It’s going to be more and more difficult for nation states to continue imposing taxes on their citizens, as competition for tax havens heat up, and as leaks like this erode public trust.
Nation states that rely on taxation to finance operations will eventually be outcompeted.
Nations don’t reproduce, of course, unlike living things, but their influence is memetic and their ability to coerce citizens is a function of their ability to coerce the wealthiest of the world.
And increasingly, both are at historically low numbers.
The absolute kicker might come when it’s not just difficult to coerce the wealthiest to pay taxes, but difficult to coerce anybody, because crypto makes tax avoidance easy as pie.
This is similar to vaccine hesitancy & lockdown compliance in US & UK.
“One rule for them, one rule for the rest of us” will lead to mass defection, overwhelming the state’s capacity to enforce.
Eventually the status quo will break the way that elites are already behaving.
Taxation is as much a social contract as it is law.
Realistically, it would be impossible for any state to have the capacity to enforce tax avoidance en masse.
Once collective belief in that social contract is eroded, there’s probably no going back.
Whether you think taxation is “good” or “bad” doesn’t matter, just like how it didn’t matter if you thought whether religion was “good” or “bad” in Europe before the Enlightenment.
Social norms that are broken by those who enforce them will be unlikely to persist.*
*Unless those that enforce them develop sufficient state capacity to do so, preventing defection. This means that nations like China and North Korea will likely be able to continue doing so for a time, and the USA will for a time, too.
I’m not sure how this will affect international relations, but it’s likely this means Western democratic nations will decline in their influence. This is of course a bit scary because their military might is what’s challenging China & Russia right now.
Hopefully the military that will inevitably get defunded by Western democratic states will have its slack picked up by private citizens or smaller city-states and we’ll be able to tip the scale of military might away from totalitarian control.
It might not be a bad thing that military power becomes less concentrated in a few powerful nations, and more evenly spread out across the globe. That’s the optimistic case though. 🤞
This is already all playing out. China’s already outright banned cryptocurrency. Smaller nations like El Salvador & Panama are trying to divest their economies from reliance on USD.
Let’s see where this goes. This is an interesting time to be alive for sure. 😬
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My take is that religion’s role is to provide the necessary metaphors in order for individuals to navigate complex situations where being “good” isn’t clear.
We now have science to help us navigate these complex situations, but what is considered “good” is still up for debate.
Each deity worshipped functions as a vehicle through which these metaphors are told.
Religions started out with tales featuring many deities. This has trended downwards, from polytheism to monotheism to religions without deity figures, to pop culture references, to memes.
I’m not sure why it’s trended downwards, but my take is that deities as characters in these metaphorical tales makes for an unstable configuration as to the internal consistency of each metaphor.
But personifying values helps them spread easily via oral traditions.
Why is “taste” in something commonly framed as a linear scale?
i.e. “good taste”, “poor taste”
It’s a framing that I personally struggle with, for lack of a more fitting frame.
For example, you liked a show or a restaurant that has poor reviews. Do you have poor taste?
There is definitely a “better” ↔ “worse” dimension to taste, but perhaps a differrent dimension involves the person’s affinity to different tastes.
The people who didn’t like it are clearly more discerning than you about various aspects that you didn’t care about.
So back to the original example.
If you liked a show that had poor reviews, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have poor taste. It could mean that you don’t value aspects of it that others value, and you can accept those aspects even if they are of poor taste.
Perhaps the reason why interoperability is often more of a pipe dream (literally, as you pipe data manually from one API to another) than reality, is that it’s hard to truly capture value from a standard or a protocol. It’s easier to extract value from a platform or an app.
We see this in crypto. Ethereum, as a platform, will always be worth more than Polygon, Polkadot, or Chainlink.
We also see this with the web, where standards & protocols are subsidized by platform owners (Google, Apple, Microsoft).
We also see this in the smart home / IoT space. Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa are competing standards subsidized by the owners of their respective platforms. The money is made from the hub devices each company sells.
But the list of directions aren’t a map. They’re meant to be overlaid atop a map to make any sense.
Where is the actual map? Most companies don’t have them or even the tools to make one.
@johncutlefish@jimhead@intercom The insidious thing about calling that list of directions a 'map' is that everyone assumes the actual territory is implicitly known and well-understood, not to mention some the suspension of disbelief that for the “next quarter” the territory doesn’t shift as you navigate.
People like to demo multiplayer work tech to show small groups of people doing synchronous work together.
But the value of multiplayer spaces is allowing big groups of people to collaborate asynchronously on an ever-evolving artifact. oculus.com/experiences/qu…
With the ability to jump in and out. Bursts of activity.
Occasionally, collaborators overlap resulting in momentary synchronous collaboration.
An async model with smart synchronous conflict resolution means you get Git without merge conflicts.
The assumption that work happens only synchronously is dangerous.
Synchronous-only tools (like this Oculus app, video conferencing tools, or chat) encourage a high-presence, “interruptions and context switching is good”, low-time-preference culture.