And it looks like the company lobbying for this got this bill wrote up fairly cheap too.
> Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Blockchains, LLC gave $50,000 to a political action committee, Home Means Nevada, which managed Sisolak’s transition into office in January 2019. Campaign finance records also show the company donated $10,000 to Sisolak and his Republican opponent Adam Laxalt’s campaign in 2018.
> Records also show the company’s owner, Jeffrey Berns, personally gave $50,000 to the Nevada Democratic Party in 2019 and various donations ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to various state lawmakers from both parties.
You'd be surprised how little it would take. I know in Kansas that if a rep worked 365 days a year at $88/day they would take home $31,562/yr. So $50k would be almost double their salary.
Looks like Nevada is $150.71/day or about $55k/year.
We really need to pay these people more so they don't need to supplement their pay through lobbying.
What if, and this is a crazy idea. We allowed people to form Governments instead of corporations that have a history of psychopathic behavior.
I am pretty pro-business and for small government but I think this is a bad idea all around. Why do we need this in the fist place? What is wrong with the old model of people getting together and agreeing to form their own government, why do companies need to be involved in the first place?
There have absolutely been governments that (if they were a person) exhibited psychopathic behaviour.
Corporations are nearly by definition going to exhibit psychopathic behaviour, simply because acting in the interests of their workers or other people can legally only happen if it's compatible with the interest of shareholders.
A government is at least capable of acting in the interests of its citizens, even if it doesn't always do that.
Yes, but complaining about “the government” in a functioning democracy* is just complaining about fellow citizens. Making “the government” into some exogenous monolith makes no sense.
* Local conditions may vary, contact your local election official for details on gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and voter suppression. Offer may not be available in all areas.
I recognize in myself that power corrupts me. For example, now that I’m rich - I don’t see the poor as being equal to me. Instead of serving them, I just write a check.
It's the opposite, psychopath are attracted by power.
Your Answer:
>I recognize in myself that power corrupts me. For example, now that I’m rich - I don’t see the poor as being equal to me.
I'm rich others are poor, right out of consent just to tell others your are rich (show your power) but actually not a bad person (manipulate).
then:
>Please keep your diagnosis to yourself - it will benefit you and those who love you.
"Please keep your diagnosis to yourself - it will benefit you and" again a threat or show your power "those who love you" but i am actually not a bad person, that ticktok from threat to manipulation is the exact pattern of a psychopath.
>I have never met anybody else who was wealthy or powerful deny that temptation is there - historic literature is rife with the same sentiment.
No one said anything against that. And again "never met anybody else who was wealthy or powerful deny that temptation is there" i know lots of powerful people. "historic literature is rife with the same sentiment" i am so powerful i should compare myself to historic literature.
The most recent municipal corporation formed in Nevada was in 2001. I think California has some more recent ones than that.
People form governments all the damn time, most often municipal corporations.
I’m not a fan of this new wave of interest in company towns, but the worst aspect of them was company scrip and that was outlawed by Congress. Still, cities are an emergent phenomenon, cities that you can call cities and not just cities on paper. You can’t plant a few skyscrapers in the ground and call it a day.
Even if it technically is, some apartment buildings, offices, restaurants, and stores in an existing industrial park is not a city in any meaningful sense. And throwing a dart at a map of Nevada and building a city for 100K people on the premise of "if you build it they will come" would almost certainly be a hilarious failure even if some billionaire felt his cash burning a hole in his pocket.
I don't want it to sound like an attack, but honestly, how do you actually visualize this?
I try to explore the anarchist leaning ideas with an open mind since I see the problems with government, but in a way, maybe I'm just a square but my reasoning always comes back to government.
First I start with ok, I like my water drinkable and my food not poisoned, I do like my roads to go around, ok but smaller entities could regulate it, cool, but now we have thousands if not millions of entities regulating this in their own manner, wouldn't it be cool to have a standard? not too mention that some of this smaller entities would have a real hard time if they don't have enough resources that a central entity would distribute more fairly?
It always seems to start from the basis of every actor will collaborate, what if the river I need for water is right outside the border from my smaller entity? is they only option war?
