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Linux As a Model For a New Government?
An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"
How long does it take to make a phone call?
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Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind. I'm sure like communism it might work well in theory.
Democracy is basic open source government. You get what you put in. Adding in a republic aspect allows you to have some higher level maintainers to keep things orderly and to occasionally make unpopular decisions for the good of the project. Yes, it's potentially open to corruption, but as long as the democratic process itself isn't corrupted, repairs can be made.
Well, I think the real question here is how long till it forks?
And which one to choose, there are so many! Would it be possible to try each fork on my family first in a sort of LiveGOV program instead of committing to one particular fork of the government?
We are already about to have a government bought and paid for by Soros
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This has to be the most idiotic suggestions I've seen here for a while. There is nothing wrong with the current U.S. government - it is ignoring the constitution which is the problem. There are clear boundaries presented by the constitution to protect citizens from the abusive and corrupt politicians, but if the law is ignored, it does not matter who is in charge and whether or not the government is "open source" or not. Why not all put our pants down and bend over for the Linux boys...since they write good code, they obviously could be really good at coming up with constitutional law and governmental suggestions! Of course, they would never get corrupt at the first sight of pr0n, because they already have the hottest women on the block :)
This is a terrible idea. Any thinking person knows that we should use BSD as a model for a new government.
This guy's the limit!
... but even now as we pay taxes, we should be telling the government what we want them to spend it on.
This way any election of persons "running' the government can at worse just bias such usage rather then run us into the ground with misusing your taxes and leaving us low and wet with no retirement or healthcare.
Someone said to me, when I suggested we tell the government "for the people by the people" how to spend our taxes, that the constitution of the US says we do not have the right to question how the government spends our taxes.
I agreed and said we will not question them, we will instead tell them how to use it.
The Linux ideal was applied when this country was first started, "for the people by the people" and reason, specific reasons, given is found in the "Declaration of Independence."
As an example of Government Abuse today, if you genuinely uphold the "Declaration of Independence" you WILL BE LABELED A TERRORIST and put of list of such people!
Namely, how are people put into positions of power? Through growing reputation and ability? Meaning that the govt. would be populated (in theory) by the best politicians (and uhhh, do we really want that)? How would you get people out of power once they got there? Currently, you can just fork an open source project if you don't like the project leaders. Clearly this is not a good option for government because it usually involves bloody warfare to happen.
No, this seems like a bit of a silly, not well thought out argument. Most discussions of open source that I've been a part of trumpet it as a more "democratic" process, meaning that open source mimics the current US government more than the government should mimic open source.
Now this will likely cause a flood of comments declaring our current government as broken, and not democratic. It is fine if you think that, but if you are going to rant about a problem, you darn well better have a better solution. and if you're thinking of improving the voting process (a good place to start) you may want to check out Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which states that no voting system can possibly be fair to everyone.
I'm all for open government, which is not to say a government based on an open source software product development group.
Any one who has taken a poli sci class or a history class that covered ancient rome, athens or the founding of the US should see that the organization of ideas and resources in order to build a good software product is a vastly different paradigm than organizing a 'good' government.
First, the argument should be about what government means. I'm less concerned with what a government provides me ( a product ) than what it denies me. The moment government thinks it's supposed to produce a product as opposed to leave me alone, I would describe that government as tyrannical.
The bad mortgage/bad credit crisis was in large part created by people who felt it was the government's job to ensure anyone could get a house, regardless of ability to afford it. This is but one example of how government by good intentions invokes the law of unintended consequences for disastrous results.
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Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
The last time we tried to fork the US, it didn't work too well. But actually, I do think that this could be the germ of a new idea, experimental modes of government in test communities. People will argue the pro's and con's back and forth but until the theories have been put to the test, it's just speculation. The only problem I've seen is that when a bad idea is proven to be such in a proper experiment, the true believers won't say the idea was flawed, it simply was not applied with enough vigor. We're thus back where we started, only the true believers are crazier for it.
The thing I keep coming back to is that rigidly hierarchical models of direction and control were necessary in the pre-computer age. Just imagine trying to keep up with documents and records when they're all held on sheets of paper in real folders in real file drawers, just imagine trying to communicate with someone when long-distance communication is just scratchy phone lines and letters. It makes sense to concentrate all of the command and control in one place and issue orders from there, capital cities, corporate HQ's and all.
With modern telecommunications, it will be easier to push the brains of the organization out to the periphery. Just drawing from my own experience, I've worked in several different corporate environments starting with food services, then telecommunications, then a mixture of small and big shops for computers and financial services. The thing that really struck me about the chain stores is that they took away the initiative from the store manager. A place could not vary from corporate standard and while this sets a base line of acceptable quality, nobody was allowed to rise above that level, either. What also happened is that management refused to accept feedback from the stores, the front lines of the business, so when they tried to implement stupid ideas, they never got the feedback that it wasn't working; either they didn't ask for it or wouldn't listen.
Just talking about restaurants, the strength of the traditional franchise is national brand recognition, expensive marketing and research efforts to develop products for the menu, and a proven formula for success that simply needs to be adopted and adhered to. Of course, this also means that you'll often get crap. If I compare the local Denny's with the local breakfast and lunch place, there's no comparison, the local mom and pop kicks the shit out of Denny's and their "real breakfast" bullshit. Of course, Denny's gets huge advantages of scale with purchasing, etc.
What I think would be interesting is if the mom and pops could create co-ops to do the same thing nation-wide. "Look, we're all individuals but together we represent a thousand restaurants. We promise to buy in this quantity at these prices, and if anyone drops out, the rest of the members will pick up the slack." Very hard to do 30 years ago but with computers these days, should be far easier.
