Hard to tell if this is a proposal to fight over hardware or an offer for free stuff.

I choose to believe the former because it makes me chuckle more.

Can someone provide a summary on what this means? I thought there were malicious exploits in this. Why is it back up and the perpetrator unbanned?

Personally I think the biggest hurdle will be moderation and defederation as it pertains to the first amendment. I believe there was already a supreme Court case where blocking a user on Twitter (from an official govt account) was deemed unconstitutional. This precedent might mean a govt instance is not allowed to defederate with any other server unless they defederate with all(?) This is pure speculation on my part, but I can guarantee it would go to the courts.

Paint.net

A great point! I feel like the overarching end goal is a meritocracy - people are rewarded for their talents and hard work. I’d wager most people agree with this goal.

The problem becomes disentangling history and circumstance from our ability to measure talent and hard work. The only way we know to break some social norms that hinder a true meritocracy is to unfairly manipulate the playing field in the short term, which in itself does not follow a meritocracy.

I think there are a few main obstacles:

1. Perceived talent and hard work that was actually the result of circumstance - those that think the system is currently working and therefore their position is justified.
2. Lack of acceptance that the goal is long term / generational. Those that are unwilling to accept a temporary ‘manipulated meritocracy’ in the short term that would allow a better one in the future.

The perfect use case is tickets to live events. One entity creates one NFT for each seat or spot available and can initially sell them. The owner of that NFT (ticket) can then do whatever they want with it without the need for a third party (Ticketmaster) to scalp the shit out of any subsequent transactions.

Proof of ownership of a single ticket at the time of the event is the end goal, which is what NFTs do.

Why this hasn’t been done is pretty baffling to me.

What’s better, is if artists want to provide a subset of tickets that are not resellable they can. Those tickets will only be accepted if a single transaction has taken place.

That’s quite a bomb to drop in your last sentence. Gonna need a source on that one.

Damn, everyone could have been right if the OG just relented. He changed his mind to agree people don’t change their minds? Chess grandmaster move right there… What a missed opportunity.

Love this write up! Thank you for posting, I really like your ideas. Out of curiosity how would apartment buildings work in your plan. There are many cities where you probably don’t want to encourage single family homes to reduce urban sprawl. How would you encourage high density housing in your plan?

I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.

As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people’s needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.

How do you handle situations where people want to live temporarily in houses? An example would be a traveling nurse that doesn’t want to be in an apartment building.

Again, love the lofty goal you’re setting, but you pretty blatantly don’t mention an alternative system. Easy to point out a problem, much harder to build a real solution.

The funny thing is, capitalism happened organically. It wasn’t a designed system. So dismantling capitalism without a solid replacement will likely just lead right back to capitalism.

Love your optimism, but “making things affordable” is not a valid plan for managing resources. It provides a goal without a solution.

Are you suggesting price fixing? That has a lot of associated outcomes that typically cause worse situations than doing nothing.

You can introduce a guaranteed buyer at fixed price points which alleviate some of the negative consequences, but add others.

These are not simple problems. The reason these problems exist isn’t solely because “rich and powerful people are evil” as nice as that would be. These problems still exist because they’re complicated and ‘one size fits all’ solutions haven’t been found for them.

Disclaimer: not advocating for current system.

What alternative would you propose for providing loans?

My controversial (for Lemmy) take is that loans are good for society. They provide an incentive to not hoard resources, but provide them to those who want to put them into action today for future benefit.

A good loan benefits both parties, ie. An auto loan that allows someone to buy a car to get to a job to earn an income that is above the cost of the loan. Without the loan that person couldn’t get to work and whatever service they were providing to society is lost.

All that said - that doesn’t mean the way loans work today is the best solution, but the same functionality of trading current and future resources needs to exist. You don’t have to call it a loan, and it doesn’t have to be performed by private for profit institutions, but if you want a thriving economy I believe you need this function carried out somehow.

The equivalent function in Communism is (or historically has been) a centrally planned resource allocation which very clearly is a horrible idea because of the incentives towards corruption. If you take a literal interpretation of communism (instead of historical) where “the workers own the means of production” trade unions could fulfill this current to future resource allocation function. I do not know if this would create the same corruption as single central authority, but my gut feels is that it would (based on the US labor union and organized crime affiliation of the past.

In short, the current function for trading current and future resources (ie. loans) is far from ideal, but I have not found an alternate that provides more benefits than deficits. I would love to learn about more alternatives, but just saying ‘loans R bad’ makes it sound like you’re advocating getting rid of them with nothing to handle their underlying function, which is a terrible idea.

Whose got your favorite bass face?

I think mine is Sam Wilkes or Joe Dart.

Bassists are just translators between rhythm and melody instruments (source: bassist).