[HN Gopher] A mental model for decentralization
___________________________________________________________________
A mental model for decentralization
Author : jacobobryant
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-12-19 21:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobobryant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobobryant.com)
| verisimi wrote:
| Here's a fantastic quote I heard this week:
|
| "A successful utopian society would most likely be one made up of
| 1000s of smaller utopias."
|
| This strikes me as the valid mega-target that we should be
| attempting to reach collectively - space for all.
|
| It should also be the foundational principle for software
| solutions. And neutral software solutions should also be able to
| accommodate people who don't want to be in the proposed solution!
| pessimizer wrote:
| Better would be 1000s of _overlapping_ utopias. Reducing the
| geographic size of government seems like a lot less desirable a
| way to shrink it than reducing the _scope_ of governments.
|
| That was the original rhetoric behind "Defund" IIRC. Break up
| the central police force to a rump used to coordinate and
| regulate police functions that have been devolved to exist
| under other government departments. Basically a bid to put a
| domestically-operating military under more thoughtfully-
| organized civilian control instead of simply having city cops,
| state cops, and country cops whose only points of oversight
| come respectively from the mayor, the governor, and the
| president.
| skohan wrote:
| It's a good start but you still need a mechanism for preventing
| negative externalities between utopias.
| verisimi wrote:
| The foundational principle is the same as it ever was: 'do no
| harm'. The golden rule.
|
| Do not initiate harm. In reverse, do not roll over when
| someone is initiating harm against you.
| [deleted]
| coderzach wrote:
| Land Value Tax solves everything! /meme
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| From the linked article _Avoiding Internet Centralization_ :
|
| 5.2. Encrypt, Always When deployed at scale,
| encryption can be an effective technique to reduce many inherited
| centralization risks. By reducing the number of parties who have
| access to content of communication, the ability of lower-
| layer protocols and intermediaries at those layers to
| interfere with or observe is precluded. Even when they can still
| prevent communication, the use of encryption makes it more
| difficult to discriminate the target from other traffic.
| Note that the benefits are most pronounced when the majority (if
| not all) traffic is encrypted. As a result, protocols
| SHOULD be encrypted by default.
|
| They're literally describing the _lack of decentralization_ that
| encryption brings. "If you encrypt, intermediaries have no
| control". Which means a central actor does. By encrypting
| communications, without an intermediary protocol to support more
| flexible operations, there is no way to extend functionality for
| networks that depend on intermediary controls.
|
| All systems that scale HTTP-based applications require a _lack_
| of encryption on the backend. The encryption is terminated at the
| load balancer and the entire connection is then inspected in
| plaintext. Sure, the "best practice" is to encrypt between
| endpoints, but they must be decrypted at each hop so that load
| balancers, API gateways, and applications can inject or parse
| headers, perform rewrites, forward traffic, inspect requests
| (WAF), create sticky sessions, and cache media. If all HTTP
| connections were end to end encrypted, the web could not scale.
|
| Another example is DNS over HTTPS. The encryption centralizes
| control of the protocol at the server. The encryption removes the
| ability of intermediate LAN/WAN DNS resolvers to cache records
| for a large local network, or to serve their own custom zones
| transparently, or do things like ad-blocking. As there are valid
| and necessary use cases, it means that now new "hacks" will have
| to be developed to accommodate the old use cases, that the
| protocol design intentionally ignored. The result is more
| centralization.
|
| Distributed decentralized applications also suffer when PKI is
| used for encryption. It is very common for backend applications
| to stop working because they were using a private CA to encrypt
| backend connections and the certs expired without warning,
| killing all the connections. Refreshing the certs then involves
| re-deploying not just the servers, but all the clients that were
| reliant on an old client cert, and possibly an expired CA cert.
| This use of a private CA also breaks decentralization compared to
| the public CA model.
| lottin wrote:
| Discussions about decentralization should start by defining the
| term decentralization in the specific context of the discussion,
| otherwise nobody knows what they're talking about. For example,
| nobody in the economics profession would refer to the financial
| system as being 'centralised'. It is not. There's no central
| planner. Financial institutions are autonomous and make their own
| decisions with regards to what products to sell, and how to make
| them. If you want to argue that it's centralised, you will have
| to be much more specific. And the same applies to everything
| else, from the internet, money, software or whatever.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > There's no central planner
|
| There may not be _one_ central planner but there are definitely
| power centers that exert far more influence than rest of the
| participants combined.
|
| There's fed which walks a tight rope of managing inflation
| while keeping low unemployment rate. And then there's federal
| government, by far the biggest spender in the market. You also
| have Fannie Mae etc selling mortgages which is huuuge.
| dvlsadvoxate6 wrote:
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Good point. Control of the inflation rate (total money supply)
| in fiat currency is centralized.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| Isn't the same thing true for bitcoin? As far as I know, it
| was set with the first implementation, and can only be
| changed when a majority of miners agree to change it.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Valid point. It's much more complicated but suffice to say
| it can be changed by a majority of full node operators, of
| which miners are only a subset. The meta checks and
| balances preventing such an occurrence have been proven for
| Bitcoin. We haven't seen miners succeed in reversing the
| halvenings, for instance.
