from Hacker News

The world will only get weirder

by saadalem on 3/10/21, 7:18 PM with 13 comments

• by chacha2 on 3/11/21, 1:33 AM

  > To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.

  If websites are this man’s ideal, thank god for regulations.

• by teterphiel on 3/11/21, 3:20 AM

  The ancients took it for granted that civilisations would rise, reach a peak, and then gradually decline, similar to other living things. It's a distinctly western/modern idea that there could be unceasing progress.

  While both these views are essentially myths, my money is on the ancients being more in-line with reality. At the very least I don't need to look at decline and call it "weird". Permanent progress on the other hand is a political poison that will turn people against one another as they try to find the culprits.

• by saurik on 3/11/21, 7:56 AM

  To the extent to which one agrees with this argument, it applies at any level of scale: the government isn't the only place from which one experiences "rules". Apple has a number of rules for software on its devices, as does Google (though not as many, almost as many); the result being that virtually every device and user is gated by similar rules from one of these two companies... rules that they claim are there to keep us safe, but are often there for their own business interests (aka: the same as a lot of the worst government regulation in the form of rent capture).

  Do you want to build a new decentralized market with end to end encrypted metadata free anonymous transactions? Sorry, no: you have to filter content that Apple dislikes (such as breastfeeding women <- Instagram directly blamed Apple for their puritanical rules about this), centralize all payments through Apple's bank accounts (so they can take their 30% rake), and ensure the only way for users to get push notifications leaves a trace of metadata on Apple's servers (as Apple prefers a world in which users can't make their own battery tradeoffs).

  What makes some rules special--what I will argue are the "best rules"--are the rules that prevent people from themselves making up arbitrary rules and enforcing them on large numbers of other people just because they are in a momentary privileged position: we need more of those rules--rules that create level playing fields and allow for competition from small companies attempting to take on giants--and fewer rules about how to prevent specific forms of terrorism.

• by xchaotic on 3/11/21, 5:57 AM

  I had a job once where we eventually determined that frictionless commerce is not a good goal. With no rules, taxes, fees etc no money can be extracted at various points of the supply chain. You want just the right amount of friction to keep economy going. Otherwise you get 1 rich Bezos and a billion people too poor to afford buying from him.

• by phnofive on 3/11/21, 2:10 AM

  (2015)

  Now we’re having a hard time agreeing on the rules for grounding airplanes with defective software and components. Time marches on!

• by saurik on 3/11/21, 7:42 AM

  > It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that)...

  https://gigaom.com/2012/06/29/the-fda-wants-to-regulate-your...

  > However, the FDA disagreed and in March, called Frommeyer up and argued that because the connected toothbrush was essentially a new class of toothbrush (which the FDA classifies as a medical device) it would require the agency’s approval.

  OMG

• by jeremysalwen on 3/11/21, 5:10 AM

  > To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.

  It's hard for me to believe that "number of rules" is the main determiner of how much value is created. Wouldn't that make failed states the most economically productive places? Where are all the innovative toothbrush designs coming out of Somalia that the FDA is suppressing? Why isn't California (the most regulated state in the country) the source of the least innovation?

  Do we really need an explanation for why new technology is so productive? Maybe because new technology allows you to do new things?

• by Hani1337 on 3/11/21, 8:38 AM

  Is it so difficult to add satellite tracking to planes?