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Everyone here is so optimistic; no one is talking about a dystopia in which one man owns everything. Obviously planned experimental cities ala Disney are cool,

Everyone here is so optimistic; no one is talking about a dystopia in which one man owns everything. Obviously planned experimental cities ala Disney are cool, and interesting to think about, and perhaps beneficial, but it's worth playing devil's advocate anyway. We used to have butchers and bakers and vegetable-sellers and dry goods stores, then we had supermarkets, and they employed cashiers and truck-drivers and shelf-stockers. Now we've got supermarkets with self-checkouts, robot price checkers, soon shelf stockers, and sooner still self-driving trucks. One guy owns the warehouse, the supermarket, and the trucks, and employs, essentially, no one. Now, imagine a city owned by one man, you rent your house from him, buy from his stores, work in his factory, and let his cars drive you around. Just because things could work out well doesn't mean they will.

xor1 9y ago
Irvine is the closest thing to this that I can imagine in the modern-day US. Seems to be working out...
- PostOnce 9y ago
  There have been benevolent dictators, it does not mean subsequent dictators will also be? Should we not be wary?
  - sbmassey 9y ago
    As long as people are free to leave, I wouldn't worry about it. If Gates' plans include a large wall, or making it into a single employer 'company town' type thing, that might be an issue.
    - PostOnce 9y ago
      Being legally free to leave may not mean you're also financially free to do so. In a hypothetical designed dystopia, your wages and employment would be such that you couldn't afford to leave the machine that makes the designer rich. For example, you wouldn't make enough to save more than $5/week, the rest would have been spent on food and power and rent. So, if you missed a weeks work you'd miss a weeks rent. You'd have nothing in the bank to travel to an out-of-town interview. Just a theory I don't expect to happen any time soon, but an interesting thought exercise when a billionaire buys a town.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  I found Irvine to be a terrible place to live, but that's mostly because of the poor design, not who owns it.
PostOnce 9y ago
Replying to myself because I can't add an edit: It's interesting that I'm being downvoted without many comments arguing that I may be wrong in some way, it feels like a downvote-of-disagreement. I thought HN meant downvote for irrelevance, not for disagreement. That's what comments are for. Is it truly not worth even considering? Is our tech worship that strong? We talk of dystopias in every other thread, about Amazon owning the economy, Facebook owning our communication, and Google owning a lot of things, and we talk about the dangers of these; is it forbidden to be suspect of a billionaire experimenter when it pertains to a society who could arguably get no vote in such a city?
- jholman 9y ago
  > I thought HN meant downvote for irrelevance, not for disagreement. That's what comments are for. Why do you believe those things?
  - PostOnce 9y ago
    meta about hn's comment systems, but: why else would you ban low-karma accounts from downvoting? It seems like upvote-only systems make for better comment sorting, thus why downvoting is not even allowed by low karma accounts. Still, trolls and total irrelevance need to be policed to keep the quality of discussion high, so high karma users will police the trolls and irrelevant posters, rather than down-sorting things they disagree with, but which contribute to the discussion? I thought I had read this somewhere on here, that it's all about relevance and inciting conversation, rather than sort-by-mob-rule and prevailing opinion?
    - spraak 9y ago
      I think the above poster is being sarcastic...
    - jholman 9y ago
      The Guidelines don't support any of this theorizing. Reddit's "reddiquette" has a rule like the one you suggest for HN. I think the fact that this rule has failed to show up in the published Guidelines, after a decade or so, even through Guidelines edits, is (weak) evidence that HN does not use Reddit's rule. As far as I can tell, downvotes are for whatever you want them to be for. I mean, I mostly only use my downvotes according to the rule you propose. But I think your claim that this is the "meaning" of downvotes is unsupported by evidence. And, from the Guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. As such, one thing I do downvote for: unconstructive complaining about downvotes.
clydethefrog 9y ago
It isn't a coincidence that writer Morozov - the strident canary in the technology coal mine - is currently working on a new book about "smart cities" [1]. Just as he popped the balloon of hot air about web 2.0, much to annoyance of HN at the time [2], I am afraid he is right about the real motive behind these developments. Just as we see a lot of nostalgic posts lately here about the "old web", maybe in five years there will be a new found appreciation of pesky things such as public infrastructure. [1] http://inuxwetrust.waxle.com/keynote-evgeny-morozov-the-smart-city-as-a-transition-point-towards-the-private-city/ http://inuxwetrust.waxle.com/keynote-evgeny-morozov-the-smar... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759

xor1 9y ago

Irvine is the closest thing to this that I can imagine in the modern-day US. Seems to be working out...