| pphysch wrote:
| > For example, nobody in the economics profession would refer
| to the financial system as being 'centralised'. It is not.
| There's no central planner.
|
| There is and it is called the Board of Governors of the Federal
| Reserve System. By setting the EFF rate (or QE policy if EFFR
| ~= 0%) of the global reserve currency, they control many facets
| of the financial system and broader economy.
|
| It's not very fine grained control ("bake X loaves of bread"),
| but it _is_ centralized control and planning.
| Kranar wrote:
| The economy as a whole isn't centralized but the commercial
| banking system is centralized by each nation's respective
| "central bank" [1]. It would be kind of awkward to claim that
| economists are unaware that a central bank isn't a form of
| centralization, specifically of a nation's monetary system.
|
| That said, most people can pick up the meaning of
| centralization based on the context without every discussion
| having to spend a paragraph defining it. A discussion about a
| centralized Internet isn't too hard to understand, nor are
| discussions about finance, media, markets, governments, etc
| etc... The idea that people can't figure out what
| decentralization means in the context of a discussion about the
| Internet or finance unless someone spells it out in precise
| detail is kind of obtuse.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
| lottin wrote:
| Economists are fully aware of central banks and the role they
| play in the monetary and the financial system. Still they
| won't use the term 'centralised' because it doesn't describe
| the current system well. In fact, it does a terrible job of
| describing it. For example, consider the fact that 90-95% of
| the currency in circulation is not issued by the central
| bank, but created by commercial banks via fractional reserve
| banking.
| Kranar wrote:
| Then it's not clear in what way you expect economists to
| hypothetically use that term, even in principle. Your
| argument becomes unfalsifiable. If using the term central
| to describe the "central bank" isn't a prime instance of
| economists using the term centralized, then it's not clear
| that anything could ever possibly satisfy your standard. I
| could go on to show you how "centralized finance" returns
| over half a million scholarly publications on Google
| Scholar, many of which predate Bitcoin, to discuss
| centralized payment systems, centralized monetary systems,
| centralized exchanges, centralization of finance in China
| but as I said before, this is such an obtuse discussion at
| this point it's not clear that anything I ever produce
| could ever change your mind. It's not like "centralized
| psychology" returns half a million results, or "centralized
| math" returns half a million results (centralized math
| mostly refers to centralization in the education system)...
| but "centralized finance" does.
|
| All I can say then is that empirically, if I talk about a
| centralized Internet (700,000 results), people are able to
| understand what it means... if I talk about a centralized
| monetary system or centralized banking system, people
| understand that too. These all appear to be commonly
| discussed and researched topics that people are aware of.
| Someone might need a precise definition of "centralized
| psychology" or "centralized chemistry" since those topics
| do not seem to produce much of any academic research, but
| centralized finance appears to be well understood.
|
| If you don't believe it, you can see for yourself by doing
| a search and going over the abstract of several academic
| papers that use the term without having to spend paragraphs
| precisely defining it.
| lottin wrote:
| > I could go on to show you how "centralized finance"
| returns over half a million scholarly publications on
| Google Scholar
|
| Do you not know how to use Google? "Centralized finance"
| returns 685 results, and if you go through the results
| you'll quickly see that most don't even talk about the
| financial system.
| 3np wrote:
| Thank you. It really grinds my gears when
| people/projects/companies make strong claims about
| "decentralization" without even specifying what they're talking
| about. Many times it becomes nonsensical.
| golemotron wrote:
| > Given my mental model of centralization vs. decentralization, I
| think it's more productive to think about the boundary: how much
| decentralization do we need? If there's too little, then software
| will stagnate from lack of competition; if there's too much, then
| it'll stagnate from lack of coordination. So we want to figure
| out where the sweet spot is.
|
| This is a static view. A dynamic view would recognize that
| systems have a lifetime and tend to go through centralize and
| then disintegrate. Decentralization often exists prior to
| centralization. Catch systems on the rise.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Honestly how decentralized is the Internet? AFAIK there are
| groups like W3C and ICAAN which basically control domains, and a
| few IPs which control routing. Most of the internet is also
| behind Cloudflare, AWS, etc.
|
| The key is that these companies are very conservative when
| blocking users and giving others special privileges. Your service
| won't be blocked by Cloudflare and IPs unless it's particularly
| bad or your government requests it. Whereas e.g. YouTube has very
| strict rules and often bans people incorrectly or for debatable
| reasons.
|
| Idk if the issue is actually decentralized vs. centralized. I
| think it's "do I decide the rules or do I just enforce them?"
| gandutraveler wrote:
| Centralization is a human nature. Internet is already
| decentralized but we still tend to congregate in common space.
| Even with web3, organizations like polkadot are creating a
| centralized space around them. So I doubt we will ever achieve
| true decentralization there will always be a hierarchy and a
| central body that will have more control over it.
