Unless I’m missing something, that’s quintiles of absolute wealth. I’d be curious how the data shakes out for the lowest quintile calculated relative to costs of living.
The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc.
It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.)
That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs.
And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual.
So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.
> a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal
I agree with this part, but relying Apple is quite far from self-sovereignty compared to many other practical alternatives: not relying on external clouds, GrapheneOS, Linux. By relying on Apple, you not only pay a tax to essentially bribe them to not attack you (perhaps a viable strategy, not too different from taxes to governments), but more importantly you give up the ability to resist without serious compromises (can't have E2EE backups on your own cloud if they said so). This is akin to trying to be paying taxes to the government to get better police coverage, and they decide to ban locks, security cameras, and leaving the walled garden.
The problem with the current computing security paradigm is that it puts too much trust in entities that do not deserve it, because the entities are simply too powerful and do not suffer consequences when they break that trust.
Fair points, I can't say I disagree, and I'm aware of the trade-offs I'm making. (I was actually tempted to use the word "bribe" when describing the Apple Tax!)
There are a couple meaningful points of divergence in the ecosystem: Mac vs iOS (the former has some self-sovereignty, even if there are risks of backdoors/etc); and, cloud vs not (I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public).
I agree about the trust problem. Varoufakis might make some valid points re: "Technofeudalism", but then Bruce Schneier was making a similar analogy over a decade ago. I've heard cogent arguments, that early feudalism evolved from rational self-interest, that serfs were willing to trade some degree of autonomy for safety, and it does feel that many "normie" users (especially with iOS) are making a similar rational trade, even if it sets up an asymmetric power dynamic, and risk (inevitability?) of future betrayal.
I'm curious if you have any examples in mind for Apple, re: "do not suffer consequences when they break that trust". IMO, they've done okay at putting actions and costly signaling behind their privacy rhetoric, and I think they'd take some kind of market hit if they were to blatantly break that trust. But I'm curious if you think there are past instances in which that already happened, which maybe I've forgotten or am neglecting, or if it's a threat model of the future.
Their image scanning proposal? The recent UK E2EE backup thing?
For the first, although they eventually backtracked, proposing it alone should be ruinous they are actually a privacy-oriented company.
Although the second situation is forced by a government, it is still a self-inflicted problem where iCloud is the only way you can back up your stuff. Not being able to have encrypted backups is a serious QoL issue.
> I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public
This is also my attitude toward "the cloud" in general.
Someone with everything to lose if they break it. Most large companies do not. Perhaps smaller companies whose main selling point is privacy? Proton? Signal? I don't use either but they seem relatively plausible.
I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the manufacturers were actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX should be “insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play” is not exactly rocket science.
I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).
Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon
This is one advantage of a system with a constrained set of commands/grammars, as opposed to the Alexa/Siri model of trying to process all arbitrary text while in active mode. It can simply ignore/discard any invocations which don't match those specific grammars (and no need to wait to confirm that the device is awake).
"Computer, turn lights to 50%" -> "turn lights to fifty percent" -> {action: "lights", value: 50}
"My new computer has a really beefy graphics card" -> "has a really beefy graphics card" -> {action: null}
You might already be referencing this, but linking it anyway: Cory Doctorow's "I, Rowboat", where Asimov's Laws are a religion which some AIs adopt voluntarily to give their existence meaning.
What's the problem? Just do a Vickrey auction with your insurer, where you bid how much you're willing to spend to stay alive, and they make a counter-bid.
If you win, they spend their bid to keep you alive; if they win, they pay out your bid to your next of kin when you die. A perfectly Pareto-optimal solution of revealed preferences! /s
This is accurate, regarding preferences for optionality, and how our economy currently works. But I think it's worth questioning the expectation that giving up that optionality deserves compensation, whether morally or practically (resulting in compounding "money-on-money returns", usually at low risk if sufficiently diversified).
The Italian economist Silvio Gesell noted, that no other good besides currency works this way. Every other good with a use value (food, houses) tends to lose value over time (entropy being fundamental to the universe), and/or, to carry risk (a share of stock which represents unpredictable ROI). There is course an exception in land, which doesn't intrinsically depreciate, but whose value trends upwards thanks to location value (and which can be addressed separately via Georgist land tax).
