Nature is hard to replicate. Ecosystems form to provide resilience and the opportunity for life to flourish. We need to set our collective efforts to produce a digital immune system.
I want to put his up as a challenge against the wider crypto currency and safenetwork visions. The former wants to create a new financial services plumbing for the world. I argue this is flawed and while the safenetwork puts forward a perpetual (data first) vision for the new Internet I still think is is not enough.
Do one thing and do it well. There is good reason and logic to providing a new data utility protocol and economic incentive model (safecoin) . From these new foundations, let the creativity and freedom of other (developers) build out the use cases. This might be the way things play out but I think this vision sits too low down the tech stack.
An example to explain. The Luftdaten air quality project was started by CodeforGermany and the hacker/data science community brought it to Aberdeen. A decision was made to separate the tech from the environmental activism. The results is that while new data on air quality flows there is no use of it to change pollution practice on the ground. A digital immune system thinking would fuse together the activism with the tech. That is what will deploy practical real world change.
The real world change priority will also drive different development priorities as real world events would drive the need to deliver. Current events (virus) has encouraged me to bring back this long term narrative. Feedback welcomed.
Crisis as we are now in can be very telling and I think backs up your sentiment here. I would love a post money world for sure. I get pelters for that belief so cannot say too much. What I do strongly believe though is that “price seeking” and “value measuring” for everything is not possible and may lead to what might be in the heart of capitalism a disaster of huge proportions when we tried to value health ( I feel the same about education). Right now though we still need a value transfer mechanism and probably will until we evolve, or be hit with a global pandemic? Who knows, but the greed is good mentality of money is quite stifling at times. You can see the argument in value transfer (goods/food/services), but not so much in health and education.
Always good to probe these points though, I am seldom right on such matters, but hate to see people depressed, oppreseed and have no opportunity to do what they love.
Health and education are emotive issues, but we must remember that doctors, nurses, teachers and other staff all need to be paid. Likewise, supplies such as medicine, instruments, books, etc, also need to be paid for.
In short, health and education are just as bound by the reality of market forces and subjective value as everything else. It is just much harder to choose what is best value, when it may mean that some may suffer, die or remain uneducated.
All gd points, but the issue is when you consider the price of wages/research/books/staff etc. they ultimately either educate a person or keep one well. But how educated and how well are IMO impossible to measure. We cannot tell right now how educated a person is in relation to another one and we cannot tell that given X resources a person need not have died or been unwell for so long and so on.
Whereas commodities markets, like wheat/oats are great where we can say too much wheat so make it cheaper and so on. This works very well and some African countries now find the benefit of famers knowing what to grow, to an extent. Previously their stuff was bought by middlemen who could con them.
Sure, it’s hard to assess the demand, but the supply side remains - anyone working to heal or educate in embedded in the economy regardless.
Incidentally, it is hard to assess demand primarily because these things aren’t paid for directly by consumers. Instead, we must vote for how they are collectively funded and everyone has a different opinion on this. Since it isn’t directly their money paying for it, they tend to just ask for more.
Moreover, when services are free at the point of use, people tend to react differently towards them. If you’re paying for an education, you make sure your kids attend. If you are paying for health care, you make sure you do your best to remain healthy. That’s not too say this stuff should necessarily be paid for directly, it is just to point out that demand becomes hard to measure.
Where was can draw parallels is that food markets don’t stop over eating or eating unhealthily either. They just provide a signal of demand, to allow supply to react to it. Whether the demand is good or bad for the consumer is outside of the equation.
Everyone wants unlimited health and education. The question is, how much do they want it relative to everything else. Something has to give. If it is felt that people should want something more or less than other stuff, presumably a better mechanism to help people make those decisions is needed?
That certainly one thing I have noticed about teacher unions. They don’t do a full cost/benefit analysis. They have a good grasp of potential benefits for sure… but seem to think they are worth any cost to the public.
Ok maybe if we live in a future without money that means there is no need to account for costs because we have as much of anything as we could ever need. Right now though those damn teachers just want more and more of my money it seems like. If we are moving towards a benefits only paradigm they really should be asking for progressively smaller slices of the pie until it reaches zero
You ever been married to a teacher? You ever seen the hours of unpaid work they put in? Would YOU do the job? In an inner city school where 50% of the kids are refugees who do not have English as a first language, 80% of the refugees have PTSD to some extent and YOU have to get 25-30 6 year olds able to do basic reading and writing within a couple of school terms…
It is not like in the movies, not. at. all.
I concur. I looked into teaching as a career change even after having had a senior school teacher as my partner - I though maybe being primary school teacher would be ok, but even back then it was “no way” am I doing this. And it has become far, far harder job. I have a friend who is a primary teacher and I’ve seen what he’s been through over recent years.
Now I don’t know as much about it in the states but if anything it sounds worse as I understand it, many teachers have two or three jobs, and still don’t live well.
This is a fundamental problem at the root of most socio-economic complaints. When you stop paying directly, other people gain the right/authority to make decisions for you. Once third party payments take hold in an economy, they become whales that control the market and further degrade one’s ability to be economically independent. The sheepish majority seem to be fine with this.
