United States Politics Thread 46

[rotting bones]

I personally am for a mixed economy, where on paper it is market socialism with production being carried out by worker cooperatives, but in reality a democratic government strongly influences things by providing significant subsidies/incentives and penalties/disincentives to steer the economy to produce things that are worthwhile for society, up to and including complete government funding for things such as FLOSS development (as FLOSS is a good for all of society, but has the problem that it by itself is not profitable, aside from things like paid support, due to software having near-zero marginal cost).

My full posts arguing for a mixed economy might still be up there if they haven't been purged.

[Torco]

And the gross offensiveness and association of us with our mass-murderers is just an unintentional byproduct, is it?

look, it's not me doing the nazi shit. if calling them nazis on account of them doing nazi shit offends you more than them doing the nazi shit there's something wrong, and it's not with me. the phrase nazi jews is revolting, i agree, but that is because the reality of it is revolting: a people surviving the biggest genocide in the recent history just for elements of it to turn around and do their best to replicate it. it is that reality that should offend you, not my calling a spade a spade.

Of course, there really are such a thing as Israeli neo-Nazis, but mind you that most of these were people of Jewish descent from the (former) Eastern Bloc who were neo-Nazis ─ yes, this is a real thing ─ who decided to immigrate to Israel just because the economy and living conditions were better there than in the former Eastern Bloc rather than because of any special love of their Jewish heritage.

so they're not real jews or something?

[Travis B.]

And the gross offensiveness and association of us with our mass-murderers is just an unintentional byproduct, is it?

look, it's not me doing the nazi shit. if calling them nazis on account of them doing nazi shit offends you more than them doing the nazi shit there's something wrong, and it's not with me. the phrase nazi jews is revolting, i agree, but that is because the reality of it is revolting: a people surviving the biggest genocide in the recent history just for elements of it to turn around and do their best to replicate it. it is that reality that should offend you, not my calling a spade a spade.

There is a long record of people referring to "Nazi Jews" in particular, predating the latest war ─ not "fascist Israelis" or like ─ to the point that it has become an anti-Semitic canard. The key part is "Jews", because that implies that one, by being a Jew, is somehow responsible for the conduct of the Israeli gov't ─ one need not even be an Israeli for this to be applied to one. In such, it goes back to the old anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty, where Jews are (generally wrongly) accused of having greater loyalty to Israel than to their own countries. (This is akin to the anti-Catholic canard of dual loyalty, where Catholics are similarly wrongly accused of having greater loyalty to the Pope in Rome than to their own countries.)

Of course, there really are such a thing as Israeli neo-Nazis, but mind you that most of these were people of Jewish descent from the (former) Eastern Bloc who were neo-Nazis ─ yes, this is a real thing ─ who decided to immigrate to Israel just because the economy and living conditions were better there than in the former Eastern Bloc rather than because of any special love of their Jewish heritage.

so they're not real jews or something?

No, they are real Jews in the sense of that their mothers are/were Jews, and their mothers are/were Jews, and so on. They just happen to be neo-Nazis, and of course their Israeli citizenship is of convenience rather than their love of Jewishness.

[jcb]

I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.

All the useful niches that used to be terra nullius have now been claimed, but to keep the money flowing, they have to make useless shit like cryptocurrencies and pretend that it's useful, or start turning everything into a subscription ( like printers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUYrCxHuRgU ), or just pay workers less by classifying them as independent contractors instead of employees (Uber).

I'd say capitalism, whatever else you might think about it, can be quite good at providing things we use in daily life as long as the average capitalist is content with running a business on razor-thin profit margins. That used to be the case, but it no longer is, or at least not to the same extent. More and more, capitalists insist not just on profits, but on constantly growing profits, or at least constantly growing revenues. This means that they have basically forgotten how to run a saturated market.

Capitalism has always been this way. John Steinbeck wroth in "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939:

When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

[bradrn]

I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.

All the useful niches that used to be terra nullius have now been claimed, but to keep the money flowing, they have to make useless shit like cryptocurrencies and pretend that it's useful, or start turning everything into a subscription ( like printers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUYrCxHuRgU ), or just pay workers less by classifying them as independent contractors instead of employees (Uber).

Or, as I once said:

The profit motive is extremely useful as you say, but only up to a point — once you’ve exhausted all the ways to increase profit by improving your product, the only thing left is to increase profit by worsening your product.