Gesell proposed a "demurrage currency" [0], which gradually loses value as it is held: the idea being, rather than being entitled to a return, retaining high long-term optionality is actually a privilege that one should have to pay for, since the real-world value it represents is depreciating. And the incentive to invest (whether at high or low risk) instead becomes to break even (with the rate of demurrage tracking what we currently call the discount rate).
I have no idea if such a concept is practical in a trans-national, growth-dependent global economy (with deflationary crypto-currencies as a BATNA!); if anything, I'm fairly confident it's not. But it's at least worth thinking about: that it's not at all axiomatic that holders of value should be entitled to compensation for "forgoing consumption" (not only because the wealthy don't necessarily need such an incentive, but also because increased consumption can mean an increase in the velocity of money, and more total value created, per the multiplier effect, and the "hotel riddle" [1]).
I support your general thrust in spirit, but I think "monopoly" isn't a helpful frame here. Consumers have a glut of options in streaming services: Prime, Max, AppleTV, Hulu, even YouTube (contrast with one of the classic monopolies, AT&T, which for many was the only game in town, unless you consider "write a letter to your friend instead" to be a valid substitution good).
I feel the correct frame is the general category of "market power" (including, but not limited to, the "anti-competitive practices" that forms the basis of current regulatory policy).
In the case of streaming, the closest analogue to monopolization is vertical integration: the custom-produced content which is only accessible on a particular streaming platform (sometimes including no releases on physical media).
On the one hand, Netflix could be considered to have a monopoly over the distribution of "Squid Game" (and Prime over "The Boys", Apple over "Silo", etc), meaning they can raise prices, not for the product itself, but for the "club goods" distribution platform, which the consumer may not be interested in otherwise.
On the other hand, entertainment/culture are not the same kind of "inelastic demand" necessity as telephone service in the past, or internet service now. And when we look at actual outcomes, I'd say quality for vertically-integrated productions are better on average than older business models; and while prices are going up, I wouldn't call them ridiculous price-gouging either (in addition to competing with each other, the streaming services are also competing with piracy and password-sharing).
Anyway, I think it's absolutely the case that enshittification isn't inevitable, and we should be wary of succumbing to learned helplessness in the face of capital consolidation. I would claim it's a "natural expected process" of the shareholder corporation, and the perverse incentives of short-term profits and stock prices, even when it comes at the expense of long-term brand equity. But solving that general problem is probably out of scope for "the bitrate is too damn low and the subscription fees are too damn high".
I'd love to see more regulation in the space, but realistically it'd be tricky (I don't expect any Doctorow-approved abolition of DRM, or mandatory interoperability, anytime soon). One could perhaps establish streaming-quality standards, where a company couldn't advertise "4K" unless it hit some threshold. But when it comes to the issue of streaming quality in particular, I suspect the tragic reality is that the majority of users simply won't notice or care.
Arrow’s Theorem is often invoked as a criticism of alternative voting systems (RCV, etc). And not while not wrong exactly, it seems textbook “perfect being the enemy of the good”. (It’s also one reason I prefer Approval Voting, which in addition to its benefit of simplicity, sidesteps Arrow by redefining the goal: not perfectly capturing preferences, but maximizing Consent of the Governed.)
Arrow's Theorem only applies to some voting systems and only in some situations.
Yes, the theorem doesn' apply to approval voting nor does it apply to score voting.
Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic voting systems. So sortition (or other method based on random sampling) are not affected.
The theorem also doesn't apply to proportional representation systems. (Though they have their own problems, of course.)
Most RCV systems are very gameable with tactical voting. Though they aren't that useful, I guess.
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Arrow's theorem also doesn't guarantee that you will have problems. It just says that for some votings systems you can construct voting populations with preference that can't be captured well. It doesn't say whether these situations are likely to occur in practice.
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Arrow's theorem also doesn't apply when you allow bargaining, or people compensating each other.
