Yeah, absolutely, and as far as I understand it anarchism doesn’t really prevent large organizations from forming and coordinating.

My understanding of pure anarchism would have two main conditions for such coordinated orgs or efforts:

1. Collective decisions are made via consensus - if one person disagrees, we continue deliberating.
2. People can leave and join organizations at any time, with no obligation to stay if they no longer agree with the direction.

Now, these conditions aren’t realistic for real life all the time. Sometimes we need to be able to make decisions with a time constraint, and consensus is very, very slow. And likewise, sometimes resources are constrained and one can’t just leave and do their own thing. But if we see this as an ideal sort of direction, we can aim to get closer over time.

And this is actually how many professional organizations and technical groups work. For instance, TC39 is the committee that defines the JavaScript the language, and it works via consensus - any member can prevent a proposal from moving forward at any time. This makes it a very, very slow process, and people complain about this a lot (myself included, I was impatient when I first started working on proposals). But JavaScript also has the constraint of “no breaking changes, ever”. So these proposals are permanent, and we live with the consequences of earlier ones today. So a process that forces more thought, discussion, and agreement, that really makes us make sure it’s a good idea, is a good one here.

There are varying levels of this. 2/3rds majority rather than 51%. Requiring at least 50% and not a plurality. Approval voting is more in line with this than first-past-the-post. Etc etc.

Like I said, it’s not about preventing things from moving forward. It’s about slowing down a bit, and using that time to shore up infrastructure, solve general problems (like how do we get basic amenities for every person, or at least many more people), and getting society as a whole out of a scarcity, zero-sum mindset.

Yeah, we could. But the structures of capital as they are currently running are funneling money away from that, and toward what makes profit. Look at what they’ve done to Boeing, once an engineer led giant, now a hollow shell.

I think worker collectives and more distributed decision making would slow things down at first, but in the long run would lead to more stability, more ownership, and eventually in the long term, more speedup as we build out infrastructure. I also don’t think we’ll ever get to a fully decentralized society, for a variety of reasons. But the first step in that direction would be something like more democratic company decision making and ownership (e.g. like the German model where workers elect a board member on large companies).

I dunno, I feel like rushing forward and making hasty generalizations and doing shoddy science is also morally questionable, and also ultimately gets worse results. And I see a lot of that in the tech industry anyways.

Just a had a convo today with one my mentors about javascript framework benchmarks, and how the main ones don’t actually measure accurately at all because of the way the engine inlines and optimizes things. He went through all the trouble of building a tool to make it easier to do rigorous measurements, because engineers at the company had been doing these shoddy benchmarks, using it to justify shipping “optimizations”, getting a nice raise, and then he would come in and realize that they had really just moved the work elsewhere and it actually caused a regression here or there.

And nobody really cared in the end. They used it for a while, then it fell by the wayside.

Real scientific rigor isn’t really respected in the same way it used to be, if it ever was. It’s more about marketing, finding an angle you can sell. Because when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, everyone starts gaming it. And money and productivity have become the ultimate metric.

I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.

Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?

I think it’s more that it would take more time and coordination to do larger things. Like, you need to get all of the people on board, you need to convince them to work on it without coercion (either force or money), so it takes a lot longer. Everybody is going to want their basic needs met and their problems dealt with first.

But when you step back and think about it, with our current level of technology, that would be fine. Like, if I went to a hundred engineers and was like “hey I wanna build a rocket, who’s with me?” And they said “sure, once I have free time, but can we figure out food/water/shelter/entertainment/comfort first?” That would be reasonable. Maybe it takes a few decades or longer to figure those things out in a sustainable way, but at scale in society it could definitely be done.

Think about electricity. It is currently functionally limitless (yes, there are limits, but we don’t treat it like that in day to day life). And to keep it that way is relatively low maintenance, once we figure out renewables (or nuclear, or both) anyways. Same with the internet, once it’s built it’s fairly easy to maintain, and we’re at the point with fiber where it’s fairly difficult to overuse it, so giving it to everyone as baseline would be easy.

Once we had a better system for the basics, one that essentially is low maintenance and ensures everyone gets everything they need (with choice and freedom too, if everyone is fed but all we have is potatoes, the next question would be “ok how do we get more variety?”), then there would be a lot more time to focus on large efforts.

