[HN Gopher] Tim O'Reilly: The Internet Is Being Scapegoated in a...
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Tim O'Reilly: The Internet Is Being Scapegoated in a Lot of Ways
(2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-04-05 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zeit.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zeit.de)
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| TL;DR - O'Reilly argues Big Tech is not as responsible as Big
| Tobacco, Big Oil and all the other big baddies because Big Tech
| devotes large resources to researching and deploying counter
| measures. And that is mostly it as far as insight.
|
| IMHO - this is largely fair and true, only his POV is distinctly
| technocratic. He says China does "some bad things" with facial
| recognition but the tech has some great potential. We're not
| scapegoating Big Tech - we're applying the brakes because it
| operates like a monopoly and enables far scarier scenarios than
| Big Tobacco or Big Oil.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| I click on that and it's a bunch of stuff in German. I guess
| asking me to get a subscription?
| gruez wrote:
| I think it's giving you a choice between the ad supported
| version and the premium version (probably required for GDPR
| consent). The free version can be accessed via the left green
| button on the interstitial.
| dawg- wrote:
| Click "Einverstehen"
| freddybobs wrote:
| I think Mr O'Reilly is largely incorrect. He is espousing a tech
| utopian vision. Underlying that idea is that politics is
| redundant. That is born out of the (not wholly unjustified)
| frustration around the failure of politics in the west.
|
| So what is politics replaced with? Some other system/s - computer
| networks, AI, 'the market'.
|
| The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not -
| they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people
| with power to take political actions and can credibly that they
| are not political.
|
| In essence they move people further away from having some say in
| issues that can significantly affect their lives. They lose
| power. They lose it directly - they have less say, and indirectly
| in that their arguments are harder against a supposedly
| apolitical non human entity.
|
| Moreover the default of any such system is to maintain stability.
| Which in general gives most benefit to people who are already
| satisfied by the status quo. Tech people quite like the status
| quo right now.
|
| Lastly and most importantly such systems have no vision of the
| future. That requires people.
|
| The end result is a stasis, and increasing frustration from the
| people who aren't benefiting.
|
| Much of this is covered well by the documentary 'All Watched Over
| by Machines of Loving Grace', which is now available on Amazon
| Prime.
| sebastos wrote:
| I'd never quite thought about it in these terms before, but the
| way you laid it out makes it obvious: there's no replacing
| politics. At most, you can hide it.
|
| The reason it cannot be replaced is that there will always be
| resentment and dissatisfaction brewing among society's relative
| 'losers'. Eventually, society's "losers" will want to change
| things. Whether those people are right or not about which
| policies are hurting them is almost irrelevant. They will want
| the agency to make some change - any change. But: if you factor
| out all of the things that are still up for debate and start
| re-categorizing them as laws of nature or apolitical
| infrastructure, then there's nothing left to change! It will be
| cold comfort to them if all of human policy is "above
| changing". What they will hear is "Everything is fine. Stay
| where you are."
| stcredzero wrote:
| _The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not -
| they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people
| with power to take political actions and can credibly that they
| are not political._
|
| It sounds like something from a cyberpunk novel, but much of
| this baked in politics resides within powerful mega-
| corporations, playing within their moats and exploiting their
| walled gardens. People high up in those corporations have their
| own agenda. Much of this agenda is carried out with the aid of
| lobbying.
|
| Deep inside those mega-corporations, other strata of lower-
| level functionaries from an entirely different social class are
| carrying out their own agendas. Often these agendas clash with
| the higher-ups. Often, these agendas clash with those of the
| users and ordinary people.
|
| _such systems have no vision of the future. That requires
| people._
|
| Many of the problems arise when people with some power have
| dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to mistreat
| them, within whatever level of power they may have. By their
| very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce many such
| opportunities.
|
| _' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'_
|
| This title, as a phrase, describes _The Culture_ in Iain M.
| Bank 's books.
| freddybobs wrote:
| > Many of the problems arise when people with some power have
| dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to
| mistreat them, within whatever level of power they may have.
| By their very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce
| many such opportunities.