Speaking of war, if we have all small entities that are peaceful amongst them but a couple of them decide they want more group and invade this smaller entities for their resources, maybe we could start an organization that unites the smaller entities together so we can defend against them, sounds familiar? looks like the history of mankind, and again it always seems to go back to government.
My view is that it sounds like a nice idea to tend towards but not possible to instill unless we're on a situation where there's literally nothing to be gained by being a bad actor, and to be honest, I can't again visualize this scenario, how can there be nothing to be gained? It sounds to start terrible, nothing to aspire to?
Again, I'd like to point out that you shouldn't get me started on the abuses of government and the injustices that it brings, but I just can't get my head out of what seem to be a necessary evil unless you are starting from basis that seem just counter to what human nature is.
I'm more than open to being convinced otherwise since the idea sounds so good in so many regards.
This has nothing to do with anarchy. This is a bill proposed by the government of the state of Nevada. Any "innovation zones" formed under this bill will not be sovereign states, they will still be subject to the laws of the state of Nevada and the US Federal government.
Governments have way more of a history of psychopathic violence than corporations, on the order of 100-1000x more deaths in our recorded history.
Corporations aren't (generally) permitted to directly engage in violence. The defining characteristic of a government that distinguishes it from all
other groups of people is that it claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Let's be careful not to conflate "any aggression" with "psychopathic violence". The values at clash in past conflict are sometimes very human values, rather than manifestations of psychopathic anti-social mechanisms. (safe example: USA joining war against Germany)
Though I'm sure the complexities of conflict make for a mixed bag of such overlapping actors and rationales...!
The CCP is a government, as was the USSR, as is the USA.
I'll take Google antispam algorithms going haywire and suspending my electric power or fiber account and providing zero recourse to human support over a Great Leap Forward or a continent-wide Genocide any day of the fuckin' week.
Respectfully, this feels like a bit of misdirection.
Government is literally an institution grounded in collective welfare (albeit imperfect instantiations of this goal). Google has NO SUCH directive, and the only reasons we don't see companies doing worse (at least not since East India Company times) is because the very container you criticize has enough power to keep it anchored to ostensibly human values.
We can just agree to disagree here, if you are truly deep in the anti-government camp (because I am pretty entrenched in the unfolding repair narratives of government, not disposal narratives)
EDIT: Reworded to use less provocative language. Sorry if you read v1
Actually, if you include all wars that have occurred from government in history, I'd say the number of deaths compared to corporations is a much higher multiple than that.
I think it's an interesting question to consider how much of that is due to corporations being legally constrained from the sorts of violence governments engage in, particularly in a thread discussing relaxing legal constraints on corporations.
If corporations were sovereign, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they participated in comparable levels of violence.
The East India Company would be a good supporting example or, more recently, United Fruit Company giving the world the term “banana republic”.
I think the corporation versus government phrasing is obscuring the underlying problem of power without accountability to the people. That’s going to end poorly no matter the exact relationship between the private and public sectors.
Corporations will absolutely use violence if not constrained by the state. I trust a democratically elected government much then a random board of directors.
There is an entire genre of fiction called cyberpunk which is mostly about why this is a bad idea. It's like if they announced that they managed to clone a dinosaur all of us would be like "did you watch movie"
Couldn't a tech company that is sufficiently determined and large enough to fulfill the requirements already try to incorporate a new city/county through whatever the standard method is to do that in Nevada? Does this "just" signal the state's support for companies doing so, or make that process easier / more likely to be approved? Or is it something qualitatively different? Like, would these city/county governments be able to do things that a normal city/county government couldn't?
I've been following this for a while (~months), unless this a new bill. If it's the same bill, then I see it possibly propelling us down the road to Shadowrun style corporations with extra-territoriality.
What I'd like to see implemented is a city government formed as a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) into which city taxes went, and for which the owners are the inhabitants of the city. The security would need to be set up much better than the DAO corporation was for this to work though.
There are a lot of thorny issues to be resolved beside security too. For example, if you make owners be the taxpayers, you excluding population segments (many students, those earning less than the poverty line, etc.). If instead you have ownership be based on mandatory buy in when people move to the city, that creates other problems, including two classes of citizenship within the city (owners and not-owners).
