Cambridge Analytica thing again. All political campaigns have been used behavioral data to get out the vote and influence results, but of course only for some campaigns it is extremely nefarious.
All in all, extremely sloppily done justification for grabbing power to control speech and development of digital economy, by people that do not have any justification for it and use "democracy" as if they own it, and only when they are in control it is "democracy" but if somebody else is allowed to play the same role they do it's "dangerous" and "harmful".
I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.
Look, pretty soon you are going to have to choose either left or right accelerationism. There is no in between. Acceleration is occurring whether you want it to or not.
That was one of the worst written articles in terms of form, and the worst overall pitch, that I've read in a long time. It reminded me of a whiteboard of disconnected concepts that one might come up with when brainstorming for article support while using random association.
Besides lacking logic and therefore honesty in terms of why anyone should support her ask, the author is nakedly partisan and the ask is rank in its authoritarianism. Which aren't persuasive characteristics when pitching for more authority.
Either the writing should get better, or if it can't because the premise is horrible and dishonest, then at least learn to lie and cajole with more concision.
A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone.
We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it.
Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.
It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.
Tech companies have successfully weaponized "the algorithm" as a shield of plausible deniability.
Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible.
But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it.
Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower.
The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans.
We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta.
The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example.
And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.
We imported a Member of European Parliament, from a place with a sclerotic and insignificant tech industry, to tell us how to sabotage our robust and awesome tech industry. No thanks!
Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of companies. I'm hearing less these days about startups disrupting incumbents, and I'm hearing more about incumbents entrenching their gains. Even when it comes to career choices, it seems these days that more young people are opting for the Leetcode grind in hopes to join a FAANG or another high-paying Silicon Valley firm instead of starting a company. After all, it's hard to start a company in a garage when renting a home with a garage is prohibitively expensive for many people.
My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it.
While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors).
The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm.
Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'"
This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant.
Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!"
This is an interesting discussion, no doubt. But no one questions this is the case. Yes corporations grow in power and reach and are taking on responsibilities previously held by states.
I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies.
Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it?
Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
There are two important differences between corporations (even non-for-profit ones) and the government.
The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it.
The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone").
These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
Regarding point 1, I would argue that citizens have more of a say in how the corporations operate, (and what corporations for that matter) as their say occurs every time they pay or not pay or engage into a commercial contract, which is much more often than once every 4 years.
As any company reaches scale, they will begin to have negative externalizes due to that scale. It is rational to address these externalities.
The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who:
- Have much greater scale
- Are more opaque
- Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives
- Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate capture---negating the fundamental point of the argument.
Tech companies (in spite of all of their warts) are at least promoting the free flow of information. This (free thought and expression) is the bedrock of every successful culture in history. Moreover, loss of these has been the downfall of almost every one of these cultures.
Examples:
- Late Ming Dynasty China (16th-17th centuries)
- Late Ottoman Empire (18th-19th centuries)
- Fall of the roman empire
- Tokugawa era in Japan
- Ancient Greece after the execution of Socrates.
- Golden Age of Islam (9th to 10th centuries)
Pretty much all of these examples were cases where the political class enacted controls that prevented challenges to government orthodoxy and/or becoming more isolationist, and other avenues to preventing/controlling free speech in the name of "better social cohesion" and preventing bad influences (...cough...misinformation...).
So I cannot more vehemently disagree with the authors precept (especially since she is likely in a position to benefit from it)
> The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate captur
The author has chosen to write about, and I quote "How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance"
This does not include, and is not obligated to include, any other factors that might destabilize governance.
As for the claims of virtue re: tech companies, I think they are overbroad and overpositive. There are several examples of tech companies violating any of the virtues you mention, and going head to head with government regulation to the determent of us all. This is not to say tech companies lack virtue, just that they may not all be the paramount morality that you seem to describe.
Yes, the author is not obligated to include that, but nor is the reader obligated to ignore obvious evidence of her hypocrisy and self interest. And when a creature surfaces from the morass of governemnt bureaucracy to complain about the threat of something much less ominous and powerful than itself, that hypocrisy is certainly something I will point out.
Is the HCAIP funded by newspaper or TV companies, by any chance?
There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter).
The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies.
And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
This is basically spelled out in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Same stuff over and over again. Corporate monopolies accrue incredible undemocratic power. They must be owned by the people and their workers.
capitalist countries literally starved other countries outside the imperial core. gaza is in famine today to satisfy the lust for control of world markets.
churchill starved india. the list goes on.
the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
This isn't some accident, it is the stated aim, and result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians.
For those who do not know this, in the USA, our choice is not just between government controls and corporate controls. There is a third element, one that is supposed to be primary. We are supposed to live in a place where we people enact laws. This is not the case. The simplest test is simply to ask "Cui Bono". Who benefits from the laws enacted? For example, do the laws enacted favor drug companies and help them charge $1000 per month, or do the laws help keep drug cost under control? Do the laws enacted ensure that workers earn a living wage, or do they ensure that corporations can charge whatever price they want and pay as little as possible?
What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
This is not rocket science. And it is stupid. At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.
We, the people, need to start enacting laws that benefit the people. First and foremost is one that reverses Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision by the Supreme Court represents the height of incompetence or stupid.
Why is this not happening? Are the opinions and situation of common Americans ongoing and visible? Or does the NYT cater to wealthy corporate advertisers? Does it feature articles like "What house can you buy Portland, Maine with $1.5 million" while the number of homeless in Portland, Maine is staggering. Is the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (aka Amazon) really going to talk about corporate excesses? Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?
This idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with your economic policy is obviously a paid plant is painful. I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions. Seek out what they think they mean.
The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans). Even if I agree with you, your rhetoric costs you an ally.
> This is not rocket science
No, its economic policy and its arguably much much more complex than rocket science. We’ve been thinking about rockets for about 100 years, political economy for about 2500.
> I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies.
Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:
"Up until around 32 weeks," and not all with medical diagnoses. And this is under current law. Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?
If a given abortion is in fact murder, and I have some power to stop it (through politics or otherwise,) I feel uncomfortable inasmuch as I am allowing murder, and I feel it ethically necessary to resolve the discomfort. This moral consideration does of course balance against many others, including the preventable deaths of mothers that the OP highlighted.
Looking from outside of US its quite confusing how society of the free the country of libertarians… even makes this debatable. Its quite literally commanding someone what they can or cannot do about their body.
Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.
Abortion is the ultimate debate; with no clear answer from any biological, moral, legal, ethical, philosophical, or even religious clause, and science leaning the "wrong" direction depending on social "norms".
Social norms are friction against the ability to be honest with peers - that are nearly all going to be incentived to lie about their actual opinion, and project the opposite (but vote the way they are told anyway)
> The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans).
You've been duped [1].
There is an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.
There is a well understood principle hhere too called the alienation of labor [2]. To summarize, without pushback workers will become increasingly estranged from and unable to produce the products they produce.
This is ultimately bad for the corporations that are exploiting them and the society as a whole because if nobody has any money, then there are no customers for your business. Over recent decades we've extended this by invoking debt. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt, credit card debt. These are temporary patches to a system that is fundamentally exploitative.
> an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.
This is not an honest summary of the literature.
Every recent increase in the minimum wage in America has produced zero to positive local employment effects [1][2][3][4]. Per your source, however, it also causes (non-monetary) inflation [5]. Moreover, we find in other countries that there is a limit to the tactic: in France, minimum-wage increases significantly decrease employment [6].
So no, people expressing scepticism towards minimum-wage increases are being duped no more than those being told it's corporate propaganda. They're asking legitimate questions that have nuanced answers. (It's also reasonable to ask if rural Alabama might have a different minimum wage from New York City.)
1/ it pulls data from Uber eats. Many restaurants added “vanity” service charges to bills to provide visibility to the law changes. Instead of increasing menu prices, they add a mandatory service charge. I don’t know if this is accounted for in Uber eats takeout/delivery pricing
2/ most of the restaurants are fast food chains (think McDonalds). Full service business is included, but the sample size is much smaller. Even if it’s full service, the user isn’t “serviced” as these are delivery/takeout prices.
3/ the analysis is only national chain restaurants.
You didn't actually argue against the point though. How is it obvious that raising the minimum wage benefits all Americans? The people making wage already don't "have any money" yet the economy is fine anyways since they don't make up the majority of spending. Debt has been high forever.
Marx is right, the only thing that matters is labor + capex to create products / services. If rich people want to move money around buying expensive crap that's marginally better and isn't too much harder to produce, we should encourage that. As of now, most of the S&P 500 focuses on producing products for the common man or other businesses. This is exactly what you'd want to see and I don't see why we should rock the boat and reduce the total labor spent on the needs of the average person (minimum wage labor).
> if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions
Why should I? One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality.
The time for "assume good faith" is long, long, long gone. These arguments are not in good faith. And I can rule out good intentions when you can't even have a sincere argument about it and lie through your teeth, knowingly and deliberately about it.
For the sake of argument: if a foreign power would want to destabilize the US there are few better ways than promoting ideas like the above as much as possible.
If compromise isn't possible on any issue because the other side is evil incarnate and completely unreasonable - well that doesn't leave many nice places where a democracy can go.
"And why should I change? If I change, I loose everything! I loose my self! Who in their right mind would accept such a fate? That's why..." - Amalthus, circa 4058 Alrest.
It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.
Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position. At best you might get some likes on social media though, which can feel nice.
Most of the web consists of this, so if that's what you prefer, I guess it's just going with the flow.
As anodyne as this post appears, there is real brilliance is linking the inability to convince others of your point with the inability to imagine other people's point of view. Just wanted to thank you for this one.
> if you ... simply fail to understand the opposition's position ... your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining
The one where it is okay to be absolutely, and objectively, dishonest, to get what you want?
When you have people who say "I don't actually care if your position is correct", your position that it is somehow my obligation to cater and pander to them, and that it is a failing of mine to not be willing to do so is farcical.
This is literally idiocracy in the making.
If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.
> One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality
Doesn't that increase the chances that one side consists of a significant number of good people who have simpy been duped? How does demonising them help?
Many people think incest, rape, and vitally-risky abortions total something more than 7% of abortions. Not remotely close.
Knowing that the vast abortions are preventable and essentially extremely ethically lazy birth control may also be a factoid worth "evangelizing".
Embryonic stem cells only come from four to five day old blastocysts or younger embryos. These are eggs that have been fertilized in the laboratory but have not been implanted in a womb.
Ironically, 'science' and 'religion' actually oppose each other as to when "life" begins. Which ironically neither side can even cognitively process, because they are so blinded ideologically.
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people.
There are people trying to abolish the minimum wage in the US.[1] "Abolishing the federal minimum wage would help small businesses. Some economic theory suggests it would lower labor costs, expand the worker pool, raise profits, and reduce costs for consumers, as businesses tend to pass off the burden onto them. Also, ending it would delay the automation revolution. At a time in which ChatGPT – the AI chatbot that answers questions – is all the rage, more jobs get lost to machines every day (Burton & Wolla, 2021). The first ones to go are minimum-wage jobs. “Increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers,” according to Professors Lordan of the London School of Economics and Neumark of UC Irvine (Lordan & Neumark, 2015). Cost-effective measures such as AI and self-service counters become less appealing when one isn’t forced to pay workers more."
Plus, it's weakly enforced. "Wage theft" is bigger than burglary, larceny, and robbery combined.[2] That doesn't include misclassification as an "independent contractor".
