> It has received fulsome praise from such right-libertarian eminences as economists Milton Friedman and Donald Boudreaux
I had Boudreaux for an economics class in law school. His, shall we say, enthusiasm and dogmatic faith in markets was off putting. I once got riled up and sparred with him a little in class when we were on the subject of monopolies and he was teaching the theory that monopoly profits are an impossibility. My point was that the theory only makes sense when transaction costs are zero; non-zero transaction costs means monopolies can extract excess profits when there's an asymmetry in transaction (particularly financing) costs that favor the monopolist, as there often will be.
But later I realized that, at the end of the day, and like most of abstract economics, the theory was more right than wrong, just incomplete and oversimplified. And I learned much that day. If I had rejected the theory outright and walked way (notwithstanding remembering how to recite it for the exam), I would have ended up in a much worse place intellectually than accepting it, with qualifications, as an important conceptual model. The mature takeaway from his teaching the theory isn't that monopolies can't exist, just that it's more difficult than you'd think, and monopolists' ability to extract profits are bounded by the degree to which the situation deviates from the simplified model world. And doing so puts us in a place where can we can constructively ask and answer quantitative questions, as opposed to debating in qualitative rhetorical terms.
It's childish to nit-pick ideas and then pretend one has vanquished them because they pointed out technicalities about how they're wrong. The point of "I, Pencil" is to teach how humans communicate, cooperate, and produce amazing things through systems and processes that keep them all at arms length, without everyone deliberately working toward the same targeted outcome. Pedagologically, it does teach something profound and non-obvious. Is the essay simplified and reductive? Of course, but no more reductive (and IMO considerably less so) than, e.g., the anti-colonialist rhetoric trotted out in "Revisited", which feels more like an extended ad hominem than a substantive piece about political economics. (And it's worth pointing out that economic thinking can be useful in understanding and addressing colonial exploitation, such as understanding it in terms of cost externalization. And unlike rhetorical moralizing, that approach suggests far more actionable options for systematically ameliorating such exploitation--i.e. how to put our money where our mouth is, literally and figuratively.)
It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.
Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).
Unless I’m missing something, that’s quintiles of absolute wealth. I’d be curious how the data shakes out for the lowest quintile calculated relative to costs of living.
The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc.
It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.)
That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs.
And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual.
So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.
> a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal
I agree with this part, but relying Apple is quite far from self-sovereignty compared to many other practical alternatives: not relying on external clouds, GrapheneOS, Linux. By relying on Apple, you not only pay a tax to essentially bribe them to not attack you (perhaps a viable strategy, not too different from taxes to governments), but more importantly you give up the ability to resist without serious compromises (can't have E2EE backups on your own cloud if they said so). This is akin to trying to be paying taxes to the government to get better police coverage, and they decide to ban locks, security cameras, and leaving the walled garden.
The problem with the current computing security paradigm is that it puts too much trust in entities that do not deserve it, because the entities are simply too powerful and do not suffer consequences when they break that trust.
Fair points, I can't say I disagree, and I'm aware of the trade-offs I'm making. (I was actually tempted to use the word "bribe" when describing the Apple Tax!)
There are a couple meaningful points of divergence in the ecosystem: Mac vs iOS (the former has some self-sovereignty, even if there are risks of backdoors/etc); and, cloud vs not (I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public).
I agree about the trust problem. Varoufakis might make some valid points re: "Technofeudalism", but then Bruce Schneier was making a similar analogy over a decade ago. I've heard cogent arguments, that early feudalism evolved from rational self-interest, that serfs were willing to trade some degree of autonomy for safety, and it does feel that many "normie" users (especially with iOS) are making a similar rational trade, even if it sets up an asymmetric power dynamic, and risk (inevitability?) of future betrayal.
I'm curious if you have any examples in mind for Apple, re: "do not suffer consequences when they break that trust". IMO, they've done okay at putting actions and costly signaling behind their privacy rhetoric, and I think they'd take some kind of market hit if they were to blatantly break that trust. But I'm curious if you think there are past instances in which that already happened, which maybe I've forgotten or am neglecting, or if it's a threat model of the future.
Their image scanning proposal? The recent UK E2EE backup thing?
For the first, although they eventually backtracked, proposing it alone should be ruinous they are actually a privacy-oriented company.
Although the second situation is forced by a government, it is still a self-inflicted problem where iCloud is the only way you can back up your stuff. Not being able to have encrypted backups is a serious QoL issue.
> I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public
This is also my attitude toward "the cloud" in general.
Someone with everything to lose if they break it. Most large companies do not. Perhaps smaller companies whose main selling point is privacy? Proton? Signal? I don't use either but they seem relatively plausible.
I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the manufacturers were actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX should be “insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play” is not exactly rocket science.
I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).
Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon
This is one advantage of a system with a constrained set of commands/grammars, as opposed to the Alexa/Siri model of trying to process all arbitrary text while in active mode. It can simply ignore/discard any invocations which don't match those specific grammars (and no need to wait to confirm that the device is awake).
"Computer, turn lights to 50%" -> "turn lights to fifty percent" -> {action: "lights", value: 50}
"My new computer has a really beefy graphics card" -> "has a really beefy graphics card" -> {action: null}
You might already be referencing this, but linking it anyway: Cory Doctorow's "I, Rowboat", where Asimov's Laws are a religion which some AIs adopt voluntarily to give their existence meaning.
What's the problem? Just do a Vickrey auction with your insurer, where you bid how much you're willing to spend to stay alive, and they make a counter-bid.
If you win, they spend their bid to keep you alive; if they win, they pay out your bid to your next of kin when you die. A perfectly Pareto-optimal solution of revealed preferences! /s
This is accurate, regarding preferences for optionality, and how our economy currently works. But I think it's worth questioning the expectation that giving up that optionality deserves compensation, whether morally or practically (resulting in compounding "money-on-money returns", usually at low risk if sufficiently diversified).
The Italian economist Silvio Gesell noted, that no other good besides currency works this way. Every other good with a use value (food, houses) tends to lose value over time (entropy being fundamental to the universe), and/or, to carry risk (a share of stock which represents unpredictable ROI). There is course an exception in land, which doesn't intrinsically depreciate, but whose value trends upwards thanks to location value (and which can be addressed separately via Georgist land tax).
Gesell proposed a "demurrage currency" [0], which gradually loses value as it is held: the idea being, rather than being entitled to a return, retaining high long-term optionality is actually a privilege that one should have to pay for, since the real-world value it represents is depreciating. And the incentive to invest (whether at high or low risk) instead becomes to break even (with the rate of demurrage tracking what we currently call the discount rate).
I have no idea if such a concept is practical in a trans-national, growth-dependent global economy (with deflationary crypto-currencies as a BATNA!); if anything, I'm fairly confident it's not. But it's at least worth thinking about: that it's not at all axiomatic that holders of value should be entitled to compensation for "forgoing consumption" (not only because the wealthy don't necessarily need such an incentive, but also because increased consumption can mean an increase in the velocity of money, and more total value created, per the multiplier effect, and the "hotel riddle" [1]).
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