Right, agreed. The problem with our current system in the US is the "cracks" are being exploited by those who have massive amounts of capital, and they've engineered the system so they continuously control a growing amount of it. So wealth is being siphoned out of the economy at an alarming rate and we now essentially have an economic plutocracy. But, gee, that's fine because those people earned that money...nevermind that's it's economically ineffective.
We either need more radical forms of wealth (re)distribution or we need to give everyone a share in the productive forces.
Yes, there will be cracks in the system, but I guarantee we'll be better off than we are now.
I'm curious. Did you take my post as pro capitalism? Or pro status quo? And out of curiosity, what exactly was it that pointed to that conclusion? It really wasn't my intention, is all and that's why I'm curious and you seem pretty bent out of shape, or am I misreading the, "But, gee, that's fine because those people earned that money...nevermind that's it's economically ineffective."
I did not intend to come off snarky. I did read your comment as a little bit pro-capitalist (although not strongly). I think the thing that did it was "The grass is always greener on the other side" which I read as "why bother changing when another system will have just as many problems."
> am I misreading the, "But, gee, that's fine because those people earned that money...nevermind that's it's economically ineffective."
Honestly, it wasn't really directed at you at all, it was more of a general broadcast of how I feel about our current system. I've been talking to people about capitalism in general and many will fiercly defend the existence of billionaires while deriding poor people because they just aren't "leveraging opportunities" enough (as if anybody can leverage opportunities and become rich)! I think the problem comes from people being told that wealth is not zero-sum, when in reality, it actually is. "Wealth is not zero sum" is nothing more than capitalist propaganda.
Mine was a comment on the failure of systems. I came to Hacker News from a functional programming (somewhat, not pure) background, and that tends to be how I view large systems in general. Government systems seem to be these old school, monolithic systems who are pretty resistant to change. And, to be honest, a large part of that seems to come from the populace.
I don't really care if it's capitalism, socialism, or communism; once a system reaches a certain size, it becomes unstable and corrupt and starts to fold in upon itself through manipulation by people or groups who survive solely through that manipulation. You can see it in governments, crime systems, investment banking, etc. etc. any system which involves goods or moneys. It's a bug in the system and it's hard to fix because we can't change the smaller systems without revamping a huge amount of the larger system, as a whole, because a lot of these systems have not been built in easily changeable ways.
But, people are weird, machines are easy. What do you want when you bring politics into a computer forum.
Which is a huge interest of mine as well. I have no formal training in "systems" but have picked apart quite a bit about them just from observation.
> Government systems seem to be these old school, monolithic systems who are pretty resistant to change. And, to be honest, a large part of that seems to come from the populace.
Right, the larger the system, the more slowly it evolves. I think a lot of this comes out of the requirement for stability. Evolution requires testing of theories and sometimes just the act of trying something breaks other parts of the system. It's hard to determine how one thing affects another until it's actually done, so things tend to be conservative.
> I don't really care if it's capitalism, socialism, or communism; once a system reaches a certain size, it becomes unstable and corrupt and starts to fold in upon itself through manipulation by people or groups who survive solely through that manipulation.
Completely agree. I always roll my eyes when people on HN blather on and on about cryptocurrencies, but I actually think government is a perfect candidate. If all government holdings and all government buying/selling happened on a public ledger, the amount of corruption and "back scratching" would likely decrease significantly. I'm not naive enough to think it would solve all problems of corruption (of course, there's always a way to navigate around it) but it would certainly combat it more significantly.
I think one of the biggest problems with corruption in large systems is the lack of transparency. Corruption generally occurs around money, so if you make the flow of money transparent, you at least shine a light on the inner operations of the government.
But good luck getting the federal, or even a municipal, government to implement this!
> But, people are weird, machines are easy.
Yeah, true. It would be incredible if changing the world was as easy as forking it and changing whatever variables you wanted to try out and running it in a new test. Maybe one day we'll have the computational power to do something like this.
You saying that ("machines are easy") reminds me of a strange computer I had. It always froze whenever I shut it down (like, hung before the Windows 98 "It's now ok to turn off your computer" message). Over time, I made a number of changes to it. I replaced all the hard drives. I reinstalled the OS. I installed a new motherboard, new CPU, new video card. New memory. New power supply. In essence, the only thing about the machine that was the same after years of changes was the case. But it still froze whenever I tried to shut it down.
It made me wonder if even machines have an essence, and maybe are also corruptable. Who knows.
We either need more radical forms of wealth (re)distribution or we need to give everyone a share in the productive forces.
Yes, there will be cracks in the system, but I guarantee we'll be better off than we are now.