When I was a kid, the strength of the capitalist versus communist economies was described as demand versus command. Command economies tried to decide everything from the capital city and they really had no clue how many paperclips were needed, would set unrealistic production goals and would never have the right amount. A demand economy places the paperclip decision at the level of the people buying the paperclips and the people making the paperclips -- a better understanding of the need for paperclips helps limit the production to just as much as is necessary. This decentralizes the bureaucracy.
Can the same thing be done at the federal level? Break the monolithic agencies into smaller "franchises" with the same goal but offices spread throughout the nation, all following the same game plan but fully cognizant of what's going on at the front lines? Can we bring back a meritocracy where the successful succeed and the failures go away? That used to be the strength of the western capitalist economies but now we allow such concentration of resources in oversized companies that are "too big to fail" that we've arrived at the same inefficiencies as the communist nations.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
All "modern" government systems (democracy, communism, you name it), or in fact, all government systems until now, had one giant elephant of a problem sitting right there in the middle of the room:
There are humans governing others.
Now continue to read before you judge.
The problem behind this is, that those people have a conflict of interest, between the needs of the governed and their own interests. So the ideal leader would be someone, where those two match perfectly.... which is of course impossible. But you can approximate it.
The problem with this is, that we have no reliable way of selecting such a person. Mostly because normal people can be tricked pretty easily.
But there is one new solution, that just came up when computers and the Internet got available everywhere:
Do not use an humans, but a very simple mathematical model (one that is so simple that every educated human can check it for himself), that calculates descisions out of the votes of a model of cascading trust relationships. This sounds complicated but it's very simple. (If you know how CSS decides, what rules apply to a HTML element, you already know it.)
In reality, it would work like this:
There is a set of things, where a decision has to be taken. That set is defined by people having differences in these points. Now someone - the typical role, that a politician would fill today - can create decisions for that set. Then another one can say "I want what he wants.... but, i want this specific thing to be different". Of course someone can use the results of that as his base too. And you can combine partial sets too, as you like. For example, you could say "I'm a liberal, but I agree with person X on family matters and person Y on science matters. oh, and I want social skills to be taught in school."
That way you could form a nice set of your own views without voting for every shit out there. (Because, it should make your life better, not worse :)
Now of course, this does not mean that you can get everything you want... because you live in a community.
So you assign yourself to a community/communities (country, state, town) (those are cascading too, and you can define which one has priority over which), and your views will merge with those of the community, to create the rules for that group of people.
So a conflict of interest would not be possible, because you could change your set of rules at any time.
Now there would of course be one simple limitation: You have to be in the same group with people that you share resources (land, water, jobs) with, when it comes to that matter (land, water, jobs). This could be automatically solved via a GPS input (or something similar).
I think that would work great. You could even extensively test it in parallel to the current system, round out all problems, and if it works, you can simply let all people join that system by themselves, until the old government does not matter anymore and goes away. So there is also no need for a "transient" government, like in communism, which for some reason never seems to end its job of transition (again a conflict of interest).
This idea of mine is open and I do not care who implements it, as long as you do not create a slightly modified system that becomes evil, and still associate it with me!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at the
University of Edinburgh) had this to say about 'the fall of
the Athenian Republic' some 2,000 years prior.
'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy
will continue to exist up until the time that voters
discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from
the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates who promise the most
benefits from the public treasury, with the result that
every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal
policy, [which is] always followed by a dictatorship.
'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations
from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.
During those 200 years, these nations always progressed
through the following sequence:
'From bondage to spiritual faith;
'From spiritual faith to great courage;
'From courage to liberty;
'From liberty to abundance;
'From abundance to complacency;
'From complacency to apathy;
'From apathy to dependence;
'From dependence back into bondage.
Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffet's company. Berkshire Hathaway does not specialize in "estate tax insurance and planning" which is not a "huge part" of their business. Berkshire Hathaway sells all sorts of things including electricity, candy, and insurance. But nobody sells "estate tax insurance" since people can only insure themselves against risks not known liabilities.
Before anybody listens to the parent's allegations of conflict of interest (which he curiously portrays as a phenomenon unique to the Democratic Party) I think it's fair to demand the following evidence:
BTW, I'm really excited to hear that url for estate tax insurance. Gosh, maybe he even sells other tax insurance, like income tax insurance! That would be awesome. Geeze, it seems like I have to pay that one every year.
Wait-a-minute! That's why buffet is supporting Obama's tax hike for the rich: He's going to make a mint selling the income tax insurance! Oh Buffet, you are a wiley one!
Marxism is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ideal governmental model. It is human nature to want to work for your reward, and to appreciate only things that you've worked for.
Marxism takes this and turns it on it's head. It claims that you should hate work, but that you should do it for the "common good" and that people should have their needs met by society even if they are unable to work.
The only thing I can think of that's more degrading than working for nothing is being paid for nothing. In Marxism, you can only get something by needing it, and no matter how hard you work you can never earn anything. The whole thing is disgusting and degrading on a fundamental level.
That sounds like an Ayn Rand quote to me (I'm pretty sure I read it in Atlas Shrugged), though I'm sure she wasn't the first to say it.
That's a good practical argument, but it's not an idealist's argument. The problem with Marxism is more fundamental than that. It demands that people be something they are not.
I like to work, because I get what I want from it. But a Marxist says that I should work even though I will get nothing. That's a self-loathing, life hating approach to life. It claims that my desire for material things is bad, and I should pretend not to want them. But I want what I want and there's not anything wrong with that. Even if it was bad, I'd rather be the bad person I am than pretend to be a good person I am not.