| hwhelan210 wrote:
| I don't think what we're running into here is "human nature" so
| much as it is investor nature. I'm not particularly familiar
| with them, but Polkadot has raised $300M. There has to be some
| return for that investment (i.e. they need to be able to lock
| users into their ecosystem and prove to investors that a
| competitor can't come along and provide an equally valuable
| service without starting from scratch). How can a truly
| decentralized service / protocol compete with the companies
| that are getting that kind of investment?
| s7r wrote:
| This is akin asking 'Will we build our community around hammers
| or screwdrivers?'
|
| Network architectures are _means_ , not ends.
|
| The question is _what are we trying to do?_
|
| Based on that context, we can determine whether a hammer,
| screwdriver, centralized architecture, decentralized
| architecture, or federated architecture is most beneficial for
| us. They all have tradeoffs (e.g. easier to remove screws than
| nails, easier to secure centralized than decentralized systems,
| easier to power federated systems than decentralized systems,
| easier to trust decentralized and federated systems than
| centralized systems) which can make them more or less useful for
| us in any given context. The point is, they are _tools_ to help
| us realize our desired outcomes -- not the outcomes themselves.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Finally, some common sense.
|
| There's some weird psychology of tech circles that keeps us
| focused on decentralization. Often it just seems like
| bikeshedding rather than problem-solving. My guess is the
| Social Media generation has become wary of people controlling
| their lives, preferring autonomy. They hear about network
| decentralization, and then come to the conclusion that it must
| be better than the alternative, because the alternative is
| centralization, which is Google and Facebook (but never Apple
| apparently, which is pretty ironic).
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Yeah. This seems to be missing from the current conversation.
| blamestross wrote:
| First, thinking of decentralization/centralization as having a
| boundary between them can be useful, but is wrong. They are a
| continuum upon which things oscillate.
|
| Decentralization fundamentally trades inefficiency for long-term
| robustness. Centralization trades long term robustness for short
| term efficiencies.
|
| Under our implementation of capitalism, most people don't value
| robustness on a timescale longer than 20 years unless there was
| recently a crisis to remind them of it.
|
| So every aspect of human infrastructure oscillates on the
| centralized-decentralized axis over time. Thinking of
| "decentralized" as something that will stay that way is wrong,
| over time people will ever centralize the system in pursuit of
| short term returns until the perceived "decentralized" system
| might as well be centralized in practice (see internet
| infrastructure), once a crisis happens due to over-centralization
| we build a new system (or re-brand an old system) that is more
| decentralized in response. That system eventually decays into
| centralization the same way.
|
| I value changing society to think in the long term, so I think it
| is a lot more valuable to change the cycle versus attempt to
| participate in just one swing of it.
| foxhop wrote:
| Hello, I have a similar thread going here. I think we need to
| "shard the centralized monolith".
|
| https://www.unturf.com/let-us-define-a-permacomputer/
|
| I avoid writing prescriptively to avoid setting a bias on the
| talent.
|
| I AM growing my own "YouTube". Not open source yet but I'm
| planning big things.
|
| https://media.unturf.com
| kuroguro wrote:
| > there are the decentralization maximalists who think that
| blockchain will make tech platforms obsolete
|
| I doubt blockchain is a silver bullet. I really liked Kleppmann's
| work on local-first software / CRDTs. It seems a lot closer to
| something practically usable at least.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E
| blamestross wrote:
| Blockchain tech just offuscates centralization, it doesn't
| provide decentralization.
| brightstep wrote:
| In terms used by the memo discussed by the article,
| blockchain are still susceptible to indirect and platform
| centralization.
| delaaxe wrote:
| In other words, it's ok for some things to be "decentralized
| enough", as opposed to fully decentralized (whatever that means).
| austincheney wrote:
| I am writing a fully decentralized application and in doing so
| have learned a lot about the concept. There has been a lot of
| interest on the subject over the last few months so I likely need
| to write a document about the things I have learned. Some quick
| things:
|
| * Security is wildly different in a decentralized model compared
| with a client/server model.
|
| * Decentralization is about one thing only: maximum autonomy.
|
| * Federated systems are semi-autonomous. They are a move towards
| decentralization but not completely so. With decentralization you
| only need an application that send/receive agreed upon
| instructions.
|
| * Anonymity and privacy are opposing qualities. Decentralization
| is not about either but enables one or the other.
|
| As I have been exploring this subject I have formed some criteria
| for decentralization:
|
| * Address based (IP addresses or identifiers that resolve to an
| IP address without third party consultation, no DNS)
|
| * Protocol agnostic (what ever two parties can agree upon)
|
| * No third parties (no servers or message proxies unless you own
| them)
|
| Think about it in terms of snail mail. The post office moves
| packages around without opening or inspecting the contents. The
| contents are never stored in a database and could be broken. It
| is address to address communication.
|
| Decentralization allows for personal or organizational devices to
| be remotely connected as a large physically distributed computer:
|
| * A single file system, cross OS.
