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I don't know how to think about the idea that the government is totally useless for technological problems. If we just accept that I think we're probably just d

by ragona 6y ago

I don't know how to think about the idea that the government is totally useless for technological problems. If we just accept that I think we're probably just doomed to be overtaken by more advanced societies. Agreed that we can't just dump AWS on the USDS or whatever tomorrow, but if we never plan for public digital infrastructure we're screaming towards some kind of Gibsonian cyberpunk future where the tubes are privately controlled.

Nasrudith 6y ago
If you worked for the Department of Defense having Windows Vista based computers at their oldest you would be a heroic figure in their IT. They earned their bad reputation all on their own. Calling it sclerotic is an insult to those with scoliosis, especially as obstinance and incompetence didn't cause their disease. The zeal to nationalize has gone from."theorerical improvement" to dogma to outright mental sickness. At this point just accept that partnerships where entities specialize in what they are good it can exist already instead of going full paranoid improbable worst case scenario. Amazon would not do well if they tried to occupy a small nation-state. It would be trivial to the US government. (Whether it would be wise for either to do is another question.) The treatment of "nationalizing being a bad idea" as a threat is a black and white insanity like equating being "unable to be murder someone without consequences" equates to the target automatically becoming the immortal god king eternal tyrant over all.
- ragona 6y ago
  The bit of this that I think is easy to overlook is that if this is the status quo indefinitely I assume this is a very long term problem. Amazon is a baby, it's a new-ish company in the grand scheme of things. It's a huge, huge baby, it has accumulated power incredibly quickly. Where is it gonna be in 200 years? Will the federal government still be more powerful? No one is saying nationalize Amazon tomorrow. But we haven't even managed to give our citizens good internet service yet, we're way behind here, and we do not appear to be catching up.
freeopinion 6y ago
Once upon a time there were millions of individually-owned windmills in the U.S. There were hundreds of windmill manufacturers. Around the 1920s that went into decline. It didn't take long before all of the U.S. was dependant on power companies instead of harvesting their own energy. Perhaps you would argue that "if we never plan for public energy infrastructure we're screaming towards some kind of Gibsonian cyberpunk future where energy is privately controlled". Do you know any Americans who are completely self-sufficient in food production? Should we plan for public infrastructure there? Or is it ok that our food production is privately controlled? I personally think it is foolish to move a company's data entirely outside the company and place it wholly at the mercy of a single third party outside your control. But I don't see it as needing some plan to put it into the hands of "public digital infrastructure".
- ragona 6y ago
  I think power is an interesting example because everywhere that it is privatized it tends to be a mess. Shit, PG&E burnt down half of California... what, on behalf of its shareholders, trying to cut corners and make them a buck? Who the fuck did that help? So yeah, I'd really rather see basic internet infrastructure be made into a public utility. Maybe 100 years from now S3 might make sense too. The problem is that we're so busy arguing about whether we should even HAVE a government it's incredibly difficult to do anything smart with ours.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Nice, you brought up two markets that have plenty of government involvement. Do you know who own the Hoover dam? Have you ever heard of this thing called National Grid? Lets adress food production - ever heard of farming subsidies? Did you never read anything about how these markets function? Because if you do, you will realise that government absolutely does have a hand inevery indutry that's essential to survival of organised civilisation.
philwelch 6y ago
American railroads were privately owned from the beginning, until passenger rail started dying off due to competition from airlines, when the US nationalized passenger rail. Freight rail is still private and owns the actual tracks, and passenger rail is even less important today outside of Acela, which would probably do even better than it does today if Amtrak were privatized and allowed to drop the legacy long-distance lines that only lose money in order to reinvest in Acela. AWS isn’t the highway system. It’s the railroad. Now, railroads aren’t all good. Farmers were once relieved that the railroad would buy all of their produce but ultimately grew resentful that the railroad had become the only cost-effective buyer and shipper and could dictate prices to them—this is the etymology of the term “railroaded”. And eventually with the interstate highway system, the railroads had to compete with trucking. And from that perspective, AWS isn’t even the railroad. It’s a trucking company. The railroad owns the tracks. AWS doesn’t own the tracks; they operate on the same highway that Azure and GCP use. If someone invents something better than AWS, people will invest in migrating to it; that’s how they ended up on AWS in the first place. Does that mean that the network connectivity should be a public utility? Maybe at the last mile (municipal broadband?) but the backbones seem to work fine as a competitive market, too. Did you know that the US was one of the only countries where radio was privatized when it was first invented? Most countries nationalized their radio airwaves and had the government control all the broadcasting. We do have the FCC to allocate spectrum but we also had a remarkably free market in broadcasting and, as a result, led the world in radio technology well into the 20th century. Even Britain was so committed to controlling the radio that as late as the 1960’s, the unmet demand for listening to rock music on the radio could only be met by pirate radio stations broadcasting from ships at sea.
JamesBarney 6y ago
I think very few organisations could run AWS as successfully as Amazon. Why do you think the U.S. government is one of them? They previously have shown no organizational aptitude for developing software far less complicated than AWS.
- ragona 6y ago
  Let me be clear, I do not. I think the U.S. government in its state can barely run itself. It appears to be actively working to be as net harmful to the general populous as possible. I genuinely believe in Amazon and its humans. But at some point in the distant future internet infrastructure will be so ingrained in our lives that it IS our society, and I want to live in a Democracy. I want our representatives to continue asking powerful companies how they're handling our data, and if they're becoming too big, and all of these things. I see this as a fundamentally good thing. I don't believe that AWS should be handed to the government, that would kill AWS. I believe that when something becomes critical to the public we should talk about what that means, and how we stay safe. Amazon holds themselves to an incredibly high bar, and I really applaud them for that. It made me proud to work there when we talked about how critical the work was, and I was awed to see how far we would go to recover from disaster. But Amazon has this saying about relying on mechanisms and not best intentions, and relying on Amazon's best intentions is foolish as a citizenry; we should continue to question them. And if at some point in the future we realize that AWS is more important than the self-governing society that we live in we should ask whether that is okay. Tech companies have become some of the most powerful entities in the world in short decades. In generations they could become the world. We shouldn't rely on their best intentions.