|
| This is a good insight. That many efforts in the fairly
| recent past to alter the the situation have failed
| spectacularly, or at least not turned out in the way it was
| expected. As examples, 'communism' seems to degenerate into a
| strict hierarchy of authoritarianism and associated suffering
| (perversely such a hierarchy being an anathema to principals
| of communism). The Arab spring, something seen in a positive
| light in the west, seems to have in several cases failed. It
| could be argued the failure was in part because it didn't
| have a clear vision or the people in place to make the change
| happen - there was a power vacuum.
|
| These failures make us very wary of people talking about any
| significant change. They seem at a default that they could be
| dangerous. That predicting the future is hard.
|
| It is important to be wary. What really is a red flag is
| claims of a better future, when it's not explained clearly
| what that future is, and the policy changes that will need to
| be undertaken to get there.
|
| All that being said it seems to me important for a society to
| strive to be better, and to think of other solutions than
| just more of the same.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| In that same vein, one of my biggest career mistakes has been
| thinking I could "just do good technical work, and avoid the
| politics"... its not possible. In the end, if you take that
| stance, the people who do play politics will run roughshod over
| you. I appreciate your perspective on this.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Robert Heinlein once said something like, "Politics is like
| your digestive tract. The end product is quite unpleasant,
| but it's still vital to your continued well being."
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Do you know what makes something not political? It not being in
| dispute - it says nothing about its value just like "X benefits
| from" and "status quo" means nothing without a context point of
| reference about what the changes are to say if it is good or
| bad, let alone slightly more nuanced situations like "too much
| of a good thing" or "a neccessary evil" or even different
| relative values.
|
| I find speaking only in vagueness like "status quo" and "good
| for <the elite>" major red flags - the first especially as
| implying the changes you want with no knowledge and impossible
| to reconcile across even two people. Essentially the same sort
| of lie of populists. The second is a warning sign for
| fallacious zero sum thinking - best succicently and snarkily
| refuted as "It is also good for rich people for the atmosphere
| to be breathable at all."
|
| The assertion that AI and networking are by default pro status
| quo and that is a bad thing looks like gibberish without any
| reasoning backing it. Not even "was funded by X" has been a
| guarantee that it would sustain a stasis.
|
| The arguments leave me with an uneasy feeling of superfically
| trying to sound good while lacking any substance.
| hitekker wrote:
| Quite an insightful comment. A tangential but classic science
| fiction story covers a similar theme
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
| olivermarks wrote:
| I read 'The Machine Stops' every few months, it's very often
| top of my mind as I see where society is heading
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Whether we like it or not politics is trending towards becoming
| de facto redundant
| Semiapies wrote:
| This argument has the baked-in premise that only government can
| change society and only government can have "people" with a
| "vision of the future".
| freddybobs wrote:
| Politics != government.
|
| "Politics (from Greek: Politika, politika, 'affairs of the
| cities') is the set of activities that are associated with
| making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations
| between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or
| status. The branch of social science that studies politics is
| referred to as political science. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
| Semiapies wrote:
| Politics is inextricable from government/the state.
|
| For that matter, what would it even mean to talk about "the
| failure of politics in the West" in a context beyond
| government?
| elmomle wrote:
| One might say, rather, that government is the apotheosis
| of politics. Much politics goes on without touching
| government, but a well-functioning government is the
| ultimate arbiter of disputes within a region, and is
| therefore the obvious final testbed (and most dramatic
| battleground) of political action.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Something like Trump's campaign is clearly politics and
| not government/state.
| hitekker wrote:
| That's a useful & intimate, definition of politics. I think
| a lot of folks are uncomfortable contemplating the power
| relations that rule their own social circles, so they
| unconsciously externalize that mess to outside, negative
| forces. They want to distance themselves from that
| unpleasant questions like "Who do I have power over? Have I
| ever abused my power? How have I abused it and who got
| hurt?"
|
| With enough gymnastics, "politics" becomes a scary game
| that faraway, bad people play to get ahead, whereas we, the
| good, close people who are all equal, have no need to think
| about power in our daily lives at all.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The problem is giant companies. O'Reilly is making the issue
| worse by equating them not only to the Web (of which Wikipedia or
| blogs are probably a better representation), but even to the
| whole Internet!