|
| * Remote application execution, such as Steam's remote game play.
|
| * Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access
| their computer and pull it off yourself.
| loceng wrote:
| "* Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access
| their computer and pull it off yourself."
|
| Reminds me of dialing into a BBS way back when, that early on
| was just someone with a non-dedicated or dedicated telephone
| line hooked up to their personal computer's modem; you could
| connect to fun, non-real-time multi-player text-based games
| (ASCII art FTW!) hosted on their PC, and some had file servers
| open for download and sometimes upload.
| Comevius wrote:
| I'm writing an offline-first database and it typically uses a
| server for storage and coordination. The difference is that I
| don't think the server should be able to see what it stores and
| coordinates, for which searchable encryption is the solution.
|
| However my database is address based, it reads and writes
| blocks of encrypted data, and it is protocol agnostic, it works
| over S3 and Google Drive, or could work over a pendrive sent in
| a letter back and forth, or IPFS. It just requires a single
| source of truth and optionally event notification.
|
| So would this fit into an every peer-to-peer system is
| decentralized, but not every decentralized system is peer-to-
| peer picture, or is this not decentralized at all, because you
| would normally use it with Amazon S3, albeit in a maliciously-
| secure manner (the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity
| of your data is secured via authenticated encryption, the
| client keeps the key, the access pattern is obfuscated).
| austincheney wrote:
| Peer to peer systems are not necessarily decentralized. They
| are decentralized if their traffic does not require access by
| a third party. Its the difference between Napster and
| BitTorrent.
|
| In the case of your scenario it could be considered
| decentralized as you are using cloud storage as merely a
| storage point, as in a dedicated redundancy, but I am
| hesitant to consider a dedicate server as a point of
| decentralization regardless of its intention or access
| limitations.
| dkh wrote:
| While I agree that there should be more discussion about what
| should/shouldn't be decentralized and to what extent, the huge
| issue right now that's responsible for how heated of a debate
| this is right now, is in the implementation. It seems almost like
| it's already been decided by players in the decentralization
| space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy
| model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with --
| crypto trading, NFTs, etc. Now add to it the rat race everyone is
| in to transition to a DAO as soon possible, despite the existing
| insane complexity modification difficulty of blockchain
| platforms, or that the DAO concept has a short history but one
| filled with failures, and we're left with something that,
| frankly, frightens me.
|
| I'm not anti-crypto, and in fact I work in the space and am
| primarily focused on some areas I feel are in need of being
| "decentralized" in the CDN and streaming video spaces. And while
| a ton of technical progress has been made, I can't shake the
| feeling that we are in many cases implementing this stuff wrong,
| or haven't even bothered to address the "how" or "why" in as much
| length as one should before going out and building it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > by players in the decentralization space
|
| Keep in mind that this is a somewhat large space, and depending
| on what parts of the decentralization space you're looking at
| you might see players who are all-in on blockchain tech, or you
| might see people who view it as a giant waste of time or even
| actively campaign against it. In particular when I look at
| projects that are using federation (Mastodon, Matrix, etc), I
| see a lot of people who are fairly skeptical about
| cryptocurrency and outright hostile to NFTs.
|
| I have my own biases there, I don't think that NFTs are in
| practice particularly decentralized, and I've slowly come to
| believe that cryptocurrencies have both systemic problems that
| make them less valuable as a decentralization tool than they're
| often advertised as being, and community problems that make
| them difficult to use as a basis for any kind of political
| movement (and decentralization is inherently a political
| idea/movement).
|
| But my biases aside (I'm not trying to make a pro/anti
| blockchain post here), just remember it's a big space without a
| single uniformity of views; from the circle of advocates I'm
| paying attention to and interacting with the most, I would have
| almost guessed the opposite, absent better stats I'd have
| guessed from my experiences that at least a plurality if not
| the majority of the decentralized "community" is against this
| stuff. Interesting to run into people who seem to be more in
| touch with parts of the community that are outside of my
| bubble.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| > It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in
| the decentralization space that the only solution is a
| blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely
| alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading,
| NFTs, etc.
|
| This isn't my experience. These types of solutions may be
| generating a lot of interest in some places (perhaps because
| the people talking about them hope to profit?), but they're not
| all that exist.
| austincheney wrote:
| Implementation is whatever two parties agree upon, otherwise it
| isn't decentralized.
| k__ wrote:
| What are good alternatives that also have useful
| incentivization mechanisms built in?
|
| Every system that is lacking this is doomed.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by "useful incentivization
| mechanisms" and why they're necessary?
|
| I use scuttlebutt because it's fun and nice. I'm not sure
| what more incentive is needed.
| rglullis wrote:
| Scuttlebutt works on a small scale because all of its
| participants are willing to pay for the cost of hosting the
| data and they can afford the inefficiencies and
| redundancies of decentralization.
|
| And I know that it works for you, but if we want something
| that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs
| to be some kind of economic incentive for it to be viable.
