> There is one other use case for identity, and yes, it is decentralized and bottom-up, because it is about dividing into secure, self-sovereign affinity groups, and the reasons for doing that are on a very short list of uses. Super fun, but basically a weapon.
A weapon against who? A self sovereign affinity group could just be a community trying to self organize without relying on non-owned infrastructure. Aka prepper stuff.
There’s a tragedy of commons problem in engineering. The engineering orgs collective ability to handle complexity is the community resource. Without safeguards in place this resource is squandered by engineers because the easy solution to a problem often paradoxically leads to higher complexity in the code base. Why? Because it’s easier to make ad-hoc new connections between things than to abide by a larger plan. And connections are the complexity.
One thing I’ve noticed that sometimes leads to this idea is using a “survival of the fittest” approach to percolating ideas.
Technically the US doesn't prevent you from leaving the country for not having an American passport - it's other countries that are likely not to let you in.
But that's between you and this private company :)
Plus, I think at least part of the reason why airlines would be reluctant to board you is exactly that - knowing that the destination country wouldn't be happy with them dropping you at their doorstep with no passport in hand. What would they care otherwise?
This is exactly it - the airline is responsible for returning you home if you are denied entry to a country.
My wife used to work as an air stewardess, and one of her longer flights was a 16 hour non-stop flight from Dubai to Brazil. This involved a 3 day layover, and on the inbound flight she saw some (rather tired) passengers who had been on the outbound flight.
Apparently they were denied entry, however it was too late for them to go back on the same aircraft, so they had to wait in the airport (airside) for the next flight.
Right, so that goes back to my original point - it's other countries not letting a passport-less person in. The airlines have no other choice but to accept the fact.
An airline denied my passport (had gone through the wash) I had just returned from Canada and had used the passport, in the same condition, in the country I was going to. But the airline didn't care. They said they could be fined $25000 for bringing a passenger without a valid passport plus they would have to return me.
That private company is constrained by rules established in the countries it operates in. It's weirder than you might imagine. I regularly fly between the EU and USA and the immigration and security rules are different for American operators than for their EU counterparts.
Does anyone else remember being taught in Econ 101 about globalization and comparative advantage and how great it is? Either the educators didn't know this would happen or it was a campaign to sell the public on the idea. Or maybe it was just bad teaching. I wonder which one it was.
> Either the educators didn't know this would happen or it was a campaign to sell the public on the idea.
Globalisation has resulted in the greatest reduction in human poverty to have ever occurred. The benefits are not uniformly distributed, and there are losers and winners, the losers deserve protection, and the shortcomings should be decried and fixed, sure.
But to conclude from the fact that some migrants in one country are having a rough time that globalisation as a whole is a negative thing is errant nonsense; the equivalent of stubbing your toe and deciding that the entire concept of furniture was a mistake.
The mere fact you're posting on here makes it clear you're part of the global 1%. As such, you have the luxury of preferring policies that avoid making you uncomfortable. Others face harsher constraints.
To conclude that globalization is a positive thing for the poorest people of the planet without qualification is also errant nonsense.
The greatest reduction in human poverty is due mainly to China, where globalization has been managed in order to develop the country.
The standard narrative is that this is not necessary. Just open your markets and everything will be OK. Don't protect your industries, don't manipulate your currency, don't 'steel' 'intellectual property', etc and everything will work for the best.
That's obviously not true, but it's a line that keep being pushed.
I mean I guess define globalization because the thing immediately preceding it--colonial mercantilism--was just as global. That rise from poverty coincides with both the death of nominal colonialism and also frankly the rise of Soviet and Maoist communism and the CIA's banana republic crimes in Central and South America. Further "Free Trade" as usually used to characterize Globalisation still doesn't exist in any useful sense even in things like NAFTA which has free trade in the name.
> Globalisation has resulted in the greatest reduction in human poverty to have ever occurred
Correlation ≠ Causation. How can you so easily attribute one to the other? I'd argue advancements in science have done far more to alleviate poverty and suffering rather than lowered trade barriers.
It's a common theme worldwide that most of the gains from globalisation have gone to the elites while environmental damage has been externalised.
That's not a bad point IMO, and one that I often vaguely wonder about too. Just how much of the reduction in poverty is because of capitalism/globalization, and how much is because of improved technology?
