Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[glen]

Arlo Barnes wrote at 09/13/2013 08:38 PM:
Gary Schiltz wrote at 09/13/2013 05:41 PM:

Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom
for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the
issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither.


I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which
is true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither.
In other words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P


I _think_ the actual quote is: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little 
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  So, it's possible that the primary point is the 
trade-off between "essential" vs. "temporary".  If that's the right way to read it, then 
I am inclined to agree.  I'd even go so far as to say that you don't deserve safety at all if you give up 
essential safety for temporary safety ... or essential health for temporary health, etc.

I don't suppose it works for, say, celery... I'd gladly give up essential 
celery in exchange for some temporary celery.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy


--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
From the frozen depths of a forgotten fjord,
 



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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Steve Smith]

The "code" for democratic capitalism was written at Bretton Woods in 
1944.  It followed the initiation and rapid rise of consumer 
advertising and public relations, which began in the '30s and picked 
up steam in the '40s.  I gave a TEDx talk in Albuquerque last weekend 
in which I put out a call for a "Bretton Woods 3.0."  The talk should 
be posted on-line next week.


Merle Lefkoff
I'm wondering if Bretton Woods is "code" or more of a "design 
pattern"?   I realize this all gets fuzzy with many levels of abstraction.


I look forward to your TEDx talk when it comes online.

- Steve


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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Merle Lefkoff]

The "code" for democratic capitalism was written at Bretton Woods in 1944.
 It followed the initiation and rapid rise of consumer advertising and
public relations, which began in the '30s and picked up steam in the '40s.
 I gave a TEDx talk in Albuquerque last weekend in which I put out a call
for a "Bretton Woods 3.0."  The talk should be posted on-line next week.

Merle Lefkoff


On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Arlo Barnes  wrote:

> *Some Incomplete and Scattered Thoughts*
> I missed some of the discussion and will have to catch up once I get the
> number of unread emails I have at least less than the current year :P but I
> don't see why true transparency wouldn't affect people becoming dominant
> through a better understanding of the system - would not that understanding
> be public knowledge if indeed all parts of the system were transparent?
> Unless we are talking about gut instinct / intuition, in which case
> inequality is probably unavoidable.
>
>> Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with
>> it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old
>> Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite
>> willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security.
>> I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are
>> so disposed deserve neither.
>>
> I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which is
> true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither. In other
> words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P
>
>> Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions
>> of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that
>> libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view.
>>
>  Many people would agree with you, but I also think the whole point of
> community is that we keep each other "in check", that is, on the path
> towards some goal. We can't do that if we don't have the freedom to be
> different from one another, which requires some degree of autonomy. It's
> like balancing an ecosystem. At the risk of mixing metaphors, there have to
> be enough wolves to keep the sheep in check but also few enough to keep
> them from hunting the sheep to extinction (of both populations). No, I
> think that definitely mixed the metaphors / crossed the streams. Oh well.
> Anyway, my point was that adolescence is often claimed to be one of the
> most formative parts of people's lives, along with maturity, if/when that
> comes along.
>
>> Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS)
>> running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am
>>
>  As I think you were heading towards with your previous comments, one
> shouldn't be faulted for the shortcomings of the system wherein one
> resides, in this case the consumer computer market that makes a couple
> sub-prime setups most convenient.
>
>>  I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert 
>> Riechon
>>  his new film, "Inequality for All".
>>
>> Still puzzling over that title, but then I was in and out of the room
> while my parents were watching the show.
>
>>  Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"?   And
>> isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code?  It seems
>> like much of our discussion about transparency in government and
>> accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code
>> that is being executed.  Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the
>> rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers,
>> interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice
>> (exception handling?)
>>
>> I find it interesting and maybe (or maybe not) significant that criminal
> justice seems to have a less clear role in this analogy. Perhaps this
> relates to how varied the number of opinions one can find regarding it's
> purpose are?
>
>> Is there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as
>> ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase
>> change?  Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but
>> Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just
>> as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves.
>>
>>  I think several related projects have been discussed on this list (FOSS
> Estonian voting software, Citizens Elect [right name?]), but I think none
> of them get at what you are saying. I think the problem is that (like
> microchips and the computers that play a major role in designing / building
> them) society is a lower-level construct which produces the higher-level
> construct of technology, and (unlike microchips, perhaps) we want / expect
> society to work even when tech does not, rather than the other way around
> (with some excepti

Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 9/13/13 10:14 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
No... I still think it is like an exception detection/handling 
process...  enforcement is roughly detection and handling is roughly 
courts and penal?   Intelligence is more like virus-scanning...
Crimes are punished and criminals contained -- security theater for an 
audience that needs to see `something is being done'.  But the deed is 
already done.  In the analogy, the bits have already been written to 
disk.   Then you have to hunt evidence and then the bad actor from the 
evidence (which is to find the signature in the pool of storage).


More modern virus scanners intercept the bad bits before they hit disk 
(as they are coming on the network) and don't torture users of the 
system as the cops run around looking the same suspects (disk blocks) 
over and over and over.   Disk heads flying all over the place, I/O 
bandwidth saturated and CPUs wasting cycles looking for known-bad 
patterns.  Like our apparent insatiable need for security, this is a 
huge distraction from actually getting work done.


Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Steve Smith]

Markus...
Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution 
of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system 
libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?)
Ok, criminal Justice is more like crude block-device virus scanning 
for `bad' signatures.
No... I still think it is like an exception detection/handling 
process...  enforcement is roughly detection and handling is roughly 
courts and penal?   Intelligence is more like virus-scanning...
It doesn't prevent problems (stop the malware from entering in the 
first place), it tries to mop up afterward.   To me, the debate about 
the FISA court & government overreach, is analogous to what devices 
are allowed to be scanned what what signatures constitute badness, and 
_who_ defines that.  The NSA, not even metaphorically, is concerned 
getting access to the space of physical memory to get lookahead on 
badness, and our democracy says there there should be protection rules 
on those pages.  Law is about laying out how privilege escalation in 
the operating system works, when exceptions can be issued in user 
space (longjmp, signal handlers), and when they are issued to 
processes or the kernel (NMIs,  termination).   And national security 
is about keeping the machine room a reasonable temperature and 
ensuring their is power!

Yes, national (foreign and domestic) security is like malware scanning...
But I don't agree that democracy is the act of writing code, in 
reality it's more like `core war', a process of finding the best (or 
just dominant) programs through competition.
Well, politics is like core-wars but democracy itself (writing your own 
rules, including rules about how to write rules whether directly or by 
proxy-representatives) still seems a lot like writing code to me.  The 
interpreters/compiler/system drivers may be a lot buggier than what we 
are used to... but ... ?
Everyone with influence wants less competition, whether they are 
governing or not.  That's the biggest risk to finding the best 
programs IMO.
So I guess I agree that "psuedo-democracy-as-we-practice-it" is very 
much like self-modifying code, etc.


- Steve

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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 9/13/13 6:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of 
everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system 
libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?)
Ok, criminal Justice is more like crude block-device virus scanning for 
`bad' signatures.   It doesn't prevent problems (stop the malware from 
entering in the first place), it tries to mop up afterward.   To me, the 
debate about the FISA court & government overreach, is analogous to what 
devices are allowed to be scanned what what signatures constitute 
badness, and _who_ defines that. The NSA, not even metaphorically, is 
concerned getting access to the space of physical memory to get 
lookahead on badness, and our democracy says there there should be 
protection rules on those pages.  Law is about laying out how privilege 
escalation in the operating system works, when exceptions can be issued 
in user space (longjmp, signal handlers), and when they are issued to 
processes or the kernel (NMIs,  termination).   And national security is 
about keeping the machine room a reasonable temperature and ensuring 
their is power!