| danShumway wrote:
| > if we want something that can reach more than a few
| thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic
| incentive
|
| The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching
| more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating
| a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments
| around building communities also start to look pretty bad
| in practice.
|
| I have yet to see any general-user social platform built
| on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of
| mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is
| comparatively tiny when stacked up against
| Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But
| at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have
| somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using
| this are the people who built it or who are invested in
| it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like
| Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get
| you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda
| looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being
| actually useful.
|
| A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money
| moving through them. But the ratio of money to
| users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto
| has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic
| investment, but at a certain point I start to question
| whether those incentives actually result in generalized,
| successful platforms that tons of everyday people are
| using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the
| incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot
| of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of
| decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't
| seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required
| to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to
| join in.
| rglullis wrote:
| Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are
| pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money
| (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with
| strong economic incentives to get it working.
|
| Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd say
| they are still far from being mainstream. When we start
| having companies using their own instance instead of
| Twitter/FB to promote their content and when we start
| having youtubers leaving Google to broadcast their
| content from their own branded Peertube, _then_ I 'd say
| it has hit mainstream.
|
| > A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money
| moving through them. But the ratio of money to
| users/disruption seems to be really low.
|
| That comes with the territory in any hot market, and
| crypto is no exception to Sturgeon's Law. The main point
| that I would argue though is that is not just about the
| "money", but rather if these new systems can be
| sustainable and if they can create new alternatives to
| the status quo. The best example that I can think of is
| Brave and BAT. The BAT "economy" is still ridiculously
| small, but on a bet about the longevity of Brave vs
| Mozilla, my money is (literally) on Brave. Mozilla can
| have all the wishy-washy nice words about how they are
| protecting the web, but it doesn't take much to realize
| that they can not bite the hand that feeds them.
| Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the
| browser and its search system will be a way for them to
| fight Google at their core. You will have soon lots of
| people making coordinated efforts to get more people off
| Google and into an alternative where they can benefit.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Matrix wouldn't exist without Riot/Element and they are
| pretty much a startup running on Other People's Money
| (Amdocs/VCs/Automattic) and it already has someone with
| strong economic incentives to get it working.
|
| And it turns out that system (for all of its problems) is
| working better than blockchain for shipping actual
| software that ordinary people can use.
|
| > Mastodon (ActivityPub in general) is growing, but I'd
| say they are still far from being mainstream.
|
| And again, far from being mainstream is still miles ahead
| of any blockchain social network.
|
| > When we start having companies using their own instance
| instead of Twitter/FB to promote their content
|
| We literally do have this, Trump's recent venture into
| the social media space was built off of a Mastodon fork.
| Wasn't built off of blockchain.
|
| > Meanwhile Brave is already growing the user base on the
| browser and its search system will be a way for them to
| fight Google at their core.
|
| Brave is literally built on top of Chrome.
|
| ----
|
| You don't really have to convince me of anything, you
| don't have to argue theory to me. All the blockchain
| needs to do is to launch projects that are _better_ than
| the alternatives. So far it hasn 't, which is a really
| low bar to clear. You're attacking Mastodon, how
| embarrassing is it then that there isn't a blockchain
| network that's bigger?
|
| If you're right, and if a blockchain social network
| springs up that out-competes the other projects on the
| metrics that actually matter (not just money), then I'll
| start taking the space more seriously. But so far it just
| hasn't happened.
| loceng wrote:
| Democratically elected government which implements policy
| mandating data mobility (etc) at penalty of exponentially
| increasing fines for non-compliance? You don't need to use a
| carrot for corporations, a "stick" will work just fine for
| making sure they follow what's determined to be ideal.
| k__ wrote:
| I had the impression, the money of companies is used for
| lobbying, effectively controlling the "stick".
| loceng wrote:
| Indeed that is another problem and why policy needs to
| shift to counter that - but don't forget that Bitcoin et
| al will be, are involved in the same regulatory capture
| game - holders are financially incentivized to try to be
| the ones to gain control.
|
| I like Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including
| Ranked Choice Voting, and most notable I believe is his
| Democracy Dollars policy - wherein every eligible voter
| gets $100/year voucher they can allocate to the political
| candidate of their choice, which would wash out the
| corporate lobbyist money of roughly $4 billion with 8
| times that by citizens (including giving those who can't
| afford $100/year for an additional layer of "voting with
| money" to fuel/funding the political system), meaning $4
| billion to up to $32 billing from eligible voters;
| https://andrewyang.com - Andrew Yang, ran in last
| Presidential race as a Democrat - polled higher than
| Kamala Harris and raised half that of Bernie Sanders,
| starting as an unknown - then ran for Mayor of NYC, and
| author of The War on Normal People, and most recently
| Forward: Notes On The Future Of Our Democracy - which in
| part was to announce the new relatively centrist
| political party he started called the Forward Party.
