> FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
Cereal leaves the room. He’s gone for like 15 seconds. Mom pops her head in:
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Cereal has.”
That always cracks me up. Like he had to have walked out of the room, spun on his heel, and marched straight into the kitchen and raided the fridge. He couldn’t have taken more than 5 breaths after leaving before he was eating something.
Purposefully devaluing the dollar to make US goods more globally marketable and hide the Japanese debt crisis is an interesting but risky strategy.
Currently, I'm glad to see a correction without panic, but it's too early to make a call on the effect on the overall global economy. Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
The channel appears to be five years of "It is happening!" and "It started!" thumbnails. I just can't take it seriously, so I decided to look into the company/leadership.
It appears they've been associated with a lot of hype/fear copy-paste companies that offer highly inflated monthly access to their trades and research. Note that they were named "Game of Trades" before rebranding.
> It appears they've been associated with a lot of hype/fear copy-paste companies that offer highly inflated monthly access to their trades and research. Note that they were named "Game of Trades" before rebranding.
I really wish that people would wake up to the danger posed by meme stock BS “leaking” into the general markets.
Just as voters are responsible for changes in society, uninformed investors can impact society too, especially when they’re amplifying their purchasing power via leverage.
For instance, I’ve been buying real estate forever, and I’ve enjoyed the Reventure app.
But I’ve REALLY noticed that his YT videos are exclusively doom and gloom.
This ceaseless negativity moves markets, just as the irrational exuberance for real estate in 2005 moved markets.
But the exuberance for real estate was driven by people who were buying real estate.
The endless doom and gloom of YT finance videos is for a much different reason:
It drives page views.
That’s not a good thing. Because it’s really easy to get swept up in the negativity. And that negativity has a downstream effect, where it’s often used to convince people to invest in things that the YouTuber is promoting.
Basically, I don’t know if we need an “SEC for YouTube,” but we might.
Yes, I know we already have an SEC for YouTube (it’s the SEC), but nearly none of the people doling out financial advice on YT are trained professionals. It’s the fundamental defect of internet advice; who to trust?
Misinformation and mass hysteria suck, I agree. But if the amplification of the sky-is-falling-flavor-of-the-week braindead youtuber take can materially imperil financial markets, the stability of that system was always doomed.
An “SEC for YouTube” can’t prevent shit if the lever of influence is already that long. It might be able to keep a lot of meme investor idiots from losing their shirts, but that has to be weighed against the historically evident risks of having what amounts to a ministry of truth/state propaganda regulator.
I remember sky-is-falling-flavor-of-the-week newsletters from the 1970s; they probably go back further than that, but I don't remember firsthand. The difference is that YouTube lets millions of people find this without either having to subscribe to the newsletter, or the newsletter having to figure out who they are and send them a free copy.
In other words, what's different is that the gain is higher. The system was not always doomed, because the gain wasn't this high. Now that it is this high, the system may now be doomed.
He was on at one in the morning, and a big chunk of his audience was calling in to the show drunk or high. 99% of the audience knew it was fake.
And twenty years later, the conspiracy stories live on, via YouTube, but without the CONTEXT that the Art Bell show was broadcasting to a VERY niche audience.
The channel appears to be five years of "It is happening!" and "It started!" thumbnails. I just can't take it seriously, so I decided to look into the company/leadership.
Reminds me of ZeroHedge. They've been shouting that the depresssion-level market crash is near now since 2009. Every single day. For 17 years.
i don't think that's a fair representation of the average of the ZH articles.
many bird's eye view articles are depicting how the game is rigged and corrupt to the core and that it is heading towards a wall (and you should buy x, typically gold)... yes.
but then they also have more day-to-day articles discussing market moves and predictions in all directions.
ZH is a wider range of stuff than that. and in all that noise, most of the important alternative, often initially censored news appeared there first.
so, yeah, don't take it all in literally... but then it's a site edited by Tyler Durden FFS... :)
I can only personally speak for myself and I'm not giving financial advice here. I use the Bolgehead strategy of the 3 fund portfolio is still the tried and true I follow, and I have yet to not benefit from doing so, even in economic downturns[0]
I'm immediately concerned with the note about silver dropping so much. Yes, that happened, and was a historic drop. But it followed a historic run up to its prior price, so the drop is still net positive for even a 1 month period.