| nickpinkston wrote:
| Note: posted in Dec 2019
| WalterGR wrote:
| The user submits the same posts every day in a loop,
| interspersed with a few new ones. The user has been doing this
| for 2 years. It seems like an effective way to earn karma and
| possibly? make the new submissions get greater traction.
| tgv wrote:
| Note: as remarked below, press the green button left (free with
| ads) and you'll be brought to the English text, but it's not
| worth reading.
|
| The interview starts off really bad, comparing "AI" (which does
| not mean Artificial Intelligence here) with Donald Trump, and
| comparing making a system of laws for a large country with Google
| changing the order of the search results. Then he moves the goal
| posts on scapegoating the internet to "big tobacco was worse than
| facebook" to avoid answering the question.
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| One of the worst things we could have would be an efficient
| government.
|
| Delay is a feature of government, with a special carve out for
| emergencies.
|
| People tend to think of and idealize best case scenarios rather
| than likely scenarios. The likely scenario is China. Mass
| mobilization and change in policy from one day to the next.
| api wrote:
| A related observation I've come to: government is among the
| class of things that should be boring. Interesting government
| was a major cause of death in the first half of the 20th
| century.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Interesting government in the 20th century killed less people
| than boring deaths that were prevented by some "interesting"
| governments. Beyond that, the most major cause of death after
| poverty was war, specifically the attempted invasion of the
| USSR by Germany, which was really just a matter of
| realpolitik at the time (thus why the USSR proposed a
| defensive alliance with France and the UK before the Third
| Reich).
|
| Just to take the Chinese example again - less people died due
| to Mao's atrocities in China than due to regular old poverty
| in India, despite them starting at the same spot.
|
| We just have normalcy bias by the absolutely staggering
| amount of death that comes with poverty, whereas a
| comparatively smaller amount of death brought by a government
| that fixed the former is much more interesting.
| [deleted]
| datavirtue wrote:
| Both were government inflicted.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > less people died due to Mao's atrocities in China than
| due to regular old poverty in India, despite them starting
| at the same spot
|
| What is the source of that?
|
| Note also that China had deaths both from poverty and Mao
| dictatorship.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is trickery with timescales. It is like saying for
| instance "Malaria killed more Jews than Adolf Hitler
| did!" ignoring that one has existed for millenia and the
| other didn't make it to 57.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Poor analogy. This was a period of just under 30 years
| for which Mao was the supreme ruler of China.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| No, I don't. I'm specifically referring to 1950-1980.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yes. Look at the UN death rates for India and China from
| 1960 to 1990.
|
| Mao definitely had deaths both from poverty and inhuman
| atrocities. but way less death from poverty.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Can you link to this statistics confirming your claims?
|
| I am quite suspicious and dubious about claim that Mao
| had any sort of positive effects that would balance his
| criminal incompetence and/or cruelty.
|
| I am willing to be convinced by good source but ...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| As a point of order, I think people want an _efficiently run_
| government, but your point about delay being valuable still
| stands.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Or at least efficient _enough_ that illiberal movements can
| 't exploit frustration at that inefficiency to seize power.
|
| For that matter, despite all the creepy enthusiasm for
| dictatorships in this thread, they tend to be remarkably
| incompetent, being even more dysfunctional than democracies
| due to lacking their corrective mechanisms.
|
| Despite the myth, Mussolini never made the trains run on time
| --he just relaxed the definition of "on time" until the
| trains were never officially late and then punished anyone
| who complained.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Redefine words, then punish any parties who complain. It's
| a strangely familiar pattern.
| mc32 wrote:
| I understand that it comes from a place where we don't want
| waste (in taxes, resources, time, etc), but what delivers
| that efficiency also delivers other undesired efficiencies
| (fine everyone who is contrarian, imprison the opposition,
| what have you).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Inefficient states are most of the states doing this though
| (say, Egypt is no paragon of efficiency.)
|
| The inertia of the bureaucracy can be a hindrance but at
| the end of the day any bureaucrat will move mountains if a
| tyrant is breathing down their neck with knife in hand.
| mc32 wrote:
| Ok, but imagine them being efficient at what they do.