Those still would take longer, because even when we have all of the basics handled, it would take much longer to make decisions, there would be long, frustrating debates, somebody might storm off, etc. It might take a lifetime. But there wouldn’t be urgency either, because we all have the basics, plus luxuries, essentially our modern lives as they are. Just without the need to produce more every second of every day.

All of this could be decentralized too. It’s not like I’m saying there would be a command economy, necessarily. In fact, it shouldn’t be centralized too much ideally, that could over concentrate power.

Where this falls apart is game theory essentially. If I choose to be less productive and focus on that basic infrastructure, and take my time, that lets other players get ahead. If that goes on long enough, those other players may have advanced enough that they can dominate the game. It’s a literal arms race in that sense, this is playing out with AI right now. For it to work, everyone would need to agree to slow down, all at once.

This is a major issue because what’s happening is we’re hitting artificial maximum’s because of this strategy. I deal with this all the time working on software infrastructure. People want to push for product non stop, and then their code turns out completely unmaintainable. Infra comes along, analyzes, figures out a better pattern, and eventually we fix it, but not before the damage is done and it takes years to fix, or we just rewrite it all. If we had taken the time to build it the right way the first time, it would have likely been a much faster process. BUT, the startup may have folded in the meantime, because someone else put together a dumpster fire, spruced it up to look real nice, and got a bunch of people to choose them instead. And now they won.

So yeah, I think about this a lot haha 😅 we are, technologically speaking, capable of being post scarcity. Why are we still acting like technological advancement is about life and death? Why do we have to race to the bottom?

Edit: Oh, speed also does matter for coordinating in emergencies, so there is an argument for “we don’t have time because the environment will fall apart or we have an asteroid incoming, etc.” but like, re: the environment, that is not only happening, but the productivity arms race is making it worse! That’s an example of an artificial maximum’s there.

Ok, let’s continue to focus on this technicality then.

Let’s say that’s true, and that anything other than witnessing the vows and signing the form is “ceremonial” and covered under freedom of speech. (Forget the part where you need to, you know, prompt each party for their vows. Not like you just sit there, stone cold, and they walk up and start talking to each other. But anyways.) The role of public servants is to be impartial and provide a common good or service to all citizens. And for a judge especially, this is extremely important. If a judge shows signs of bias, it could call into question the ways that they interpret the law. Did they also make biased judgements? Did they interpret laws to target certain classes of people, when they could get away with it?

So, if all of that is speech, then I propose that judges should be required to perform the same procedure for all couples when they are doing so as a service in a court. If they say “kiss the bride” to one couple, they have to say “kiss the ___” to all of them. That’s fair, prevents judges from seeming biased and prevents the institution from seeming biased, and allows judges to decide what they want to do as part of the proceedings. They can each have their own flair, or just do the basic witness + signing.

Would that be acceptable, in your view?

Look, we’re talking past each other.

I don’t believe that any judge or person in general should be forced to perform a ceremony of a different religion or belief system. I agree with you on that point, because full ceremonies are indeed performances with a lot of layered, cultural meanings.

The issue here is you are then taking that and asserting that any proceeding that is more involved than signing a piece of paper is, in fact, a ceremony. This is where we differ, and I’ll tell you why: by that definition, signing the paper is ceremonial.

Yes, it does record a real world event. But that is a ceremony that we have culturally come to accept after a long history of doing it. We could have come up with many other types of ceremonies to confirm a contract - it could have been a wax seal, or using a broke stick like stocks originally were. Anything can fit the definition of ceremony if you squint hard enough.

So, what’s a reasonable place for us to draw the line? I would argue that the current status quo is not particularly religious or meaningful outside of the contract.

The officiant confirms that both parties understand what is happening, that this is a contract that will legally bind them together. It’s very serious. Be very sure.

Then, they announce that the couple is officially wed, and they sign the document.

Last, they usually say “you may kiss” or something to that effect.

The most objectionable thing here is the final statement, but even that is hardly objectionable. It is a statement of fact and does not imply any level of endorsement beyond confirming that the deed is done.

This is a very, very small formality. There are courtroom procedures that are more lengthy and involved than this regularly. But you are pushing to say this counts as a ceremony, because if it does, then the judge doesn’t have to do this and she’s in the right.

