Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy | Hacker News Reader

Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy

stanfordreview.org

There is a good book whose title and author are eluding me for the moment that examines the necessity of a frontier for freedom. Freedom requires the ability to up and move into an area that is a challenge for the nearest power to control, regulate, and abuse. That is the only meaningful check on the power of the sedentary bandits that become a region's elite.

Historically, this has all been geography. But going forward, there is the opportunity to do something new with technology and section off slices of economic activity into reaches that while existing in the same geographic location as a centralized state are prohibitively expensive to control for its bureaucrats and enforcers.

The malaise of the modern world is, I think, in large part due to the shrinking of frontiers. There is little of the world left that is easily colonized but also hard for the major players to reach into, and so the states become ever more grasping. There is no safety valve by which people can up and peacefully revolt with their feet in large numbers, and that won't return until the cost of getting into orbit falls dramatically.

Meanwhile, there is cryptography.

> Freedom requires the ability to up and move into an area that is a challenge for the nearest power to control, regulate, and abuse.

You're so right. Just read about the horrendous abuses committed by Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic children in Iraq. And this in an area that was one of the cradles of civilization, many millennia ago. WTF happened in the meantime?

Life in ancient Mesopotamia was at least as violent as life under Saddam Hussein or the current Iraqi government[1]. It was likely preceded by a succession of violent thugs (aka rulers) back to the dawn of humanity. If only the historical record was better you could probably trace the legitimacy of most governments back to some Neolithic caveman beating another caveman into submission.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130425-indus...

History is written by winners.

The problem therein is that the winners are usually those who, after a prolonged conflict, stand on top of the highest pile of bodies. If they are smart enough, they will then start to purge the records from the worst atrocities. Maybe not to make themselves seem more benevolent than they are, but perhaps to prevent anyone from fully documenting the amount of force and brutality necessary to become a winner.

After all, if you know how to win in a game where the only move to win is to cheat, why would you leave the most succesful instructions lying around?

Or under German occupation the french resistance where called terrorists. The one who wins gets to select his perspective of the events.

You do know that the story of the soccer coach in the plastic shredder was made-up? Also, no babies were hurled from incubators in Kuwait. I have no idea how bad a man he was in fact, but the facts are now muddied by a lot of professionally crafted lies, like about WMDs, meant to justify an invasion. He was also a friend of America. He was secular and progressive. Until it was time to have a war.

Both of those images of Hussein were created for us to shape our opinions. Which do you like to believe? What are the actual facts?

It's of course hard to know "the actual facts". As another commenter here reminded us, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

It's not one person, it's an entire brutal regime that operated in Iraq. I remember reading some stories, but don't have links saved. But the stories are so numerous and so "over the top" that it's probably not just "a lot of professionally crafted lies". There's probably a lot of truth there.

So I did a quick search. The Guardian [1] (leftist rag recently giving us the Snowden revelations) had this to say about Uday, one of Saddam Hussein's sons, in the lead paragraph in a story in 2003:

   Uday: career of rape, torture and murder

   He was a monster even by the standards of
   Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a sadist with a taste
   for cruelty so extreme that even his father
   was forced to acknowledge that his first-born
   son would not be a worthy heir.

Uday and Qusay pretty much got to do as they pleased in Iraq. At least until they suffered from a terminal case of acute lead poisoning.

I was never very enthusiastic about how jingoistic the US was vis a vis Iraq in the runup to the 2003 invasion. But ridding the gene pool of a few of these miscreants can't be such a bad thing.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/23/iraq.suzannegol...

I'm curious why Antarctica isn't more of a frontier? Or the high seas?

The high seas are a frontier. See Sealand or Somalia. The seas are largely a lawless system where waste dumping, flying under flags of convenience and even piracy are fairly common practice. Which, of course, raises the issue with "frontiers". They are often very free, but also very dangerous.

Antartica's not really a "frontier" in this sense. It's protected and policed by international treaty. It's also cold, which keeps people from squatting on it.

Some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/shipbreakers/gwin-...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/sealand-and-haven...

It's amazing how many problems are solved when a market accounts for just the two factors mentioned in the article: quality and scamsters.

Maybe it's just my browser, but my goodness that font is hard to read. I'm sure the article is quite interesting, but it's beyond my ability.

cala-light, embedded as a webfont. You can go into web inspector and delete that font in the css, turning it back into whatever the default serif is.

Cala-light does look more readable at sane font sizes, but although I'm not a typography expert, its kerning looks bad. e.g. the letter spacing in the word "charging" on the first line, or the sequence "rr" or "oin" just to name a few.

Thank you for reminding me of this option.

The height of some of the characters, such as t and i, are giving me more trouble than the kerning, even at "sane" font sizes. Words like "contentious" end up so flattened I'm doing double takes on half the words, having misread them. As chrome renders them, words like "to" have height going the wrong way outright, with the t appearing shorter, not taller, than the o!

Seldom have I seen a serious site that would be improved by switching to Comic Sans and Papyrus, but here one is.

At 150-200% zoom it's more legible.

I'm not shilling for Evernote, but some of the comments here suggest that not everyone is familiar with browser plugins like Clearly: http://evernote.com/clearly

Couldn't imagine reading log articles on the web without it. It amazes me that 90% of all content-based sites are not designed for simply reading.

It's what happens when you let print designers design a web page.

I must be missing the actual argument that supports the headline, "Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy". If the claim is that governments cannot keep up with technology, I would hardly call that a cure. That's a workaround.

Pretentious undergrad writing + "cryptography" = heavy bro!!