| Imagine efficient suppression or efficient indoctrination
| policies, etc.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Gotcha, I was coming at this from a different angle.
| Mostly a local-government perspective for things like
| city services. That's the kind of government I want
| streamlined and efficiently run.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The problem is that if the elected government is weak,
| ineffective and isn't fulfilling its core roles, then other
| people and organizations would take on these roles and the
| associated power and decisionmaking - and those emergent de
| facto replacement "governments" are likely to be even more
| illiberal, oppressive mini-dictatorships that are not
| elected or accountable to the general society. That's how
| you get the origins of Cosa Nostra, or the cartel-governed
| zones in Mexico, or de-facto rule by corporations in the
| fictional cyberpunk dystopias.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Slow government is sort of only a feature of you don't think
| government should act. Really we should want deliberate and
| democratic/cooperative to decide but fast to act on settled
| matters.
| kansface wrote:
| The a priori expected outcome of any government intervention
| is neutral at best, net negative on average. Worse still,
| government interventions are sticky - essentially append
| only. We create government, policy, institutions, and
| regulations but very rarely remove them. Slow government is a
| feature, not a bug given the constraints.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Slow government is like reducing the clock of your cpu in
| order to protect against security vulnerabilities. It's a
| non-sequitur. If you want to protect against bad government
| decisions you have to address the processes by which
| decisions are made, not slow down already made decisions.
| kansface wrote:
| > Slow government is like reducing the clock of your cpu
| in order to protect against security vulnerabilities.
|
| Negative. Bad laws are the program (business logic)
| itself, not the vulnerabilities. In lieu of refactoring
| society, I'd vote to continue underclocking the CPU.
|
| In so many words, "move fast and break things" isn't how
| I want society to be run. You have proposed we "move fast
| but don't break things". I do not believe that possible.
| tremon wrote:
| _Slow government is like reducing the clock of your cpu
| in order to protect against security vulnerabilities_
|
| Step debugging is exactly that: slowing down the
| execution enough so that errors in the process become
| apparent before the program reaches its fatal state.
|
| I disagree that it's a non-sequitur. What you want is for
| government _to move slower than its observing processes_
| , otherwise you can't prevent disasters, only correct
| them after-the-fact. Whether that means slowing down
| government or speeding up transparency (e.g.
| journalism/foia requests) is open for debate, but
| slow(ish) government is essential to the process of
| checks and balances.
| Semiapies wrote:
| It's a feature if you don't trust government to act well. If
| you did trust government to act well, why would you want them
| to be deliberate? Deliberation is a feature allowing
| opportunities to prevent harmful policies before they're
| enacted.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because there's a point where continuing deliberations does
| more harm than acting without full confidence in the
| decision. It applies to governments as much as it does to
| companies and individuals.
| mc32 wrote:
| That presumes a democratic polity always settles on good
| matters.
| dv_dt wrote:
| In general, to have a government at all, it should act by
| the processes by which it is validated by it's citizens -
| democratically ideally. But to have a government and
| pretend you don't want one to actually act seems silly. If
| you're worried about it acting in the wrong way, then focus
| on strengthening the democracy, transparency, and
| collaboration aspect of it.
|
| An ineffective government is a long term path to
| instability often leading to a risk of non-democratic rule.
| mc32 wrote:
| You're fundamentally betting on both people AND
| government to make the "good" decision even in trying
| times. That's just not the case. Under duress both
| people, even in a healthy democracy, can reach for the
| easy solution to a threat which might not be the good of
| right solution. Time delay usually blunts that initial
| urge.
| dv_dt wrote:
| That's why I say "we should want deliberate and
| democratic/cooperative to decide"...
| paulmd wrote:
| Inertia is only that - inertia. It doesn't affect the
| overall trend, by definition no democratic system can
| withstand a popular-but-harmful idea that remains popular
| over a sustained period of time (Brexit might be an
| example). If a system doesn't manifest that public opinion
| then it is no longer democratic.
|
| In other words what you're arguing against here isn't rapid
| change, it's _democracy as a whole_. You can 't prevent
| people from having stupid ideas, and on a long enough
| timescale any democratic system will eventually implement
| those ideas.