I still think a DAC (Distributed Autonomous Community) is viable and possibly a good idea though. I just don't want to see it under a Board of Directors control, or individual control. Because.. "You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be."
If you examine the destruction related to the BLM protests. The vast majority of it occurred directly in the opportunity zones in these cities. These are areas zoned for capital investment tax free. You can sell your Facebook shares and your Amazon ones too and invest your profits into these zones without any capital gains due.
I don’t understand the point of this Bill - companies can and already do partner with the government in order to achieve democratically decided objectives (let’s ignore for a moment lobbying and other pseudo corruption).
Does this achieve anything other than simply giving companies more power? Time will tell. If anything we need to go in the other direction - allow people to have the same powers as large companies, not large companies having the power of governments.
Uhh... am I in bizarro world? The general public and gov consensus has finally wised up that tech companies with free reign have been pretty dangerous. While I get a majority of NV is a wasteland (driven through a good part of it when I was a truck driver for a little while), this is just stupid for their own state gov. No matter where this tech dystopia happens, the water infrastructure required will be a testament to anti-environmentalism and unsustainability. Vegas already is unsustainable. Another city, profit centric needing vast amounts of water?
This doesn't get into the new veil of secrecy tech giants will be given. That's going to create an even bigger hurdle for whistle blowers and investigators to stop tech giants from hijacking both the economy and public discourse.
What's that I smell from clear across the country? Smells like large stacks of undeclared cash in envelopes traded hands. I wonder where that smell is coming from? We all know the history of Vegas and the state of Nevada is the epitome of law, honor and corruption busting practices.
Company towns have never worked! This is bullshit! Am I the only one that reads history books or am I taking crazy pills!?!?
Despite the title, this appears to currently only involve a company called "Blockchains, LLC". I can't see anything involving actual "big tech" companies.
No one believed Facebook could be a platform to influence US elections as well. I remember a tiny investigation regarding this only a few years ago.
You really dont think that when an inch is given, they're not going to take a mile? It's a "company town". Look up the history of that shit. It has never worked to the benefit of the people. It's a massive source of corruption and profiteering. The current tech generation's philosophy is "break things fast". Why is everyone willing to ignore that just because these people say, "we like engineers" but in the background are just as money greedy as the old school oil tycoons?
Because the tech oligarchs have been so good with paying their taxes under current tax codes when governed by an outside body. They'll do even better in a tech governed county.
I forsee Dystopia County's tax collection office will be led by Santa since he's so good at maintaining lists.
Maybe this isn’t an insightful or clever take either, but this article reads like the first chapter origin story in a book about corporations become de facto government like WALL-E or Bladerunner.
On one hand, will be interesting to see if private entities can run government better than public ones, and if so then the road to there may just be a matter of time as lobbying, voters voting with their feet and money, and public messaging takes hold.
Company towns were entirely opt-in too, at the start. The problems with concentrating power only rear their head down the road when conflict arises. Instead of worrying about getting fired, now you worry about getting simultaneously fired, evicted, jailed, and censored. Even if you are officially protected, how much can they do unofficially?
> "We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.
Given that cities often are responsible for zoning, and the company is taking on the role of city governance, a company could do a lot to ensure its the only employer in town. Obviously this depends on the particulars of the bill, but it doesn't seem far fetched that companies could put some serious disincentives towards other companies forming.
Ok, strike "fired" from the list. Maybe. It's still a concentration of power and the same rules apply. Attractive at first, but then it goes sour when the people with concentrated power start using it for their own ends.
Blockchains aren't companies, scrip isn't a thing anymore, DeFi renders it interoperable even if it were, we all have smartphones and internet now, webapps and networks change the entire marketplace for information labor, no part of this suggests that the company offering the civic services would be an employer or the only employer, company towns were for in-person work, et c.
Even if you just focus on the idea that a company town had a single employer for in-person work, and now we work online for anyone via the internet, this doesn't even have the basic parallels.
The company owns the wires and radio bands. Maybe by a funny coincidence using alternative blockchains and working remotely for other companies creates an 'unfair to the other users' drain on bandwidth.
I think we've all read about ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ and how that ended.
Maybe something useful will come out of it and I am definitely in support of thinking outside of the box. But there are probably some major downsides to this...
