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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

That literally already exists and nobody uses it. Gnutella. Jabber. Tor. IPFS. Mastodon. The Entire Fucking IPv4/IPv6 Address Space And Every Layer Built On Top Of It. (if you don't think the internet is p2p, you don't understand how it works)

You know what else we need? We need food to be free. We need medicine to be free, especially medicines which end epidemics and transmissible disease. We need education to be free. We need to end homelessness. We need to end pollution. We need to end nationalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism. We need freedom of speech, religion, print, association. We need to end war.

There are a lot of things we as a society need. But we can't even make "p2p internet" work, and we already have it. (And please just forget the word 'distributed', because it's misleading you into thinking it's a transformative idea, when it's not)

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I don't think we need for food to be free, we just need it to be accessible to everyone.

Every family should be provided with a UBI that covers food and rent (not in the city). That is a more attainable goal and would solve the same problems (better, in fact).

(Not saying that UBI is a panacea, but I've lived in countries that have experimented with such and it seems the best of the alternatives)

I do not think free is attainable for everything due to thermodynamics constraints. Imagine "free energy". Everybody uses as much as they want, Earth heats up, things go bad (not far from what is actually happening!).

I would settle for simpler, attainable things. Equal opportunity for next generation. Quality education for everybody. Focus on merit not other characteristics. Personal freedom if it does not infringe on the freedom of people around you (ex: there can't be such thing as a "freedom to pollute").

In my view Internet as p2p worked pretty well to improve the previous status quo in many areas (not all). But there will never be a "stable solution", life and humans are dynamic. We do have some good and free stuff on the Internet today because of the groundwork laid out 30 years ago by the open source movement. Any plan started today will have noticeable effect in many years. So "we can't even make" sounds more of an excuse to not start, rather than an honest take.

> Equal opportunity for next generation.

What does this mean? I suppose it can't literally mean equal opportunity, because people aren't equal, and their circumstances aren't equal; but then, what does this mean?

A clear definition is definitively hard to come by, but I will share what I see as rather large issues that impact society: minimal spending per children for education to allow a good service for most (this will imply that smart kids are selected and become productive as opposed to drop out because they had nobody to learn from); reasonable health availability for children such that they can develop rather than being sick; sufficient food for children to support the first two (can't learn or be healthy if you are hungry).

Currently I know in many countries multiple measures/rules/policies that affect these 3 things in ways that I find damaging for the society overall on the long term. Companies complain they don't have work forces, governments complain the natality is low but there are many issues with raising a child. Financial incentives to parents do not seem to work (for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612)

We already have excesses of everything needed to provide for people's basic needs for no extra cost. We have excess food, excess land for housing, and we already pay for free emergency services, which actually costs us much more than if we fixed problems before they became emergencies. (And if there were a need for extra cost, we have massive wealth inequality that can be adjusted, not to mention things like massive military budgets and unfair medical pricing)

We do have resources inefficiently allocated (too much accumulation towards one end of the scale), but "shifting" those to the rest will have its challenges, people are complex and sometimes unreasonable (for example: there is housing available but people prefer living badly in a place where they feel they have a chance at some point to live better - big cities usually - rather than villages with few opportunities)

I feel that saying "we have the resources" ignores the difficulty of allocating them better, which is the hardest part. Compared to 20 years ago we have amazing software tools and hardware capabilities, and still many large projects fail - it's not because they don't have the resources...

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