|
| The idea of gridlock as a design objective is very harmful.
| The "inability to form a government" is considered a
| failure states in most government systems, having a
| government that is _actually able to enact policy_ is a
| good thing.
|
| In practice however, this gridlock does not produce any
| incentive to pass "things everyone really agrees on" at
| all, as you can see by various topics that have 90% public
| support (eg cannabis legalization) that have been ignored
| for decades. It just produces gridlock and nothing gets
| done at all, not even the stuff that "everyone" agrees on.
| This, too, is a form of un-democracy.
|
| A lot of the "gridlock = good" comes back to people blindly
| falling back on the fetishism they were taught about the US
| constitution in grade schools - checks and balances are a
| good thing, who could be against checks and balances? But
| if there are too many checks and balances that drags the
| whole system to a halt - again, having a government that is
| able to actually enact policy without a supermajority
| control of all branches of government is a good thing. They
| only work when everyone has a "gentleman's agreement" to
| play nice and actually do the things that help constituents
| - when everyone starts playing hardball to the maximal
| extent permitted by law, the systems drags to a halt and
| stops working. And once that becomes a matter of routine as
| opposed to a last resort due to extremity, the systems
| begins to fail. That's a _design flaw_ , that gets brushed
| under the rug because we're all taught "checks and balances
| are automatically good!" as children. Having _some_ checks
| and balances is good, but too many can also be bad.
|
| With inertia taken to an extreme you get the Polish Sejm
| and the liberum veto - where any single member could object
| and veto not just the current legislation but every bit of
| legislation that had been passed in that session. That
| certainly "slowed government down", and eventually led to
| the collapse of the polish government. So there clearly
| exists some configurations where there can be too much
| inertia and it leads to an inability of the state to
| respond to a changing world and eventual collapse. Where
| does the US fall? Compared to most other countries, far far
| on the side of too much inertia, and we are also failing to
| a much greater extent then most other states at the moment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
|
| In particular I think the election of the US president
| separately from the legislature is very harmful. The
| executive and legislative agenda largely should be aligned,
| the cases where it's adversarial have been largely periods
| of "failed government" where nothing really gets passed. Of
| course that is also tied up with representative-level
| gerrymandering and state-size mismatches in the senate. The
| fixed 2-4-6 year cycles of the US government is also
| harmful compared to the (potentially) more frequent
| election cycles in other countries, as those countries can
| respond to losses in public confidence much more quickly.
| As such - the best solution to an unpopular
| president/legislature is likely a variable election cycle
| to get them back out quicker once they lose a mandate.
|
| I am completely willing to trade the other party being able
| to accomplish more of their agenda while they're in office,
| for me being able to accomplish more of my agenda while I'm
| in office. Elections should result in a mandate to enact
| policy, that is a good thing. It is better to have frequent
| elections that result in a mandate to lead, with changes in
| control when the party no longer reflects the will of the
| people, than to have nobody able to do anything all of the
| time.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Inertia is only that - inertia. It doesn't affect the
| overall trend, by definition no democratic system can
| withstand a popular-but-harmful idea that remains popular
| over a sustained period of time (Brexit might be an
| example). If a system doesn't manifest that public
| opinion then it is no longer democratic.
|
| This is a spherical-cow version of politics that doesnt
| reflect reality. There are plenty of path- and timing-
| dependent effects that shape public opinion and policy,
| especially given the powerful status quo bias most people
| use as the core of their cognition about policy.
|
| > what you're arguing against here isn't rapid change,
| it's democracy as a whole.
|
| There are two senses of the word democracy that you're
| conflating. One is democracy as a pure platonic concept,
| and one is the much more universal colloquial use to
| refer to a polity that meets a certain threshold of being
| democratic. The maximal case of the former word sense
| would be something like direct democracy with no
| constitutional protections. Very few people would argue
| for this form of "pure" democracy, and a marginal
| directional move away from that end of the spectrum
| doesn't suggest one is opposed to a country being
| democratic in the colloquial sense. (The distinction of
| the senses is important enough that explicitly anti-
| democratic phrases like "tyranny [of the majority]" are
| often used to refer to the "pure democracy" perspective).