I'm not saying the article's thesis is incorrect, but its providing some data without context. I'm always leery of data presented without context.
I take “not financial advice” articles like this at best as entertainment. How can anyone seriously talk about metals for example without mentioning that gold was $1900 and silver $20 a few years ago. Today they sit at $5000 and $80. It’s completely absurd to write about the “drop” as a proof of anything
this article discusses the events in the recent couple of months, explicitly. the moves prior to that is not really relevant for its thesis -- regardless of how true it actually is.
The bar has been significantly lowered in the last year since the US has decided to commit bigly to unpredictability. Another 3 years of these kinds of manipulations and the Yuan could very well look like the lesser evil to a lot of countries.
I don't understand why gold-backing is required. I'm a novice.
My understanding is that a reserve currency requires fluid markets and a stable, reliable, metrics-based currency policy. It's why the Fed is so stubborn about its relatively simple policy goals: 2% inflation and low unemployment.
China appears to be attempting to reproduce what the USD was before it was free floating.
USD is currently backed by debt and nominally military might. If the US defaults then all of the US bonds held by foreign banks become worthless. That is an enormous risk which is why countries have been divesting from US bonds. If USD was still gold, as it was before 1913, if you hold your money it cannot be made worthless by a third party. After 1913 USD became gold backed bills with partial reserve. It is why USD became the global reserve currency. But, reserve requirements were reduced and more paper was produced. In 1971 Nixon removed the convertibility of paper bills to gold metal effectively stealing the gold of any nation that asked the US to hold it.
One of my favorite bits of currency trivia is that a $20 double gold eagle coin used in circulation prior to 1933 had a gold content of 0.9675 troy ounces. Twenty dollars in your hand was literally nearly an ounce of gold.
This simplistic explanation seems to elide the very point it makes ... a gold backed currency becoming a non-gold backed currency was done via a political decision making process, just as any decision to default on US national debt would be.
You seem to suggest that people should worry about a default claiming if we had still had a gold backed currency the risk would go away ... "if you hold your money it cannot be made worthless by a third party" ... but it can be made worthless by a government any time that government chooses.
The government (having defaulted on gold-backed debt) could simply refuse to convert the paper of the debt to gold (sure, that would be bad, but hey, they've already chosen to default, so not much worse ...)
Oh no! You have found the fatal flaw of using paper currency backed by anything. Before 1913 money was gold and silver. Not paper bills backed by those metals.
Many people doubt that returning to gold and silver coinage is possible. Going to gold backed currency is a step in the right direction.
A full reserve requirement might work for paper currency. But the only way the plebs that are stuck with paper can truly secure their wealth is to use metal the same as countries do.
1. old situation: currency backed by full (gold) reserve
2. actual political decision: currency no longer backed by full reserve
3. result: currency no longer backed by full reserve
1. possible political decision: return to currency backed by full (gold) reserve
2. possible political decision: currency no longer backed by full reserve
3. result: currency no longer backed by full reserve
To whatever extent government could return a full-reserve backed currency, government can move away from that again. Thus, there's no builtin security for anyone in a return to a full reserve backed currency.
If no government in the history of the world had ever done this, then arguing for a full-reserve backed currency might have a bit more weight. But they have, and it really has done.
Your first point is wrong. Before 1913 gold and silver coins were the money in peoples pockets. Government produced the coins of known weight and purity. After 1913 paper bills were produced with partial reserve. The US has never had a full reserve paper currency. Step one of going to gold backed paper always comes with printing more paper than there is gold. Wanting to spend more money than they have is the reason every time a government debases its money.
Regardless, I get your point that political decisions ruined it. It is clear that government cannot be trusted to maintain a constant unit of measure that money should be. So, would you agree to an amendment to separate economy and state? Require government to produce coins of known weight and purity and that is it. If they want more money to spend they will have to extract it as taxes.
> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
Of course more countries may enrol in the system, but that dilutes the influence of the five namesake nations of BRICS.
But then you have to choose an actual currency(s) to do transactions in, so will you trust them to be stable? Or perhaps go with a 'theoretical' currency likes Keynes' bancor?