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Of course, the problem with democracy in practice isn't so much that existing voting systems don't capture what voters want. Even first-past-the-post seems to be doing a reasonable job of that.
And who’s going to decide that those things you mentioned at the end are good or bad? If not (elected) leaders, that is. Take the exemple of the most famous democracy, the US, its current dominance was built on a few wars (the Civil War, to settle things domestically, and the two World Wars that allowed it to extend its dominance worldwide) and big periods of protectionism (like at the end of the 19th century).
Who's going to decide what voting system is good or bad? At some point, you have to inject some judgement calls, if you want to end up with a judgement call.
Btw, the protectionism was bad for the US economy, and did not help its dominance at all. (That's assuming you like US dominance?)
> Arrow's theorem also doesn't guarantee that you will have problems. It just says that for some votings systems you can construct voting populations with preference that can't be captured well.
no, it has nothing to do with capturing preferences. it simply says that no ordinal social welfare function can simultaneously satisfy these criteria:
There is no dictator.
If every voter prefers A to B then so does the group.
The relative positions of A and B in the group ranking depend on their relative positions in the individual rankings, but do not depend on the individual rankings of any irrelevant alternative C.
To be clear: I am saying that in practice people get the _policies_ they mostly agree with, not that the candidates they prefer over other candidates get elected.
That's (partially) because the candidates in order to attract voters pick policies that voters prefer.
Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit. But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise or who play repeatedly. And it also only applies to aggregating an ordering of preferences. It doesn't apply to eg filling up a parliament for proportional representation.
(Btw, the random dictatorship doesn't sound too bad. As a slightly modified form, I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parliament with a few hundred randomly selected people amongst all who are willing.)
> But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise
You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work?
> or who play repeatedly.
I don't see why I should expect that to make the problem easier.
> I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parliament with a few hundred randomly selected people amongst all who are willing
That sounds like it could go incredibly wrong. Everyone who is willing will sell themselves out to the highest "bidder" (maybe bidding via money, maybe promises of future laws...), and the population unwilling or unable to become a member of parliament will have no say in the matter.
> You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work?
Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives.
>> or who play repeatedly.
> I don't see why I should expect that to make the problem easier.
Check out the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma for some inspiration for how repeated play can breed cooperation.
> That sounds like it could go incredibly wrong. Everyone who is willing will sell themselves out to the highest "bidder" (maybe bidding via money, maybe promises of future laws...), [...]
How is that different from people selling their vote today?
Just make sure that the legal system does not enforce these contracts, and you are good. (You can also make such contracts illegal completely, just like selling your vote today is illegal in many countries.)
> [...] and the population unwilling or unable to become a member of parliament will have no say in the matter.
You can cook up slightly more complicated versions: every voter nominates a (willing) candidate on their ballot. Nationwide, you collect 600 ballots and fill up parliament with the people named on them. Pick your favourite resolution method, in case the same person gets picked multiple times in your sample.
(Eg you could give that person more weight in parliament, or you could pick the voter's second choice, or you could pick the ballot of the guy who got picked twice to pick a replacement, etc.)
> Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives.
And now you're back to square one? How do you choose those representatives in a way that represents their constituents' views? That was literally the original problem.
> Check out the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma for some inspiration for how repeated play can breed cooperation.
Have you seen literature on this somewhere? On its face iterated prisoner's dilemma being more cooperative does not in any way suggest that iterates voting somehow admits an easier solution for finding collective preferences than non-repeated voting. The problems are drastically different so far as I can tell. If you've seen literature suggesting otherwise I would love a link or two.
> How is that different from people selling their vote today? Just make sure that the legal system does not enforce these contracts
You seem confused? The reason you can't sell your vote today isn't that it's illegal to sell your vote, but rather the fact that there's no way to prove how you voted, so you could just lie with no incriminating evidence.
Whereas it's pretty darn easy to see how the candidate who promised you tax breaks suddenly voted to raise them when he came into office.
> slightly more complicated version
I see nothing obvious suggesting that your (homemade?) scheme is better, so I'm gonna put the onus on you to explain it wouldn't suffer from similar problems...