Their parents' basement, usually. Low skilled jobs are frequently stepping stones or temporary respites on the way to better jobs. But if you yank them out of their reach, by jacking up the pay and so forcing the employers to either hire more productive workers or automate, the same people would be earning the true minimum wage - $0. And unlike the previous case, they would never gain any experience and use it to get the next, better job.
I hope you're aware not only youth work on minimum wage jobs. Some of them are not going to get better jobs (and aren't on their way there), they are stuck in those jobs and you are proposing they shouldn't ever see a raise because if not those jobs will cease to exist.
I'd like to see some hard data and sources for this assumption, it's quite a big one and since you started the argument with the unrealistic view that those jobs are only stepping stones to better ones or performed by youngsters with access to their parents' home I cannot trust your argument prima facie.
>I'd like to see some hard data and sources for this assumption,
"prove that this illegal thing would be good systematically at a macro-economic level when it being illegal has not shown to be good"
>this assumption, it's quite a big one and since you started the argument with the unrealistic view that those jobs are only stepping stones to better ones or performed by youngsters with access to their parents' home
Fuck, ya got me. Let's try the opposite: lets give economically vital careers to homeless babies... that makes a lot more sense.
That is where they live now, and are told they aren't allowed to work, or else their substituent welfare money they are dis-afforded (against their collective interests long term).
They can be something, and feel something, than the federal definition of "so low its illegal"
It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it (gun argument!?) and the border is open (but not for guns???).
> It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it?
Hm. That suggests an idea. A higher minimum wage for illegal workers.
Employers get a choice. Verify immigration status with E-Verify/RealID, and pay at least minimum wage. Or don't, and pay at least twice the minimum wage.
Offer sizable rewards for reporting wage theft. 3X penalty at least. Jail if the total stolen passes the felony threshold.
Now that would stop illegal aliens from taking low-end jobs in the US.
What percent of those drugs exist explicitly because they can charge high prices for them? Are companies going to continue to invest countless millions developing drugs they have no chance to recoop?
I'd argue everyone benefits from a world where cures exist but are expensive, when the alternative is everything that exists is affordable, but progress halts.
This view is a bit too simplistic when the "countless millions" is often paid by taxpayers. Taxpayers pay the company to develop a drug, and then the company gets to seek profit by maximally exploiting taxpayers who paid for the drug.
We don't need to forcefully regulate drug companies, all we have to do, as taxpayers, is ask for something in return for our tax dollars. "We will pay to develop your drug, but then we get to regulate the price, and you'll still make a reasonable profit. That's the deal, take it or leave it." No force, no compulsion, just us taxpayers asking for something in return for our dollars and coming to an agreement before handing over our dollars.
Also, the prohibition on letting Medicare negotiate drug prices could be seen as taxpayer funded drug development, assuming that money were used to fund drug development rather than enrich shareholders.
> pharmaceutical and biotechnology sales revenue increased from $534 billion to $775 billion between 2006 and 2015
> worldwide company-reported R&D spending, most of which went to drug development (rather than research) ... $89 billion in 2015 dollars
> During the same period, federal spending, which funded a greater amount of basic research relative to industry, remained stable at around $28 billion
So only ~11% of total revenue was being reinvested, mostly into drug development.
And basic research was funded largely by federal spending.
Drug development is a pretty critical component of getting a drug to the consumer, unless you don't consider completing human clinical trials and receiving FDA approval to be valuable
it is a question of who is going to subsidize global pharma R&D?
same drug costs $10k in US is sold for $5k in EU and $10 in India.
The biggest question is: Why should US consumer subsidize pharma R&D so that pharma can sell it globally and hoard profits in Switzerland?
note: all pharma companies are incorporated in a way to pay de-minimus tax in US/EU/Asia via transfer pricing schemes and hoard all extra profits in Switzerland because of Swiss laws taxing licensing IP only at 15%
example:
1. Pharma, Inc sells drug for $10,000 in US
2. it licenses IP from Swiss entity and swiss entity charges it $9999 royalty
3. Pharma, Inc pays US tax on $1 of profit at 35%
4. Swiss entity records $9999 profit and pays 15% tax
so US consumer is screwed in the end.
US consumer think twice: do you want to pay $10,000 for a drug + $20,000 in insurance premium+copay when you can travel to India/Egypt/Turkey/Germany and get the same treatment for the same brand name drug for 1/10 (or 1/1000 of cost).
We need to talk about geographical arbitrage of healthcare costs more
The rest of the world. Including many countries host to major drug companies.
Somehow I don’t think they’ll let those companies’ R&D departments starve if the US stops paying $700 for things that cost other countries $120, or what have you.
I remember reading that part of the problem is that Medicare/Medicaid is not allowed to actually negotiate prices with drug companies but must pay the list price. That seems ridiculous and a legally sanctioned way to basically milk the government and co-insurance payers is money. It appears to have been addressed by the Biden administration though: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/10/22/biden-harris-admin...
How many medicines are required just to treat issues brought on by unrepentant greed in other industries? Does Ozempic treat obesity and diabetes or does it treat the lack of regulation in food quality and advertising? How much cancer is an outcome of greed in exchange for disregarding public health, how much depression is the outcome of greed and economically-produced hopelessness, on and on.
How have so many people lost their hearts and minds to this tail-chasing madness?
The comment we're both responding to is about the validity of modern pharmaceutical research and what kinds of medicines they produce as an outcome of US federal government investment. "Before industrialization" is over 400 years ago.
None of these statements relate to the comment thread you're responding to IMO. Are you saying that the median human today is "vastly" "healthier" because of medications developed by American pharmaceutical companies, that they are "healthier" because of medications created to alleviate the outcomes of pollution/greed? What point of the discussion said humans are not healthier than they once were?
"What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people"
Can you give a source on this one, you state it like it's something obvious and studied but I don't follow? I'm curious how this policy doesn't result in increased off shoring in a world where USA doesn't control 100% of resources, and a theoretical world this would result in inflation normalizing against the increased monetary supply.
In Australia, the minimum wage is 16.12 USD. Minimum wage employment is not vulnerable to off-shoring (shelves must be packed in the local warehouse), but is to automation.
Looking at a few studies online, it seems as though there is no long term correlation between increasing the minimum wage and inflation.
I think you hit my points nail on the head. Automation is the upper bound, I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage, which I think a different comment or brought up in relation to McDonalds.
Just so it's clear I think if there is a legal solution to this it's on taxing the high end of incomes, inheritances, and capital gains, not the low end.
> I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage
If there were a long term inflationary effect, then industries particularly sensitive to minimum wage costs should have significantly higher prices in Australia compared to the US. That doesn’t appear to be the case; perhaps they absorb the additional costs in the profit margin. It can’t have no effect, but it’s clearly not as simple as you were implying.
There are offshore clothing manufacturers that arrange the clothes on racks and pack them in the containers.
Once the package reach the destination they do directly on display. This "saves" the company from having to pay someone higher wages for arranging clothing displays.
The companies will always chose lower costs wherever they can get away with.
Nobody pays $7.25/hr in 2024, as nobody will work for that. McDonald's here is paying $15/hr and in the past 10-15 years have completely rebuilt their stores and kitchens and preparation processes to reduce labor needs.
From that link, "that is only 0.15% of the working population" and nearly half of those workers are teenagers, i.e. it's a first-time, likely part-time job.
I stand by my claim that (essentially) nobody is working for minimum wage in 2024.
these are people specifically choose to work under the poverty limit to be eligible for safety net welfare: EBT/SNAP/WIC/Medicaid and then work for cash unrecorded.
like they work 4hr/day and accumulate ~1000 hours/year and then work off w2-payroll
The 7.25 rate was set in 1996.
Adjusted for inflation, 7.25 is worth 15 today.
There are thousands and thousands of jobs paying less than 15/hr.
In NC, where I live, the average wage for an entry-level crew member at McDonalds is $12.16, effectively 20% lower than the original purchasing power of the 1996 minimum wage.
Agree on all points, but there’s on crucial thing you’re missing. The government was always created BY rich people FOR rich people. All the founding fathers were rich or well connected to rich people. Some owned slaves. Most countries are like this anyway, only a few very notable exceptions.
Singapore comes to mind, their government focuses extremely on improving life for the common person.
Well they're certainly not improving life for people who will lose their housing predicated on heterosexual marriage if they transition, or attempting to murder anti-corruption activists.
Tell me explicitly what the difference between 1 person and 100 people are. What happens to their rights when you go from 1 to 1,000,000, what you can strip from them when you go from 1 to 335,893,238.
Enumerate specifically at which number rights begin to be eliminated, and why. Be careful, you might not like what the people actually think of you when you strip their rights from them. But since you are so adamant about the "stupidity" of Citizen's United, you ought to have an actual stance here. There is a number here, tell me, and everyone else here, what that number is, we don't even need to touch the rights if you are too skittish to answer.
"We, the people" is a phrase that means something very specific, take a bit of caution that you are not using it nefariously.
generally i share your sentiment but your arguments are rather weak - let me play the devil's advocate here:
- drug prices: research is expensive and assuring safety by extensive testing is even more expensive.
- minimum wage: if wages are higher then many jobs won't be economically sustainable any longer and then the former employee is becoming unemployed plus still sustained service are more expensive now.
- house prices: first of all it's not being homeless vs owning a home. secondly lower house prices, less incentive to build, fewer houses, more expensive apartments, more homeless people.
the problem is we try to solve problems with money. not going to work any longer. worked for a while while the fabric of society was still sufficiently in tact. isn't any more. we have to ask spiritual questions. yes, i know it's a trigger word. but that's how it is. you wanna know what society is now about - spend a day on instagram. a majority of the youth seems to be obsessed with clips about guys punching each other in the face or stomach while keeping a straight face. it's no longer - mommy i want to be an astronaut when i'm old - it's mommy i want to fight, bully and be able to keep a straight face when someone kicks me in the guts while someone else films it and i hope some equally shallow dame sees it and we found a family based on values i learned from some sun glasses wearing guy on tiktok who talks like a retarded drill sergeant.
We don't have consensus around the solution. Also, look at our current election. The problem isn't corporate money in politics. It's just money in politics.
> Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?
>At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.
I some times wish that were actually the case. Revolutions don't happen until people can't afford bread. So they're drip feeding us just enough to keep things on that edge. In a lot of ways life is cheaper and easier now for consumers overall. Everyone can afford a big screen TV, smartphone, etc. Consumer goods are kept at that level. But assets have simultaeneously reached levels that are completely unattainable for 90% of people. They want to keep us in this "constant now" where there are no thoughts of retirement or wealth or ownership of anything. Just a nonstop struggle to keep the lights on in a way that's just bareable enough to not rock the boat.
>What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Really? I imagine that a very large percentage of the voting public, almost certainly a majority, benefits more from cheap services than they do from the minimum wage. The median weekly wage in the US is ~$1150, which is 4 times as much as someone would make from working 40 hours at the federal minimum wage. There is some upward pressure on wages overall when the minimum wage is raised but my understanding is it's negligible beyond a narrow threshold. So most Americans wouldn't see any personal benefit from doubling the federal minimum wage (making it higher than at any point in US history, adjusted for inflation). On the other side of the equation, nearly everyone purchases labor intensive services from people working near minimum wage, at least occasionally.
None of that is to say the minimum wage is a bad policy, but in the same way most people probably wouldn't want to pay a sales tax that raised the earned income tax credit, many people would be upset about the higher prices that followed a minimum wage increase. That's basically what happened during the pandemic; a very tight labor supply resulted in wages going up dramatically at the bottom end of the income ladder and the resulting inflation was very unpopular.
