6 ms·

The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Community owned banks? We have those in Spain, and those were the main culprits of Spain's bank

• jbooth 13y ago
  jbooth's axiom of internet comment sniping: Anyone who accuses an article of being (insert ideological label) actually has a much harder ideological bias in the opposite direction.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    I don't accuse the article of being socialist. It's not only obvious, but also the article itself points it: "He's actually more of a socialist and would be more likely to vote for the left-wing parties". So I have a bias because I point at what happened with "community owned banks" in my country?
    • jbooth 13y ago
      I was just taking a drive-by shot. It was jbooth's axiom of comment sniping, not jbooth's axiom of carefully reasoned article analysis. Regardless of the guy's politics, strictly speaking, you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal. You need to either engage the existing power structures or have a complete revolution in order to make change happen. That's without getting into policy preferences or details, it's just the basic ground zero of the situation. That's what I got from the article.. it's facile, maybe a lazy conclusion, certainly not a great article but also not incorrect.
      • mseebach 13y ago
        > you can't fight the law with technology because the law can make your tech illegal But you can. Napster launched, what, 13 years ago, and desperate upon desperate law has not even put a dent into the explosive growth of piracy.
        • jbooth 13y ago
          Napster's been dead for over 10 years, and music sharing, while rampant, is far enough underground that the music companies are making a ton of cash selling digital music.
          • mseebach 13y ago
            It's probably hard to directly change the law, but you can definitely fight it. Napster has been dead for 10 years, but to quote fictive Sean Parker in The Social Network, "Do you want to buy a Tower Records store?", and plenty of services, not least Pirate Bay, has risen to fill its void. It's hard to argue that low-friction, even non-DRM, digital music sales wasn't brought around (or at least, brought around much faster) by piracy-induced pain. The RIAAs would have been more than happy to use the law to shut down piracy (in effect, their competition), but even tough the law obliged them, the customers didn't. I'd call that fighting the law.
          • malka 13y ago
            music sharing ? rampant ? I dont know a single person that actually doesn't download music. Even my grand-mother does it. I live in France, and it may be different in other countries, but music (and other cultural stuff) sharing is not really underground here.
        • PavlovsCat 13y ago
          At the same time, Napster et al. haven't made a dent in copyright laws..
        • notahacker 13y ago
          Sure, you can subvert copyright law by making file sharing easier, just as you can subvert drug laws by making it easier to buy drugs. The actual problem for most people though isn't that copies or drugs are especially difficult to obtain, but that they might find themselves in a courtroom for procuring them. Technology hasn't changed that; arguably Napster and SilkRoad made it easier for vested interests to generate moral panics around pirating and drug use, and to ensnare people attempting to download music or mail-order contraband. You didn't get children facing lawsuits for making mixtapes in the 1990s.
    • ThomPete 13y ago
      You do realise there is a huge huge difference between "actually more of a socialist" and communist right?
      • kaoD 13y ago
        You do realise I said communist/socialist (slash included) because it is a wide spectrum and I can't place him in a single spot from a few comments in an interview? Also: communism sees socialism as the transition from capitalism to communism. The only difference is the long term.
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    That's not just a pithy saying, it's a demonstrated truth. If you show the same article, or the same piece of TV news, to people with opposite partisan orientations, each of them will think the article is unjustly biased towards the other guy. Republicans will always see a bias towards Democrats, Democrats a bias towards Republicans, in the same material.
• ilaksh 13y ago
  I'm interested to hear more about the problems with community owned banks. Actually there are a lot of people that are really hoping more of those will solve many problems in the US. So I would like to know specifically why they don't help and turned out so bad in Spain. Sure, the State generally won't fight against itself, but I think that he makes a good point though about not just completely giving up. I mean I have given up on politics like a lot of people, but when I was reading that article it made me think that if enough people tried, we _could_ make some improvements and help at least ease the adoption of technologies that solve structural/political problems. There are a lot of people, especially in the US, that are really looking toward social democracy (socialism) as the light at the end of the tunnel. I think that its unfortunate that there isn't a better perspective for these people on the realities of social democracies in Europe or of the historical context of socialism. However, with such extreme inequality, its hard not to lean in that direction in one's thinking. I actually think the key problems are over-centralization, which occurs both in capitalistic societies and socialist societies to a high degree, as well as a lack of social and physical science being incorporated into decision making. The communist/socialist ideal especially overcentralizes although it does a better job of incorporating hard science into decision making. In that case the main problem is lack of distribution of decision-making and diversity of solutions which stifles evolution of the system. The capitalistic ideal especially lacks the input of hard social and physical sciences although it does provide a diverse set of solutions, at least until monopoly takes over. We need to measure human and ecological well-being and incorporate different scientifically motivated attempts to improve those holistic measurements into our various enterprises. Technology is going to be incredibly powerful in moving away from centralization which should directly impact human well-being and inequality.
