Building an Opt-In Society 182
An anonymous reader writes "In a talk at Y Combinator's startup school event, Stanford lecturer Balaji Srinivasan explained his vision for governing systems of the future. The idea is to find space to set up a new 'opt-in' society outside existing governments, and design it to take full advantage of technology to keep people in control of their own lives. That means embracing tech that subverts existing industries and rejecting regulation on new ways of doing things. '[N]ew industries are simultaneously disrupting existing ones while also exiting the system entirely, he says. With 3D printing, regulation is being turned into DRM. With quantified self, medicine is going mobile. With Bitcoin, capital control becomes packet filtering. All of these examples, Srinivasan says, are ways in which technology is allowing people to exit current systems like physical product production and distribution; personal health; and finance in favor of spaces of their own creation.' Srinivasan's ideas are a natural extension of a few proposals already in the works — Peter Thiel has been trying to build a small tech incubator city that floats in international waters, outside of government control. Elon Musk wants to have a Mars colony, and Larry Page has wished for a tech-centric Burning man that's free from government regulation. 'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'"
Power abhors a vacuum. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
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The bad news is, we likely won't even reach those places, due to the vast distance. If we do, we maybe found a way to take 'shortcuts', but then, orders can be sent through those shortcuts, too.
There's no known technical reason why we can't travel at around 10% of the speed of light. At that rate we can expand across the entire galaxy in a million years or so.
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Ah, colonising space ... the techno-utopianist version of Homer Simpson's "Under The Sea" [youtube.com].
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The good news is that, once we're off this planet, most of those grand old sociopathic power dreams become impossible. There'll never be a Galactic Empire, because you can't boss people around when your orders take thousands of years to reach them. There will probably never even be a Solar Empire, because the odds are high that your 'private army' can't travel at more than 10% of the speed of light, and the Oort Cloud is far enough away for even that to be very hard to control.
There is an inverse to this too though. Once the average person can travel the galaxy with ease there is no way to stop someone from
capturing and enslaving people on their private ships or planets and doing all sorts of inhumane things. Pirates and mercenaries would
permanently come back, people could disappear forever, blowing up or even threatening to blow up a planet would become a viable
option and a host of other very negative things as with access to a single ship you could go your own way and write y
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Your assumptions that the vacuum of space also includes a vacuum of existing political power and regulation seems rather childish and wishful thinking. Along the lines of the crazy logic, that because 100% of the planets that we have investigate in the surface water zone, the rest of the galaxy is uninhabited. When humanity has investigated say 100 planets in this zone and found them to lack life, get back to me.
As for intelligent life, as an intelligent species advances so it life span increase, eventua
Re:Power abhors a vacuum. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah. One wonders what dreams these people have that are being blocked by the government.
Mr. Musk is doing good work in establishing commercial access to space and giving us a new choice in cars. SpaceX has a $1+Billion ISS supply contract from NASA (Government), and Tesla accepted and paid back a roughly half-billion dollar loan *from the government* that was extremely helpful in establishing the company's manufacturing operations. Seems to me that in Mr. Musk's case, the government has been a facilitator
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Corporations don't really want to be the government analog, corporations just want peace in their primary business areas so that they can do business and make money. If the incumbent government leaves corporations will ally themselves with whoever is ready to fill its place, be it private security companies, or druglords, or motorcycle gangs.
no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
As a resident of a prosperous northern-European country with working infrastructure, a working healthcare system, relatively low poverty and homelessness levels, and generally a decent civil society that we all pay our share towards, I'll take the universal welfare state over some kind of ridiculous experiment in anarcho-capitalism. That's about as likely to work as any other anarchist experiment has worked. I guess America can have fun with it, though.
Re:no thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess America can have fun with it, though.
Somalia is having fun with it right now. I don't think this is what even the craziest teabaggers want.
Fortunately with Obamacare, America is realizing that there needs to be some kind of social security. In the long run, there's no way around it if you want to keep exploiting people and keep them relatively peaceful at the same time.