I don't disagree with, say, reversing Citizens United but really what you list here is a bunch of symptoms.
> Why is this not happening?
Because Americans, as a whole, have zero class consciousness, thanks the hyper-individualism of liberalism and possibly the most successful propaganda campaign in history ie the Red Scare.
We have people who unironically will champion for the likes of Jeff Bezos to pay less in taxes and will identify more with Bezos than their fellow worker.
The wealthy and the corporations embarked on an intentional journey to destroy class consciousness and to buy the government. It's fascism, pure and simple. They even say it out loud [1]:
> "This is a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now. There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things," Vance said,
This isn't fringe. This is from Peter Thiel's alleged blood boy [2] and VP candidate, JD Vance. What did Yarvin say?
> "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia," Yarvin says in the clip.
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Not a great example. The evidence of its effectiveness is mixed, and the burden of the wage increase hits small businesses early. The Walmarts of the world are better equipped to cope.
Maybe it's a good idea, maybe not; I'm just saying it's not obvious.
Or, how about a fourth way? Maybe government is not supposed to replace mom and dad? Where in the us constitution does it say the role of government is to be a charity, or leverage in some Marxist struggle?
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Source on that. Higher federal minimum wage causes low profit, manufacturing jobs to move off shore. The higher the federal wage the more automation becomes a higher ROI. The more those in poverty have to spend, the more competition for scarce resourcing (e.g. housing), and the more housing inflates in cost.
Simply raising federal minimum wage doesn't necessarily benefit all.
You could deal with that through subsidy. Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out. Free market lovers might hate this but effectively the government does this anyway by definition for everything provided for free.
> Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out
This is a model for shit labour productivity à la the Soviet Union or Argentina. Much better to have no minimum wage and a UBI, to avoid distorting your industry through your wage policy.
Why? Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government. Maybe the sub is based on productivity rather than wage. $ per tonne.
> Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying everyone who has tried something like this wound up with a sclerotic industry. At a certain point, you wind up with the subsidy grantor deciding who can and cannot participate in the industry. Those already in don't want competition. The rest follows quite simply. (Moreover, your export market gets constrained because foreign countries will overcorrect undoing your subsidy with tariffs.)
We do this sort of thing in America. It's why we have booming shipbuilding and steelmaking industries.
Yes because companies are totally unchecked and there's no regulation at all and because of this we have governance that brings us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and bullshit wars and tampons in boys bathrooms and under lock and key at Walgreens. Good grief. This is not the kind of thing technical people or hackers want to read.
Is that a generalisation about the readership or to content here, or a bitter observation of lack of concern by the readership? There are multiple interpretations possible here.
And? By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. For reference, here’s how it describes itself…
“To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?”
Can you elaborate? Quick scan of her Wikipedia entry and top Google hits doesn’t indicate an authoritarian bent. They all list her as a center-left progressive.
I watched Julian Assange’s recent talk at the Council of Europe and his testimony on the insanity that the U.S. Government put him through [1]. This makes me come to a different conclusion than the article.
> In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments.
Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders.
For US companies and its citizens, trading stock enough to send a message and make a difference is in the hand of the top X% of people. Those same people don’t have to worry about the same things we do. Their income tier makes them operate fundamentally differently. When you have a team of lawyers on call you can get a lot done quickly. For us companies depend on us deeming it not worth our time and money for a chance to right a wrong. On top of that companies are at times misusing or breaking the law for decades before they are taken to justice. And that justice is more and more just the cost of doing business.
I could go on and on, but I would rather face down one tyrant than an army of them. But the way things are going, we might be facing both soon.
Democratic governments have some form of accountability to those elected, if none other than periodic elections. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.
Does government not act within self interest? The self interest of the company is to provide the information that people want. The self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians. And who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations.
I understand companies act within their own self interest. But the problem is when we provide government with enormous power it becomes within the self interest of companies to influence government rather than provide value to society.
> self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians
Now expand your model to one where the government, politicans and citizens aren't monoliths.
> who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations
It's a pertinent game for everyone. That's the point of democracy. It's still a profitable game in a dictatorship. It's just that while democracy gives a peanut-gallery seat to even the most disinterested citizen, autocracies hoard those seats for the deserving.
How do you end up in a position where governments aren't monoliths? You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths.
> You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths
“State control” isn’t a monolithic lever. You can have a theoretically powerful but weak state if power is properly shattered. This is the lost art of designing democracies. (Not just throwing elections at every problem.)
This is the current situation in the United States. The problem with this is that when you have shattered/distributed state power, they work to achieve opposing objectives. On one hand we have massive subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry while at the same time spending millions on research in renewable energy. Recently we had huge subsidies to growing tobacco while also funding programs to stop people from smoking. This is ineffective and inefficient use of money. Now, this would happen with private companies as well, but the difference is that private companies have no means to force individuals to pay for their costs the way state government does. The state can threaten you by means of force or jail to pay for both of these conflicting endeavors through taxation. Whereas you only give money to private enterprises voluntarily, where you find value in their goods or services.
They operate under the constraint of my ability to take my business elsewhere. This gives me 1000x more leverage over companies than my vote will ever have over the government. The worst customer service nightmare i have ever been through is nothing compared to the time the IRS incorrectly calculated that I owed them thousands more in taxes. My vote does not constrain them in the least.
Because companies make decisions based on who has the most money. 90% of Americans have basically no control of those decisions. And companies interfere with democratic control of the government. Getting things out of the way of democracy seems good to me.
Again, how would that be different if government had the power to control information? Its human nature to do things that benefit yourself. At least if its not centralized then you have competition which gives people a choice of where they want their information coming from.
We already know that organizations (whether public or private) eventually devolve into a bureaucracy where the goal is the growth of the organization itself.
We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely.
It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.
The state is the primary means by which wealth is siphoned from the public to private interests. You see it with lobbyists, Covid scams, politicians amassing millions on a 200,000 salary. The state is the enemy. If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. In 100 years we’ll look back at the carcass of the nation state the way we do the Catholic Church.
Wow. I feel the complete opposite. The state is the only thing that can fix things like climate change. Public companies cannot have ethics, they only focus on profits.
Not all are created equal. I do get the impression that the Nordic states maintain responsible governance and generally have a vested interest in the success of their people. But most Western states are a malignant plague of cronyism and theft with no hope of recovery. We are genuinely in the phase “steal as much as you can before the show is over”. Taxes will continue to rise, austerity will increase, and the state will oversee the continued transfer of wealth from the public to its corrupt benefactors.
Profits mean providing value to individuals. People more and more are valuing sustainability and spending their money to buy sustainable products. It might not be happening where you are yet, but in Seattle there are huge markets for plastic free goods, compostable packaging, farmers markets and locally sourced foods.
You seem to be suggesting that without the state companies would find it harder to extract wealth from the people. I really can't understand why this would be the case?
Any sufficiently large company could simply build their own private army and enforce whatever "law" they wanted. Essentially, this would result in a Mafia society which would seem way worse (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia).
No offense but this feels like a politically immature opinion. You could say "this implementation of the state". I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils? Those types of states would explicitly NOT transfer wealth from public to private interests, since private property would not exist.
Liberal Nation States + Capitalist Corporations are kind of the same evil in different clothing. They are undemocratic. You either have capital and control the corporation, or you don't. You either have political capital and control the state and its violent mechanisms of control, or you don't.
> If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it.
Could you explain to me what you think the difference would be between:
1. Living in an authoritarian city where the state has total control over your day-to-day life.
2. Living in an authoritarian company town where the company has total control over your day-to-day life.
(If your response is "the free market" please explain why we wouldn't just see anti-competitive behavior between the corporations in order to mutually supress workers and consolidate their control?)
I would say the main difference between (1) and (2) is the nature of the compulsion.
If my company town sucks and I’m talented, I can find a better company town.
But with the state, such agency is either high friction or downright impossible to achieve. For instance, if Im American living abroad, I still am required to file my taxes to the American state, even if my life and employment has nothing to do with my place of birth.
A company town never gains that much power.
I have a question for you, regarding
> I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils?
Is this a system like in ancient Athens, where regular folk were basically selected at random to serve in govt for a rotation? I like it! But, I don’t understand how this system precludes private property.
> If my company town sucks and I’m talented, I can find a better company town.
What's stopping the company from hiring a private police force to prevent you from leaving?
> For instance, if Im American living abroad, I still am required to file my taxes to the American state, even if my life and employment has nothing to do with my place of birth.
I think you are looking at current systems as they exist and claiming that these are inherent properties of states/corporations. There is a broad spectrum of corporation. You could have a company that is a dual partnership between owners, or a corporation in a social democracy that is compelled to "behave well" by a strong liberal government. On the opposite extreme, you could also have the Dutch East India company which was basically a colonial administration with as much power as a state. The subjects of the VOC were equally as oppressed (if not more) as someone living under totalitarian state control.
There is no inherent benefit that corporate control has over state control. I think the metric to look at is how democratic the implementation of a system is. Sure corporate control of your life might have less friction in its current iteration, but what if they gain more control?
> Is this a system like in ancient Athens, where regular folk were basically selected at random to serve in govt for a rotation? I like it! But, I don’t understand how this system precludes private property.
I was thinking more along the lines of Russia after the abdication of the Tsar, prior to Boleshevik takeover. Worker's councils (soviets) controlled their factory, and a council of soviets controlled each region. The Supreme Soviet was basically a top-level council. There is no private property because the "means of production" was controlled democratically by a council of workers.
I'm not saying this was a good system of governance (it collapsed almost immediately when faced with a centralized force), but I am just giving a counter-example to the statement that "the state is meant to move public funds into private control". That statement needs some qualifiers since there are many different examples of states.
I think that a more universal description would be "the state controls the distribution of wealth (or power)". This can either be the distribution of wealth from many to few, or few to many.
The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
Stallman's contributions may have issues, but man his views on Intellectual Property stands on its own legs.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
Good read. I wonder how you get the average person to be interested in these issues.
Run for President in an attention-grabbing way without caring about winning and say it over & over?
Lawrence Lessig tried (not quite without caring about winning, but close), but that attention-grabbing didn't work out that well.
You don't. The average person ought to do simple work and produce children, select few of which will have talent and integrity. These few have and always will make all the difference.
That was interesting. I was hoping for him to dive deeper into specific cases but I suppose the essay was long enough. Any other recommendations (potentially from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#Laws)?
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
I think they meant basic concept of keeping the things you paid for, such as software, ebooks, musics, et.. Not actual housing market.
I didn't mention the housing market? I was talking about anyone who produces goods (digital or physical).
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
> There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
I think the problem is not with renting but with letting owners hoard property (real estate or other) to profit from renting them out en masse, depriving others from ownership options. Also owners considering their property as something to do with as they want (exploit) rather than a duty of care. Best of both worlds for them: e.g. charge each month for software to pay for "ongoing development" and spend it on shareholders and/or features for growth but cut costs on support and maintenance... Or you know, rent out a moldy, drafty studio to a desperate intern who must move to Paris to work and doesn't have rich parents.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
>from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
> Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
> I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism"
Bruce Schneier, for one, not sure if anyone else had applied the feudal analogy before him. His remarks stand up quite well, I think:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...
>Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
Serfs has very little choice over their situation.
What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
Code running on medical devices.
It's the producer of the software that has the property rights, not the user.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
Not much software is really all that useful, let alone necessary, though. And only a little bit of that isn’t provided by one vendor or another as part of delivering whatever other actual service you were after (e.g. banking apps).
Yanis Varoufakis.