by ragona 6y ago

Nasrudith 6y ago

If you worked for the Department of Defense having Windows Vista based computers at their oldest you would be a heroic figure in their IT. They earned their bad reputation all on their own. Calling it sclerotic is an insult to those with scoliosis, especially as obstinance and incompetence didn't cause their disease. The zeal to nationalize has gone from."theorerical improvement" to dogma to outright mental sickness. At this point just accept that partnerships where entities specialize in what they are good it can exist already instead of going full paranoid improbable worst case scenario. Amazon would not do well if they tried to occupy a small nation-state. It would be trivial to the US government. (Whether it would be wise for either to do is another question.) The treatment of "nationalizing being a bad idea" as a threat is a black and white insanity like equating being "unable to be murder someone without consequences" equates to the target automatically becoming the immortal god king eternal tyrant over all.

ragona 6y ago
The bit of this that I think is easy to overlook is that if this is the status quo indefinitely I assume this is a very long term problem. Amazon is a baby, it's a new-ish company in the grand scheme of things. It's a huge, huge baby, it has accumulated power incredibly quickly. Where is it gonna be in 200 years? Will the federal government still be more powerful? No one is saying nationalize Amazon tomorrow. But we haven't even managed to give our citizens good internet service yet, we're way behind here, and we do not appear to be catching up.

freeopinion 6y ago

Once upon a time there were millions of individually-owned windmills in the U.S. There were hundreds of windmill manufacturers. Around the 1920s that went into decline. It didn't take long before all of the U.S. was dependant on power companies instead of harvesting their own energy. Perhaps you would argue that "if we never plan for public energy infrastructure we're screaming towards some kind of Gibsonian cyberpunk future where energy is privately controlled". Do you know any Americans who are completely self-sufficient in food production? Should we plan for public infrastructure there? Or is it ok that our food production is privately controlled? I personally think it is foolish to move a company's data entirely outside the company and place it wholly at the mercy of a single third party outside your control. But I don't see it as needing some plan to put it into the hands of "public digital infrastructure".

