Having the wrong power structure is barely scratching the surface of why running a government like a business is an awful idea. Rural mail delivery loses money, so I guess that’s out. A defense department “for profit” would be a decent start to a scary movie, not a way to defend your country. But the biggest reason is that “like a business” simply ignores the fact that there are values other than money: protecting people from harm, enforcing laws, safeguarding our land and resources, and providing a social safety net. None of those are business values. That’s something I didn’t understand when I was a larval libertarian-leaning single guy living in an apartment, supporting no one but myself.
— I’m an American software developer and the “broligarchs” don’t speak for me
Agree. (But I’m not American.)
And the rest of the article — which is long — is pretty good too.
It was only much, much later and with a fair amount of pain that I realized “meritocracy” has a dark side. There was a question I wasn’t asking: Who, exactly, decides which ideas and skills have merit? And the scary answer is that it turns out there are people in this field, people who would describe themselves as “rationalists,” who would say they have that answer. Sadly, we have among us those who believe that you can quantify merit. If you listen to those people and follow that train of thought too far, you end up in a very bad place, rubbing shoulders with eugenicists and other creeps.
Ideas are always interesting. But I do agree, you’d better explore who promotes the idea, so to understand the context it came from. Oftentimes it matters.
Current generation semiconductor manufacturing technology is simply incredible: Laser pulses vaporize microscopic tin particles to produce extreme ultraviolet light with which we “print” components that are literally invisible to the eye. Chips are made under conditions of cleanliness and elemental purity that is like nothing that has ever existed before and is difficult to even fathom. This technology is the result of a fairly recent globe-spanning research and development project with a size and scope that reminds me of the space race of the 1960s. And unlike a Saturn V rocket, there’s a good chance the results of that manufacturing process are in your pocket right now. How cool is that?
I can buy a 32Gb USB flash drive for the price of a cup of coffee, store a compressed copy of Wikipedia on it, and throw it in my pocket like it’s no big deal. That’s incredible.
By the way, just recently, a couple of months ago, I’ve bought a bunch of 64 GB microSD cards for my OrangePi servers, €2.9 each, just because it was the cheapest available option.
- I’d buy 16 GB cards, or even less, but they were literally the same price.
So, technically, I could load two Wikipedias on just one that card, a fingernail size. Couldn’t I?
How cool is that?!
I know that not everyone will love computers like I do. But everyone should have a chance to find out for themselves.
Definitely.
Believe me, I’m as nostalgic about the old Web as anyone, and yet a lot of those old websites still exist. Many of them never went away (like this website!). Plus now there’s even more of them. Honestly, it’s not even that hard to find them once you start exploring outside of the Google/Microsoft/Meta silos.
Silos is a nice way of placing that.
I want everyone to have the same computer experience I have right now. I run a free operating system that serves no ads and does not update unless I explicitly tell it to. I trust the software tools I use because they are written by fellow enthusiasts. I visit ad-free websites. My computer hardware is cheap and plentiful. The computer serves me, not the other way around and I call the shots on everything.
But, there’s a catch. The reason I can have this utopian computing experience is because I’ve made sacrifices. The first is a certain amount of convenience (when I can’t make something work without bending my principles, I do without it). The second is that I’ve put a lot of time into learning how to use the free operating system and the free tools.
So yeah, that’s great for me. But that’s not good enough. There is absolutely no reason my path should be so difficult or so rarefied.
Everyone, regardless of skill level, money, or time, should be able to experience computers the way I do. There is NO TECHNICAL REASON we can’t have that.
Yes! Me too! I have this experience too!
Garry Kasparov (yup, former World Chess Champion 1985-2000, Garry Kasparov) says of our new era, “The danger we face is of a new breed of ideologically-motivated billionaires, ones who believe that democratic institutions have lost purpose in our world, and are ready to use their wealth and connections to advance their own alternative vision.”
By the way, Garry Kasparov is one of the few so-called ‘good russians’ whom I’d say not imperialist and he says sane things. Maybe that’s because he’s not actually Russian, but Azerbaijani.
My heroes don’t break or bend laws to make a buck, use their power to bully people, or think it would be cool to be feudal lords over a frightened populace of vassals. My heroes create things and share what they know and they stand up for others.
Just brilliant! It’s a very solid article, and I agree to what that person says. Count me in! (As a developer, not American.)