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> It is very hard to convince people that are legitimately working hard for their personal well being that they should also give thoughts to those that come nex

> It is very hard to convince people that are legitimately working hard for their personal well being that they should also give thoughts to those that come next. I think the way to do this is to put their gains in jeopardy. We need to sit down and find an example where some money-making endeavor made life worse for most people, and scrub those dollars from the record. Perhaps we'll do this yearly. Make dollars gained doing obvious good more reliable than dollars gained doing obvious harm.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
The issue is who decides the obvious good and obvious harm? As soon as you’ve made such a powerful authority it becomes a target for regulatory capture since the incentives if you pull this off are sky high.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  No need for an authority, it can be a DIY/opt-in sort of thing. If somebody came up to you and presented you with some money that had metadata re: how it was earned, you'd have to decide whether to accept it, so it would be up to you to decide if that endeavor was one you wanted to align yourself with. If you make that call in a way that disagrees with your wider community, you may end up in a situation where you can't find anyone else who will accept that money, so I expect some degree of consensus will emerge. Making that judgement call on every transaction would be tedious, so I imagine organizations would form which are trusted to make that call, and then you'd sort of "subscribe" your wallet to their decisions so that you don't have to think about it all the time. As for regulatory capture, if such an organization stopped aligning with your interests, you could just unsubscribe from their judgements and either do it yourself or form a competing one.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    See, I think this is a great reason to colonize Mars or the Moon. Because I'd like to see the result of this social experiment without watching the world crash and burn at the whim of popularity economics.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  We have the sky high regulatory capture as it is, just that what has been captured is opaque. There are loads of things that corporations should be getting fined for but are not.
Joker_vD 3y ago
> We need to sit down and find an example where some money-making endeavor made life worse for most people, and scrub those dollars from the record. Perhaps we'll do this yearly. And then what? Just sitting down and finding out that some thing some people did made some other people's life worse won't put the gains of the first group of people in jeopardy — unless you do something more tangible. What do propose that should be?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Once we know which money is working against our interests, we stop accepting that money. If people show up at the grocery store with it, they leave empty handed. Eventually, people start assessing risks differently, and stop investing in endeavors that are likely to leave them in that situation.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Who are those "we"? How do you check that nobody of those "we" defects? Strikebreaking is a thing. > If people show up at the grocery store with it What if those grocery stores are actually the chain that's owned by one of those "bad" companies? Those grocery stores won't implement your policy, and now what? Plus I'm fairly certain you'll run afoul of some anti-discrimination law or another. Really, if you're engaging in wishful thinking you may as well just wish for everyone to be nice and be done with it.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      > Really, if you're engaging in wishful thinking you may as well just wish for everyone to be nice and be done with it. I disagree. "Everyone be nice" is not something that can be engineered. As hackers, we can live it, and we should, but we can't hack towards it. > Strikebreaking is a thing. The kind of information hygiene that makes strike breaking a more difficult endeavor is the kind of thing we can hack towards. So many of our problems today come from how we've organized our information infrastructure (there's a lot of centralized authority in it). If we find ways to do it differently, if we practice ways to do it differently, then we may be able to achieve different outcomes.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

The issue is who decides the obvious good and obvious harm? As soon as you’ve made such a powerful authority it becomes a target for regulatory capture since the incentives if you pull this off are sky high.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
No need for an authority, it can be a DIY/opt-in sort of thing. If somebody came up to you and presented you with some money that had metadata re: how it was earned, you'd have to decide whether to accept it, so it would be up to you to decide if that endeavor was one you wanted to align yourself with. If you make that call in a way that disagrees with your wider community, you may end up in a situation where you can't find anyone else who will accept that money, so I expect some degree of consensus will emerge. Making that judgement call on every transaction would be tedious, so I imagine organizations would form which are trusted to make that call, and then you'd sort of "subscribe" your wallet to their decisions so that you don't have to think about it all the time. As for regulatory capture, if such an organization stopped aligning with your interests, you could just unsubscribe from their judgements and either do it yourself or form a competing one.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  See, I think this is a great reason to colonize Mars or the Moon. Because I'd like to see the result of this social experiment without watching the world crash and burn at the whim of popularity economics.
hgomersall 3y ago
We have the sky high regulatory capture as it is, just that what has been captured is opaque. There are loads of things that corporations should be getting fined for but are not.

Joker_vD 3y ago

> We need to sit down and find an example where some money-making endeavor made life worse for most people, and scrub those dollars from the record. Perhaps we'll do this yearly. And then what? Just sitting down and finding out that some thing some people did made some other people's life worse won't put the gains of the first group of people in jeopardy — unless you do something more tangible. What do propose that should be?

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Once we know which money is working against our interests, we stop accepting that money. If people show up at the grocery store with it, they leave empty handed. Eventually, people start assessing risks differently, and stop investing in endeavors that are likely to leave them in that situation.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Who are those "we"? How do you check that nobody of those "we" defects? Strikebreaking is a thing. > If people show up at the grocery store with it What if those grocery stores are actually the chain that's owned by one of those "bad" companies? Those grocery stores won't implement your policy, and now what? Plus I'm fairly certain you'll run afoul of some anti-discrimination law or another. Really, if you're engaging in wishful thinking you may as well just wish for everyone to be nice and be done with it.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    > Really, if you're engaging in wishful thinking you may as well just wish for everyone to be nice and be done with it. I disagree. "Everyone be nice" is not something that can be engineered. As hackers, we can live it, and we should, but we can't hack towards it. > Strikebreaking is a thing. The kind of information hygiene that makes strike breaking a more difficult endeavor is the kind of thing we can hack towards. So many of our problems today come from how we've organized our information infrastructure (there's a lot of centralized authority in it). If we find ways to do it differently, if we practice ways to do it differently, then we may be able to achieve different outcomes.