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(I don't really respond to these kind of threads, but I'll respond to you because I respect you and am a Zerotier customer and have been for years. Thanks for y

(I don't really respond to these kind of threads, but I'll respond to you because I respect you and am a Zerotier customer and have been for years. Thanks for your work!) > My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s. I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.

imtringued 19d ago
It doesn't require deep thinking to understand that the idea of a guaranteed 0% return on cash is inherently a physically impossible lie and that this lie will have consequences on all of society since money is a mandatory monopoly and there is no competition between non thermodynamics aware and thermodynamics aware money systems. The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
api 19d ago
(Thanks for knowing about ZeroTier! BTW my opinions are 100% my own, not those of my employer yada yada.) I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem. It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved. "But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?" Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems. Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max. But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage. The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all. They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.

imtringued 19d ago

It doesn't require deep thinking to understand that the idea of a guaranteed 0% return on cash is inherently a physically impossible lie and that this lie will have consequences on all of society since money is a mandatory monopoly and there is no competition between non thermodynamics aware and thermodynamics aware money systems. The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.

api 19d ago

(Thanks for knowing about ZeroTier! BTW my opinions are 100% my own, not those of my employer yada yada.) I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem. It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved. "But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?" Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems. Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max. But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage. The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all. They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.