I'm not sure I know the answer to that. Then again, I'm not sure it's so easy to separate out these things - capitalism almost certainly lead to more technology.
I remember my Econ 101 teacher being much more cautious - noting that trade produces benefits on average, and that the benefits everyone iff there is political action to redistribute the benefits; and that fiscal is better than monetary stimulus, but in most Western political systems that's harder to push through.
Generally those simple adages are very much spherical-cow observations, with assumptions of rational (i.e. operating in the system's interest) leadership, rule of law, and priced-in externalities; when those professors go from their intro classes to their research they start to account for more of the real-world complications.
Any econ 101 teacher who goes off script talking about politics shouldn't be taken seriously. My micro and macro classes did not mention political actions at all unless you consider describing the potential actions of the Federal reserve as inherently political.
Any econ 101 class that talks seriously about a) fiscal effects, or b) trade (and hence the usefulness of Pareto-optimal game states) needs to talk about politics, because they are part of the system in question.
This professor specifically specialized in the study of recessions, in which government action is essential; and took special interest in the effectiveness of different government interventions.
Studying these subjects without talking about policy and politics is like studying security and ignoring human-factors research. I am in fact seriously skeptical about the quality of your econ classes that did not mention the effects of government spending, trade policy, taxation, or price controls.
I would argue the opposite. Especially for Macro. I'd argue that any econ 101 teacher that doesn't consider politics shouldn't be taken seriously. Ignoring political realities is precisely what is wrong with a lot of (but by no means all) economic reasoning in our society.
It's easy to look at how bad things are and lose sight of the possibility that this might be an improvement.
Somehow foreigners keep coming, despite the abuses, so either these people are complete idiots who can't figure things out even after decades of being taken advantage of, or things actually work out well for most of them.
Keep in mind that the exploitation may be just as bad, or worse, in many of the places these people originate from.
The "competitive advantage" that many countries offer has always had more to do with their willingness to grind their workers into bone meal than any sort of technological or agricultural capability.
Do they not teach you people about the Cultural Revolution? Those workers were bone meal long before they walked into a Foxconn factory. Inequality is a precondition for exploitive labor practices, not a result of them.
Or maybe it's a complicated subject and the outrageous aggregate wealth increases might plausibly be seen as worthwhile even if they create this kind of localized disaster.
Basically: if you want to argue against "globalization" and for a return to, I dunno, the world of the 1960's, recognize that you are arguing for a return to the 1960's, and the 60's were by modern standards a human rights disaster basically everywhere.
Progress is good. It's not "all" good, and needs attention and regulation. But ludditism is never the answer. What was that about bad teaching again?
>Basically: if you want to argue against "globalization" and for a return to, I dunno, the world of the 1960's, recognize that you are arguing for a return to the 1960's, and the 60's were by modern standards a human rights disaster basically everywhere.
That's one of the more bizarro strawmen I've seen.
He doesn't suggest some kind of time travel -- so that we have to take it all, the good and the bad, of an earlier era.
In that he doesn't even say anything about going back to an earlier era.
He speaks of going back to an earlier practice.
Which is what humans who shape their future, as opposed to being taken left and right by some impersonal forces, can perfectly do, without having to adopt anything else.
>Progress is good.
Progress, outside of technology (which is accumulative), is a myth.
History has ups and downs and can go either way. The horrors of WWII were worse than whatever 19th century came up with. American politics, for one, where better in the 60s and 70s than today. And so on....
> He doesn't suggest some kind of time travel -- so that we have to take it all, the good and the bad, of an earlier era.
He/you are hardly illustrating a clear example either. You're just flinging poop, basically, with your "bad teaching" and "progress is a myth". The bottom line is that trade with the developing world over the past half century has been a staggering engine of growth. So if you don't want "globalization" then you have to explain how you get China to grow at 9% year after year for like three decades (or whatever the numbers were) without that trade. You don't get to wave a magic wand and assume that part.
>He/you are hardly illustrating a clear example either.
My argument is: if we want to change society in a way that resembles how one thing was in another era, there's no law or necessity that dictates that we also adopt everything else from that era.
We can pick and match.
>You're just flinging poop, basically, with your "bad teaching" and "progress is a myth"
Not sure what the "bad teaching" refers to.
The "Flinging poop" part, I find rude.