Somalia, Somaliland, Statelessness, and Vampires (Score:4, Interesting)
Somalia doesn't have statelessness, it has an overlapping collection of theocracies and despotisms. The main exception is Somaliland in the north, where there's been a functional breakaway republic for years and there's a noteworthy level of prosperity. Somaliland has been completely unable to secure any kind of foreign recognition, largely because if it gets it, it ruins the claim that the vampires at the IMF have to shakedown the Somali people to repay the loans made to the Barre regime. The upside of this lack of recognition, however, is that the Somaliland government hasn't been able to get foreign aid, which, as it turns out, suppresses development rather than fostering it. But condemning foreign aid to governments of low income countries is about the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from the twenty-first century Somali experience, it doesn't speak to the efficacy of statelessness at all (either way).
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Somaliland the unknown. Thanks for that.
Thing that's long bothered me, being un-knowledgeable in how this stuff works (IMF, e.g.), is that from source to destination, even if the intent is to help, by the time it gets on the ground, it's twisted - what doesn't get siphoned off into a few bank accounts or turned into off-the-books weaponry. Conundrums that are over my head, mostly.
I guess it's the old story, money and power look out for themselves, everyone else shifts lower on the teats, until those most
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I love it when someone mentions Somalia and gives entirely uninformed opinions. This gives me the opportunity to debunk your statement with a single link: http://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf [peterleeson.com]
2007. 2013 now and 1/3rd of somalians suffer from depression and the common cure is to chain them up.
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2007. 2013 now and 1/3rd of somalians suffer from depression and the common cure is to chain them up.
A few things. First, no country on the planet has 1/3rd of its population suffering from depression. The highest year over year incidence rate has been reported at .8%, with a lifetime incidence of 8-10%, if you're unfortunate enough to be a woman in that country. And that country is not Somalia. Somalia rated 153 out of 192 this past year on per capita depression. You'll never guess who got number one [wikipedia.org]. And Somalia also rated pretty low on incarceration rates. Guess who got number one again [nationmaster.com]?
How should I put
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If Somalia is fine why are so many of them leaving?
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You don't have to be clinically depressed to believe that you'd be better off somewhere else than where you are now. For example, the small island nation of Dominica scored near the top of the world happiness index a few years ago, yet young people emigrate from there in droves in search of high paying jobs in wealthier countries.
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No it isn't.
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Then move to Somalia and stop trying to turn this country into it.
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Did you seriously say Cantonese?
Re: no thanks (Score:2)
Right, I meant Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin.
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LMAO that's your argument? Because the Barre government were abusive scumbags the Somali people are better off under the warlords and Islamists? Funnily enough all the Somalis that have fled their country disagree.
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That's your debunking? That Somalia was (according to some guy who wrote a paper) a shithole before anarchy, and is marginally less of a shithole afterwards, therefore anarchy is good?
This is why the ultra-hard libertarian arguments always come across as so flaky. There aren't any examples of places that are both nice to live and stateless.
Let's run the experiment (Score:2)
That's true. On the other hand, there's nowhere that's shitty and stateless either, unless you count Antarctica. I say we let hardcore libertarians have a ten mile square stateless area and see what happens.
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The one non-shitty part of Somalia has an (unrecognized thus far) state. Of it's 3 politil parties, 2 are left of center and I have no idea how the third leans.
The rest may be better off stateless than what they had before, but that's hardly the same thing. I would be better off having my leg sawed off than having my leg sawed off and being branded with a hot poker, but I would be better off still if neither was happening.
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How does it weaken society? By reducing suffering?
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How does it weaken society? By reducing suffering?
Reduce suffering? You really don't get the problems with the law do you?