But I don't agree that democracy is the act of writing code, in reality 
it's more like `core war', a process of finding the best (or just 
dominant) programs through competition.   Everyone with influence wants 
less competition, whether they are governing or not.  That's the biggest 
risk to finding the best programs IMO.


Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Arlo Barnes]

*Some Incomplete and Scattered Thoughts*
I missed some of the discussion and will have to catch up once I get the
number of unread emails I have at least less than the current year :P but I
don't see why true transparency wouldn't affect people becoming dominant
through a better understanding of the system - would not that understanding
be public knowledge if indeed all parts of the system were transparent?
Unless we are talking about gut instinct / intuition, in which case
inequality is probably unavoidable.

> Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with
> it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old
> Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite
> willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security.
> I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are
> so disposed deserve neither.
>
I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which is
true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither. In other
words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P

> Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions
> of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that
> libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view.
>
 Many people would agree with you, but I also think the whole point of
community is that we keep each other "in check", that is, on the path
towards some goal. We can't do that if we don't have the freedom to be
different from one another, which requires some degree of autonomy. It's
like balancing an ecosystem. At the risk of mixing metaphors, there have to
be enough wolves to keep the sheep in check but also few enough to keep
them from hunting the sheep to extinction (of both populations). No, I
think that definitely mixed the metaphors / crossed the streams. Oh well.
Anyway, my point was that adolescence is often claimed to be one of the
most formative parts of people's lives, along with maturity, if/when that
comes along.

> Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS)
> running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am
>
 As I think you were heading towards with your previous comments, one
shouldn't be faulted for the shortcomings of the system wherein one
resides, in this case the consumer computer market that makes a couple
sub-prime setups most convenient.

>  I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert 
> Riechon
>  his new film, "Inequality for All".
>
> Still puzzling over that title, but then I was in and out of the room
while my parents were watching the show.

>  Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"?   And isn't
> Economics the primary execution environment for that code?  It seems like
> much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability
> is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being
> executed.  Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of
> execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters,
> system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?)
>
> I find it interesting and maybe (or maybe not) significant that criminal
justice seems to have a less clear role in this analogy. Perhaps this
relates to how varied the number of opinions one can find regarding it's
purpose are?

> Is there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as
> ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase
> change?  Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but
> Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just
> as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves.
>
>  I think several related projects have been discussed on this list (FOSS
Estonian voting software, Citizens Elect [right name?]), but I think none
of them get at what you are saying. I think the problem is that (like
microchips and the computers that play a major role in designing / building
them) society is a lower-level construct which produces the higher-level
construct of technology, and (unlike microchips, perhaps) we want / expect
society to work even when tech does not, rather than the other way around
(with some exceptions, I suppose. Zombie 
knives?
I can't really think of any non-trivial examples. I guess some more
realistic survival gear like water filters).

-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?

[Gary Schiltz]

Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, 
but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. 
Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with 
a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come 
down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. 
Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of 
years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian 
thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view.

Gary
Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC 
hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am :-)

On Sep 13, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Steve Smith  wrote:

> Marcus/Glen/et alii -
> 
> 
> 
> I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riech on his new film, 
> "Inequality for All".  I was caught enough by the following statement he made 
> to look it up and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website 
> transcript):
> This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we make in 
> the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the 
> film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy is not 
> something out there, it is not kind of a state of nature, the economy is a 
> set of rules. It is based upon, basically, rules that are decided upon by our 
> democracy. And if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that 
> don’t work very well, that don’t spread enough of the gains of economic 
> growth to enough people, we change the rules.
> [...]
> Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting "code development"?   And isn't 
> Economics the primary execution environment for that code?  It seems like 
> much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is 
> not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. 
>  Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of 
> everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, 
> OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?)
> 
> IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring "technocrats" such as 
> ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase 
> change?  Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but 
> Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as 
> the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves.   
> 
> Just a thought...
> 
> - Steve

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