Every political system forgets its lessons (inflation, war, disease, food, housing, wealth inequality) until reality eventually slaps it in its face again.

Sure, but time scales matter. Both sides (there will always be 2 under our structure) will inevitably forget how much voters absolutely hate inflation; that's how we get inflation. But it won't happen within the lifespan of the "MMT" fad; I think that lifespan may have already elapsed.

> My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.

I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.

Very few here probably believe Ellison, Gates, Bezos, Page/Brin, Elon, or Zuckerberg don't deserve to be very rich.

But that reasonable "very" is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than their current net worth.

That's what many people feel is the broken part of end stage capitalism.

> I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.

I'd like to believe this, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being how they vote. Apart from a few well known politicians, most of them aren't running on a platform of countering oligarchs.

A HNer might ask themselves: do I vote for the future where preserve low taxes in case I become massively wealthy, or do I vote for the future where I work for my income?

Slight note that Bush Senior also got tossed out of office in part for being fiscally responsible.

We probably want to fix that quirk, if we want politicians more reliably doing the fiscally sound thing.

Absolutely. One note though - it wasn’t just the raised tax, it was that he very explicitly promised to not raise taxes. Maybe doesn’t get elected without that promise but I really don’t know enough about politics before Clinton/Newt Gingrich.

The issue with requiring balanced budgets at the federal level is there are a number of situations where, by any economic theory, you want to run deficits.

So what you really need is an impartial Fed-budgetary-counterpart arbiter that declares when balanced budget rules are and aren't in effect.

And probably toss in what target percent of debt needs to be paid down too.

The impartial arbiter is the voting public.

The voting public doesn't know shit about economics or budgets.

The issue here is divorcing budgeting from democracy, which I believe Germany did after their travails?

Similar to how well-run companies separate their CFO duties (how much we can and can't afford) and from their CEO ones (what we choose to invest that in).

The US has that in the monetary side (for now, the Fed) but has never had that on the budgetary side with Congress being concerned with being reelected (and bringing home the bacon being a reliable way to make that happen).

Paying down US debt seriously will only happen if Congress and the President choose to cede part of their spending cap authority to an independent entity, and that's never likely to happen.

It's really hard to do that in the general case. As the aphorism goes, "Show me your budgets and I'll show you your priorities", and in a democratic society, the priorities are supposed to be decided by the voters.

You could however envision a system where the bottom-line (the overall budget surplus or deficit) is dictated algorithmically by economic conditions, with the government free to move funds between different priorities, raise taxes, or cut overall spending as long as they met the target budget surplus. Actually wouldn't be a bad idea; it mimics how private organizations and households have to adjust their spending to fit constraints. The whole idea of algorithmic central banking and algorithmic fiscal policy could be quite interesting, particularly now that you have cryptocurrency where you can build algorithms into the nature of money itself.

Better said than I: that was the distinction I was trying to make.

What should absolutely be democratic.

Bottom line, maybe we try less so.

You can't make voters care about budgeting for the future. They have unrealistic expectations and politicians have to pander to voters.

The majority of voters can't manage their own finances that well.

When the future hits us hard, we simply all blame the past politicians for not being prudent. Or people older than us - like boomers - the blimmin idjuts.

> So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit.

40k lore is like South Park: either extremely dumb or unexpectedly insightful.

The Cult Mechanicus' raison d'etre is the realization that religion persists across time and space scales that knowledge alone does not. Thus, by making a religion of knowledge you better guarantee its preservation.

Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war.

PS: 20 years ago I told a friend that "software archaeologist" would be a career by the time I die. Should have put money on it.

Unfortunately, I think Vernor Vinge scooped you any way. One of the main characters of A Deepness in the Sky was something akin to a software archaeologist (I swear that exact phrase was used, but it’s been a minute) and that book was published in 1999.

Fair, but I didn't get to it until ~2010. And yeah, Vinge uses the exact phrasing https://akkartik.name/post/deepness

Well. Either "software archaeologist" appears as a profession before the time you pass away, and you get paid. Or, you die first, and then your friend doesn't get paid. I don't think they would have gone for that...

One would hope that I'd die with at least a few dollars in my estate!

You'll need to write it into your will or probate (can't remember if that's the right word) will never let it through! :)

Feel free to call me next time your lights stop working, and then we can have a nice theological discussion before I choose to fix them. ;)

> I can't remember any example of companies in the past 10 years that have suffered reputational damage related to their inefficient apps

OTOH, under what sequence of events would you?

Something gets big / popular enough for you to hear about it, despite having an inefficient app?

It seems exceedingly likely that a large number of companies with terrible apps just never grow... because they have terrible apps.

Also implied in that scenario: mass unemployment and wealth concentration

I'm under 50 and know SGI. People should spend more time learning some of the field's history.

Maybe then they wouldn't make the same goddamn mistakes over and over again.

> Until you read the device compatibility page and see you're still at the mercy of Google.

Alternate take: good. I'd rather the GrapheneOS team pick standardized (if limited) hardware configurations to support and then spend their (many multiples less than Google) resources on the platform rather than device compatibility.

The Android OEM diversity mean the time/economics of supporting every phone with a non-Google OS were never going to work, and I'd rather have it working well on a limited number of platforms than poorly on more.

Firmware engineering and patching sucks and delivers little value to the user, because best case (you solved the issue or patched the hardware errata) something basic that a user expects is now working.

Nobody is going to switch to a platform because a phone can now make calls. Even if there are 1000+ human hours in patching some cheap clone LTE chip it uses.