nickpp

Plenty of communist experiments ran unimpeded (a few are even running right now) and they pretty much all had the same predictable miserable ends.

Oh, and to address your earlier point:

> you fine fellow serfs have made this a fertile land for discussion

Yes, the community is where the value is. But we all congregated here and not on some free and open-source place somewhere else on the Internet. So there must also be some value added by the creators and maintainers of this place, value we recognized and built upon.

> a manifesto inspired by the fascist manifesto

This is literally not true.

Anybody who tried has starved to death or needed a bloody revolution to get rid of their dictator and his nomenklatura.

So it looks to me like the only thing they all have in common is the root word "to accelerate" - otherwise they are completely different ideologies.

I thought Varoufakis stepped down in 2015 (after only half a year) and Greece's debt crisis continued until around 2018?!

None of your examples have anything to do with fascism.

You sound like Putin saying Ukrainians are Nazi because they vote for the west, reject his occupation and fight for their land. What?!

> ad hominem fallacy

It's not ad hominem to judge a critic's own track record in order to measure the weight of his words. Otherwise we'd end up listening to any little trust fund ideologues with no actual idea about how the world really works, like Marx.

> What do you mean "how are you going to do that"?

I mean that in order to regulate a technology you normally would develop it first, to see how it's used. EU (where I am unfortunately residing) just reached an agreement to regulate AI without any AI products originally developed here at all!

Previously they made practically illegal to develop other charging standards than USB-C.

This is "the strawman" I am talking about: regulating emerging tech into oblivion out of fear something bad may come out of it.

> the FDA

Same FDA that regulated insulin so hard they gave a practical monopoly to a producer who promptly then decided to jack up the prices? The drug prices in US are so high, buying trips to Mexico and Canada come out cheaper. This is what happens when you decimate competition.

You see a few dangers narrowly avoided by the FDA, like thalidomide, but you never see the millions dead because life-saving drugs stay tens of years in approval limbo or never get developed in the first place.

> Nobody is asking to live in the perfect nanny state

Are you sure? Because that is where the EU is clearly headed. Have you forgotten the pandemic and its unspeakable abuses? Can't you see the ever accumulating regulations? Can't you hear people asking more and more from the state to intervene while politicians are more than happy to promise anything for votes? That is why I am into e/acc.

> to adjust the style of life

In what direction? Most of the world is only now slowly achieving the lifestyle of a middle-class Westerner in the 50s. If you think that these people are going to accept a downgrade from that, from their "dream", you are deluding yourself. One painful lessons communists learn was that human nature doesn't change and people are competitive and selfish.

> Nuclear was a missed opportunity

It wasn't the only one: GMOs and stem cells also come to mind.

> let's fund the sciences, let's make higher education accessible, let's share the bounty

I believe pretty much the same things, but we disagree on the means. I believe the way to get them is the only proven value-creation mechanism, the one that pulled mankind out of dirt: free-market capitalism.

> what is the [...] point here? That allowing VC money to do whatever it wants is going to accelerate this trend of progress?

The opposite, actually: that putting any brake on technological development (even if for completely great intentions) will delay that trend of progress to the point of endangering our survival as a species - simply because history shows us that technology is a net positive and we need every single bit of that progress to solve certain urgent civilization-ending dangers.

And how are you gonna do that? Not even the very inventors of technology can predict how it’s gonna be used (especially for bad) and by whom. Are you gonna have a committee of bureaucrats who never invented anything in their life come in and promise they will protect you from any possible downside? And are you gonna believe them?

How exactly are “neofascists using technology to further and further tighten their grip on power and undermine our democratic institutions”?!

> Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues

Maybe Varoufakis should try creating an Amazon instead of writing some book and running Greece’s economy into the ground.

We are serfs for even commenting here, by the way. This site is owned (and created) by the technofeudalists who founded YC, not by Mr Varoufakis. So what brings you here, serf on their property, if you don’t see any value in it? They are certainly not putting a gun to your head just like Amazon is not making you shop there.

> Elsewhere millions starve and freeze. Elsewhen uncountable numbers of humans have suffered and died.

Only millions out of 8 billions? But that is incredible progress! It used to be that not many millenia ago every single human on earth was starving and freezing. And everybody's fate was to suffer and die.

Today we have the lowest percent of humanity living in poverty ever. No, not everybody is saved, and technology has not create a paradise, but it is so much better than where we started from, we can't even compare.

> is religion, not science

And so is doomerism. I guess having fate in anything (even science and progress) can be seen like a religion. But my "religion" has delivered and is promissing to deliver more. What have other "religions" done for us?

> we can't even resolve the simple issues around our climate today

Actually we had the tech to avoid global warming since the 60's. It's called nuclear energy. It was fear and doomerism that prevented us from using it in the first place and brought us to our current situation. And now the same people who pushed us into this corner are trying their best to prevent us from finding solutions.

No, it's just stronger than the opposing point: that there exists such a potentially negative technology that it's worth freezing/delaying our technological development to avoid it.

> it's extremely difficult (if even possible) to assign "scores" to the outcomes of all technologies

On the contrary, it's quite easy to judge the outcome of technological development for our species: it's about 4 billion years after first microorganisms emerged on our planet and we are having this conversation while thousands of miles apart, in the comfort of our homes, with our bellies full, well clothed, sheltered and without anybody trying to eat us. Nature left us naked in the freezing rain in a eat-or-be-eaten world. Everything else comes from technology. In a word: amazing.