(This remains one of my favourite statements I’ve made on this forum.)

[Nortaneous]

I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.

1) Venture capital is a hit-driven business. If 99 of the 100 companies you fund fail but the hundredth increases in value a thousandfold, you're ahead. But you don't know which companies will fail ahead of time (if you did, you wouldn't invest in them) and sometimes implausible things increase in value a thousandfold - like Bitcoin, Ethereum, SMS group chat, an online directory for Harvard, and a limousine rental app.

2) Rich people often have more money than they know what to do with. Individually, this looks like dentists falling for real estate scams and the Waltons investing nine figures in Theranos; as a class, this looks like the Alfa Romeo dealership up the road from Tysons Galleria and speculative bubbles, as all that money sloshes around with nowhere to go, and fails to connect with progress bottlenecks that are primarily regulatory in nature, which is how we pronounce "address the public's loss of trust in engineering".

[Ares Land]

1) Venture capital is a hit-driven business. If 99 of the 100 companies you fund fail but the hundredth increases in value a thousandfold, you're ahead. But you don't know which companies will fail ahead of time (if you did, you wouldn't invest in them) and sometimes implausible things increase in value a thousandfold - like Bitcoin, Ethereum, SMS group chat, an online directory for Harvard, and a limousine rental app.

2) Rich people often have more money than they know what to do with. Individually, this looks like dentists falling for real estate scams and the Waltons investing nine figures in Theranos; as a class, this looks like the Alfa Romeo dealership up the road from Tysons Galleria and speculative bubbles, as all that money sloshes around with nowhere to go, and fails to connect with progress bottlenecks that are primarily regulatory in nature, which is how we pronounce "address the public's loss of trust in engineering".

Yeah, that makes sense. The part I still can't explain is that the process still somehow got us useful results twenty or ten years ago.

[zompist]

I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.

Lots of reasons, I think. One is that the wrong lesson was taken from the Internet boom. Rather than "it turns out to be really useful to connect everything to the web", the lesson drawn was "You can make a lot of money by monopolizing a new medium."

The thing is, enshittification is built into the model. That is, the procedure is:

1. Make a product that pleases the customers, for free, making no money but building a monopoly and destroying pre-web competition. Everybody likes this part.
2. Turn it into a product aimed at people who can make money on the platform and pay for it: advertisers, Amazon suppliers, content creators.
3. Turn it into a product to maximize shareholder value. By this point no one can leave, so the customers and suppliers are both screwed.

You can't really just be nostalgic for step 1, because it was free for customers as a trap, to build market share. If people had to pay to get the services received, the platform wouldn't have grown as fast.

I think the mistake the rest of society made was never figuring out micropayments. Yes, really. As someone on Mefi put it, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." When only investors and advertisers provide the money, the enshittification process is inevitable.

Now, micropayments never worked because no one wants to allocate $0.30, or $0.03, or whatever, every time they access a web page. To make it work, it'd have to be built into the system, and automatic-- probably an extra charge from your ISP. You'd need a tracking system to distribute the money... but guess what, we already have that tracking system, it's just there to help advertisers and platforms, not content creators.

Could a system where individual users pay for a network actually function? Sure, we have one in the US, and it's even run by for-profit companies; it's called "telephones." Imagine how unusable telephones would be if instead calls were paid for via ads. (Scammers and spammers are bad enough, but at least they have to pay for phone service too.)

[Ares Land]

Could a system where individual users pay for a network actually function? Sure, we have one in the US, and it's even run by for-profit companies; it's called "telephones."

We had such a system in France when it was a kid. It was called the Minitel; In the 80s and 90s in France, the Minitel was a system of dumb terminals, offering a fair amount of online services. I remember almost every household having one.
You had quite a few services open: online banking, movie theaters.
The Minitel was infamous for the Minitel rose (the sex chat lines) but I think the memory most of us have is using it to check exam results. (I have memories of using the Minitel for this this as late as 2003!)

Here in France, the Minitel is often used as an example of how incompetent and useless our technocratic elites are -- to think we were using dumb terminals with tiny screens when the Americans were developping the Internet.
Actually, the Minitel was far ahead of its time.

I think France Télécom and governments envisioned a faster, higher-bandwidth kind of Minitel, but the Web intervened in 1993 and the rest is history. This would have had a huge advantage: payment was built into the system! You got charged as part of your telephone bill.
It's fun to imagine an alternate history where the Web never took off, and that sort of terminal services took over instead.

