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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?
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 :)
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.
I like to work, because I get what I want from it.
Psychologists have found that we are at our happiest when working on something that is at our correct level of challenge (not overwhelming or tedious). Actually, video games are this theory in practice.
Most people today distinguish work and play, but they are truly the same thing. The only difference is usually that someone has told you to do "work" and you have chosen to do your hobby (or "play") yourself.
But a Marxist says that I should work even though I will get nothing. That's a self-loathing, life hating approach to life.
Most people we consider "geniuses" worked on things because they found it interesting. They often also used it to make a living. But once their basic needs were met, their goal was to continue the work that interested them. It's not self loathing. It's often self love and love to improve yourself and things.
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.
No, it's not "bad". But psychology has shown, time and time again, that once your needs are met, you will be happier if you are working on things that develop you or are part of a cause you believe in. It brings people a satisfied life, where they are happy with themselves and generally happy overall. If you work for material things, you get spikes of happiness followed by low plains of being unsatisfied, bored, frustrated because you want something else, etc.