Unrelated but I love your username haha, wonder why I didn't think of it earlier.
> Software has completely eroded property rights.
This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
Nobody owns software. Some people control it. Others, it controls.
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
Reputation is the usual solution. You build a community and you know who to trust, like humans have always done.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
>Reputation is the usual solution.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
American's trust in media declined accordingly.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
My point was about small communities though. For country scale organizations it's a much trickier problem indeed.
I think it's beyond current institutions. It's so easy to infiltrate and subvert any well-regarded institution, so it can't be institutions.
It has to be decentralised, i.e. you or an open source software agent that you control is what's doing the filtering and deciding what you see.
It has to be a moderatorless system where you end up with what you actually choose.
If Humans ever got their act together enough to organize, would they even have a clue what to do?
It's sad how a comment decrying the falsehoods of institutions is relaying it's own falsehoods right here...
Do tell what those are.
The algorithm has replaced following out of necessity. The following paradigm made sense when social media was something where you mainly connected with people you were friends with IRL and where media came from a small number of channels that could be browsed by one person (even this was already overwheling by the time cable hit hundreds of channels). There is simply no way to navigate the billions of pieces of content generated daily without an algorithm. There could be the exact thing you want out there, but how would you ever discover it?
Search for it?
Reputation requires identity. I'd need to know people are who they say they are. This is still hard to do. You ain't getting reputation and privacy.
I think trust and identity are fundamentally intertwined, for sure. I think it's also why trust can be easily gamed by posing as certain identity groups. It's a dark path taken to the extreme.
I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.
Pseudonyms are anonymous yet can still build trust. I appreciate anonymity when I want to talk about sensitive topics.
Anonymous reputation can turn on those who trust the reputable entity. Easy, though facile, examples are the romantic schemes used to defraud, more intricate are spies and so on.
In a small communities, newcomers are more scrutinized to prevent that. And the scammer can only have a single victim before being expelled.
HN, while being large, incentivizes that brilliantly, by highlighting new accounts in green.
You can't expel people without proper identity. If you kick out a scammer they can keep coming back with different names/identities.
If you can't put your real name on your opinion, what is it really worth?
If I can build reputation somewhere, I'm going to use the same account, but that account may not have my real name. Reputation incentivizes identity, but not necessarily association to a real identity.
>FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Alternatively: it's what users want.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chr...
The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).
I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).
People want cigarettes and fast food too. It's not good for them either, and legislation and education improved the situation.
Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s
Agreed. I’m pretty sure future generations will look at our social media habits like we look at this https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7355737/amp/The-chi...
> Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s
That is an interesting thought. Thanks!
And not a new one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
Thanks. new to me anyway!
That remains to be seen. Studies purporting to show the harms of social media are shaky at best. It could very well turn out to be more benign like TVs or violent video games (remember the pearl clutching around those in the early 2000s?).
Who are you to decide for people that they cannot smoke and eat McDonald’s
I thoroughly despise the frankly Puritan attitude that society should prevent people from harming themselves
> Alternatively: it's what users want.
So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?
It’s what users are addicted to. I did that with TikTok first time I installed it. Just swipe swipe watch swipe. Those like 15-30 seconds hits are addictive as hell. I deleted my account after an hour and haven’t touched it since, except the occasional video a friends sends a link to. Their algo is way better than Twitter or Meta algos.
You can market cocaine and sell it then make the same argument. “This is what people want, thats why it makes money” is not an argument in many cases.
True trust is earned. "Default trust" is not the same thing. But the two are often confused.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
I think earning trust often requires significant personal sacrifice. Institutions are made up of people, and I think that one of the outcomes of the web era is that it seems that fewer high talented folks find the motivation to do unglamorous, lower-remuneration jobs.
No pain. No gain. That too applies in the earned / sacrifice sense.
Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).
Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
Exacerbated witch hunting, for one[1]. Enabled the Protestant reformation which led to the 30 years war, among others[2].
[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
Maybe Elon Musk should enter the education game too.
A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
Doesn't really undermine your point, but as a fun aside: Trusting Trust style attacks on compilers were (theoretically) solved by David Wheeler with "diverse double compiling".
Yes, good point. That's pretty similar to scientific falsifiability at least!
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
I think of how I lost trust and it's more along the lines of: "Wow, with all of this new information, I can see how institutions/experts/officials have been lying to me all along."
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Hope I'm making sense...
Unpopular opinion: It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world. There's so much freedom in having the faith to say "I trust you that I need those brake pads". If I get screwed for $200 it just means I have $200 less to spend on some other junk I don't need. The scammer won't survive in the long run.
> It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world.
Oh, I agree. It is tiring.
> If I get screwed for $200...
Some scams do far more damage than $200.00.
> The scammer won't survive in the long run.
Not really true. Some entire industries are built on scams and last decades or indefinitely.
Maybe the Amish are on to something.
> We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce.
They do.
> You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Would you be pissed if you got penalized for this comment?
I don't really see how that's related to the article (not trying to be a dick about it or anything; probably I'm just dense).
...you can make rules to stop this? The Dominion election fraud was more or less cast out of mainstream discourse with commercial damages law. If you expand this a bit (ONLY A BIT) farther, you'd expect a roughly linear scale of results.
There was no fraud. That was debunked.
Yes, that's my whole point? Dominion election fraud was cast out because of court cases.
It's not a very good paper, even though the author has reasonable credentials in Europe.
She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation."
This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests."
The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players. Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
IMHO, it's the companies AND the government against the people.
The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?"
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
This is not worth reading, because it was not generated as part of a deductive process, where you start with some facts and work your way to some entailments.
Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc.
The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there.
Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?
> What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?
If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
We're implicitly talking about the US, though, given that the subject of the article is SV tech companies
It is entirely possible that it is not possible for us to vote our way out of this.
Remember how the US came to be in the first place.
instructions unclear, choice is between more government power and more government power
Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
>> If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
> Those countries exist?
Yes. The US is one, others exist today as well.
> Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests.
Start by voting for the least objectionable politicians in the general election (local, state, and federal).
If you do not like those choices, remember this and vote in the primary (or primaries where allowed) for the least objectionable politicians.
If you do not like the choices in primaries, remember this and get involved in the selection process for the least objectionable political party.
Note the recurring theme of involvement in the representation process. Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
>Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
You just contradicted yourself. Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
>> Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
> You just contradicted yourself.
I did not. Please re-read what I wrote dispassionately.
> Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
This is a false dichotomy[0]. The US has had free and fair elections for at least 40 years. I wish I could confidently state a longer period. Some might include the 70's but few would include much of the 60's.
What the wealthy do in attempt to convince people they do not have agency, or that their involvement in representative government does not matter, is orthogonal to having it. I humbly recommend contemplating the difference.
HTH
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
You're begging the question with respect to what is "free" and "fair." The US is neither by any reasonable definition of these words.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
See, I can do that too.
In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
> You're begging the question with respect to what is "free" and "fair."
Free: there are no longer Jim Crow laws[0], such as voting poll taxes[1].
Fair: each eligible voter whom casts a vote in US elections has it included in the vote tally (see below).
> In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Every eligible voter has the ability to cast their vote in one form or another. In extenuating circumstances, some votes will not be included. I am neither a constitutional nor civil rights lawyer, so will not attempt to clarify those situations beyond acknowledging they exist.
I will not further engage in this thread as my interpretation of your replies thus far is they are not based in intellectually honest discourse.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax
Insufficient definition.
> Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests
If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it.
Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
"Bought out by corporate interests" is a completely accurate assessment of the American electoral system. It's honestly quite alienating reading all of these completely delusional comments. Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population. We don't even have that. We are bombarded with corporate propaganda every fucking day. A senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California. This notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy.
> notion that we live in a democracy or anything close to that is asinine. The system is not tethered to the will of the people in any sense of the word. It's an oligarchy
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
You sound like a religious fundamentalist. Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote?
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
> sound like a religious fundamentalist
Wat.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
It's a good thing I don't advocate for nihilism. You haven't asked what I advocate, which illustrates to me you're a dull, incurious person. And if you're seriously bringing up the "woke mind virus," I think that says all I need to know about you. I haven't even brought up matters of social justice. Many of the things I think are rather "unwoke" in many respects; however, if that's your paradigm, your brain is hopelessly broken. I don't particularly care that you have gotten "language" into legislation. Do you also have some patents in your name?
> Your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population
that's not true in the US, a republic not a direct democracy. Never has been.
Ah, blind deference to the status quo. You got me on that one.
> blind deference to the status quo
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
You're trying to trip me up on technicalities that are completely immaterial to my point.
Blind deference to the status quo illustrates poor critical thinking skills.
You will be lambasted for it, but you're fundamentally correct. Recall that the question was "What can be done about the unchecked power of governance?" If your response to that question is "just vote," you have missed the plot entirely. It is truly pathetic how naive that statement is. It's akin to still believing in Santa Claus.
I would say the statement was "Well, at least vote". And in local elections, that does make a difference.
In general, I think far too much attention is paid to single election cycles at the federal level. And I'm not sure why. The state you live in has significantly more effect on your experience with government, outlay of benefits, taxes, education and environmental policies than who holds the presidential office, for essentially all issues that matter.
In the rare case that a federal change affects you (likely a court decision, thanks to lame duck congress), states routinely step in, as we've seen recently.
The one exception to everything is that if you want _other_ states to live like _your_ state, then yeah - you better try to get the federal government aligned with your virtues. But why any sane person would want that is beyond me.
This is just the galaxy brain version of the position I am criticizing. You are not any less naive than the person who said "just vote." You're fundamentally missing the point. Corporations manipulate state and local elections as well, and the scope of what is possible is shaped by this. If your impulse during this political moment is to rally people to vote, all you are demonstrating is that you do not fully understand the system you live in.
If you live in a democracy, you show up. That can mean voting, attending local council meetings, and running for office.
Society is shaped by those who just simply show up, so show up if you want a say.
Historically that is simply untrue.
Then alternatively I suggest you read The Power Broker by Robert Caro and sire a child to lead the change you seek.
America is as broken as it is because explicit Republican policy for 50 years has been "Don't let the government interfere with company activities" and Americans voted for that with all their might. Millions of registered democrats voted for Reagan, with his loud and clear "I'm going to make the government do less" policy, and his history of narcing on coworkers and friends to the "Commies are bad" witch hunt.
Empirically, people who think the government has a duty to protect it's citizens from corporate raiding have not shown up to vote. The US has had 2 years of total democrat control during my entire life, plus a decade.
For the most part it's people who are politically apathetic, as if letting the choice be made by only the most rabid political fans is a better option than making your mild opinion known. Or they swear that "both sides are the same" despite Congressional votes not being secret and "both sides" being trivially not the same on many very important issues.
Elections have consequences. We got exactly what we voted for.
Nearly all of this happened before the citizens united decision.
Do we live in history or the present?
Gee, wouldn't want people to think too hard. Better come up with a false dilemma.
What is it that people should be thinking about?
We study history in order to understand the present moment. So your question presents a false dilemma in an attempt to cut off historical analysis and blindly continue what you're doing without question. How is society actually shaped? If you believe it's by people simply "showing up," you are delusional.
I humbly disagree, at least at the local level. Get involved and you'll be surprised at how much you can do. Local clubs, like an Optimist Club or Lions Club volunteering for your community builds relationships. Many people involved are part of the community: business owners, politicians, accomplished/connected individuals, etc. Much of what affects you in a democracy is local and can be changed if you get involved. It is not just about checking some boxes every couple years.
First you can have democracy. Then separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature along with property rights and the rule of law.