I just don’t buy it. The only part of that which can be called remotely ceremonial is the statement about kissing, and honestly if the judge refused to say that in the end I would not care. But every other part is a reasonable procedure to make sure both parties understand the stakes, are not being coerced, etc.

Ok, cool. Law should be updated. Noted.

In the meantime, here in reality, I know this because I got married at city hall as a formality and my wife and I tried to just have it signed, since our real ceremony was months later. We were refused, because according to the clerk, we needed to follow a full procedure.

Stop arguing in bad faith, you’re just plain wrong here. Until laws and procedures actually change, the fact is that those are the minimum requirements and she refused to do them.

The point is that it’s part of standard process and procedure, and she made an off-duty judge come in on her day off to do it instead.

It’s an asshole move. She should not be a public servant if she intends to hold up proceedings based on her beliefs. Especially one with authority like a judges.

The ceremony aspect of marriage is not just a ceremony, it’s a requirement. Asking the basic questions is part of the court procedure, it’s what makes an officiant different than a notary.

She refused to sign the paper, essentially.

Yes, because in order for the marriage to happen, you need an officiant to ask some questions of both parties and confirm that they know what they signed and that it was all above board. That is not a performance, that is standard court procedure and the minimum requirement to get married.

This was a court proceeding, look at the actual article. The marriage happened in court.

By the sound of it, she was the on-duty judge at city hall. It was a public service because it’s the most basic kind of legal marriage, a courthouse marriage. There is barely any ceremony or performance, and lots of people do it prior to the real ceremony because it is considered a formality.

Why shouldn’t a public servant who is assigned that duty be required to follow through? I understand not wanting to do it if it’s a whole ordeal, but if this is the bare minimum required to formalize a marriage, should that not always be available to all people regardless of their race, sex, etc?

This really conflicts with the idea that, as platforms, websites are not legally liable for the content their user’s produce. At least at a high level, it feels like those two should be mutually exclusive. If X owns all of the accounts on its site, it should be legally liable for all of them. If X is not legally liable, it should imply some amount of individual ownership.

Like, yes federation is better and we should be pushing for it, but also, we should be trying to push for better regulation of incumbent social media platforms too if we can. Seems unlikely but we can try.

I don’t care what bad-faith conservatives are saying, yes they’re full of it. Here are the facts:

• We are pushing forward full-tilt on renewables in general. Factories are going up, the IRA was 80% focused on renewables, and as long as the incoming admin doesn’t actively roll things back, we’re heading in the right direction.
• Headlines like this one are coming up because private companies are starting to invest in nuclear for their own purposes. This is spare money and effort that we could be leaving on the table.
• If we start seeing politicians actively shutting down green energy in favor of nuclear, we should absolutely say “fuck no”.
• As of yet, I have not been seeing this in policy or in reality, and every year the renewable industry becomes more self-sustaining and grows without active pushes from the government (though we can and should continue to subsidize).

From where I’m standing, we should be encouraging the private sector and investing some percentage of our portfolio in restarting and building nukes with all of that context.

This is the same logic behind building an investment portfolio. You could go all in on Bitcoin, or you could spread out your portfolio in the market. 80% into the solid, tried and true stocks, 15% into up and comers, 5% into moonshots like crypto or gamestop or whatever. Same deal here.

Hmm, I think of baseload as the following:

• Hospitals and emergency services
• Data centers and communications
• 24 hour transit needs
• 24 hour lighting in cities
• Ventilation, heating/cooling for certain climates

Some of these can be mitigated significantly, but some of these are just things that really can never be down and have to have like 99.999% reliability. As we electrify, I’m going to be looking at storage solutions for these things and seeing if we really feel confident in that up time and having extra reserves. Engineers usually over design, so if we expect to need like 0.1 gigawatts for a week for emergency services during an abnormal weather event, I would want to plan for 1 gigawatt for two weeks for instance.

If that can be done with storage, then that’s awesome, and once we start seeing that roll out widely I will stop advocating for the “do both” strategy.

My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.

I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.

And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.

We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.

We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.

We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.

We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.

When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.

The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?

I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.

We can do both.

Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.

On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.

It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!

Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.

The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”

They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:

1. We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
2. We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.

Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.