ragona 6y ago
I think power is an interesting example because everywhere that it is privatized it tends to be a mess. Shit, PG&E burnt down half of California... what, on behalf of its shareholders, trying to cut corners and make them a buck? Who the fuck did that help? So yeah, I'd really rather see basic internet infrastructure be made into a public utility. Maybe 100 years from now S3 might make sense too. The problem is that we're so busy arguing about whether we should even HAVE a government it's incredibly difficult to do anything smart with ours.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Nice, you brought up two markets that have plenty of government involvement. Do you know who own the Hoover dam? Have you ever heard of this thing called National Grid? Lets adress food production - ever heard of farming subsidies? Did you never read anything about how these markets function? Because if you do, you will realise that government absolutely does have a hand inevery indutry that's essential to survival of organised civilisation.

philwelch 6y ago

American railroads were privately owned from the beginning, until passenger rail started dying off due to competition from airlines, when the US nationalized passenger rail. Freight rail is still private and owns the actual tracks, and passenger rail is even less important today outside of Acela, which would probably do even better than it does today if Amtrak were privatized and allowed to drop the legacy long-distance lines that only lose money in order to reinvest in Acela. AWS isn’t the highway system. It’s the railroad. Now, railroads aren’t all good. Farmers were once relieved that the railroad would buy all of their produce but ultimately grew resentful that the railroad had become the only cost-effective buyer and shipper and could dictate prices to them—this is the etymology of the term “railroaded”. And eventually with the interstate highway system, the railroads had to compete with trucking. And from that perspective, AWS isn’t even the railroad. It’s a trucking company. The railroad owns the tracks. AWS doesn’t own the tracks; they operate on the same highway that Azure and GCP use. If someone invents something better than AWS, people will invest in migrating to it; that’s how they ended up on AWS in the first place. Does that mean that the network connectivity should be a public utility? Maybe at the last mile (municipal broadband?) but the backbones seem to work fine as a competitive market, too. Did you know that the US was one of the only countries where radio was privatized when it was first invented? Most countries nationalized their radio airwaves and had the government control all the broadcasting. We do have the FCC to allocate spectrum but we also had a remarkably free market in broadcasting and, as a result, led the world in radio technology well into the 20th century. Even Britain was so committed to controlling the radio that as late as the 1960’s, the unmet demand for listening to rock music on the radio could only be met by pirate radio stations broadcasting from ships at sea.

JamesBarney 6y ago

I think very few organisations could run AWS as successfully as Amazon. Why do you think the U.S. government is one of them? They previously have shown no organizational aptitude for developing software far less complicated than AWS.

ragona 6y ago
Let me be clear, I do not. I think the U.S. government in its state can barely run itself. It appears to be actively working to be as net harmful to the general populous as possible. I genuinely believe in Amazon and its humans. But at some point in the distant future internet infrastructure will be so ingrained in our lives that it IS our society, and I want to live in a Democracy. I want our representatives to continue asking powerful companies how they're handling our data, and if they're becoming too big, and all of these things. I see this as a fundamentally good thing. I don't believe that AWS should be handed to the government, that would kill AWS. I believe that when something becomes critical to the public we should talk about what that means, and how we stay safe. Amazon holds themselves to an incredibly high bar, and I really applaud them for that. It made me proud to work there when we talked about how critical the work was, and I was awed to see how far we would go to recover from disaster. But Amazon has this saying about relying on mechanisms and not best intentions, and relying on Amazon's best intentions is foolish as a citizenry; we should continue to question them. And if at some point in the future we realize that AWS is more important than the self-governing society that we live in we should ask whether that is okay. Tech companies have become some of the most powerful entities in the world in short decades. In generations they could become the world. We shouldn't rely on their best intentions.