First, it's a misallocation of public funding and a large inefficiency in the economy. Rather than spend a lot of money to make medical care more expensive (via the large health insurance subsidies plus those mandates on insurers), wouldn't it be better used to pay for federal level law enforcement and disaster response? Roads? National defense? The more you spend on feel good stuff the less you have for the things that actually matt
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If you mean we should just forget the insurance and socialize medicine, I'll agree. Don't even try to claim it will make it more expensive since every country that has done it has cheaper healthcare than we do. I'm with you on the infrastructure repairs.c We can pay for them by no longer playing world police and dropping the failed war on drugs.
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If you mean we should just forget the insurance and socialize medicine, I'll agree.
I don't.
Don't even try to claim it will make it more expensive since every country that has done it has cheaper healthcare than we do.
Obamacare is what the single payer people got when they had the votes to do something. Of course, it will be ludicrously expensive just like everything else the federal government does!
We can pay for them by no longer playing world police and dropping the failed war on drugs.
I'm cool with that.
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Obamacare is what the single payer people got when they had the votes to do something.
Not precisely. The Democrats have moved very far left over recent decades, and are now functionally the same as 60s-70s Republicans. Obama's further right still. Plus in most instances, he's proven to be a terrible negotiator. He didn't even use single payer as a bargaining chip for something in the middle, much less as a dream program; he gave it away in exchange for nothing, right out of the gate. Assuming he ever wanted it.
What we got isn't single payer, so please don't act like it is.
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Not precisely. The Democrats have moved very far left over recent decades, and are now functionally the same as 60s-70s Republicans. Obama's further right still.
Presumably you meant "very far right over recent decades" (see, for example, this Democratic president's 1949 State Of The Union speech [ucsb.edu]).
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Obamacare is Romneycare re-packaged and is nothing like single payer and absolutely unlike nationalized healthcare.
We really needed to go that extra distance to get a healthcare system with a proven track record.
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Obamacare is Romneycare re-packaged and is nothing like single payer and absolutely unlike nationalized healthcare.
I favor the theory that this law is intended to destroy insurance-based health care. Create an exploitable emergency to generate political will for single payer.
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Serious numbers on this speak a different language. Health care will be a lot cheaper (and better) for the vast majority of people, and only a little bit more expensive for those well off. The right is just making shit up [salon.com]. I don't really understand the motives - perhaps they like it when other people suffer? Perhaps they are just crazy? Most likely both.
This is basically "argumentum ad novitatem" (Score:2)
...made into life-governing philosophy.
Everything new is great and should not be controlled or regulated.
I.e. Had human society chosen such a way of living 100 or so years ago we'd be having our rejuvenating dose of radium with our cornflakes every morning. [wikipedia.org]
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You're trotting out that link, I suppose, to imply that a benevolent nanny-state is the only protection against quackery, but I think the market has a way of sorting such things out.
So, based on history, which ways of sorting such things out work better at preventing such things before people get sick or die?
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You're generally shielded from the burden of unskilled migration by your geographical location, shielded from invasion by your southern and eastern neighbors who recently joined NATO, you are far out enough in the periphery of world affairs to not attract the ire of regional powers, but near enough that everyone wants to woo you to their side. You have few people, yet have a claim to large swathes of ocean energy and mineral resources. While you have some exposure to the world and to racial diversity, you s
Re:no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
You're generally shielded from the burden of unskilled migration by your geographical location, shielded from invasion by your southern and eastern neighbors who recently joined NATO, you are far out enough in the periphery of world affairs to not attract the ire of regional powers, but near enough that everyone wants to woo you to their side. You have few people, yet have a claim to large swathes of ocean energy and mineral resources. While you have some exposure to the world and to racial diversity, you still remain one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the West, sparing you much of the social strife that other countries experience. Plus, most people have forgotten your country's contributions to murder, slavery, rape, and pillage, or they'd rather focus on someone else's. Pretty comfortable place to be. Though, not quite a place from which to judge.