I'm not sure it would have worked, though. The problem with the payment thing is that you can run very high bills, and in fact people did with the Minitel (on games and the aforementioned chat lines.)
But perhaps more importantly... people didn't use the system as much as they could have because they were afraid of running very high bills.
(That said.. early dial-up Internet bills could get frightening!)

[Raphael]

Could a system where individual users pay for a network actually function? Sure, we have one in the US, and it's even run by for-profit companies; it's called "telephones."

Dunno about the US, but over here, these days, most people pay flatrates to their phone companies.

I'd say capitalism, whatever else you might think about it, can be quite good at providing things we use in daily life as long as the average capitalist is content with running a business on razor-thin profit margins. That used to be the case, but it no longer is, or at least not to the same extent. More and more, capitalists insist not just on profits, but on constantly growing profits, or at least constantly growing revenues. This means that they have basically forgotten how to run a saturated market.

Capitalism has always been this way. John Steinbeck wroth in "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939:

When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

When I was a small child, capitalism won the First Cold War by being better at providing consumer goods than the Soviet system.

Or, as I once said:

The profit motive is extremely useful as you say, but only up to a point — once you’ve exhausted all the ways to increase profit by improving your product, the only thing left is to increase profit by worsening your product.

(This remains one of my favourite statements I’ve made on this forum.)

It's one of my favorite statements anyone has made on this forum, too.

[Raphael]

Could a system where individual users pay for a network actually function? Sure, we have one in the US, and it's even run by for-profit companies; it's called "telephones."

We had such a system in France when it was a kid. It was called the Minitel; In the 80s and 90s in France, the Minitel was a system of dumb terminals, offering a fair amount of online services. I remember almost every household having one.

Germany had the BTX system, which was similar, but never used by most or even all that many people.

[zompist]

Actually, the Minitel was far ahead of its time.

From what I've heard, I agree!

I'm not sure it would have worked, though. The problem with the payment thing is that you can run very high bills, and in fact people did with the Minitel (on games and the aforementioned chat lines.)
But perhaps more importantly... people didn't use the system as much as they could have because they were afraid of running very high bills.
(That said.. early dial-up Internet bills could get frightening!)

Maybe seeing true prices would be good though. Overindulging in things is usually too expensive for most people to do.

But there are ways to make the system work better. Wait for the Almean internet in Almea+400.

Dunno about the US, but over here, these days, most people pay flatrates to their phone companies.

Here too, except for international calls. But you still pay for service, which makes you the customer not the product.

[Raphael]

The thing is, enshittification is built into the model. That is, the procedure is:

1. Make a product that pleases the customers, for free, making no money but building a monopoly and destroying pre-web competition. Everybody likes this part.
2. Turn it into a product aimed at people who can make money on the platform and pay for it: advertisers, Amazon suppliers, content creators.
3. Turn it into a product to maximize shareholder value. By this point no one can leave, so the customers and suppliers are both screwed.

You can't really just be nostalgic for step 1, because it was free for customers as a trap, to build market share. If people had to pay to get the services received, the platform wouldn't have grown as fast.

Belated afterthought: Some services that people do pay for, such as streaming websites, seem to be subject to enshittification, too.

[Nortaneous]

1) Venture capital is a hit-driven business. If 99 of the 100 companies you fund fail but the hundredth increases in value a thousandfold, you're ahead. But you don't know which companies will fail ahead of time (if you did, you wouldn't invest in them) and sometimes implausible things increase in value a thousandfold - like Bitcoin, Ethereum, SMS group chat, an online directory for Harvard, and a limousine rental app.

2) Rich people often have more money than they know what to do with. Individually, this looks like dentists falling for real estate scams and the Waltons investing nine figures in Theranos; as a class, this looks like the Alfa Romeo dealership up the road from Tysons Galleria and speculative bubbles, as all that money sloshes around with nowhere to go, and fails to connect with progress bottlenecks that are primarily regulatory in nature, which is how we pronounce "address the public's loss of trust in engineering".

Yeah, that makes sense. The part I still can't explain is that the process still somehow got us useful results twenty or ten years ago.