|
| A second assumption you're making is that the
| distribution of the "goodness" of a policy is completely
| neutral with respect to policies that the masses are
| whimsical about vs have sustained support for. This is
| quite an extraordinary claim to make so confidently. If
| anything, it seems more plausible to me to assume that
| this distribution would shift in favor of the sustained-
| interest policies, which is precisely what inertia
| optimizes for.
|
| Now obviously, it matters where you are on the inertia
| scale. A society going through rapid, ill-considered,
| constant change is going to benefit from inertia while a
| sclerotic, declining polity in need of bold gov't action
| would benefit from less. But showing that the second case
| is relevant and making a case for the necessary policy
| shifts is a far heavier lift than the oversimplified
| assumptions you rest your general case on.
| question000 wrote:
| Well the life of the average Chinese citizen has improved
| substantially in the last 30 years, no Western country can
| really say that.
| echelon wrote:
| That's because the West already made those improvements and
| there are no longer any low hanging fruit.
| question000 wrote:
| I'm sorry China has solved many problems the West is still
| working on. They've had public funded healthcare/education
| from the medieval era and they haven't been involved in any
| major wars and yet still dictate policy in the region.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Disregarding who actually had access to that healthcare
| and education (since by similar definitions of who had
| access, the West had both public services by the
| classical Greek era)...No major wars? _Really?_
|
| Even ignoring the phrasing that could be read as claiming
| no major wars since the medieval era, we don't have to go
| so far back. I mean, sure, the Cultural Revolution killed
| more Chinese people than WW2 and the Korean war did
| combined, but that's still eleven million or so Chinese
| people dead in those conflicts.
| kansface wrote:
| China is responsible for murdering many 10s, possibly 100
| million of its own citizens and is actively and
| purposefully engaged in genocide of its own people right
| now. I have a _very_ hard time separating the good from
| the bad here.
|
| > they haven't been involved in any major wars and yet
| still dictate policy in the region.
|
| As far as I know, the last major war China fought in was
| when they invaded Vietnam in 1979 after Vietnam had
| invaded Cambodia (Chinese ally) to get rid of the Khmer
| Rouge (the same regime that killed everyone who wore
| glasses because they may have been reading too much)...
| asdff wrote:
| The west made some of these improvements 70 years ago but
| follow up maintenance, replacement, and expansion never
| came.
|
| The built environment of the U.S. has changed remarkably
| little in the past 40 years, and we are paying for this
| stasis today with our housing crisis from not building
| enough housing supply, our congested and crumbling
| roadways, our lack of transit infrastructure investment
| (NYC subway has been frozen in time for almost a century
| practically, and all we can celebrate elsewhere are a
| handful of light rail lines that usually sit in traffic
| with the cars), we've voted to defund our schools, and have
| refused to expand our public healthcare system to those
| younger than 65 as originally planned in order to protect
| private insurance industries.
|
| The only improvement the west has made in the last 40 years
| was figuring out how to move a greater proportion of its
| wealth into the hands of the few, and iPhones I guess.
| jjb123 wrote:
| We made those same moves 100 years earlier, with liberty
| intact. If North Korea made this relative progress over the
| next 30 years (and 70 years after South Korea), this same
| argument would suggest there's something we should copy
| there.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yes, in 160 years, as opposed to 30, and then solved many
| problems we aren't able to solve.
|
| No one is saying that authoritarian governments are good,
| but opposition to efficient governments just makes life
| worse for everyone.
| andrepd wrote:
| Better that it took 200 or 300 and we have advanced
| liberties instead of a totalitarian state. There's no
| amount of prosperity that pays for a dystopian state like
| China.
| mc32 wrote:
| Any country in a retrograde economy has the benefit of
| existing modern technology to adopt as well as the
| absence of legacy encumbrances, making it easier to play
| catch-up.
| Semiapies wrote:
| It's similar to the "miracle" of Soviet
| industrialization. The USSR hired scads of advisors from
| Western companies to direct their efforts, then chest-
| thumped about socialism.