> we haven't wiped out our species

We also understood the laws of the Universe and used them build rockets and supercomputers.

> My personal cosmology is that death is natural, normal, and good.

It's every individual's right to embrace a death cult. But as a civilization we can't. We have to evolve and grow beyond the tiny pocket of the Universe where we emerged, before some cosmic cataclysm (or ourselves) wipes us out. We owe it to our ancestors and our children.

> extremely dubious assumption

I personally don't know any technology that overall was a net negative.

I agree, we could happen run across one in the future, but so far history is on our side. Also, don't forget that our species's default fate is dire. Statistically speaking our civilisation is highly likely to end where is began: on this planet.

Technology is the only change we got to change this dreadful default fate awaiting us.

I am quite sure people were able to come up with plenty of downsides when fire was discovered too (accidents, usage as weapon, burning whole fields, forests and even dwellings), but most of us can now agree it was a net positive for mankind.

> associations of the term "accelrationism" with the extremes of the political spectrum

Care to elaborate? I am completely unaware of these associations.

It's a simple but powerful idea: since any new tech comes with good and bad but overall there is more good than bad - we are better off accelerating adoption to outrun doomers who'd rather have the whole humankind stagnate than risk the potential bad.

> make me very deeply uncomfortable

Especially when thinking that we ourselves may very well be AIs in a simulation and our life events - the prompt to get an answer/behavior out of us.

Cost. Cost is what you are forgetting. Yes - we try to reduce risk as much as we can but the more we protect ourselves the more expensive that is until the last little part it's costs everything.

How many resources are you willing to allocate to limit and control dangers and risks instead of using them for your kids, education or maybe simple enjoyment of life? What percent of your income are you willing to give those who promise that risk-reduction and how can you measure that they lived up to their promise?

> fails miserably to account for human behavior.

Agreed - the only system I know of that takes human behavior into consideration is capitalism and free markets.

> ARPANET [...] CERN

You do realize that the Internet is not just a set of protocols, right? It's people, services and companies all coming together in this amazing web. How do you think that happened? Who brought them here?

There is a long distance from Arpanet and Cern to Johnny getting his Tiktok fix on his smartphone. And it took a lot of private money and initiative for this to happen. Nobody's denying DoD's role in funding the basic protocols Internet relies on, but compared to what was added on top of that since then - it's a tiny contribution, to be honest.

Have you driven a Lada car? Drunk a Soviet pop soda? Worn some commie clothes? I did and I can tell you that until you do, you have no idea what “shitty” is.

You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.

Please point out the “better” not profit-driven computer, website and network you find less “shitty”.

Also hope I will not lose my consciousness in the middle of the desert where there is no hospital. Yes, there are risks in life and you cannot protect yourself from every possible danger. Life is harsh.

> The profit motive does not select for high quality products

Simply not true. Under communism, where the profit motive was outlawed, we had the absolut crappiest and worst products. While in the west, capitalism and free markets were spoiling people for choice.

> it assumes everyone has perfect knowledge

Nobody says that. Free markets are actually the best mechanism to deal with situations in which participants have partial/imperfect knowledge.

> I don't need to do a ton of research about what drugs I'm taking

I do, and I recommend all do. Just the other week my ear doctor gave me a prescription for an antibiotic that had as a side effect a significant chance of ligament fracture. I went back and he changed it to a milder, less aggressive medicine.

> put their trust in a profit-driven company's hands

Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.

> Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive

Healthcare is far from being the only essential good that I have to buy to survive. It's a merchandise like any other - the market rules still apply. Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for. That's what I use in countless other domains as well: car emergency assistance, travel emergency, etc.

AT&T's monopoly was definitely government-granted: there was even a law forbidding users to install their own 3rd party telephone receiver "to protect the AT&T network"!

I am not familiar with the other 2 cases but I wouldn't be surprised if it was, again, government-granted or not an actual monopoly. Think about it, it's logical: why wouldn't competing startups attack a monopolized market? It's ripe for disruption, after all.

Monopolies can arise on the free market but unfettered competition will always defeat them.

> purely as a free market

Who said anything about purely free markets?! Markets are indeed over regulated around the world today. More so in Europe, than in the US, explaining why EU is lagging behind economically further and further. But much less so at the beginning of the last century where a tremendous amount of wealth and building got done in a very short time.

The truth is staring us in the face: the more we regulate (no matter how good the reason is), the higher the costs and delays. Culminating with the three broken markets of today: healthcare, education and housing.

> history is full of evidence

Please feel free to provide some then. The historical evidence I know (USSR and such) shows that countries that killed their free markets were unable to even feed their own citizens.

> Healthcare industry as we know it today did not exist back then

Not true - it always existed (with different costs and treatments of course) and it was rather developed and affordable in the '50s and beginning of '60s before government intervention started in the earnest.

> Not really or only in a very superficial way and extremely basic way

Why and how? Feel free to expand and provide some examples.

> this is almost entirely an American problem

Not true. Health care and education are quite expensive in all developed countries, including where they are paid from our tax money then offered to us "for free".

> extensive regulation has kept costs relatively low and accessibility at very high levels.

How does that even work? I never heard of a regulation able to lower prices. Price controls only create shortages. Swiss private healthcare is quite expensive, but the competition on their (relatively) free market is keeping the costs from exploding even more.