With 'progress is a myth' I made a statement, and gave two supporting examples just below it.
>The bottom line is that trade with the developing world over the past half century has been a staggering engine of growth. So if you don't want "globalization" then you have to explain how you get China to grow at 9% year after year for like three decades (or whatever the numbers were) without that trade. You don't get to wave a magic wand and assume that part.
I don't want "China to grow at 9% year after year". I want them to have a stable economy and work on redistribution. Similar for everybody else.
I don't want ever growing pies and larger slices. I want better cut slices of the already existing pies. Growth "year after year" is not sustainable (not just not sustainable itself, not sustainable for the environment and society either).
Besides, the net result of that "growth" was to make a middle class in China by deflating the middle class elsewhere (including the US).
The rich get to produce stuff in China and increase their margins (so the "economy grows"), but their country's working class (that used to produce similar stuff at home) is dealt a heavy blow and the middle class is squeezed.
The end result is not some large pie / bigger harmony slices and other fictional unicorns, rather it's trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit, plus "99% percent" on one side, and the "Tea Party" and Trump on the other side.
> I don't want "China to grow at 9% year after year". I want them to have a stable economy and work on redistribution. Similar for everybody else.
No one who knows anything about the cultural revolution would make that statement. A China starting in the 1960's with a "stable economy" and "better redistribution" would, today, be a dirt poor backwater having survived famine after famine. Think North Korea, but with a billion people.
You're fantasizing about a world that doesn't/didn't exist. There's no way to get modern Chinese wealth without "globalization". And without that wealth you have a humanitarian disaster.
>You're fantasizing about a world that doesn't/didn't exist. There's no way to get modern Chinese wealth without "globalization". And without that wealth you have a humanitarian disaster.
China existed for milennia without "modern Chinese wealth" -- and was the biggest economy on earth for many centuries before the European powers started their colonial plundering.
Economies can also grow slowly and organically -- as opposed to a mad rush to "year over year N% growth" consequences be damned -- and can also chose which areas NOT to grow, and not to pursue, when those areas might be harmful etc.
What on earth are you on about? It genuinely seems like you're arguing that the only difference between the literal famine of the cultural revolution and modern China is... I dunno, attitude or something.
Something had to build all that infrastructure: the factories, generators, plumbing, aqueducts, cell towers, refineries... If you have an alternative economics that can get all that without "economic growth", then you really need to start explaining it to people.
>What on earth are you on about? It genuinely seems like you're arguing that the only difference between the literal famine of the cultural revolution and modern China is... I dunno, attitude or something.
Who said modern China is what's needed or that it's a sustainable model? I, for one, didn't.
You can avoid famine without having "modern china". They could avoid famine even in the "great famine" era -- as long as they didn't have the stupid bureaucratic policies that created its conditions (forced migrations, mismanagement, agricultural regulations, etc).
I'm using the usual casual meaning of progress that conveys some overall, non-necessarily monotonic but steady, betterment of humanity in all aspects.
And in particular I (and many scholars -- though others of course disagree) say that:
1) there's nothing inevitable about progress in the areas where it has been made. Even technologically we could regress a la Mad Max if we hit e.g. continuous climate conditions, or a lengthy major war (nuclear or not).
That this can happen locally is a plain fact -- there are tons of places where it has indeed. Libya, for one, were more technological advanced, prosperous, safe, and progressive a mere few decades ago. I'm also saying that it can happen globally too.
2) actual cumulative progress, while itself volatile (see 1), is only increasing for the most part in the area of technology and/or knowledge. Not in moral norms, or in arts, etc.
Morally populations can regress on a dime, and we have ups and downs all the time, plus there are modern norms that are worse (or less progressive by even our standards) than older norms. There are also eras that produced far crappier art than earlier or later eras (e.g. medieval art vs classical).
Don't be obtuse. When people talk about going back to the 60s in this context, they are talking about a return to the economic conditions that actually saw a steady improvement of QOL for the working class in the US - namely, organized labor and high marginal tax rates. Shoehorning in the orthogonal human rights abuses is just a distraction.
High marginal tax rates don't create steady improvement for the working class. They might create a single step of improvement by lowering their taxes, but it doesn't increase the rate of improvement beyond that one jump.