It seems to work reasonably well.
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?
I consider https://longbets.org/ the public version of this.
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
It'd be pretty hard to curate. What qualifies? How are they ranked? Is this just a prediction market of ideas?
I would love to hear more of these from your doc
I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few:
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
You are seeing the first two as "concluded"? Apple is known for playing long games, especially now that they need to be careful due to threats of regulation, and studies about long COVID take a long time - we really don't have enough research yet to be sure and we're barely 2 years out of the pandemic.
I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
For the first, the prediction was "in the next few years." If we take "a few" as three, that would bring us to 2024-10-02, which was earlier this month. It could still happen someday, but didn't in the time frame of this prediction.
For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
This doesn't sound like a crisis? These are all recent:
"How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light"
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi...
"Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
"The Long Covid Moonshot"
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
"Long Covid is a significant health crisis in China too"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
"Long Covid at 3 Years"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years
"The future of excess mortality after COVID-19"
https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d...
"Covid Brain"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain
"The Indomitable Covid Virus"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus
The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention.
And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?
>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables.
I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in.
Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares.
We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract.
Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar.
I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present.
As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid?
https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr...
https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...
>Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in Toronto I've noticed the frequency and especially the severity of such events decrease over time. It's been 21 years since "the big one" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). This year's biggest event was much less impressive (https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/07/16/power-outages-toronto...), and that was caused by exceptional storms (https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/a-parade-of-storms-how-toro...).
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
If we do face a wave of disaster, it will be because the government has prevented sufficient building of powerplants.
Have any of those timed predictions proven correct yet?
The insidious take over of security by the smart phone is what worries me the most. I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed.
Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
>I can't pay my taxes, access healthcare or even sign-on to my job without using my phone any more.
Where is this? For instance the IRS still allows you to file by mail[1], and it's unclear why you'd need a phone to go to a hospital or walk in clinic. As for needing a phone to access your company networks, I don't how it's deserving of outrage anymore than needing a laptop to do a modern desk job.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/where-to-file-paper-tax-returns-w...
Not everyone lives in the US
That's why I asked OP for where he lived, and qualified my point about the IRS with "for instance". I'm not going to do an exhaustive search of all countries to validate the claim.
OP is Australian
I understand your concern, but I think it's overly simplistic to frame this as a zero-sum tradeoff between convenience and security/freedom. Smartphones have undoubtedly made interacting with government services more accessible and efficient - especially for marginalized communities, rural populations, and individuals with disabilities.
That being said, I'm not convinced that access to government services has been "completely privatized" as you claim. Governments often partner with private companies to develop and provide these services, and there's usually some level of regulatory oversight in place. This collaboration has led to some really valuable innovations, like online portals for tax filing and telemedicine.
The Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security is still relevant, of course. But maybe we should also consider the flip side: by resisting technological change, we risk getting left behind. Finding a balance between convenience, security, and individual rights is the real challenge.
Rather than sounding the alarm about an "insidious takeover," perhaps we should focus on the practical steps we can take to ensure our rights are protected. Advocating for open standards, strengthening regulatory frameworks, and investing in digital literacy programs would be a good start. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion about this, rather than resorting to hyperbole.
I stand by the idea that it is insidious. It’s one thing for our governments to ensure access is secure, it’s entirely another to assume we all have smartphones and have aligned ourselves with Apple or Google. Being a digital serf is our new reality and we did it willingly. If we had to start up our Ford to access a government website it would be ridiculous but having to have your phone at hand is just as bad. Google and Apple both know exactly when and where you accessed a government service and stand as a gatekeeper to doing so. It is by definition insidious.
Plenty of people when I lived in Texas 25 years ago who would be pretty easy to get onboard with privatizing access to government services. Complaints about the DMV, for instance, are eternal. School vouchers were and continue to be hot in many influential circles, with people wanting to get rid of the government services entirely in favor of privatized ones. Pro-privatization, small-government ideas have been WILDLY popular since at least Reagan.
Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
Not to mention the tracking on our vehicles and TVs. And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
>And how the police can demand the video off our Ring door bells. What's next, my dash cams?
They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
I believe most services you can still use the mail for?
An interesting point from the article -
> Governments are increasingly outsourcing all kinds of processes to tech companies. And if a tech company operates in the name of a government, it should be as accountable as the government. I call this “the public accountability extension.” It sounds simple, but it would be a huge game changer. Right now, as governments outsource more and more critical governmental functions to tech companies, they also offload governmental accountability.
I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet.
In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.
If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.
Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.
For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
I would generally agree - but effectively, government does have control of the internet, at least the cables that run underground in their portion of the world, and even moreso the bits and bytes that travel along those wires that travel into and out of their territory.
Wireless and satellite shoots a rather big hole in that ownership model, but not completely, the concept of air space is a thing, as well as maritime. Things get muddy when you extend out into space of course, but most internet is distributed by wire + signals on the ground rather than from satellite, might not be able to argue that to much of an extent.
Then there's the arguability of whether or not government(s) own their people - I think governments today worldwide truly believe in that position wholeheartedly. I certainly don't think they do, and government(s) ought to think twice about that position if you were to ask me.
> For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.
What exact scenario are you envisioning here? Germany bans X (for example), but people smuggle Starlink terminals to continue reading it and advertisers continue advertising to them illegally by paying with crypto? Sounds extremely unrealistic to me TBH.
Huh?
Germany is notorious for banning, restricting, or altering, a huge number of tech products from smartphones to video games, with practically perfect compliance after a valid court order is issued.
Do you have some examples of non-compliance?
Crypto in modems, and mp3s
Are there any recent examples, in the past decade?
>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere.
Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed?
The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.
Why not? The EU has some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet and they seem to be the only coalition that are actively legislating against big tech.
Why be so dismissive on the idea that the “tech utopia” that Google or Meta wants to sell us is just digital serfdom? Seems appropriate seeing how damaging to society these companies truly are.
I am half way through the book and like it. The book rubs against many of my own pro tech beliefs, and that is a good thing.
So, the question is: "What can be done to put democratic entities back in charge" - supposedly wrestling control from the hands of "companies". And as an answer, she talks about war in Ukraine, as performed by US government. It's not even tangentially related to the question asked, how does it makes any sense?!
Then, in the next question: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information." What are "independent experts", where would the come from? Academia? NGOs? How really "independent" will they be? WHo will establish this independence and ensure it? It looks like quest for power - those guys do not deserve power, take power from them and give it to us, because we're the Experts, we deserve it!
Then: "There are no standards or reporting obligations requiring companies to say how much energy or water they’re using or plan to use." - why should they? It's their private business, why should they disclose this data to anyone?
Then Cambridge Analytica thing again. All political campaigns have been used behavioral data to get out the vote and influence results, but of course only for some campaigns it is extremely nefarious.
All in all, extremely sloppily done justification for grabbing power to control speech and development of digital economy, by people that do not have any justification for it and use "democracy" as if they own it, and only when they are in control it is "democracy" but if somebody else is allowed to play the same role they do it's "dangerous" and "harmful".
I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.
Look, pretty soon you are going to have to choose either left or right accelerationism. There is no in between. Acceleration is occurring whether you want it to or not.
Era of Cyberpunk is arriving! Interesting times indeed.
That was one of the worst written articles in terms of form, and the worst overall pitch, that I've read in a long time. It reminded me of a whiteboard of disconnected concepts that one might come up with when brainstorming for article support while using random association.
Besides lacking logic and therefore honesty in terms of why anyone should support her ask, the author is nakedly partisan and the ask is rank in its authoritarianism. Which aren't persuasive characteristics when pitching for more authority.
Either the writing should get better, or if it can't because the premise is horrible and dishonest, then at least learn to lie and cajole with more concision.
A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone.
We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it.
Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.
It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.
Tech companies have successfully weaponized "the algorithm" as a shield of plausible deniability.
Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible.
But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it.
Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower.
The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans.
We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta.
The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example.
And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.
I was just waiting for something about this!
We imported a Member of European Parliament, from a place with a sclerotic and insignificant tech industry, to tell us how to sabotage our robust and awesome tech industry. No thanks!
Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of companies. I'm hearing less these days about startups disrupting incumbents, and I'm hearing more about incumbents entrenching their gains. Even when it comes to career choices, it seems these days that more young people are opting for the Leetcode grind in hopes to join a FAANG or another high-paying Silicon Valley firm instead of starting a company. After all, it's hard to start a company in a garage when renting a home with a garage is prohibitively expensive for many people.
My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it.
While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors).
The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
Right!? We should send someone to write serious and thoughtful pieces about “How the unchecked power of governments is destabilizing companies”
This is hopelessly confused:
they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm.
Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'"
This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant.
Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...
Money and Violence dictates who controls resources hence power. So, companies controlling government is no surprise.
This is an interesting discussion, no doubt. But no one questions this is the case. Yes corporations grow in power and reach and are taking on responsibilities previously held by states.
I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies.
Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it?
Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
There are two important differences between corporations (even non-for-profit ones) and the government.
The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it.
The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone").
These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
Regarding point 1, I would argue that citizens have more of a say in how the corporations operate, (and what corporations for that matter) as their say occurs every time they pay or not pay or engage into a commercial contract, which is much more often than once every 4 years.
As any company reaches scale, they will begin to have negative externalizes due to that scale. It is rational to address these externalities.
The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who:
- Have much greater scale
- Are more opaque
- Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives
- Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate capture---negating the fundamental point of the argument.
Tech companies (in spite of all of their warts) are at least promoting the free flow of information. This (free thought and expression) is the bedrock of every successful culture in history. Moreover, loss of these has been the downfall of almost every one of these cultures. Examples:
- Late Ming Dynasty China (16th-17th centuries)
- Late Ottoman Empire (18th-19th centuries)
- Fall of the roman empire
- Tokugawa era in Japan
- Ancient Greece after the execution of Socrates.
- Golden Age of Islam (9th to 10th centuries)
Pretty much all of these examples were cases where the political class enacted controls that prevented challenges to government orthodoxy and/or becoming more isolationist, and other avenues to preventing/controlling free speech in the name of "better social cohesion" and preventing bad influences (...cough...misinformation...).
So I cannot more vehemently disagree with the authors precept (especially since she is likely in a position to benefit from it)
> The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who: - Have much greater scale - Are more opaque - Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives - Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate captur
The author has chosen to write about, and I quote "How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance"
This does not include, and is not obligated to include, any other factors that might destabilize governance.
As for the claims of virtue re: tech companies, I think they are overbroad and overpositive. There are several examples of tech companies violating any of the virtues you mention, and going head to head with government regulation to the determent of us all. This is not to say tech companies lack virtue, just that they may not all be the paramount morality that you seem to describe.
Yes, the author is not obligated to include that, but nor is the reader obligated to ignore obvious evidence of her hypocrisy and self interest. And when a creature surfaces from the morass of governemnt bureaucracy to complain about the threat of something much less ominous and powerful than itself, that hypocrisy is certainly something I will point out.
This person is an academic at stanford, not a " creature surfacing from the morass of governemnt bureaucracy".
I can see a little of the pot calling the kettle black, sure, but I think we disagree on degree enough to call it a disagreement of kind.
Based on her resume, I have to stand by my statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake
Is the HCAIP funded by newspaper or TV companies, by any chance?
There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter).
The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies.
And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
This is basically spelled out in the writings of Marx and Lenin. Same stuff over and over again. Corporate monopolies accrue incredible undemocratic power. They must be owned by the people and their workers.