Quite a lot of fair points there, though I'd disagree on the last one. While the people who lived through WWII is quickly dwindling, we're very aware of our not-so-distant history when most of northern Europe was in flames and we considered ourselves all but ethnically homogeneous with über- and untermenschen. An awfully lot has happened since then though and we've probably done more to mend our wounds in the last 70 years than many other conflicts that have gone on for centuries. But I think I speak for most of Europe when I say we don't want to become a United States of Europe, the English want to be English, the French French, the Germans German and so on. We've found a peaceful way to coexist with "the other side" ceasing to exist and if it sounds a bit like we're saying "we did it, you can do it too" then that's probably true.
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But I think I speak for most of Europe when I say we don't want to become a United States of Europe
So then what is the purpose of the EU? And why does it grow more and more powerful and centralized (e.g. the adoption of the euro) as time progresses?
Re:no thanks (Score:4, Informative)
So then what is the purpose of the EU? And why does it grow more and more powerful and centralized (e.g. the adoption of the euro) as time progresses?
Mostly equal access to markets, capital, labor and resources. The main reason to start a war (outside racial/religious wars) is because the other side has something you want and can't have. If you can run the same business in the same market under the same rules from Germany as you can from France, what's there to have a war about? While there's quite a few intra-EU foreign workers when you look at it from a grand picture most people want to stay where they are if the job market and wages are decent there. Despite the freedom to travel and take jobs elsewhere most want to stay in their own country.
When I talked about a US of Europe I thought mainly about culture, language and identity. I'm sure there's differences between California and New York but they're nothing compared to Portugal and Bulgaria. Totally different people but if you want to sell Portuguese goods in Bulgaria or Bulgarian goods in Portugal the same inner market rules apply. As for the euro, the idea was to lower trade barriers because if you live somewhere like in the BeNeLux countries you have like five countries inside an hour's drive. No currency exchange means cross-border trade and shopping is easy as pie. The downside is that it was like having a joint checking account without ever agreeing on the rules for using it.
Yes, there's a lot of proverbial saber rattling but in the grand scheme of things it's very far from actual saber rattling. Worst case I think the EU will have to shed a few countries down south that have mismanaged their economy too horribly from the euro, but I think the union would stand and they'd return to a position like the UK, Denmark and Sweden which are in the EU and outside the euro. The rest is a lot of scare mongering to make them realize the seriousness of the situation, they both stand to lose on a collapse and as long as they don't play chicken on who takes the bill there will be a solution.
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No wonder Europe is doomed, if so many there can't even see that the EU is, and always was, intended to create a 'United States Of Europe'.
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Have you actually been to northern Europe? Do you know anything about intra-EU migration, especially from places like Poland, Romania or Bulgaria?
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Even total Muslim immigration is quite low. It's less than 5% of the population here. Most immigrants come from such exotic places as... Lithuania or Romania.
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In 2-3 generations the cost of providing welfare will have plummeted far below what it is today. That's rather the nature of progress.
However, for now, "importing labour" a.k.a. allowing immigration doesn't seem like a terrible way to raise the tax base, now does it? Especially as most northern European countries are getting immigration from eastern European countries where the dominant religions do not involve burqas.
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where burqas (or cowboy hats) are worn is a reality.
Which country is supplying cowboy hat wearing low wage immigrant labor in Northern Europe?
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Can you please cite instances of when northern European countries, in the recent decades which have seen welfare states, have kicked people out on the grounds of them following a different religion?
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Yes, Comrade! The only hope for the world is The Glorious Workers' Revolution!
Of course, if you really are one of the few remaining unrepentant Commies, you should be celebrating technology like the 3D printer that allows workers to own the means of production.
Except what most Commies really want is to control those workers, not set them free.
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While I agree with your reservations, your countries economy is built of consumption and capitalism yes? Then it's doomed,
Thanks for warning us that this post would be full of bullshit.
Just like mine and everyone else s. It was the natural step to take as society changed. However, It's weakness and end game are now spelled out clearly for anyone how cares to look.