It's a hard one to teach, because everything carries so much baggage. Comparative advantage as they teach it is not a bad idea. It's a long road from that premise to the conclusion that free markets are all you need to know about humans.
Migrant workers have been for thousands of years and still are, the most powerless class of people. They have no political power, almost by definition. The levels of minimum standards protection they get make a big difference.
I think this is an area that the UN could have done something about, but never did.
The person in the article would most likely still be with her family. She doesn't get a net benefit from her work, she was caught by the system and now cannot leave.
That isn't what comparative advantage is - it is a recognition fo opportunity costs. If you have one country that can grow wheat and cotton better than their northern neighbor who can just grow wheat with lesser yield per acre it would make sense to get as much cotton as they need in the south and trade with the north for wheat because suitable acres not spent growing cotton are a loss in comparison.
I know my teaching of the industrial revolution emphasized that things were dirty, nasty, and brutal. There was exploitation of the desperate masses but it was still sadly a better alternative than being killed in a pogrom or starving to death in a famine and eventually after many lives were lost reform arose to shift the balance.
While the sort of scamming and defacto debt slavery are unacceptable - they were also unfortunately precedented, especially when desperate people are involved and it become less worth asking 'is it a scam' first.
Industrialization is a morally messy process on many levels with no comfortable answers let alone easy ones. Take something like child labor for instance - clearly it is better off to have kids learning and preparing for the coming next stage of the economy instead of toiling or risking injury. However banning it and enforcing it too early perversely leads to increased child prostitution (no pun intended for such a somber subject matter) as they still need money to survive.
> "If you have one country that can grow wheat and cotton better than their northern neighbor who can just grow wheat with lesser yield per acre..."
You're describing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage. Even if country A is worse at growing wheat than country B, it can still gain by specializing in exporting wheat to country B... so long as it's even worse at making other goods.
There is an advantage, the advantage is that you don't have to pay the full cost of their labor, you can offset it onto the workers so the price you pay is lower, looking like a savings.
The pedagogues might not have been clued in, but their masters certainly knew. If Jim Crow didn't make it abundantly clear, Norbert Wiener spelled it out again in 1950:
"Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor."
That was a comment on the perils of mechanization/automatization, not globalization:
Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not
have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment
situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem
a pleasant joke. (...) Thus the new industrial revolution is a two-edged
sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but
only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period
in which such a benefit is possible. It may also be used
to destroy humanity, and if it is not used intelligently
it can go very far in that direction. There are, however,
hopeful signs on the horizon. Since the publication of
the first edition of this book, I have participated in two
big meetings with representatives of business management, and I have been delighted to see that awareness
on the part of a great many of those present of the
social dangers of our new technology and the social
obligations of those responsible for management to see
that the new modalities are used for the benefit of man,
for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life,
rather than merely for profits and the worship of the
machine as a new brazen calf.
Bingo. Externalities make it sound like just a cost of doing business, which in a hyper capitalist system, the exploitation of human beings is exactly that...
Strictly focusing on minimizing risk to life imo leads to practices that neglect quality of life. Imagine if keeping your baby isolated at night meant that later in her life she would have trouble trusting the world and would as a result be handicapped when it comes to making and keeping healthy relationships. That's what some folks believe will happen.
The constant skin to skin contact between baby and mom from cosleeping and breastfeeding is believed by some psychologists to contribute to baby's healthy psychological development. Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.
We coslept with our first and are now doing it with our 2nd who is still a newborn. We're 3 weeks in and are already close to getting enough sleep each night.
> Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.
It's fun to watch my 1 year old son roll around in his sleep and check to see if mom is there and then roll around around or do an arm swing and feel if I am there all without waking up too much. At first it seemed random and then I noticed the pattern. He was checking if we are still there, it's like a background task running in "low power mode", probably baked in by evolution a long long time ago.
My wife and I did that, sandwiching our little guy between us, but we put a down comforter over ourselves so his fat little arms would go flumpf in the down as he verified our presence. That allowed us to replace ourselves with big pillows after he fell asleep. He would whack those comforter-covered pillows flumpf, flumpf to make sure we were still there, and we'd be downstairs watching a movie!
My 2 year old does this too every night, uses his arms and legs to feel us. And if it gets a bit cold, tries to cozy up into one of us - feels super awesome.