Ten years ago, BTC was $357. Twenty years ago was the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, which wiped out a lot of companies that are now forgotten. Everything subject to long-term selection effects is worse now than it was twenty years ago, because you don't remember the things that were selected against. The best music of a given year mostly didn't chart well, and most of the stuff that hit the top of the charts has since been rightly consigned to the trash can. (Remember Usher? Probably not. Huge in 2004, of course - like pets.com and Webvan.)

[Ares Land]

Ten years ago, BTC was $357. Twenty years ago was the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, which wiped out a lot of companies that are now forgotten. Everything subject to long-term selection effects is worse now than it was twenty years ago, because you don't remember the things that were selected against. The best music of a given year mostly didn't chart well, and most of the stuff that hit the top of the charts has since been rightly consigned to the trash can. (Remember Usher? Probably not. Huge in 2004, of course - like pets.com and Webvan.)

You're right; that's probably the best explanation. I wonder if there's a museum of tech horrors somewhere.

[fusijui]

The 99% of the human population that gets last year's model; that has no choice in whether or how to engage with it. There's your museum of tech horrors.

[alice]

The profit motive is extremely useful as you say, but only up to a point — once you’ve exhausted all the ways to increase profit by improving your product, the only thing left is to increase profit by worsening your product.

(This remains one of my favourite statements I’ve made on this forum.)

It's very pithy and perceptive, and unfortunately zompist beat me to the inevitable but entirely appropriate mention of the related term "enshitification". Coined by Cory Doctorow, IIRC.

Everything subject to long-term selection effects is worse now than it was twenty years ago, because you don't remember the things that were selected against. The best music of a given year mostly didn't chart well, and most of the stuff that hit the top of the charts has since been rightly consigned to the trash can. (Remember Usher? Probably not. Huge in 2004, of course - like pets.com and Webvan.)

Well, popular music has already eaten itself; it's just been a few decades ahead of capitalism in general doing the same.

[zompist]

Belated afterthought: Some services that people do pay for, such as streaming websites, seem to be subject to enshittification, too.

Less so, I think, as I only subscribe to one, Netflix. Still no ads, though this whole business of every production company having its own paid service is obnoxious.

But there can be two reasons why you still get some enshittification. One is that the service gets money from both customers and advertisers, so it's a mixed product. And two, enshittification is probably taught in business school by now. When all the big tech companies are doing it, CEOs think that it must be the smart thing to do.

[jcb]

Now, micropayments never worked because no one wants to allocate $0.30, or $0.03, or whatever, every time they access a web page. To make it work, it'd have to be built into the system, and automatic-- probably an extra charge from your ISP. You'd need a tracking system to distribute the money... but guess what, we already have that tracking system, it's just there to help advertisers and platforms, not content creators.

What kind of system are you describing? That people would pay the site host per page/kilobyte of data that they download from the site? (instead of buying a product from a product maker who pays an advertiser who pays the site host to show ads on the site.)

Actually, the Minitel was far ahead of its time.

How?

When I was a small child, capitalism won the First Cold War by being better at providing consumer goods than the Soviet system.

What good are consumer goods if one can't afford housing, education, or healthcare?

[zompist]

Now, micropayments never worked because no one wants to allocate $0.30, or $0.03, or whatever, every time they access a web page. To make it work, it'd have to be built into the system, and automatic-- probably an extra charge from your ISP. You'd need a tracking system to distribute the money... but guess what, we already have that tracking system, it's just there to help advertisers and platforms, not content creators.

What kind of system are you describing? That people would pay the site host per page/kilobyte of data that they download from the site? (instead of buying a product from a product maker who pays an advertiser who pays the site host to show ads on the site.)

Ironically we do have micropayments now— cf. Patreon or Twitch or Substack— and those are good illustrations of how some people will pay for content, but the 1990s vision of "pay 30¢ to see this webcomic" was never realistic.

So, I imagine it's bundled with your ISP. AT&T charges $55/month for basic Internet. I'm just spitballing, so let's say we double that. The ISP continues to get the same sum, the rest is distributed to the content creators you visit.

Doesn't that require a lot of fussy bookkeeping? Maybe, but it would be built in, invisible to the customer, and it would be no more intrusive or difficult than the tracking that underlies the ad network. (Some visibility is good, e.g. on your monthly bill, so you can adjust your usage.)

The devil is in the details, and we could talk about those all day, but my basic assertion is that such a system would better serve consumers than the ad-supported, surveillance-heavy bloatware we have today.