[Someone from a former socialist country. My parents stood in literal bread lines]
Marxist governments have caused exponentially more harm (e.g., genocides) than monopolistic companies.
Both are bad but the first one results in harm always.
capitalist countries literally starved other countries outside the imperial core. gaza is in famine today to satisfy the lust for control of world markets.
churchill starved india. the list goes on.
the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
This isn't some accident, it is the stated aim, and result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians.
>result of systematic academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists and right wing libertarians.
For anything to "result" from this, it would have to happen. What evidence do you offer for such a phenomenon?
Left wing professors outnumber right wing professors more than 12:1.
What's the ratio in the economics department?
I doubt you'll find many people identifying with either of those labels in an economics department.
For those who do not know this, in the USA, our choice is not just between government controls and corporate controls. There is a third element, one that is supposed to be primary. We are supposed to live in a place where we people enact laws. This is not the case. The simplest test is simply to ask "Cui Bono". Who benefits from the laws enacted? For example, do the laws enacted favor drug companies and help them charge $1000 per month, or do the laws help keep drug cost under control? Do the laws enacted ensure that workers earn a living wage, or do they ensure that corporations can charge whatever price they want and pay as little as possible?
What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
This is not rocket science. And it is stupid. At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.
We, the people, need to start enacting laws that benefit the people. First and foremost is one that reverses Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision by the Supreme Court represents the height of incompetence or stupid.
Why is this not happening? Are the opinions and situation of common Americans ongoing and visible? Or does the NYT cater to wealthy corporate advertisers? Does it feature articles like "What house can you buy Portland, Maine with $1.5 million" while the number of homeless in Portland, Maine is staggering. Is the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (aka Amazon) really going to talk about corporate excesses? Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?
We need to fix this.
This idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with your economic policy is obviously a paid plant is painful. I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions. Seek out what they think they mean.
The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans). Even if I agree with you, your rhetoric costs you an ally.
> This is not rocket science
No, its economic policy and its arguably much much more complex than rocket science. We’ve been thinking about rockets for about 100 years, political economy for about 2500.
> I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies.
Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:
https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...
False balance is its own form of fallacious thinking.
I don't want to get too far afield here, but just in the interest of the parent point about assuming good faith, please take a look at this article if you have time: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/dr-warr...
"Up until around 32 weeks," and not all with medical diagnoses. And this is under current law. Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?
From the OP:
> and the other wanted to control women’s bodies
and you:
> Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?
So... control of women's bodies, as claimed in the OP? Why is it necessary for you to be comfortable?
If a given abortion is in fact murder, and I have some power to stop it (through politics or otherwise,) I feel uncomfortable inasmuch as I am allowing murder, and I feel it ethically necessary to resolve the discomfort. This moral consideration does of course balance against many others, including the preventable deaths of mothers that the OP highlighted.
Looking from outside of US its quite confusing how society of the free the country of libertarians… even makes this debatable. Its quite literally commanding someone what they can or cannot do about their body.
Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.
People who are not comfortable with it should simply not seek this particular care for themselves.
Q.E.D.
Abortion is the ultimate debate; with no clear answer from any biological, moral, legal, ethical, philosophical, or even religious clause, and science leaning the "wrong" direction depending on social "norms".
Social norms are friction against the ability to be honest with peers - that are nearly all going to be incentived to lie about their actual opinion, and project the opposite (but vote the way they are told anyway)
The consequences are not necessarily the motivations.
> The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans).
You've been duped [1].
There is an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.
There is a well understood principle hhere too called the alienation of labor [2]. To summarize, without pushback workers will become increasingly estranged from and unable to produce the products they produce.
This is ultimately bad for the corporations that are exploiting them and the society as a whole because if nobody has any money, then there are no customers for your business. Over recent decades we've extended this by invoking debt. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt, credit card debt. These are temporary patches to a system that is fundamentally exploitative.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
[2]: https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...
> an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.
This is not an honest summary of the literature.
Every recent increase in the minimum wage in America has produced zero to positive local employment effects [1][2][3][4]. Per your source, however, it also causes (non-monetary) inflation [5]. Moreover, we find in other countries that there is a limit to the tactic: in France, minimum-wage increases significantly decrease employment [6].
So no, people expressing scepticism towards minimum-wage increases are being duped no more than those being told it's corporate propaganda. They're asking legitimate questions that have nuanced answers. (It's also reasonable to ask if rural Alabama might have a different minimum wage from New York City.)
[1] https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02...
[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509
[3] https://sp2.upenn.edu/study-increasing-minimum-wage-has-posi...
[4] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.35.1.3
[5] https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...
[6] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
Item 5 seems weird to me…
1/ it pulls data from Uber eats. Many restaurants added “vanity” service charges to bills to provide visibility to the law changes. Instead of increasing menu prices, they add a mandatory service charge. I don’t know if this is accounted for in Uber eats takeout/delivery pricing
2/ most of the restaurants are fast food chains (think McDonalds). Full service business is included, but the sample size is much smaller. Even if it’s full service, the user isn’t “serviced” as these are delivery/takeout prices.
3/ the analysis is only national chain restaurants.
You didn't actually argue against the point though. How is it obvious that raising the minimum wage benefits all Americans? The people making wage already don't "have any money" yet the economy is fine anyways since they don't make up the majority of spending. Debt has been high forever.
Marx is right, the only thing that matters is labor + capex to create products / services. If rich people want to move money around buying expensive crap that's marginally better and isn't too much harder to produce, we should encourage that. As of now, most of the S&P 500 focuses on producing products for the common man or other businesses. This is exactly what you'd want to see and I don't see why we should rock the boat and reduce the total labor spent on the needs of the average person (minimum wage labor).
> if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions
Why should I? One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality.
The time for "assume good faith" is long, long, long gone. These arguments are not in good faith. And I can rule out good intentions when you can't even have a sincere argument about it and lie through your teeth, knowingly and deliberately about it.
For the sake of argument: if a foreign power would want to destabilize the US there are few better ways than promoting ideas like the above as much as possible.
If compromise isn't possible on any issue because the other side is evil incarnate and completely unreasonable - well that doesn't leave many nice places where a democracy can go.
"And why should I change? If I change, I loose everything! I loose my self! Who in their right mind would accept such a fate? That's why..." - Amalthus, circa 4058 Alrest.
It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.
Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position. At best you might get some likes on social media though, which can feel nice.
Most of the web consists of this, so if that's what you prefer, I guess it's just going with the flow.
As anodyne as this post appears, there is real brilliance is linking the inability to convince others of your point with the inability to imagine other people's point of view. Just wanted to thank you for this one.
> if you ... simply fail to understand the opposition's position ... your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining
So, so good.
What position is that?
The one where it is okay to be absolutely, and objectively, dishonest, to get what you want?
When you have people who say "I don't actually care if your position is correct", your position that it is somehow my obligation to cater and pander to them, and that it is a failing of mine to not be willing to do so is farcical.
This is literally idiocracy in the making.
If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.
> One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality
Doesn't that increase the chances that one side consists of a significant number of good people who have simpy been duped? How does demonising them help?
Many people think incest, rape, and vitally-risky abortions total something more than 7% of abortions. Not remotely close.
Knowing that the vast abortions are preventable and essentially extremely ethically lazy birth control may also be a factoid worth "evangelizing".
https://www.cirm.ca.gov/myths-and-misconceptions-about-stem-...Ironically, 'science' and 'religion' actually oppose each other as to when "life" begins. Which ironically neither side can even cognitively process, because they are so blinded ideologically.
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people.
There are people trying to abolish the minimum wage in the US.[1] "Abolishing the federal minimum wage would help small businesses. Some economic theory suggests it would lower labor costs, expand the worker pool, raise profits, and reduce costs for consumers, as businesses tend to pass off the burden onto them. Also, ending it would delay the automation revolution. At a time in which ChatGPT – the AI chatbot that answers questions – is all the rage, more jobs get lost to machines every day (Burton & Wolla, 2021). The first ones to go are minimum-wage jobs. “Increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers,” according to Professors Lordan of the London School of Economics and Neumark of UC Irvine (Lordan & Neumark, 2015). Cost-effective measures such as AI and self-service counters become less appealing when one isn’t forced to pay workers more."
Plus, it's weakly enforced. "Wage theft" is bigger than burglary, larceny, and robbery combined.[2] That doesn't include misclassification as an "independent contractor".
[1] https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/03/10/opinion-the-case-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
Those people are right because the minimum wage is a very bad policy, especially for the low-skilled.
Where are these "low-skilled" people you think should be paid less than $7.25 an hour going to live? Shanty towns? Tent cities?
Their parents' basement, usually. Low skilled jobs are frequently stepping stones or temporary respites on the way to better jobs. But if you yank them out of their reach, by jacking up the pay and so forcing the employers to either hire more productive workers or automate, the same people would be earning the true minimum wage - $0. And unlike the previous case, they would never gain any experience and use it to get the next, better job.
I hope you're aware not only youth work on minimum wage jobs. Some of them are not going to get better jobs (and aren't on their way there), they are stuck in those jobs and you are proposing they shouldn't ever see a raise because if not those jobs will cease to exist.
I'd like to see some hard data and sources for this assumption, it's quite a big one and since you started the argument with the unrealistic view that those jobs are only stepping stones to better ones or performed by youngsters with access to their parents' home I cannot trust your argument prima facie.
It's better to have a job paying $5 an hour than no job at all, which is what you're proposing.
Yes.
That is where they live now, and are told they aren't allowed to work, or else their substituent welfare money they are dis-afforded (against their collective interests long term).
They can be something, and feel something, than the federal definition of "so low its illegal"
It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it (gun argument!?) and the border is open (but not for guns???).
> the border is open (but not for guns???).
The border is open for guns and it's a huge problem for Mexico to have a country with such insane gun policies next door.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/05/2...
That is the problem for the narco-state and its corrupt policies, and shitty corrupt border patrol/customs.
Our border is open to human trafficking, domestic infiltration, and massive practically a neo-chemical weapon.
> It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it?
Hm. That suggests an idea. A higher minimum wage for illegal workers.
Employers get a choice. Verify immigration status with E-Verify/RealID, and pay at least minimum wage. Or don't, and pay at least twice the minimum wage.
Offer sizable rewards for reporting wage theft. 3X penalty at least. Jail if the total stolen passes the felony threshold.
Now that would stop illegal aliens from taking low-end jobs in the US.
You can be worth a million dollars but if you are lied to, you will work for bread.
What percent of those drugs exist explicitly because they can charge high prices for them? Are companies going to continue to invest countless millions developing drugs they have no chance to recoop?
I'd argue everyone benefits from a world where cures exist but are expensive, when the alternative is everything that exists is affordable, but progress halts.
This view is a bit too simplistic when the "countless millions" is often paid by taxpayers. Taxpayers pay the company to develop a drug, and then the company gets to seek profit by maximally exploiting taxpayers who paid for the drug.
We don't need to forcefully regulate drug companies, all we have to do, as taxpayers, is ask for something in return for our tax dollars. "We will pay to develop your drug, but then we get to regulate the price, and you'll still make a reasonable profit. That's the deal, take it or leave it." No force, no compulsion, just us taxpayers asking for something in return for our dollars and coming to an agreement before handing over our dollars.
I wasn’t aware that taxpayers funded drug development.
Can you share examples? I am genuinely asking.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-c...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...
Also, the prohibition on letting Medicare negotiate drug prices could be seen as taxpayer funded drug development, assuming that money were used to fund drug development rather than enrich shareholders.