> And now you're back to square one? How do you choose those representatives in a way that represents their constituents' views? That was literally the original problem.
No, why? Arrow's Theorem eg has nothing to say about proportional representation. And Arrow's Theorem only applies to aggregating orderings of a finite list of preferences. But the methods under investigation need to be 'generic', ie can't make use of any special properties of those preferences, either. (See eg https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/tor/papers/wadler.pdf for how being 'generic' limits what your methods can do.)
And to come back to iterated games: almost no matter how the representative was chosen in the first period, if she's standing for re-election, she has an incentive for keeping her represented happy.
Arrow's theorem just applies to a list of static choices; not to how the chosen might behave when trying to get re-elected.
> Have you seen literature on this somewhere?
I don't remember right now. But I think 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' might mention some research somewhere. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) That book mostly mentions this when it argues that the problem with democracy ain't that voters don't get their wishes, but the problem is that voters do get their wishes.
> Whereas it's pretty darn easy to see how the candidate who promised you tax breaks suddenly voted to raise them when he came into office.
Sure. But if millions of people are eligible to be drafted at random, you are going to have a hard time pre-emptively bribing them. That's equivalent to doing something nice for the entire country.
> I see nothing obvious suggesting that your (homemade?) scheme is better, so I'm gonna put the onus on you to explain it wouldn't suffer from similar problems...
Because eg people who don't want to stand for parliament still have a say? That was exactly one of the problem you brought up with naive sortition. Remember?
Well, if your theorem says A implies B; if A doesn't hold, your theorem doesn't apply, but B could still be true for other reasons. But you need a different argument or empirical data to convince people of B.
Sorry, I don't understand that. Could you explain?
Arrow's Theorem applies when you have a discrete number of choices and you try to aggregate people preferences over them (in specific ways etc).
If instead of discrete elections, Alice and Bob can negotiate that _today_ they go to the football match and _tomorrow_ they go to the opera, that opens up new spaces for coordination that Arrow's theorem doesn't touch.
Similar, if Alice is allowed to pay Bob, or if they can do political horse-trading like 'I support your foreign policy, if you support my lowering the speed limit', that's also not covered by Arrow's theorem.
The theorem really only applies to deterministically aggregating people's individual orderings of a discrete set of options into some aggregated order for the group. That's it.
So it doesn't concern side-payments, or other continuous compromises. Or repeated play.
Is there a proof or demostration somehwere about maximizing the consent of the governed?
Arrows theorem always has implied to me that the next step should be quantifuing some welfare measure for voters and then exploring which system maximized that welfare measure. "Consent of the governed" sounds like a welfare measure so I an intrigued.
I don't really think you need too much to prove it yourself.
You are being governed with consent when the person who's elected is someone you are okay being governed by. And the person who wins an approval election is the person with that has the most people fine with being governed by them. Because approval voting doesn't ask people to rank candidates voting for someone you disapprove of only hurts you and voting for any subset of people you do approve of is sincere.
It's not some deep thing because it changes the target to something much easier. Finding the best candidate is hard, finding the candidate most people find acceptable is less so.
Approval voting gets more mathematically interesting when you assume people have preferences among the candidates they approve of and whether the best candidate gets elected but IRL you don't actually care about that anymore. You're fine electing someone who isn't the best.
I'm not convinced it can actually achieve that. There is still just one winner, just as now, and I'm not sure the people who picked them under duress will really feel they were listened to. (Or they can approve of only one, and almost certainly lose if it's not one of the two most popular parties.)
Still, I'm not averse to trying. Either it will help, or tactical voting will leave us more or less where we are now. If nothing else it's an opportunity to give the current deadlock a shove.
> Or they can approve of only one, and almost certainly lose if it's not one of the two most popular parties.
"They can only approve of one" is FPTP, the existing system. Everybody knows that sucks. The whole point of approval or score voting is to avoid that.
Right now if you favor candidate C but they have 5% of the vote and candidate A and B each have 45%, your preferred candidate has no chance and your vote can only change something in determining whether the winner is A or B, so you avoid voting for your preferred candidate.