|
| I feel another noteworthy policy proposal of his is
| Journalism Dollars, similarly where you give every
| individual say $50/year voucher to fund/support the
| journalist of your choice - so then journalism and news
| media isn't adversely incentivized by the advertising
| dollars coming in from industrual complexes (including
| from the political establishment/duopoly of the arguably
| captured Democratic-Republican parties).
| rglullis wrote:
| Believing that governments can be effective on a global
| scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory
| of Evolution. History has shown time and again that the
| best we can do is some local maxima that works only for a
| part of the population at the cost of everyone of the
| periphery of power, and even these on the top can get
| wiped out by a Black Swan.
|
| There will not be one single standard of policies that
| will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the
| process to establish the rules are and no matter how good
| the ideas you _think_ they are. What we need is to
| _reduce_ the scope and reach of governments, get their
| leaders to act on a localized level and to be directly
| accountable for the results of their policies. Anything
| else will take us to _more_ centralization, _more_ forced
| conformity, _less_ diversity and _more_ fragility facing
| global-scale events.
|
| We need more Switzerlands and less USAs and even less
| European Unions.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Believing that governments can be effective on a global
| scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory
| of Evolution.
|
| No, it's not.
|
| > History has shown time and again that the best we can
| do is some local maxima that works only for a part of the
| population at the cost of everyone of the periphery of
| power.
|
| To the the extent that's defensible, the problem with
| your recommendation:
|
| > What we need is to reduce the scope and reach of
| governments,
|
| Is that the evidence does not show that that produces
| better results for more people than than alternatives.
| You've jumped from a defensible argument about the
| limitations of government to an indefensible response.
| rglullis wrote:
| Let me rephrase: believing that governments can be
| effective on a global scale _while keeping individual
| freedoms_ is the leftist version of Intelligent Design
| Theory of Evolution.
|
| > Is that the evidence does not show that that produces
| better results for more people than than alternatives
|
| I am not defending localism as a way to "produce better
| results" for more people. I am defending it on the
| premise that it is a more robust idea and more likely to
| sustain long-lasting societies than any progressive "one
| size fits all" government.
| loceng wrote:
| Did I somehow propose "one size fits all" in any of my
| comments in this thread?
|
| You seem to have come to your conclusions referencing
| history, and not leading from a conclusion starting at
| founding principles.
|
| The United States of America has been an experiment, with
| the basis of the Constitution by the Founding Fathers.
| It's done quite well in its first iteration. The next
| framework now needs to be laid out, but part of that is
| educating the population (local and globally, as each
| geography is going to be prone to the actions of bad
| actors) so then they can vote rationally, reasonably, and
| ideally not following or indoctrinated into ideology.
|
| You seem to have a misconception or confusing what
| "government at a global scale" is, perhaps you're once
| again presuming the current status quo of generally
| captured and incompetence elected general officials (like
| the establishment/duopoly in the US) will forever be and
| so then yes, if you do the same thing over and over again
| (with incompetent and captured politicians in positions
| of power and others' captured leading our government
| institutions) then yes, that would be insane - but the
| status quo can change - and new ideas, the truth, is
| making its way to regular folks because of the reduction
| in capture of attention that the internet has allowed,
| and focusing on creating online platforms and systems to
| further strengthen education-learning, communications and
| reaching like-minded and like-hearted community is the
| key.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Did I somehow propose "one size fits all" in any of my
| comments in this thread?
|
| Yes, even if you don't realize it.
|
| UBI, "Journalist Dollars", "Political vouchers" and
| pretty much every proposal from Andrew Yang are all
| starting to sound like variations of the old joke about
| the farmer getting in trouble with the inspector about
| the feed given to the pigs until he decides to just give
| each pig $10 so that they can eat at the local buffet.
|
| They all involve blanket solutions without looking into
| any context or idiosyncrasy of any of the separate
| regions. It reeks of this coastal elite mentality that
| believes that people on the periphery _want_ to live like
| those in the big economic centers.
|
| > The USA has been an experiment (...) The next framework
| now needs to be laid out.
|
| Read again and tell me how you are not implying that
| _one_ framework is to be established and implemented. How
| are you _not_ advocating a top-down solution?
|
| > focusing on creating online platforms and systems to
| further strengthen education-learning, communications and
| reaching like-minded and like-hearted community is the
| key.
|
| Yeah, that has been the technocrats wet-dream about the
| Internet. I've been hearing how the internet would help
| educate people all across the world since I got my first
| 14.4k modem. But instead of this utopia you are painting
| we got Donald Trump, Orban, the Chinese "social credit"
| system _and_ a continuous detoriation of "Western
| democracies" that benefited only but the tech elite.
|
| No, thank you. This is not the world that I want to my
| live in and my children to grow on.
| loceng wrote:
| How is giving people $100 to give to a politician - who
| will have their own solutions - and say $50 to a
| journalist - who will have their own interests targeted
| based on the decision of the individual a blanket
| solution? Your argument makes zero sense. Giving those
| vouchers to everything helps even the playing field, it
| in by no way "reeks of this coastal elite mentality that
| believes that people on the periphery want to live like
| those in big economic centers."