All reasons that a paper currency backed by gold has never lasted long. Going to paper currency is the first step to start cheating by fudging numbers. The only money that has ever lasted is actual coins/bars of metal, precious or otherwise.
> The only money that has ever lasted is actual coins/bars of metal, precious or otherwise.
1. most physical paper has a relatively short life, so one would not expect it to last as long as metal tokens
2. paper was only available in much of the world several thousand years after the first currencies began, so it's not suprising that we have little record of paper money from very old civilizations.
3. the idea that there was no cheating by fudging numbers before paper currency is completely ahistorical. The nature and ease of the fudging may have changed, but the fudging itself existed long, long before paper currencies became common.
The entire reason coinage was even a thing was exactly this! Turns out it's pretty hard to know if a coin is actually the amount of gold it represents, if the shopkeepers scales are accurate etc etc. etc
The entire concept of marking coins with trustworthy seals was exactly to basically invent fiat currency as risk mitigation: coins bearing the seal would be honored, and from that it was a short hop to "what if I just presented an IOU with the seal of the local gold merchant?"
DO NOT make financial decisions based on the advice of a youtube channel.
DO NOT make financial decisions based of of the advice of an an article written by a know associate of Curtis Yarvin.
You saw the video yesterday because this is a marketing exercise.
They hold a stake in the outcome, you are the greater fool.
Christ.
Find a professional fiduciary that doesn't have a youtube channel and never speculate more than you can afford to lose.
> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political blogger and software developer. He is known, along with accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).
If one of those meanings is "one who hides their support for fascism", it doesn't apply, as they've made public displays of support. It's just that most people know them for their technical accomplishments without doing further research on who they are. This is understandable, hence my warning.
Everyone in the IDW or who followed Mencius moldbug always told normies they weren’t fascist and that you just called them Nazis because you disagreed with them until the current day when they are now more open about being in what they consider a post Constitutional era.
That’s why they were called cryptofascists even though I agree they’ve dropped the hidden part since they feel they have the power to get away with it.
This really should be pinned to the top of the thread. Finance-as-entertainment is the world's worst gatcha game. For some reason people love getting suckered by these far right idols, both financially and "intellectually", who in turn are playing three-card-monte with them.
Everyone forgetting the more likely, more rule-of-law based fallback option for a reserve currency and international payments system (which is the important bit!): the Euro. Digital or otherwise.
> Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
I wonder why you’re worried. Regime’s change all the time. From a third party perspective, China is no better or worse than the US. Also, given how literally every country under the sun despises US now, this might just happen.
The way China manages it's currency is very different to how the US manages theirs.
China maintains strict controls on capital flows in/out. A reserve currency requires free convertibility. Holders need to move large sums instantly without permission. China has repeatedly tightened these controls during stress periods (2015-16 devaluation fears, for example).
Limited access to Chinese bond markets and equities for foreign institutions. Reserve currency status requires deep, liquid markets where central banks can park hundreds of billions. US Treasury market is $26T and extremely liquid. Chinese government bond market is smaller and less accessible.
Reserve currency issuer must run persistent current account deficits to supply the world with currency. China's economic model is built on export surpluses. They'd need to fundamentally restructure their economy.
This is PRC's fundamental disagreement. US reserve currency morphed into high liquid, high speculative instrument to fund unsustainable debt, hollowed out domestic industry (triffin)... but this is not by design. It's the result of emergency adaptations moving off gold, then people post rationalize the trinity musts (open capital, floating rates, independent central bank) is what makes reserve when it's unintended structural outcome from failed gold peg.
Now we see hints of end stage USD reserve behavior, debt snow balls and reserve controller will pull the our dollar, your problem card. This US doing current conniptions trying to either reduce USD strength or inflate away debt... costly instability. People forget, liquidity / storage only matters to sovereign buyers who needs reserve for utility... everyone else (now plurality) are private buyers who buy for returns. If we enter end of dollar cycle and USD reserve cost them money, then they go elsewhere
Elsewhere is what PRC wants to offer, HIGHLY CONTROLLED, BUT STABLE reserve pegged to PRC industrial chains, i.e. real economy instead of speculative financialization. This what recent yuan reserve talk is from (note it was old Xi speech republished in Qiushi), so the propose model isn't even in response to current USD conniptions but prediction on end life of US behavior when USD reserve goes from exorbitant privilege to just exorbitant.