Capitalism works and makes sense. Let us recall that the definition of capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. Experience has shown when people own something they take better care of it. They have an interest in making it work better. They make new capital on their own initiative.
Now, you allege a bunch of bad things about capitalism. My experience in the past has been that such people aren't really speaking of capitalism nor have
combinatorial explosion (Score:3)
So let's say there are N choices you can "opt-in" for. Does this mean there will be 2^N societies to choose from?
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There only needs to be one society.
I'm not sure you used the word "needs" correctly.
Let's say I hate intellectual property, so I want to opt-in to a IP-free society. But, I'm afraid new biotech equipment (3d-printing of viruses) could destroy the world, so I would like to not opt-in to a 3d-printing-everything society. How is having one opt-in society going to help me?!?
i would like to opt-out (Score:2)
With 3D printing, regulation is being turned into DRM. With quantified self, medicine is going mobile. With Bitcoin, capital control becomes packet filtering. All of these examples, Srinivasan says, are ways in which technology is allowing people to exit current systems like physical product production and distribution; personal health; and finance in favor of spaces of their own creation.
"The best part is this, the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there," he said. "We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like without affecting anyone who wants to live under the Paper Belt," he added, using the term "paper belt" to refer to the environments currently governed by pre-existing systems like the US government.
good luck with those opt-in surgeons.
just sayin
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good luck with those opt-in surgeons.
robotic surgeons could do a better job then any human if they would only let us develop the technology!
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good luck with those opt-in surgeons.
robotic surgeons could do a better job then any human if they would only let us develop the technology!
and what exactly is stopping you?
Wall-builders (Score:2)
'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'"
Nope, instead they'll be the ones who build a thick high wall around your new "space" to make sure you stay put and don't infect everything outside of it. Your space will become a prison like Waco, Texas, etc. Eventually they'll decide to reclaim the space you Occupy, and then it's game-over.
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Nope, instead they'll be the ones who build a thick high wall around your new "space" to make sure you stay put and don't infect everything outside of it. Your space will become a prison like Waco, Texas, etc. Eventually they'll decide to reclaim the space you Occupy, and then it's game-over.
If your society doesn't manage to snuff itself out before that.
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Why reclaim? This would be the perfect place to send all the antisocial elements.
Good Luck with that. (Score:3)
what about a week later? (Score:5, Interesting)
He wants to build a society with built-in mechanisms that subvert existing businesses and institutions, while promoting new ones. Okay, that's fine on day one.
A week later, the "new" institutions are "existing", so those mechanisms subvert them. His plan then, is quite literally to build a society that subverts itself -where anything built is destroyed.
troll story (Score:2)
build a small tech incubator city that floats in international waters, outside of government control
Are these people planning to operate outside the law of an existing country? This seems beyond impossible. Not even worth discussing.
The Mars colony is more interesting for the technology required to to this than the society that might spring up on Mars.
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Old joke: who cleans the shitters in Galt's Gulch? (Score:2, Interesting)
To dust off an old joke: who cleans the shitters in Galt's Gulch? Who "opts-in" to be a janitor?
Remember, the toolbags who are coming up with this are the same ones who think BART employees get paid "too much", so don't count on financial incentives to make somebody sign up.
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To dust off an old joke: who cleans the shitters in Galt's Gulch? Who "opts-in" to be a janitor?
No idea since the book didn't say, but I bet it was a profitable business since you had all these rich guys, paying in gold, who probably didn't know and didn't want to know how to clean a toilet.
I must admit to being puzzled why this is even considered a joke. It's a pretty obvious and very long ago solved problem.
This has happened before (Score:2)
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and does Mr Srinivasan expect there will be a place for colored people in this brave new world
Let me guess, you're one of those people who thinks Western civilization disappears when the colored people are left to their own devices?
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Does not president Obamas treatment not clue you in to some of the "issues" the USA still has over race
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Does not president Obamas treatment not clue you in to some of the "issues" the USA still has over race
No, it doesn't because the man was elected and reelected president and the political differences are all over obvious issues not the color of his skin.