|
| Having a central government isn't inherently top down.
| You need an organization to do things like collect taxes.
| Are you trying to suggest that, for example, a central
| government collecting and redistributing tax funds say in
| the form of UBI is somehow top-down? In fact giving UBI
| is more consersative, less liberal, and more hands-off,
| as it isn't the government deciding what "you" do with
| that money.
|
| I think you're missing some key understandings which is
| skewing your view, and you're certainly projecting hate
| based on your comments - "elite mentality", ". We got
| Donald Trump as a consequence to regulatory capture, MSM
| being captured, etc; for example, 10 mins. video of Noam
| Chomsky explaining how the Republican party was captured
| by corporations/bad actors -
| https://boingboing.net/2019/04/20/useful-idiots-r-us.html
|
| Your argument too about "my utopia" I'm painting got
| "Donald Trump, Orban, [etc]" makes no sense either - I
| stated a new, evolved framework is needed, using what
| we've now experienced based off the Constitution, to
| avoid and counter the pitfalls that lead to a longer list
| than you presented. Maybe my responses could be more
| useful if you spoke specifically to why you dislike
| different policies of Yang, and how you understand them
| to work or not work? E.g. Don't you think washing out $4
| billion of lobbyist money with $32 billion of eligible
| voter money would shift politics to getting more citizen-
| wants oriented politicians elected into power? If you say
| no, then why?
|
| You've made/applied a lot of assumptions/inferences as to
| what to my comments suggest, your understanding seems
| completely off the mark.
| rglullis wrote:
| > How is giving people $100 to give to a politician / $50
| to a journalist a blanket solution?
|
| Why would people even want to give this money to
| politicians? ANY of them? Could I simply get the money
| and pocket it? Why not?
|
| More seriously though: why do you think is more likely to
| happen with such "journalist" money? Do you think people
| will suddenly promote rational discourse or they will
| just give this money to whoever confirms their biases?
| Imagine Alex Jones getting millions of dollars of
| government money to fund his lunacy. What will be the
| reaction on the liberal side? Will they just say "it's
| all fair" and try to compensate by over-funding NPR and
| PBS, or will they try to find ways to rig the game in
| their favor?
|
| > You need an organization to do things like collect
| taxes.
|
| That organization does not need to be centralized. As an
| example: You could have tax collection at the
| city/municipality level, and then have these
| municipalities paying to theirs state according to their
| pre-agreed budget and commitments, and having that
| bubbling up.
|
| > Maybe my responses could be more useful if you spoke
| specifically to why you dislike different policies of
| Yang
|
| It is not about the policy, it is about its _scope_ and
| the idea that you can apply the same kind of thinking on
| a country as large, diverse and uneven as the US.
|
| UBI in itself is not a bad idea. Thinking that the way to
| implement it is by pushing it at the federal level is _a
| catastrophically bad idea_.
|
| I would give Yang a lot more credit if he went to run for
| mayor of a small town in the Rust Belt, tried his ideas
| there first and _then_ went on to promote them. But when
| he goes on to think that he can run a country in the same
| way that people run a SV startup, big red lights should
| be flashing in our heads.
|
| > Don't you think washing out $4 billion of lobbyist
| money with $32 billion of eligible voter money would
| shift politics to getting more citizen-wants oriented
| politicians elected into power? If you say no, then why?
|
| "Because populism" is the short answer. The long answer
| is "if voters were rational, people would be able to
| filter out politicians who are not aligned with their
| interests and lobby groups wouldn't exist. Adding more
| money to the system will not solve the issue."
|
| If we want to get politicians that do what the citizens
| want, we need to reduce the distance between the citizens
| and their representatives. How about we get rid of the $4
| billion lobbyists AND the $32 billion "voter money"? How
| about we got rid of all forms of Federal taxes and
| started favoring again a state-centered union? How about
| people started to be more interested in discussing their
| own town budget plans (where they can actually _SEE_ the
| results of their choices) instead of giving them money to
| only pretend they have any say in these multi-trillion
| sausage factories?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Let me rephrase: believing that governments can be
| effective on a global scale while keeping individual
| freedoms is the leftist version of Intelligent Design
| Theory of Evolution.
|
| Again, no, it's not.
|
| Global scale, one-size-fits-all government is the right-
| to-center-right, neoconservative/neoliberal colonial
| capitalist project.
|
| The far left these days (Leninism having lost ground with
| the fall of the Soviet Union and it's sponsorship or
| allied groups abroad) is dominated by anarchist and
| libertarian socialist groups; and left-to-center-left
| groups are often milder versions of the same or differ
| from the center-right in the priorities of government,
| not its scale or scope. The far right may favor slightly
| smaller scale (large nation rather than global)
| government coordination, but tends to favor fairly
| intrusive scope of government and doesn't tend toward
| localism.