With approval voting you vote for them and one of the major parties. Then people notice that third party candidates are immediately getting 30-40% of the vote because the people afraid of wasting their vote no longer have to refrain from voting for their preferred candidate. In some districts they even win. Which dissolves the two party system because people have to take third party candidate seriously and starting a new party has a real chance at succeeding rather than being an exercise in futility.
I phrased that badly. I meant that they may choose to vote for only their favorite, as tactical voting. It says they don't approve of any other, to send a message.
But it's not clear they will feel the message is sent if their candidate loses, and they are stuck with least favorite choice because they didn't select an alternative.
tactical voting is normally what we call it when you DON'T vote for your favorite, e.g. a green party supporter votes democrat.
with approval voting they'd obviously vote for green too.
some of the people who normally vote green under the current system might _still_ only vote green with approval voting, but very few would do it unless green actually had a chance to win.
I think the idea is that if there are two popular candidates A and B, one of whom is almost certain to win, a voter feels forced to approve of whichever of A or B they prefer even if they don't really want either one, just to hedge against the other winning, exactly as in FPTP. Or they can approve of only the candidates they really want, but they will likely lose.
Approval only seems to be able to break this gridlock if there is a "hidden" commonground between the two parties which can be revealed by the extra approval votes.
The problem with FPTP is that as soon as you have more than two parties, the two most similar parties split the vote among their common constituency and give the win to the least similar party. As a result any candidate who wants a chance at winning has to run on the ticket of the major party they most agree with, or else they split the vote with them and lose. Hence two party system.
With a cardinal voting system, someone can run on a ticket which is similar to one of the major parties and should get approximately the same level of approval as that party's candidate. Which is to say, they can potentially win. Then more third party and independent candidates run, giving people more options.
It's not just about what voters do, it changes what candidates do.
That's not necessarily all that different from now. We have a two stage system. In the primary people with broadly similar platforms run against each other. The "third parties" are factions within the two major ones.
Those options exist, and it's a multi way election. Primaries receive far less attention but they are where the real work of democracy is done.
I believe people are hoping they can vote for a radical candidate and a mainstream candidate, on the off chance people will love the radical candidate if they just get on the general ballot. I'm not convinced that will ever happen, and such people will be not just disappointed, but continue to be convinced the system is rigged against them.
> In the primary people with broadly similar platforms run against each other. The "third parties" are factions within the two major ones.
No, you still have that problem of splitting the vote in the primaries.
Remember how Donald Trump used to be the most hated Republican candidates within the Republicans in around 2015 / 2016? As in the one that the most people actively disliked in polls; but he was different enough from the other candidates that he didn't suffer from the internal vote splitting that they did.
The primaries still use first-past-the-post in the US, don't they?
That's likely to reduce diverse representation vs. single-member districts. If there are e.g. 8 seats a party could run 8 identical candidates and they'd all get the highest approval ratings for the combined district if one of them would, and other parties wouldn't get any.
List voting might work as an alternative to single member districts. You vote for your favorite party, and they are allocated a proportion of the total seats.
You lose the ability to know your local candidate, but how many people really do these days? It's what we set up in Iraq, but we don't do it ourselves.
It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a committee but that has other downsides.
> List voting might work as an alternative to single member districts.
But now you don't have a cardinal voting system and that's even worse than single member districts.
> It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a committee but that has other downsides.
Committees are dealing with it the wrong way. The right way to deal with it is to take away all of the executive's power. Constrain the national government from doing hardly anything and instead pass local laws to do whatever you want to do.
Then create elected positions responsible for different portions of the government. Directly elect the Attorney General and the heads of the major government departments. Let the President be like the Queen of England -- a figurehead with minimal responsibilities.
Germany has an interesting hybrid voting system that combines proportional representation via parties with local representatives.
In Germany, you cast two different votes. The first vote elects your local representatives via a first-past-the-post system; they all go to parliament. Then you fill up parliament with more people to make the proportions match those of the second votes cast all over the country. (There's lots of special cases and rules involved. Eg to handle the case when a party gets lots of first votes, but no second votes.)