There are racist ideas still around, for example, your assertions that colored people wouldn't be able to cut it in a libertarian society, but they no longer have the impact on US society that they did prior to the 1950s.
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Deregulation (Score:5, Insightful)
'The best part is this,' Srinivasan said. 'The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there.'
But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!
Complain all you want about 'big banks' unethical behavior (really, keep complaining, write to your local MP/senator/whathaveyou, make sure the issue doesn't get dropped) but government regulation of banking means that if you put your money in a bank, you can be sure (at least up to £85,000 per Bank in the UK) that you will always have access to that money. Without regulation, then you have situations like with Paypal where the holder of you money can just up and decide "Nope, you can't have it anymore. It's ours for at least the next 9 months. Oh, you want an explanation? Too bad!".
Or how about enforcing standards, like power supply? You want a situation where not only does every device have it's own plug, but your house may not even supply the same voltage or frequency as the neighbourhood a mile away? 'No government at all' works fantastically when all your actors are rational and honest. That is also true to Communism. Finding this mythical group of rational and honest actors (and keeping out even a single bad egg) is the hard part.
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But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!
Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin. In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money. Even Madoff's customers are slowly getting about half their money back, as the liquidator sues everybody who made a big profit.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitc
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Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy because almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. There's no real advantage for legitimate use over fiat currency at this time, and significant disadvantages. So long as we pay for our groceries in dollars, most people would much rather have dollars than some bits that have no established support.
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I don't get why people care so much about the illegal activity going on in BitCoin. If you don't like it, then don't get mixed up in it. No one is forcing you to invest in BitCoin Ponzi schemes.
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Actually, no. That is, as you said, "standard financial scams" which usually rely on convincing people to give up control of their money. The whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to random untrustworthy third
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Not that I'm a fan of anarcho-capitalism (at all), but your points would have fairly ready responses from the crowd that is - obviously, their envisioned utopia doesn't have banks or PayPal equivalents, rather all money is in the form of Bitcoin which cannot be arbitrarily seized like that.
Also, re: power supplies, it often isn't necessary for governments to impose particular technical standards. For instance the internet has developed all kinds of protocols and standards without any government mandates.
I t
Yeah, right. (Score:3)
Not seeing any concrete plans here. Some of the ideas are silly, such as Blueseed, the scheme to have a ship just outside of US waters full of programmers. That's just a tax shelter. Of course, they want the U.S. Coast Guard to help them if they get in trouble, as their prospectus says. And they want a large ferry dock and a freighter doc in San Mateo County's Pillar Point small-boat harbor. And they want ICE to make that small-boat harbor a US entry point, so people don't have to go up to San Francisco on a boat to visit the US. They also wanted to set up a microwave link at the USAF radar station at Pillar Point. But they don't want to pay for any of this.
Then there was CITE [cite-city.com], a small city to be built in New Mexico. No people - it was supposed to be just for testing "new technologies". The company behind it [pegasusglo...ldings.com] turns out to be basically one guy without much money and a lot of clip art. Got a lot of press, and even some political support, then the vaporware project went away. The business model made no sense.
Further back, there was the high-tech Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which Walt Disney was going to build. Disney World has EPCOT today, but it's a theme park; nobody lives there. Disney did eventually build Celebration, FL, which is a retro-looking subdivision.
Some very top-down countries have done things like this: Tsukuba Science City, Guangzhou Science City, King Khalid Military City, and Brasilia. Those are all Government projects. The US private sector has a long history of "company towns", most of it not too good.
The US western frontier (Score:2)
The US western frontier was often sold to the easterners as a place you could go to free yourselves from the stranglehold of modern society and make a clean start.
Sadly, most of the folks that made the trek were ill prepared for the radical self reliance required of early settlers in that territory. Many simply returned (some died on the way out or back), and a vanishing few found their dream lives. Of course their attempts paved the way for those that followed.