  • davidw 13y ago
    Italy had banks controlled by politicians - and still does to some degree. What does not work is that loans are handed out on a political basis, rather than for economic reasons. I'm pretty happy with the credit union I have in the US - that seems to be a pretty good solution to me. It's beholden to its members, not to local politicians.
  • mseebach 13y ago
• skidoo 13y ago
  I think state owned banks would be a drastic improvement to handful of old rich guys owned banks. And that's my ultimate qualm with this. I love that Sunde (and Dotcom) are entering politics more as a means to legitimacy, but in all honesty- politics is a game for the masses to shield the actual decision-making. Democracy has never worked, because the greed of the few will always win out when the authority to instigate necessary change is left up entirely to those who would lose power in the doing. Playing the game within the system wins no battles.
  • shin_lao 13y ago
    State owned banks make it too easy for politicians to pass laws that will enable them to do whatever they want to do. Granted, private banks have the possibility to corrupt politicians to the same effect.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Sure! It went really good for Spain. Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390
    • skidoo 13y ago
      Personally, I don't see a need for banks at all though. It is legalized theft and nothing more. I gave up my account at the start of the 2007 bailout and have survived just fine ever since. I have never been in debt in my life either, which I do not see as being unrelated.
• atmosx 13y ago
  Word, given the fact that privately owned banks had no problems at all... oh wait! O jeez... they had a few...
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Are you making this up? Which private banks had problems? Unless you mean the same problems that worldwide private banking faced during the world crisis. Cajas problems were related but they couldn't make through because they were already ill. The financial crisis was just the final blow. In case you're unaware of what happened to public banks, check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754390 Please, name a single private bank that had to be intervened during the spanish financial crisis.
• fennecfoxen 13y ago
  > The interview makes clear he has a communist/socialist mindset. Mmm. "Firm believer in taxation" opposes crypto-currency. Film at 11.
• Zigurd 13y ago
  We have cooperative banks in the US and even the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. There are many organizational structures apart from the investor-owned model.
• morkbot 13y ago
  Politics and economy is not a thing of 0s and 1s - there are no clear and easy solutions that will work perfectly in every country - it's always about finding some middle-ground, where pros outweight cons. E.g. banking regulation - sure, it won't prevent all the bad behaviour, but it will help (see Poland where state control over some banking regulations prevented banks from getting into bad mortgages). Does that mean that government should control everything? of course not! It can be somewhere in the middle (think Keynes instead of Friedman) and where's that middle also depends on the local environment and such - what worked in Poland won't necessarily work the same in Spain. Also, I disagree with the notion that he proposes fighting the State with the State - he wants people to be the State and I agree with that to a large extent. People like to complain about politics as if they (the politics) were some aliens from the different planet. Spain is a good example here, 2-3 years ago thousands of people were protesting with slogans like "no nos representan". Yet no one from the protesters had the guts to take that movement and actually do something with it, become a leader, a politician, take a responsibility, try to change something for real. Instead they preferred to shift that responsibility back to the politicians they were protesting against. Year later people went to elections and voted the same people as before, the ones that supposedly "no les representaron".
  • kaoD 13y ago
    The 15M situation was a catch-22. - When they proposed solutions they were called out as being "politicized". Both left and right-wing saw them as biased (in the other direction of course). - When they didn't propose anything, they were called out as being gutless (as you said), lazy, whiny... - When leaders tried to step out they were criticized as opportunists trying to kidnap the movement for their personal interest. - When assemblies were formed, they were criticized as slow and not effective (which they actually were). Of course all these criticism were promoted from the media to form mass opinion. In case you didn't like a statement, you had the contrary to criticize 15M as loud as you wanted. In the end nothing happened.
    • morkbot 13y ago
      Yeah, I might have gone too far with that gutless thing, but the important thing is the final outcome on which we both agree: in the end nothing happened.
• snowwrestler 13y ago
  In the U.S. we have credit unions, which are community-owned banks. They generally work very well. Community-owned does not have to mean government-owned.
• onetwofiveten 13y ago
  It's weird you say people can't be trusted. Do you really think that's true? Some people can be trusted. Some can't. People tend to follow based on charisma more than anything else. Unfortunately I think charisma is a really poor indicator of trustworthiness.
  • kaoD 13y ago
    Read that again: you couldn't even trust people with good intentions because economy isn't something you can control or predict. You can't even trust people with good intentions AND knowledge (why do economists miss their predictions SO much?) And especially you can't trust people when they're not risking their own money. They're just not going to put the same effort, even subconsciously, because... well, it's not their money.
    • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Translation: it is not popular knowledge which variables in the economy are stiff variables (where changing the variable effects a large change in the economy as a whole) and which ones are sloppy (changing them doesn't affect anything else, really). Some people might know; certainly, some few people have managed to do better than chance at investing, or at macroeconomic policy. However, it is not popular knowledge.