Right! I get it that Nevada is struggling economically, but could they be making a rash decision? It's kind of hard to undue a town once it's been established.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, while certainly titillating, suffered from extreme reproducibility issues. It was also wildly unethical, and any conclusions drawn from it are not scientifically sound in any meaningful sense.
> ("We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.)
It is, however, an accurate one you can’t simply breezily dismiss because you don’t want to engage with it intellectually. This is no different in the power dynamic and will have similar failure modes in the absence of legal countermeasures: as the most obvious example, if you disagree with your boss you now have to worry about your kids being kicked out of school and losing your home at the same time. If they pay you in company block-scrip, they control the rates and where you can redeem it. You might naively think that having internet access helps but that’s assuming that the company-approved ISPs allow full unfettered access and don’t have terms of service banning unapproved usage.
Again, none of this is certain but history and other parts of the world show that it’s likely to happen to some extent if companies are granted power without strict democratic oversight. Just think about how companies have asserted their right to control who you sleep with, what family planning choices you should make, which political party you support, etc. Giving them more power will not make those intrusions less likely.
While it's true that most of Nevada is uninhabited, a lot of it is almost certainly uninhabitable (at scale) because of lack of water and other reasons. The example in this article in hardly an uninhabited area; it's an industrial park right off the highway on the outskirts of Reno. It's a lot different from creating even a small city in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.
I'm a bit scared of this. There are so many horror stories out there to the tune of, "Google banned my account, now I can't get into anything, and there's zero ways for me to get in touch with a human to talk about any avenues to fix it." and then extrapolating that to government.
I'm kind of in the 'we already tried this' camp, because life is messy and things like fire departments and courts aren't usually felt to be 'core competencies' of corporations. The closest modern example I can think of is Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District [0][1], but lots of corporations delegate their cleaning, cafeteria, security, even their real estate out. I'm interested in why they would choose to take them back on.
Do you think we'll get some theme parks out of this?
I agree. At the same time I'm torn by the idea of private companies being there own sovereign entities like a city or county. But at the same time, honestly, are city councils and county commissions any more moral than private companies?
I think my biggest hang up is the draft proposal that allows the formation of the defacto county commissioners to be chosen by the companies. But like the article says, the draft could change, so the final proposal might not be the same.
I think if they were elected from citizens I'd be a lot more excited.
If my city were owned by its residents, were its shareholders, it would be an abysmal stock to hold.
Philadelphia is 400+ years old. If we had just put away 1% a year of our budget into a endowment, we would be making more money on it each year than our entire yearly budget. Cities are long lived, but the financial side of it is so short lived because there's no city-state, there's no expectation that the city needs to be able to bail itself out. We're always looking for state and federal funds.
It's a shame, Philadelphia could be the nicest, richest city in the world if we had something just like this.
It's about the fact that they have additional incentives that are directly related to what the people in a certain jurisdiction want that are missing for a company.
Isn't this the exact thing Disney do for Disneyland? And Las Vegas? And Google, Apple etc for their HQs? And even large shopping malls and holiday resorts?
"Major technology firms would be granted authority to form their independent techno-governments within Nevada." WTF—Sounds like the beginning of a techno civil war to me! Pretty amazing though to see the evolution of the future of technology and municipalities. I don't think I could have dreamed a cooler story.
Regardless what this bill says, any local government would still be bound by the US Constitution as required by the 14th amendment. It's not at all clear to me that an unelected local government would survive an equal protection challenge from the citizens of one of these innovation zones.
Foolish. Very foolish. Allowing tech companies with no regard for public trust or public institutions set up their own "justice courts" on sovereign soil is about as crazy of a thing as I can imagine.
hmm crazy but interesting ... if you wanna build a 'smart' city, now you can do so with little to no oversight. I can see Google or Amazon jumping on this.
> Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Blockchains, LLC gave $50,000 to a political action committee, Home Means Nevada, which managed Sisolak’s transition into office in January 2019. Campaign finance records also show the company donated $10,000 to Sisolak and his Republican opponent Adam Laxalt’s campaign in 2018.
> Records also show the company’s owner, Jeffrey Berns, personally gave $50,000 to the Nevada Democratic Party in 2019 and various donations ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to various state lawmakers from both parties.