PostOnce 9y ago
There have been benevolent dictators, it does not mean subsequent dictators will also be? Should we not be wary?
- sbmassey 9y ago
  As long as people are free to leave, I wouldn't worry about it. If Gates' plans include a large wall, or making it into a single employer 'company town' type thing, that might be an issue.
  - PostOnce 9y ago
    Being legally free to leave may not mean you're also financially free to do so. In a hypothetical designed dystopia, your wages and employment would be such that you couldn't afford to leave the machine that makes the designer rich. For example, you wouldn't make enough to save more than $5/week, the rest would have been spent on food and power and rent. So, if you missed a weeks work you'd miss a weeks rent. You'd have nothing in the bank to travel to an out-of-town interview. Just a theory I don't expect to happen any time soon, but an interesting thought exercise when a billionaire buys a town.
akvadrako 9y ago
I found Irvine to be a terrible place to live, but that's mostly because of the poor design, not who owns it.

PostOnce 9y ago

Replying to myself because I can't add an edit: It's interesting that I'm being downvoted without many comments arguing that I may be wrong in some way, it feels like a downvote-of-disagreement. I thought HN meant downvote for irrelevance, not for disagreement. That's what comments are for. Is it truly not worth even considering? Is our tech worship that strong? We talk of dystopias in every other thread, about Amazon owning the economy, Facebook owning our communication, and Google owning a lot of things, and we talk about the dangers of these; is it forbidden to be suspect of a billionaire experimenter when it pertains to a society who could arguably get no vote in such a city?

jholman 9y ago
> I thought HN meant downvote for irrelevance, not for disagreement. That's what comments are for. Why do you believe those things?
- PostOnce 9y ago
  meta about hn's comment systems, but: why else would you ban low-karma accounts from downvoting? It seems like upvote-only systems make for better comment sorting, thus why downvoting is not even allowed by low karma accounts. Still, trolls and total irrelevance need to be policed to keep the quality of discussion high, so high karma users will police the trolls and irrelevant posters, rather than down-sorting things they disagree with, but which contribute to the discussion? I thought I had read this somewhere on here, that it's all about relevance and inciting conversation, rather than sort-by-mob-rule and prevailing opinion?
  - spraak 9y ago
    I think the above poster is being sarcastic...
  - jholman 9y ago
    The Guidelines don't support any of this theorizing. Reddit's "reddiquette" has a rule like the one you suggest for HN. I think the fact that this rule has failed to show up in the published Guidelines, after a decade or so, even through Guidelines edits, is (weak) evidence that HN does not use Reddit's rule. As far as I can tell, downvotes are for whatever you want them to be for. I mean, I mostly only use my downvotes according to the rule you propose. But I think your claim that this is the "meaning" of downvotes is unsupported by evidence. And, from the Guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. As such, one thing I do downvote for: unconstructive complaining about downvotes.

clydethefrog 9y ago

It isn't a coincidence that writer Morozov - the strident canary in the technology coal mine - is currently working on a new book about "smart cities" [1]. Just as he popped the balloon of hot air about web 2.0, much to annoyance of HN at the time [2], I am afraid he is right about the real motive behind these developments. Just as we see a lot of nostalgic posts lately here about the "old web", maybe in five years there will be a new found appreciation of pesky things such as public infrastructure. [1] http://inuxwetrust.waxle.com/keynote-evgeny-morozov-the-smart-city-as-a-transition-point-towards-the-private-city/ http://inuxwetrust.waxle.com/keynote-evgeny-morozov-the-smar... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472759