It's precisely because logical outcome of current reserve "musts", i.e. triffin charity/global good that makes it ultimately a stupid arrangement where the system breaks when US/owner can't afford to maintain or develops bad habits (deficit spending). Hence, what PRC plans to offer in parallel: stable regulated reserves for "real economy" financial utility. Stable Yuan "bank" reserve can coexist with volatile USD "casino" reserve. Now of course this all heterodox theory, but we are seeing theory of USD reserve limits peaking it's head, and PRC not retarded enough to pickup triffin baton. IMO PRC fine with US dealing with triffin headache and IMO betting US will fuck global creditors when shit hits fan, i.e. they waiting for USD reserve to implode due to inherent contradictions, to show world precisely why yuan reserve not modelled to repeat same mistake.
1. No one sane trusts EU after RU sanctions either.
2. Euro share of SWIFT shrunk from ~40% to ~20% post URK war. Part of this technical (t2 reforms), i.e. actual reduction not as dramatic, but Euro as toxic as USD with even less leverage.
Meanwhile PRC went from single digit % cross border settlements 10 years ago to 50%+, plenty of the world trust PRC with their money, not just money but PRC alternative to SWIFT financial plumbing, CIPS. Meanwhile PRC also recycling it's surplus USD to lending... i.e. they're financing more than imf/worldbank/paris club right now. Another indicator that countries "trusts" PRC to manage monetary system, or rather they balancing from losing trust of west.
TBH trust is western mindless muh reserve orthodoxy nonesense. Ultimately PRC has much stronger reserve posture for the same reason US did... for 80+ years countries needed USD for US techstack and then petrodollar, aka modernity was locked behind USD, all the other muh reserve "needs" is downstream of that. Need > trust.
Ironically where trust actually comes in is whether PRC TRUSTS others. Qiushi suggests PRC stable reserve functions something like panda bond lending, where PRC lends liquidity to trusted VIP (real economy) players. Everyone else can keep gambling with USD reserve with high likelihood of debasement. It looks like PRC doesn't want be THE reserve, they want to be VIP reserve while THE (USD) reserve burns.
> 1. No one sane trusts EU after RU sanctions either.
The RU sanctions were implemented 'only' because RU invaded another country. If you don't plan on invading countries is there much to worry about?
To a certain extent if you 'just' want to participate in the world economy the EUR seems fine. If you're looking to start geopolitical drama with military actions, is there any currency of a major economy that would not be a risk? Major powers tend to want stability, which would allow them to stay major, so would frown upon anyone stirring the pot (besides, perhaps, another major power: see China with Russia against UA/EU).
Europe wasn't breaking sovereign immunity / sovereign bank seizures when historically fighting each other, current actions historically unprecedented. So the answer is war is not sufficient excuse for RoW. EU extra delulu because RU/UKR not even over direct EU/NATO territory i.e. EU breaking sovereign immunity over "peripheral" interests. Like EU seize/sanction US when? Point of sovereign immunity is provide some semblance of neutrality for rest of world to do their thing while drunks fight, neutrals still want to buy from the drunks, EU has made things both hard not neutral.
Settlement and reserve currencies are two very different things. The USD isn't great as a reserve currency but it is still better than all the other options.
Settlement is leading indicator / proxy of trust. The point is countries trust in PRC running financial pipes is increasing, because vs US/EU, PRC simply look more responsible.
USD treasury isn't great now AND trending towards bag holding catastrophic "our dollar your problem" depending on debasement velocity. Hence central banks ditching dollar for gold etc... it's still currently better than other options in the sense that no other options really exist except metals with no counter party risk. More this happens the more exorbitant and less privilege USD becomes, the worse it serves as reserve, the more opening for alternatives. This where PRC eventually comes in, i.e. recent reserve talk is for eventuality not hand off. In the meantime they are banking on USD being not great, and getting worse. Which increases rates -> increase debt finance / servicing cost. The system is getting worse for everyone, including US. Don't underestimate watching US debt servicing growing from 1T to 2T in a few years when US realizes exorbitant reserve currency without privilege is not worth maintaining. Waiting for US to recognize USD reserve isn't great for US is part of the transition.