Will some news[1] articles[2] that refer to government and think-tank papers suffice or are you looking for spreadsheet-level data?
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/08/29/hhs-selects-the-fi...
[2] https://www.levernews.com/americans-paid-11-billion-to-make-...
From this [1] 2017 report:
> pharmaceutical and biotechnology sales revenue increased from $534 billion to $775 billion between 2006 and 2015
> worldwide company-reported R&D spending, most of which went to drug development (rather than research) ... $89 billion in 2015 dollars
> During the same period, federal spending, which funded a greater amount of basic research relative to industry, remained stable at around $28 billion
So only ~11% of total revenue was being reinvested, mostly into drug development.
And basic research was funded largely by federal spending.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-40
Drug development is a pretty critical component of getting a drug to the consumer, unless you don't consider completing human clinical trials and receiving FDA approval to be valuable
it is a question of who is going to subsidize global pharma R&D?
same drug costs $10k in US is sold for $5k in EU and $10 in India.
The biggest question is: Why should US consumer subsidize pharma R&D so that pharma can sell it globally and hoard profits in Switzerland?
note: all pharma companies are incorporated in a way to pay de-minimus tax in US/EU/Asia via transfer pricing schemes and hoard all extra profits in Switzerland because of Swiss laws taxing licensing IP only at 15%
example:
so US consumer is screwed in the end.US consumer think twice: do you want to pay $10,000 for a drug + $20,000 in insurance premium+copay when you can travel to India/Egypt/Turkey/Germany and get the same treatment for the same brand name drug for 1/10 (or 1/1000 of cost).
We need to talk about geographical arbitrage of healthcare costs more
Then everyone should pay.
For some reason, only we do. As far as the crazy-high prices.
> Then everyone should pay. For some reason, only we do. As far as the crazy-high prices.
Who are the “we” and who are the “they” in your telling?
The US.
The rest of the world. Including many countries host to major drug companies.
Somehow I don’t think they’ll let those companies’ R&D departments starve if the US stops paying $700 for things that cost other countries $120, or what have you.
I remember reading that part of the problem is that Medicare/Medicaid is not allowed to actually negotiate prices with drug companies but must pay the list price. That seems ridiculous and a legally sanctioned way to basically milk the government and co-insurance payers is money. It appears to have been addressed by the Biden administration though: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/10/22/biden-harris-admin...
As if science and medicine didn't exist before it was about padding some executive's bank account with a few million more.
How many medicines are required just to treat issues brought on by unrepentant greed in other industries? Does Ozempic treat obesity and diabetes or does it treat the lack of regulation in food quality and advertising? How much cancer is an outcome of greed in exchange for disregarding public health, how much depression is the outcome of greed and economically-produced hopelessness, on and on.
How have so many people lost their hearts and minds to this tail-chasing madness?
The median human is vastly healthier today than any time before industrialisation.
The comment we're both responding to is about the validity of modern pharmaceutical research and what kinds of medicines they produce as an outcome of US federal government investment. "Before industrialization" is over 400 years ago.
Sure. The median human today is vastly healthier than before WWII. The median American is vastly healther today than pre-War.
None of these statements relate to the comment thread you're responding to IMO. Are you saying that the median human today is "vastly" "healthier" because of medications developed by American pharmaceutical companies, that they are "healthier" because of medications created to alleviate the outcomes of pollution/greed? What point of the discussion said humans are not healthier than they once were?
"What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people"
Can you give a source on this one, you state it like it's something obvious and studied but I don't follow? I'm curious how this policy doesn't result in increased off shoring in a world where USA doesn't control 100% of resources, and a theoretical world this would result in inflation normalizing against the increased monetary supply.
In Australia, the minimum wage is 16.12 USD. Minimum wage employment is not vulnerable to off-shoring (shelves must be packed in the local warehouse), but is to automation.
Looking at a few studies online, it seems as though there is no long term correlation between increasing the minimum wage and inflation.
I think you hit my points nail on the head. Automation is the upper bound, I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage, which I think a different comment or brought up in relation to McDonalds.
Just so it's clear I think if there is a legal solution to this it's on taxing the high end of incomes, inheritances, and capital gains, not the low end.
> I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage
If there were a long term inflationary effect, then industries particularly sensitive to minimum wage costs should have significantly higher prices in Australia compared to the US. That doesn’t appear to be the case; perhaps they absorb the additional costs in the profit margin. It can’t have no effect, but it’s clearly not as simple as you were implying.
> shelves must be packed in the local warehouse
There are offshore clothing manufacturers that arrange the clothes on racks and pack them in the containers.
Once the package reach the destination they do directly on display. This "saves" the company from having to pay someone higher wages for arranging clothing displays.
The companies will always chose lower costs wherever they can get away with.
There are lots of examples of countries having much higher minimum wages without the consequences you mentioned.
How do you offshore a car wash, for example?
I buy one of TSLAs robots and remote control it from a foreign country claiming it AI.
We're talking about stuff that exists here.
That ain't cheaper!
Reality? What sources are you citing? Are you paid to post this?
Nobody pays $7.25/hr in 2024, as nobody will work for that. McDonald's here is paying $15/hr and in the past 10-15 years have completely rebuilt their stores and kitchens and preparation processes to reduce labor needs.
That's garbage. Quarter of a million Americans work for minimum wage, (i.e. exactly $15,079 annually) according to tax filings by employers.
This does not include those in tipping industries where they are allowed to have a base pay of under the minimum wage.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/minimum-wage-statistics
From that link, "that is only 0.15% of the working population" and nearly half of those workers are teenagers, i.e. it's a first-time, likely part-time job.
I stand by my claim that (essentially) nobody is working for minimum wage in 2024.
these are people specifically choose to work under the poverty limit to be eligible for safety net welfare: EBT/SNAP/WIC/Medicaid and then work for cash unrecorded.
like they work 4hr/day and accumulate ~1000 hours/year and then work off w2-payroll
The 7.25 rate was set in 1996. Adjusted for inflation, 7.25 is worth 15 today. There are thousands and thousands of jobs paying less than 15/hr.
In NC, where I live, the average wage for an entry-level crew member at McDonalds is $12.16, effectively 20% lower than the original purchasing power of the 1996 minimum wage.
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/McDonald%27s/salaries?location=US...
Agree on all points, but there’s on crucial thing you’re missing. The government was always created BY rich people FOR rich people. All the founding fathers were rich or well connected to rich people. Some owned slaves. Most countries are like this anyway, only a few very notable exceptions.
Singapore comes to mind, their government focuses extremely on improving life for the common person.
Well they're certainly not improving life for people who will lose their housing predicated on heterosexual marriage if they transition, or attempting to murder anti-corruption activists.
Tell me explicitly what the difference between 1 person and 100 people are. What happens to their rights when you go from 1 to 1,000,000, what you can strip from them when you go from 1 to 335,893,238.
Enumerate specifically at which number rights begin to be eliminated, and why. Be careful, you might not like what the people actually think of you when you strip their rights from them. But since you are so adamant about the "stupidity" of Citizen's United, you ought to have an actual stance here. There is a number here, tell me, and everyone else here, what that number is, we don't even need to touch the rights if you are too skittish to answer.
"We, the people" is a phrase that means something very specific, take a bit of caution that you are not using it nefariously.
It's not incompetence or stupidity in the Supreme Court, it's oligarchy and it has been for a while.
See the Powell Memo written by a future Supreme Court Judge in the 1970s for details.
Research has shown that democratic support is not what gets laws passed in the US, but corporate support.
generally i share your sentiment but your arguments are rather weak - let me play the devil's advocate here:
- drug prices: research is expensive and assuring safety by extensive testing is even more expensive.
- minimum wage: if wages are higher then many jobs won't be economically sustainable any longer and then the former employee is becoming unemployed plus still sustained service are more expensive now.
- house prices: first of all it's not being homeless vs owning a home. secondly lower house prices, less incentive to build, fewer houses, more expensive apartments, more homeless people.
the problem is we try to solve problems with money. not going to work any longer. worked for a while while the fabric of society was still sufficiently in tact. isn't any more. we have to ask spiritual questions. yes, i know it's a trigger word. but that's how it is. you wanna know what society is now about - spend a day on instagram. a majority of the youth seems to be obsessed with clips about guys punching each other in the face or stomach while keeping a straight face. it's no longer - mommy i want to be an astronaut when i'm old - it's mommy i want to fight, bully and be able to keep a straight face when someone kicks me in the guts while someone else films it and i hope some equally shallow dame sees it and we found a family based on values i learned from some sun glasses wearing guy on tiktok who talks like a retarded drill sergeant.
there is no hope ...
> Why is this not happening?
We don't have consensus around the solution. Also, look at our current election. The problem isn't corporate money in politics. It's just money in politics.
> Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?
The ones not dependent on advertising.
>At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.
I some times wish that were actually the case. Revolutions don't happen until people can't afford bread. So they're drip feeding us just enough to keep things on that edge. In a lot of ways life is cheaper and easier now for consumers overall. Everyone can afford a big screen TV, smartphone, etc. Consumer goods are kept at that level. But assets have simultaeneously reached levels that are completely unattainable for 90% of people. They want to keep us in this "constant now" where there are no thoughts of retirement or wealth or ownership of anything. Just a nonstop struggle to keep the lights on in a way that's just bareable enough to not rock the boat.
>What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Really? I imagine that a very large percentage of the voting public, almost certainly a majority, benefits more from cheap services than they do from the minimum wage. The median weekly wage in the US is ~$1150, which is 4 times as much as someone would make from working 40 hours at the federal minimum wage. There is some upward pressure on wages overall when the minimum wage is raised but my understanding is it's negligible beyond a narrow threshold. So most Americans wouldn't see any personal benefit from doubling the federal minimum wage (making it higher than at any point in US history, adjusted for inflation). On the other side of the equation, nearly everyone purchases labor intensive services from people working near minimum wage, at least occasionally.
None of that is to say the minimum wage is a bad policy, but in the same way most people probably wouldn't want to pay a sales tax that raised the earned income tax credit, many people would be upset about the higher prices that followed a minimum wage increase. That's basically what happened during the pandemic; a very tight labor supply resulted in wages going up dramatically at the bottom end of the income ladder and the resulting inflation was very unpopular.
Yes, indeed, slavery (which is effectively what minimum wage work is) makes things cheaper.
Not sure that's sustainable though.
We need to evaluate our governance system like we evaluate a system full of tech debt that's killing people:
Stop it with minimal nonconsensual death & reactor fundamental design principles.
It's the only ethical way out of such a system.
Very well articulated. Standing right next to you, fist raised, ready to share the word.
I don't disagree with, say, reversing Citizens United but really what you list here is a bunch of symptoms.
> Why is this not happening?
Because Americans, as a whole, have zero class consciousness, thanks the hyper-individualism of liberalism and possibly the most successful propaganda campaign in history ie the Red Scare.
We have people who unironically will champion for the likes of Jeff Bezos to pay less in taxes and will identify more with Bezos than their fellow worker.
The wealthy and the corporations embarked on an intentional journey to destroy class consciousness and to buy the government. It's fascism, pure and simple. They even say it out loud [1]:
> "This is a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now. There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things," Vance said,
This isn't fringe. This is from Peter Thiel's alleged blood boy [2] and VP candidate, JD Vance. What did Yarvin say?
> "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia," Yarvin says in the clip.
[1]: https://www.salon.com/2024/10/01/rachel-maddow-sounds-alarm-...
[2]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to...
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Not a great example. The evidence of its effectiveness is mixed, and the burden of the wage increase hits small businesses early. The Walmarts of the world are better equipped to cope.