|
| Or, for that matter, the Nazi economic "miracle". In
| their case, they started from the wreckage of WW1 and the
| Weimar Republic, but they used knowledge and corporate
| organization that predated both to rebuild, while letting
| their ideology and leadership take credit.
| Semiapies wrote:
| What problems do you imagine that the Chinese government
| has solved which Western governments haven't?
|
| It certainly hasn't solved violent oppression of
| minorities, though admittedly it's more industrious and
| organized in that field than any Western government.
| metalens wrote:
| I'd like to add that those moves we (assuming you're
| referring to the US) made 100 years earlier were not made
| with liberty intact. A lot of our progress was built on the
| back of slavery and racial discrimination at scale in
| housing, education, transportation, jobs, etc.
| mc32 wrote:
| Slavery isn't in dispute, nor segregation, however I'd
| posit that those elements dragged down society and the
| economy rather than strengthened it (it was detrimental
| to progress). Same as serf slavery in Czarist Russia
| before liberalization, it dragged down their economy
| immensely.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Also, the genuine improvements of the last 40-50 years in
| China come from abandoning communism in the economic arena
| and embracing markets. Just, you know, without
| _politically_ liberalizing.
| echelon wrote:
| If the Internet has been regulated from day one, no way would
| it have grown to do the things it can do.
|
| Stream music? Sell sex? Buy stuff across state lines or
| internationally?
|
| Imagine what we'd be able to do if the megacorps and government
| didn't start carving it up.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > If the Internet has been regulated from day one, no way
| would it have grown to do the things it can do.
|
| Maybe it's just me, but most of the things that the Internet
| can currently do don't feel all that great. My interaction
| with the Internet is primarily an adversarial one: I have to
| make a positive (and normally unsuccessful) effort to avoid
| the hellscape of targeted advertising and rent seeking that
| all of the dominant platforms currently depend on for income.
| But at least I can buy junk online (and damage my local
| economy in the process); is that worth it?
|
| And, for what it's worth, the Internet had protocol-level
| streaming well before it was fully commercialized[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
| II2II wrote:
| It's not just you. The existence of everything from ad
| blockers to alternatives for the web are the product of
| people who want to escape from this commercial dystopia.
| Will it reshape the Internet? Undoubtedly not, but at least
| there are places to escape to even if it is for fleeting
| moments in time.
| asdff wrote:
| What you describe is not delay, but consideration of options.
| You aren't delaying if you are thinking, you are doing. To
| delay is to do nothing for no good reason, to delay is to kick
| your feet up, allow time to pass and _not_ do any thinking of
| options, which is what happens all too often in a world where
| public works are worked upon by private contractors who are
| financially incentivized to stretch out projects as long as
| possible.
| tehWeeb wrote:
| This is a context sensitive point.
|
| We've seen government be far more efficient and successful at
| "the fundamentals" than privatization.
|
| Postal service, Medicare/caid, Social Security all financially
| stable, and logistically competent until meddled with
| politically to benefit a minority closest to the politicians.
|
| I don't want efficient government when it comes to species
| stability. I want reliable and resilient.
|
| Let man-children speculate about reality without politically
| contrived economic uncertainty foisted upon everyone. I wasn't
| a party to signing a contract that says I have to believe Musk
| and the rest are that much more worthwhile to humanity as
| decided by politically contrived fiscal economics.
|
| If you all want to be kowtowed like teen girls at a Beatles
| concert, have at it. The majority just want to live their
| lives.
| ajarmst wrote:
| This is pretty late in the cycle for O'Reilly to not realize that
| the adaptive 'algorithmic government' he is describing would
| result in government optimized for clicks and highly responsive
| to weaponized performative umbrage by groups acting in bad faith.
| Which is, of course, exactly what we have.
|
| Maybe we need something stable that can maintain a functional
| equilibrium and act in the defence of the norms of the whole
| system. Responsiveness and stability are usually antithetical,
| and systems designed to be responsive to the immediate urges of
| large masses of humanity are rarely anything but monstrous.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/HTm90
| walshemj wrote:
| Tim is right in a lot of cases its old media complaining about
| competitors and TBH the tabloids are worse - see how Meghan
| Markle is being treated.
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