The sequence of events: Elon doing a leveraged buyout of X, then xAI funding, then debt transfers to X, then the xAI–X stock deal. Now the proposed SpaceX–xAI merger appears to have shifted X’s financial burden from Musk personally toward xAI investors and, potentially, future SpaceX shareholders.
This is speculative, of course, but yeah seems likely.
RunReveal (https://runreveal.com) | Systems Software Engineer | Austin, SF (US Work Auth required) | Full-time
RunReveal is the Security Data Platform that's building tools to help companies detect and respond to threats in their network. We're a team that values speed, quality and curiosity. Our stack is Go, NextJS (TS), Postgres and ClickHouse. We believe that companies should be able to own their security data and get value out of it too and so we've built a platform that can be deployed anywhere. SIEM sucks, so we're here to fix it.
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> it prevents entire classes of bugs where IDs get mixed up across services.
~Does this really happen for people? I haven't ever seen this class of bug, and shudder to think of how it happens in code. Sure support tickets are nicer with the prefix, but how would a bug manifest in the code itself?~
Edit: of course it can happen with `new.id = old.id` where new and old are different types, now that I think about it after coffee. However, I'd be hesitant to claim that this prevents those bugs, instead I'd argue that it simply makes them easier to identify.
Also, KSUID has been around since before UUIDv7 and seems to meet all of the author's same requirements and has many client libraries already. Guess people doing research on it still aren't able to find it, or just want to do their own anyway which is cool too.
A few things here, one is that getting them mixed up isn't the same as them ending up in the wrong place. Looking fruitlessly for a missing user with id 9287dfn9384f that has some support ticket only to find out later that this was their order ID and the wrong thing was put in a form (particularly if you ask users for something, I see 4 different IDs floating around, which is my customer/user/product/order/shipping id?). If the user id is "order_1239123" I know to go and look at the orders table, not "dance around all tables trying to find what on earth the id could relate to".
However there are two other ways this happens which come to mind:
1. HTTP API calls. There's a whole untyped layer going on here. You could have a PUT to set some content, and create a new entry if one doesn't exist - there's a place for a call to go to the wrong place but succeed. If two entities have the same structure but are different things this can be harder to spot.
2. Manual entry. This is the bigger one. Vast amounts of workflows have somewhere that a human does a thing, and that will go wrong at times. An excel file uploaded to the wrong place, the wrong header, the wrong bit typed on a form.
A counting up of numbers is a simple ID but awful for both of these, because now you have overlapping IDs across systems. Having larger random IDs takes you out of this risky area because at some point the chance of a collision is so low as to be not worth considering, however even small IDs with a prefix like "customer_001" and "order_001" quickly removes a source of problems.
I'm not saying any of this is the only solution, or that there aren't better ones, but I can see places where this kind of thing can easily happen in the real world and "prefix the ids with a type" is a very small and simple change that can help.
I would also note that this then becomes a front facing thing that ties you into something as well though, and not all types are as nice to make public.
Maybe it's malware, I haven't checked, but that seems like a pretty typical trajectory to me. I posted a project on HN and got a graph of roughly the same shape (though a much more modest magnitude). https://www.star-history.com/#maxbondabe/attempt&type=date&l...
Star counts go vertical when you launch your project and it's warmly received. ~850 stars in 11 days for an AI project doesn't seem at all crazy to me.
The README also contains a mild inducement to star the repo.
> Star Us on GitHub and Get Exclusive Day 1 Badge for Your Networks
Seems sufficient to explain any inauthentic behavior. Growth hacking tactics are certainly not typical of open source projects, but how that should factor into your judgment of this project's trustworthiness, I can't say. Caveat emptor.
Hey, I still remember October 9th so well — that was the day we first went public with our project! I was so excited telling all my friends about it on social media. We'd been working towards this for months, getting everything ready.
The OP seems like the academic approach to what project kamp is learning by doing: They're attempting to build a community that's eventually completely self sufficient on a fairly limited land space, and documenting the whole process.
I like Project Kamp and have been following them for years. However, I feel they’re moving quite slowly and often making mistakes on problems that have already been solved. For example, it took them a while to figure out their composting toilet, and even now it’s not a great solution.