Maybe it's a good idea, maybe not; I'm just saying it's not obvious.
>Why is this not happening?
This is like asking why stupid people aren't smart.
Or, how about a fourth way? Maybe government is not supposed to replace mom and dad? Where in the us constitution does it say the role of government is to be a charity, or leverage in some Marxist struggle?
The corps want you to reproduce and die young.
> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people
Source on that. Higher federal minimum wage causes low profit, manufacturing jobs to move off shore. The higher the federal wage the more automation becomes a higher ROI. The more those in poverty have to spend, the more competition for scarce resourcing (e.g. housing), and the more housing inflates in cost.
Simply raising federal minimum wage doesn't necessarily benefit all.
You could deal with that through subsidy. Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out. Free market lovers might hate this but effectively the government does this anyway by definition for everything provided for free.
> Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out
This is a model for shit labour productivity à la the Soviet Union or Argentina. Much better to have no minimum wage and a UBI, to avoid distorting your industry through your wage policy.
Why? Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government. Maybe the sub is based on productivity rather than wage. $ per tonne.
> Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying everyone who has tried something like this wound up with a sclerotic industry. At a certain point, you wind up with the subsidy grantor deciding who can and cannot participate in the industry. Those already in don't want competition. The rest follows quite simply. (Moreover, your export market gets constrained because foreign countries will overcorrect undoing your subsidy with tariffs.)
We do this sort of thing in America. It's why we have booming shipbuilding and steelmaking industries.
Karl Marx already wrote about it 150 years ago.
Yes because companies are totally unchecked and there's no regulation at all and because of this we have governance that brings us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and bullshit wars and tampons in boys bathrooms and under lock and key at Walgreens. Good grief. This is not the kind of thing technical people or hackers want to read.
Is that a generalisation about the readership or to content here, or a bitter observation of lack of concern by the readership? There are multiple interpretations possible here.
The former.
The articles authored by Katharine Miller are not worth reading - they are not even wrong.
Can you expand upon what you mean? They’re right but poorly written?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
I take no stance on the article or parent comment, just for your reading.
Interesting, I always heard it as being referred to as unfalsifiable (which your link mentions).
I also don't think this is a good phrase to use in reference to society, politics, or the economy.
The headline alone sounds like a feature, not a bug!
Would you elaborate? This wasn’t my reaction so I am curious what I’m not considering.
>How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance
It's an old joke. The joke is it's working as designed for the companies.
The author is an authoritarian lawmaker. This is a false flag to consolidate additional power over the last vestige of the free Internet.
This person? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietje_Schaake … doesn’t seem so (authoritarian). Your comment is provocative, can you back that up with evidence?
World Economic Forum (WEF), co-chair of the Global Future Council on Agile Governance
And? By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian. For reference, here’s how it describes itself…
“To seize the benefits of rapid technological progress, while managing its risks, it is essential to foster responsible technology governance and regulation, advance the digital transformation of sectors and industries, and promote tech-enabled solutions to serve people and the planet. How can policies, regulations and institutions be transformed to scale technologies responsibly?”
https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-technology-policy...
> By its own description, that council doesn’t appear authoritarian.
The defendant certainly didn't kill his wife, he said so himself!
The WEF is ultimately authoritarian.
Can you elaborate? Quick scan of her Wikipedia entry and top Google hits doesn’t indicate an authoritarian bent. They all list her as a center-left progressive.
Center left is already authoritarian IMO. She’s definitely not the worst, her views are on her medium: https://medium.com/@marietje.schaake
Take from it what you will.
This very article reeks of authoritarianism. Read her blog, not the first time she’s advocated for bureaucratic regulation of tech companies.
I'm interested. Any support for that? I looked around on Wikipedia and LinkedIn.
I watched Julian Assange’s recent talk at the Council of Europe and his testimony on the insanity that the U.S. Government put him through [1]. This makes me come to a different conclusion than the article.
> In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments.
Why is it assumed that governments will act better if the power to control information is in their hands? We see this time and time again that the control over information is the most manipulating force a tyrant can wield. Why should we trust government over companies? At least with a publicly traded company we can sell stock faster than we can elect new leaders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idphGmY3QRM
For US companies and its citizens, trading stock enough to send a message and make a difference is in the hand of the top X% of people. Those same people don’t have to worry about the same things we do. Their income tier makes them operate fundamentally differently. When you have a team of lawyers on call you can get a lot done quickly. For us companies depend on us deeming it not worth our time and money for a chance to right a wrong. On top of that companies are at times misusing or breaking the law for decades before they are taken to justice. And that justice is more and more just the cost of doing business.
I could go on and on, but I would rather face down one tyrant than an army of them. But the way things are going, we might be facing both soon.
> Why should we trust government over companies?
Democratic governments have some form of accountability to those elected, if none other than periodic elections. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.
Does government not act within self interest? The self interest of the company is to provide the information that people want. The self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians. And who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations.
I understand companies act within their own self interest. But the problem is when we provide government with enormous power it becomes within the self interest of companies to influence government rather than provide value to society.
> self interest of the government is to provide the information that keep the citizens voting for who controls the politicians
Now expand your model to one where the government, politicans and citizens aren't monoliths.
> who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations
It's a pertinent game for everyone. That's the point of democracy. It's still a profitable game in a dictatorship. It's just that while democracy gives a peanut-gallery seat to even the most disinterested citizen, autocracies hoard those seats for the deserving.
How do you end up in a position where governments aren't monoliths? You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths.
> You decentralize the power. Adding more and more state control concentrates power into the monoliths
“State control” isn’t a monolithic lever. You can have a theoretically powerful but weak state if power is properly shattered. This is the lost art of designing democracies. (Not just throwing elections at every problem.)
This is the current situation in the United States. The problem with this is that when you have shattered/distributed state power, they work to achieve opposing objectives. On one hand we have massive subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry while at the same time spending millions on research in renewable energy. Recently we had huge subsidies to growing tobacco while also funding programs to stop people from smoking. This is ineffective and inefficient use of money. Now, this would happen with private companies as well, but the difference is that private companies have no means to force individuals to pay for their costs the way state government does. The state can threaten you by means of force or jail to pay for both of these conflicting endeavors through taxation. Whereas you only give money to private enterprises voluntarily, where you find value in their goods or services.
Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.
With companies I have options to not engage at all. I don’t have that option with the government.
They operate under the constraint of my ability to take my business elsewhere. This gives me 1000x more leverage over companies than my vote will ever have over the government. The worst customer service nightmare i have ever been through is nothing compared to the time the IRS incorrectly calculated that I owed them thousands more in taxes. My vote does not constrain them in the least.
i love going to hackernews and reading comments from people who are confused about the difference between democratic franchise and stock ownership
Because companies make decisions based on who has the most money. 90% of Americans have basically no control of those decisions. And companies interfere with democratic control of the government. Getting things out of the way of democracy seems good to me.
Again, how would that be different if government had the power to control information? Its human nature to do things that benefit yourself. At least if its not centralized then you have competition which gives people a choice of where they want their information coming from.
We already know that organizations (whether public or private) eventually devolve into a bureaucracy where the goal is the growth of the organization itself.
We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely.
It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.
Who does the government listen to when making decisions?
Influence and power follows a power distribution. This is an age old problem.
The state is the primary means by which wealth is siphoned from the public to private interests. You see it with lobbyists, Covid scams, politicians amassing millions on a 200,000 salary. The state is the enemy. If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it. In 100 years we’ll look back at the carcass of the nation state the way we do the Catholic Church.
Wow. I feel the complete opposite. The state is the only thing that can fix things like climate change. Public companies cannot have ethics, they only focus on profits.
Not all are created equal. I do get the impression that the Nordic states maintain responsible governance and generally have a vested interest in the success of their people. But most Western states are a malignant plague of cronyism and theft with no hope of recovery. We are genuinely in the phase “steal as much as you can before the show is over”. Taxes will continue to rise, austerity will increase, and the state will oversee the continued transfer of wealth from the public to its corrupt benefactors.
Profits mean providing value to individuals. People more and more are valuing sustainability and spending their money to buy sustainable products. It might not be happening where you are yet, but in Seattle there are huge markets for plastic free goods, compostable packaging, farmers markets and locally sourced foods.
You seem to be suggesting that without the state companies would find it harder to extract wealth from the people. I really can't understand why this would be the case?
Any sufficiently large company could simply build their own private army and enforce whatever "law" they wanted. Essentially, this would result in a Mafia society which would seem way worse (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia).
No offense but this feels like a politically immature opinion. You could say "this implementation of the state". I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils? Those types of states would explicitly NOT transfer wealth from public to private interests, since private property would not exist.
Liberal Nation States + Capitalist Corporations are kind of the same evil in different clothing. They are undemocratic. You either have capital and control the corporation, or you don't. You either have political capital and control the state and its violent mechanisms of control, or you don't.
> If tech companies (and technology generally) are stripping power from the state, so be it.
Could you explain to me what you think the difference would be between:
1. Living in an authoritarian city where the state has total control over your day-to-day life. 2. Living in an authoritarian company town where the company has total control over your day-to-day life.
(If your response is "the free market" please explain why we wouldn't just see anti-competitive behavior between the corporations in order to mutually supress workers and consolidate their control?)
No offence taken :).
I would say the main difference between (1) and (2) is the nature of the compulsion.
If my company town sucks and I’m talented, I can find a better company town.
But with the state, such agency is either high friction or downright impossible to achieve. For instance, if Im American living abroad, I still am required to file my taxes to the American state, even if my life and employment has nothing to do with my place of birth.
A company town never gains that much power.
I have a question for you, regarding
> I also believe that the "less state, the better". But what about a state that is controlled by council composed of worker and citizen councils?
Is this a system like in ancient Athens, where regular folk were basically selected at random to serve in govt for a rotation? I like it! But, I don’t understand how this system precludes private property.
> If my company town sucks and I’m talented, I can find a better company town.
What's stopping the company from hiring a private police force to prevent you from leaving?
> For instance, if Im American living abroad, I still am required to file my taxes to the American state, even if my life and employment has nothing to do with my place of birth.
I think you are looking at current systems as they exist and claiming that these are inherent properties of states/corporations. There is a broad spectrum of corporation. You could have a company that is a dual partnership between owners, or a corporation in a social democracy that is compelled to "behave well" by a strong liberal government. On the opposite extreme, you could also have the Dutch East India company which was basically a colonial administration with as much power as a state. The subjects of the VOC were equally as oppressed (if not more) as someone living under totalitarian state control.
There is no inherent benefit that corporate control has over state control. I think the metric to look at is how democratic the implementation of a system is. Sure corporate control of your life might have less friction in its current iteration, but what if they gain more control?
> Is this a system like in ancient Athens, where regular folk were basically selected at random to serve in govt for a rotation? I like it! But, I don’t understand how this system precludes private property.
I was thinking more along the lines of Russia after the abdication of the Tsar, prior to Boleshevik takeover. Worker's councils (soviets) controlled their factory, and a council of soviets controlled each region. The Supreme Soviet was basically a top-level council. There is no private property because the "means of production" was controlled democratically by a council of workers.
I'm not saying this was a good system of governance (it collapsed almost immediately when faced with a centralized force), but I am just giving a counter-example to the statement that "the state is meant to move public funds into private control". That statement needs some qualifiers since there are many different examples of states.
I think that a more universal description would be "the state controls the distribution of wealth (or power)". This can either be the distribution of wealth from many to few, or few to many.