Because smart contracts are (often) contractual obligations on real world things, they only hold as much power as the apparatus of coercion (usually the State) will allow them to hold. That is, you must trust the political authority first and foremost before you trust the contract. This is very different to bitcoin, which operates purely in the digital realm, where you can trust the ownership of the btc without requiring trust of the political authority. So bitcoin solves a trust problem and this makes the less efficient distributed architecture worthwhile (it would be much cheaper and far faster to operate a digital currency in a centralized way). But if you have to trust the political authority for digital contracts on physical goods, what is the point of the extra cost? I'm dubious there is any real benefit.
I've read it. Galbraith's history is ok and his writing is entertaining but his economic analysis is terribly flawed. I recommend Rothbard's America's Great Depression for a solid economic analysis of the causalities involved in taking a market crash and turning it into a depression. The book is available in pdf free online:
https://mises.org/library/americas-great-depression
Honest question: reading the "Political activism" section of the author's wikipedia article[1] gives me no hope of an unbiased analysis of the situation. In the book, does he try to give a balanced view, or is it a reflection of his own views as an anti-statist Austrian School economist?
It's applied Austrian Economics (what they call history as opposed to theory). It's a pretty good read even if you think Austrians are crackpot-crazy. The train of thought is pretty logically structured.
I'm not really aware of a balanced view on the topic so it's a decent idea to start just reading the different views in extreme.
I'd also recommend Friedman's "A Monetary History of the United States" (with a part about the Great Depression) for a Monetarist POV.
"The Great Crash, 1929" by Galbraith provides yet another (institutionalist/Post-Keynesian) POV.
Rothbard was a pretty good scholar even if you completely disagree with him. His "An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" is a pretty good and well researched set of books.
"... but his economic analysis is terribly flawed."
I doubt that an analysis from the Mises institute is going to enlighten us here. Austrian economics is interesting but fails on long term analysis and deeper insights due to Mises flawed understanding of Money.
Maybe you can grab a few ideas. A gold backed currency would make no difference. The driving force of capitalism is debt. Debt that needs to be served with more debt (there is no treasure box in the cellar of General Motors that they can use to build car manufacturing plants). To keep the system running you have to continuously create more debt. To be able to do this, you need to have a growing economy, for the economy to grow, you need more energy.
To make things worse, this grows exponentially. This is not bad in itself, it has enabled capitalism based economy a tremendous dynamic in the last 150 years.
The Problem: Nothing that growth exponentially can grow very long and nobody has ever been able to show how a system that does not grow anymore or does not create new (higher) debt anymore can work. ("There is no steady state economy").
It should be pointed out that US operated as a democratic republic for over a century on the gold standard - which bitcoins shares a lot of properties with, except that bitcoin can be transmitted at distance easily, whereas gold cannot.
The gold standard was dropped by all major currencies in the 20th century because it was deflationary, and now most major currencies can be transmitted at distance.
Bitcoin on the other hand has a set supply and supply schedule, making it deflationary and inadequate as a currency.
This is one of the great economics canards of the 20th century. The gold standard was dropped because western nations accumulated too much war debt during the Great War (world war I) and weren't able to inflate it away under a gold standard. That's not the fault of the gold standard but of the war and the governments that refused to acknowledge their insolvency. The 19th century saw perhaps the greatest rise of living standards in history and it was all achieved on a gold standard, which greatly facilitated world trade. As Keynes wrote, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
"The various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages. Over this great area there was an almost absolute security of property and of person."
Keynes was one of the great advocates for dropping the gold standard, calling it a barbarous relic - as his biographer Skidelsky says, "useful as a constitutional monarch but disastrous as a despot".
The various central bankers clinging to gold - against all evidence - caused the great depression's deflationary spiral.
One of the things I found frustrating about Nextdoor when I used it a year ago was that it defines the neighborhood for you. I have a mailing list I created several years ago for my street which has been a very effective way of communicating with each other, especially since we have a street block party every year and a lot of families on the street have kids who play with each other. But there's not way to create a micro-neighborhood where messages only go to other folks in the micro-community (unless they've recently added that feature). When I look at my defined neighborhood now I'm not even sure how they chose the boundaries. It doesn't correspond to neighborhood in the normal sense (capitol hill in Seattle), or to zipcode. It seems like some arbitrarily carved out chunk of my zipcode... weird.
I tried to setup a mailing list a few times. What I found out is that even though I live in neighbourhood where most people are white collar and sit at a computer all day long, a lot of people don't use email outside of work. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, various business analysts of different types - none of them use email other than to sign up for whatever social networks they use.
I had the same experience as you. The Alameda, CA neighborhood I'm in was huge on ND. What I really didn't enjoy was all the forum complaining being directly delivered to my email box. NextDoor has a very large job in balancing the personal and personality that makes up neighborhoods and the impersonality of online discussions.