They tend to have what are essentially interns do a bit of “research” and then piece together a solution. That said, I do applaud their efforts. It’s very entertaining to watch, and they seem to be hiring people lately who are more knowledgeable in their fields.
So, I very much appreciate this open-source-ecology “academic approach.”
I’ve been following Open Source Ecology for years and they too are moving quite slowly. One part of the website points to a 2014 presentation. I’ve seen very little progress in the last ten years. Sad, because it’s a great idea.
I wonder if they try to reinvent the wheel on purpose (the "first principles" thing people on HN often mention). Using off-the-shelf products can feel like cheating if your objective is to protest society / capitalism.
Efficiency I get, self sufficiency I don't get. Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
If people want to optimize for self sufficiency they will need to hoard more stuff, they will need to produce and duplicate a lot, use more land and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room.
Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.
I would argue that mutual reliance actually makes the system as a whole more resilient.
If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.
> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.
To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.
Every line of argument in this comment is very bad.
> If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Your argument exclusively rests on the assertion that the converse is true - that if individuals and organizations will invest substantial amounts of effort into making sure that their upstream suppliers will continue to exist if they are dependent on them.
Not only is there no empirical evidence to support this claim, but there is ample evidence to support the fact that it's false - such as COVID, which you literally mention later in your comment, where despite the fact that we live in a highly interdependent global economy, there's very little effort invested into making sure that your suppliers continue to exist, and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.
In addition to the empirical evidence, this is just false based on human nature. If confronted with the fact that "oh, something might happen to an entity that supplies me with things", humans and organizations overwhelmingly choose to increase their internal resilience, not the system resilience. As a trivial example of this - in response to supply chain shocks that hit lean manufacturers like car manufacturers particularly hard, those manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to stock up on parts - internal resiliency - and not to invest in the upstream supply chain, which is what you're claiming they would do.
Your claim is just rooted in an false anthropology that has massive amounts of evidence refuting it.
> I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.”
That's an irrelevant strawman. Nothing in their comment was specifically predicated on exactly that scenario happening - they were arguing for general resiliency, which is effective even in more realistic and broad scenarios.
> To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
First of all, that claim about the experiment is false. All labor in all sectors did not turn off at once.
Second, that's yet another strawman, because individuals overwhelmingly prefer to engage in tasks for the sake of self-preservation than the preservation of others. If the economy and individuals have resilient practices, they will invest substantially more effort in those practices that directly lead to their survival than if the system is not resilient and they're highly interdependent, because again, of human nature, which prioritizes the immediate.
> It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia.
Yet another strawman. Self-sufficiency is not binary. You can decrease your reliance on others without eliminating it entirely, and history's plentiful examples of system distruptions show that it is an extremely good idea to do so.
It's telling that you have to repeatedly make fallacies, false statements, and misunderstand human nature in an attempt to defend such an absurd point like "making individuals less resilient makes the system more resilient". Factually, it is exactly the opposite - systems with resilient components are objectively less fragile.
> and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.
Did we go through the same covid? No country on earth had food shortages while majority of people were stuck at home. COVID was a perfect demonstration of resiliency of trade and JIT systems. But you ate up the news the media put out that were basically china-boogeymen, to force government to create the huge CHIPs act.
The bogeyman exists - there were factually shortages in hundreds of different kinds of goods. You're just stupid because you can't do a 5-second Google search.
So what was devastating then? Maybe you mean it was devastating that toilet paper was missing for 3 days or bread baking flour for hipsters that started sourdough. Devastating shortages in my book are what you see im the history books, people dying because of the shortages themselves.
"and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room."
Depends how big the project/village is.
Also the basic idea is to be as self sufficient as possible. Not as a dogma.
And the benefit once it runs is, you don't have to go make war around the globe, because your economy is threatened. You can just stay at home minding your own buisness.
Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history. Or if it works it needs some radically different ideas. The aspect about ignoring defense is also naive, what happens when your neighbours that do have a military decide your land and self sufficiency are something they want? The best thing to prevent that, and the first step, is to have established trade with them, which in your plan you don't want or need.
Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.
"Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history."
Of course it does. Many remote mountain villages preserved their culture this way.
"Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" "
I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
What you means are cults. They also exist, true. But those operating in the open are mostly .. open.
Also the basic idea is to establish a network of trading and sharing in general. Specialisation is useful after all.
But for the basic needs, I like the idea to be independent here.
And yes, ideally also have a competent doctor you can just wake up from next door in the middle of the night in a case of emergency and not hope a ambulance is avaiable in time.
> I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
You're taking about who thinks it's cool to try to do this kind of thing. The post your replying to is trying to predict how things might evolve over a (very) long time in case of actual success.
It seems we are not talking about the same thing. You seem to be talking about strict isolationists. Those are usually of the cult type and no doubt they will all create their version of nationalism likely within the 1. Generation.
But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.
The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..
How many of those projects have been going for more than 3 generations? Why do you think all the last times it was attempted it turns to that? Most of the undisturbed tribes kill intruders on sight. Most countries that ever turned to isolationism have their population suffer vs their neighbours when enough time passes. I said nothing about the intentions of who starts these communities, that barely matters, what matters is the system they put in place after a few generations. If the system is flawed good intentions go nowhere because after a few generations you don't have a group of idealists anymore, you have random people operating in an isolationist system and they'll act according to their incentives.
We should maximize cooperation between communities, not restrict it. It's the best way to avoid war long term.
I do enjoy the freedom of movement in the EU, but don't enjoy the regulation of cucumbers.
(At least they relaxed those by now, but they still move the parliament every month, because they cannot agree on one place, I rather mind my own buisness than dealing with that)
Maybe this maxim within our software world might help: "Be loosely coupled, tightly cohesive".
Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.
The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.
I think any serious countries of the future will spend substantial resources planting self-sufficiency caches every so many kilo acres. Students should be taught the basics of booting and sustaining a self-sufficient pod.
It shouldn’t be about isolationism / anarchy, but about limiting the blast radius for any given disaster.
Finally it also serves as a center for rehab, starting from scratch, and community service. The ultimate social safety net.
For the few that live, I suppose. But this is like an almost-worst-case scenario where the people are some of the few (1%) to survive. Most disasters, even all-out war like in Ukraine or Gaza have relatively few casualties, but they all have needs. The program in Denmark where they start up emergency stores (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45216805) makes a lot more sense in that regard.
People should always have emergency supplies to last up to three days for the fairly common scenario of power outages, supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events. If you live in a disaster prone area, a week's worth of supplies should still be manageable. Anything worse than that and it's probably best to evacuate. Only the rich have the space, time and means to dig in for longer, think people with bomb shelters, storage basements, and a lifestyle of living on preserved foods (because you need to rotate things on a regular basis).
I’m thinking the vast majority of the value comes not from enabling survival but from de-alienation, which I believe is fundamental in reaching a better overall state.
>Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.
I think you forget that the alternative hides a ton of externalities.
For example those massive agri corporations are vaaaastly more efficient than me or my grandpa working our own gardens.
But we aren't spraying or the like to contribute to insect population collapse.
We're being rather damn space efficient, yet we don't use any fertilisers from gas and mining.
We don't compact the soil or lose topsoil.
and what we do produce is less deficient in micronutrients.
And as someone else already said. It really just means more self-sufficient.
Big agri corps can afford large tractors that till, plant and harvest more efficiently. They can afford to buy remote sensing imagery to optimize planting. In other words, there exist scale effects in agriculture.
You lose those effects if every hundred acres needs to produce all of needs of a human family. Self sufficient is less efficient.
You can bring back some of those effects with co-ops, but now it starts looking like a single large business with many owners again.
Project Kamp would definitely benefit from opening up a new workshop on site with the sole purpose of building some of the Open Source Ecology tooling .. it'd help them immensely with tractor scams and .. especially of course .. defeating the neverending onslaught of Spikey Booshes ..
This is exactly it. AI is sniffing out the good datamodels from the bad. Easy to understand? AI can understand it too! Complex business mess with endless technical debt? Not too much.
But this is precisely why we're seeing startups build insane things fast while well established companies are still questioning if it's even worth it or not.
When you're talking the size of investment that AI-centric companies have received, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, there's no way it's not exposed to the wider market.
But I agree with you, the article is too light on details for how inflammatory it is.
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