|
| Equating maximum support for scale and scope of
| government with the Left may have made some sense when
| Leninism (and, despite "Socialism in one State", it's
| Stalinist descendant, given observed Cold War behavior)
| were the most visibly dominant, notionally Left
| philosophies (though it still required ignoring the
| integrated colonial globalist nature of global capitalist
| ideology), but it's just plain looney-tunes today.
| rglullis wrote:
| It looks like we are going to get into a "if-by-whiskey"
| argument. By "left", I meant the American "liberal" left,
| the EU-loving social democrats and so on. If you don't
| want to consider them "real left", fine. But the overall
| point is that these groups are by and large supporters of
| increased centralization and keep defending their
| policies on the grounds that "all it takes is a
| government with good intentions and people will be nicely
| living in Kumbaya-land".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If you don't want to consider them "real left", fine.
| But the overall point is that these groups are by and
| large supporters of increased centralization
|
| They generally support a similar level of scale and scope
| of government as the parties the same distance on the
| opposite side of the local center, with different goals.
| There's nothing particularly left, even by your
| definition of "left" that excludes pretty much everything
| past the center-left, about it. On scale and scope, but
| not purpose, of government there's a fairly broad
| centrist common position.
| rglullis wrote:
| Disagree. Surely you can find more republicans defending
| more power to the states and criticizing Federal
| encroachment than democrats. Brexit was mostly a
| "liberal/left" vs "conservative/right" affair than any
| other. EU-skepticism is _not only_ a nationalistic
| /authoritarian talking point. In Latin America, all the
| left governments have softened on their speech, but their
| ideology is pretty much dictated by the Foro de Sao Paulo
| and there has been more than one occasion where
| Lula/Chavez/Kirschner/Morales put their own countries
| below the FSP's agenda.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Surely you can find more republicans defending more
| power to the states and criticizing Federal encroachment
| than democrats.
|
| As vague rhetoric, sure. When you get to brass tacks,
| those same Republicans tend to also to want federal
| control to prohibit state actions that they disagree with
| across a wide spectrum of things. The Republican Party,
| no different than the Democratic Party, favors state
| control on issues it feels it can't rally a federal
| legislative majority on, and federal control where it can
| and there are states that would otherwise defy it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > There will not be one single standard of policies that
| will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the
| process to establish the rules are and no matter how good
| the ideas you think they are.
|
| Are we defining "people" here racially, as a language
| group, or as the humans who live within the particular
| borders of an old colony or the territory of a long dead
| conquerer?
|
| Why is Switzerland the ideal size? Does something about
| that size reduce the proportion of people at the
| "periphery of power"?
| rglullis wrote:
| It's not about Switzerland's size. It's about its bottom-
| up political structure. The cantons hold more political
| and economical power than the federation. It's so local-
| first that there are stories of people who were denied
| Swiss citizenship basically because their neighbors
| considered the person to be not aligned with the
| community values. Policies are defined almost at a
| district level. Comparing with the other "big" countries
| in Europe, there is no distant bureaucracy enacting laws
| affecting subjects that are not on the same sphere.
|
| The USA _was_ built on the same idea, where states have a
| lot more direct power than the federal government, but
| that idea is basically lost because people on both sides
| of the political spectrum have been pushing for more
| centralization and federal control.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Yes, fundamental to Yang's ideas are you can make
| capitalism work if people are given a voice, ie dollars
| (capital) to vote preferences with. Currently it's really
| hard to get money when you have none, there's a
| bootstrapping problem. We do a good job of rewarding
| innovation but not of creating opportunities for it.
| rglullis wrote:
| > what's determined to be ideal.
|
| "Determined" to be ideal? Found the totalitarian.
| loceng wrote:
| "Found the totalitarian." Really?
|
| Nowhere did I state who's determining what's ideal, but
| you seem to have a need to demonize or put down - so you
| assumed it must be what _I_ believe is ideal. I suggest
| you stop making assumptions, and in part based on your
| comments in this thread, that means broadening your
| perspective.
|
| Ideally who's determining what's ideal is a
| democratically elected nation of people who have elected
| politicians to create policy that will reflect the wants,
| desires, beliefs of their population - from the local
| level and all the way up.
|
| I didn't downvote your comment by the way, that was
| others - I don't downvote anything as I think downvotes
| in this context are overall harmful and a useless and
| lazy signal at that.
| k__ wrote:
| _" how much decentralization do we need?"_
|
| I think, that hits the nail on its head.
|
| Many people are happy with MANGA basically owning the Internet
| and many people aren't.
|
| If we look at companies bending the knee for China or shutting
| down accounts, simply because they have different moral than the
| account owners, it's clear that we need much more
| decentralization than we have right now.
|
| How much? I don't know.
| loceng wrote:
| I think part of the solution is to make sure there is a
| functional and tested decentralized system that's available as
| a fallback or failsafe, say in case the system(s) get captured
| by tyranny or authoritarians; and these fallback systems must
| be enshrined in policy/constitution, so that if they're ever
| attacked or targeted then that becomes a canary signal.
|
| Data mobility could also perhaps be considered the other side
| of the decentralized coin.
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