I'm also in Alameda and recently setup a email group and directory for our neighborhood that also has block parties and neighborhood watch meetings. Shoot me an email if you want to compare notes.
I just searched for my address and no neighborhood is defined yet. It's asking me to set up a new neighborhood and asking for me to define the boundaries.
> One of the things I found frustrating about Nextdoor when I used it a year ago was that it defines the neighborhood for you.
That's not true. When you set up a neighborhood (if you are the first to do so) you can define the neighborhood house-by-house or by drawing a boundary. I don't know how they handle boundary disputes.
Regarding subgroups, you can create discussion groups within the neighborhood, and make access limited / invite only. So you could have a street by street set of groups, so each group would get general neighborhood plus street only content.
At a Hack for Change, we started something along these lines. Ideally there would be your predefined neighborhoods and your trusted neighbors. This is an exercise to move towards that idea.
They let you wee who your "lead" is in your list of offices. Usually that person will be the one who would know about why lines were drawn a certain way
Reminds me a little of the Declaration of Independence where the famous line would have been "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" if Thomas Jefferson hadn't been "touched" by Benjamin Franklin with his edit to "self-evident".
Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.
I just had a similar experience - I posted an (IMHO) well written question that was immediately downvoted with no comment. It has no answers because I suspect few people are going to look at a <0 question.
This upset me more than it should because in a vulnerable moment of need, I was digitally slapped. SO used to feel like a special gem of altruism where devs helped each other out for the love of it but now it feels like a faceless, cruel and nasty place that I want to avoid. I don't think we fully account for the emotional impact of such events when we introduce voting\karma type features.
I make an effort to upvote questions and comments/answers that have been unfairly downvoted. The same problem plagues HN for anyone who dares to defy the groupthink.
May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.
I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[
I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.
I completely agree. I've asked a couple of questions now that had lots of genuinely useful answers, and were then closed for some perceived rule violation.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the moderators were correct and my question was off-topic: it's really rude for half a dozen moderators to pile on and all say so. It gave the impression I was out of line / being told off and it really put me off continuing to be active on the website.
I agree that the messaging displayed for on-hold questions can seem like you're being ganged-up on. In reality, the way that questions get put on-hold (and eventually closed) is this: there's a review queue that users with enough reputation can go to, where they will be presented with a question that has been flagged as being "off-topic" (or having some other problem). The reviewer can either agree, disagree or skip the question. There's no discussion with other moderators around the matter, and you don't even know who the other reviewers are until you cast your vote. So the "put on-hold by John Doe, Jane Doe, etc." message that ends up on your question is not intended as a rebuke; instead it's meant to force the reviewers to act responsibly, since they won't have the shield of anonymity. This is in addition to many other checks that StackOverflow puts in place to try and prevent reviewer abuse. Point being, try not to take it personally when your question is put on hold or closed; nobody's trying to tell you off (they would do that in the comments if anywhere).
serverfault.com is the worst community in that regard. Asking a technical interesting question for an uncommon usage scenario always provokes grumpy and short comments complemented by downvotes. I'll always include a detailed explanation yet nobody seems to care. Questions are closed as duplicate despite pointing out that this use-case is unique.. I don't bother using the site anymore.
That must have been an exception to the rule though. If something is down-voted it has a significant higher chance of getting more down-votes and vice-versa.
You might think "doh". But if you get down-voted, try deleting the post and post the exact same content twenty minutes later. You will be surprised.
I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology"
Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.
The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
I think that is a bit over-enthusiastic. Life was extremely tough for the new industrial workers. I think if you look at measures of health/nutrition like BMI and height, they are static or even slightly declining throughout the 19th century. In the UK it's only after 1910/1920 that you start seeing dramatic increases (that's about the time of the introduction of old age pension, and when the Labour movement started to gain serious traction).
> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers ... the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century
Industrialization, massification, standardization of production and moving to big cities have had tough consequences on worker's life. Charlie Chaplin shows just that. It was a tougher life than traditional community life with flexible work amounts.
You could definitely argue that there was an improvement in caloric supply (except in some countries). For the general happiness, though, industrial revolution has been a tough time.
I doubt it. My mom's family was one of the first to get a washing machine in Sweden. As the story goes, my great-grandmother just stared at it while it was running and cried. Not to be out of a job, but out of joy for all those wasted hours that she had spent hand washing, and she had now regained.
I'd also factor in modern medicine into people's happiness. It is tough on families when you often have infant deaths and you often have horrible diseases like polio and MMR.
Dickens wrote many social satires critical of injustices he perceived at the time like workhouses (basically sweatshops backed by organized crime) and Yorkshire boarding houses (pools of child labor). His descriptions of city life were not pleasant: pollution, crime, and unrest. It may have been quantitatively better for society in the long run but I think that the people stuck in those workhouses might have chosen nothing instead of the job they had been so graciously provided if they were given some other means of sustaining themselves.