In the morning, he remains asleep till at least one of us is in bed, as soon as we both are out of the bed, he wakes up.
When he finds you does he squeeze you a bit? That's my son's thing. Waves the arm, makes contact, squeezes and pinches for a while... Then back to sleep. It's nice.
We have a 2 year old and 6 month old twins. Been co-sleeping since our oldest was 3 or 4 months old. We tried doing the separate room thing with the twins and it was just a nightmare of sleepless nights. Moved them into our bed after Christmas and things got much better. So much easier to just roll over half-awake to calm a baby down.
Also ditto on the oddness of wanting to isolate babies in a different room when everyone is sleeping. One of the things I look forward to most is getting to sleep next to my kids every night, even if I'm busy during the day and don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like to.
That's very weird. Thanks for sharing. Also, you absolutely cannot lump cosleeping with a toddler in with cosleeping in with cosleeping with a baby. The baby people do it because they want to avoid waking up and walking into another room to feed many times per night. With a toddler, there is no good reason.
Um, where are you getting that from? It makes the toddler happier and more comforted, and in this case (and probably most cases) the parent also.
And, even though a toddler or young child won't tend to wake up as much as a baby, they still do a lot — bad dreams, loud noises, earthquakes, etc. — and having a parent right there next to them is a lot different than not. It can be the difference between them going right back to sleep or sitting up and screaming and then being wide awake for an hour.
See all the studies linked in this thread. The only reason people do it is to try to get past the hard phase of sleep training your child. Those who give up end up co-sleeping, and will regret it later.
Sorry, that's nuts. That might be why many Americans do it, but most of the world does it by choice, and virtually nobody regrets it. And once your children are beyond the infant stage where there is some (as TFA notes, sub-lightning-strike) danger, there is none.
It sounds shitty when you don't actually have kids, but once you have them and try it, it's just kind of like oh, I see. It is self-evidently great for the kids, and it also doesn't really limit your adult life much (you can just get up when they are asleep, and come back when you're sleepy).
Anyway, avoiding training babies to sleep alone certainly not "the only reason people do it", or even a reason most people do it (although it does have that benefit).
I have kids. It's still shitty. Many people who have tried both agree. You are trying to justify how it's not that bad to artificially pretend to sleep until they fall asleep, at which point you continue to go about your business. That's a huge nuisance, and describing it as anything but doesn't make sense.
The rest of the world does it because living conditions typically dictate it, since you aren't living in a large house in the backgroundt area.
I get it, you don't like putting your kids to bed. That's fine, but most parents really don't find it to be a "huge nuisance", and certainly not when measured against the backdrop of all the other crap you have to do when you have kids.
So I really doubt that most parents, even in America, would find it "very weird" that war1025 sleeps with his young children. (You don't have to "artificially pretend to sleep", by the way, you can just tell them a story or read your own stuff, or whatever... even just tell them goodnight and you'll be back later).
It's actually very normal, in a lot of the world, and also objectively less annoying than many things most parents do every day. (For instance, I certainly find driving my kids to school in the morning a hell of a lot more annoying than anything bedtime/sleep related.)
I'm not saying you personally have to do it, or enjoy it, just that it comes off pretty strange to characterize such a routine parental activity as going to bed with your baby/kids as a "very weird, shitty, huge nuisance"...
An oddly condescending comment. If you read my post again, you will see that we are both types of terrible co-sleeping parents. Both lazy and without good reason.
Maybe you missed it, but we also have 6 month old twins who are co-sleeping with us. We sleep on a futon-style floor bed, and the toddler moved herself to another floor bed next to ours of her own accord just a week or two ago.
Anyway, we're used to people thinking our parenting tactics are odd. Works for us.
In Japan, co-sleeping is extremelly common, even until the kids are 6 or 7.
The fact that families tend to sleep in futon instead of beds make it even more convenient, because you can just lay out a bunch of futon on the floor at night for all the kids.
Another cosleeper here. Besides the benefit to the child, it was also amazing to get a full night’s sleep. When the baby was hungry my wife just had to roll over and help it latch on, then go right back to sleep while feeding. That might not be “sleeping through the night”, technically, but it was just as good from our perspective.
> I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.
Frankly my wife and I were glad of sleeping apart from our baby. Humans might be social but that doesn't mean we want to spend 24 hours a day with baby or toddler.