What made it possible, the lure of course was
We've been here before many times. (Score:2)
Didn't we already do this? A new nation that subverts the existing structures, even has a system built-in for making sure we don't have stagnant hierarchical power structures? I believe it was called "the United States of America."
Don't kid yourself into thinking you're "special" and "not like those guys." Please learn from previous generations and previous attempts. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is not just a clever bon mot to be dismissed.
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What makes you think they aren't going to learn from previous attempts?
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Once you can print 3D metal cheap, that changes a lot of things.
Plastic, less so.
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I doubt DIY metal working will ever come down to the prices of mass production, it'll be like how you could print our own book on your own ink printer but why would you do that? There's no money in it, it only matters the law says you can't have it. Which means guns and.... well, what's the rest really? Make my own knives, forks, spoons, door handles, belt buckles and so on? I think most people here too easily confuse the real world with the digital world where bits are perfectly duplicated at home with onl
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You could print your own books, but the materials would cost more than just buying it. 3D printing is likely to remove that particular rule for everyday items/tools, especially if you could 3D print steel and/or aluminum.
http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/01/0019259/study-finds-3d-printers-pay-for-themselves-in-under-a-year [slashdot.org]
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And tell me, you think most people out there have the materials science knowledge, the engineering skills and the patience to diddle around with this stuff?
The main advantage of 3D printing is that it's significantly simpler and easier to use than CNC machines.
What will change politically and economically? It's nothing more than a hobby, and how many people do you know that have a fully-equipped CNC shop at home, and what did it change for them politically or economically?
So were personal computers in 1980s. As expertise requirements go down, adoption by the general public goes up.
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maybe they thought the pizza printer would be perfected so they could dispense with the poor slobs who bake them and just sit their on their unregulated island heaven and say "computer, make me a thin curst with basil and anchovies."
And then, because they didn't think about where the crust, basil, or anchovies came from, they get PC LOAD THIN rather than a pizza, and take the pizza printer out and smash it.
Re:opt-out? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the opt-in frontier societies of the American West are a precedent, there is no opt out. Once you're in the company town, you're there for your term of service.
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So if you decide to opt-out, do they toss you overboard?
The Puritans in Massachusetts exiled its first dissidents.
But it is isolation and fear --- fear of everything that lies beyond the walls of the world you've built --- that breeds the paranoia which ends in the burning of witches.
The geek in Rapture. (Score:2)
I am disappointed, why has none made a reference to Bioshock yet, seeing how a city at sea was mentioned?
Irrational Games specializes in exquisitely crafted game worlds that brilliantly expose the flaws in the geek's anarchic-libertarian ideals --- which exist on the same plane as those of the Tea Party Republican.
As for myself, if I chose to make my home on an island, it would be Manhattan.
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Yes they will. They will follow you there, eventually, and with guns.
How do you plan to boss me around when I'm living on a comet in the Oort Cloud? Or just blasting out into deep space in a self-contained ship?
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How do you plan on constructing said ship (long-term, high-cost project) without attracting government attention, then making launching the ship before being arrested or shot, then making out of Earth orbit before being shot down?
Uh, no-one would be building it in Earth orbit.
Besides which, Big Government is on the verge of collapse world-wide, and will be a distant memory by the time such a ship is technologically possible.
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Except that she wasn't an anarcho-capitalist, so she'd probably have found a way to call this sort of thing "anti-life" or something.
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"and required only that the citizenry stay involved"
Oh, yeah, that. At first blush you wouldn't think it would be such a hard thing to do, would you?
I think a large factor was the shift from local self-made entertainments - a festival dance, church social, a shared meal after a barn raising (notice there's a rural bias to some of these) - to other-manufactured ones - motion pictures, concerts (but at least some socializing entre actes), TV, then the socializing more and more stopped, with some exception fo
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who is going to make his clothes?
how will he power his machines?
The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? [wikiquote.org]