thinking about society rn consider the following
-
-
if I owned the building I would have taken a moment to dispose of the grease properly I currently rent, but one month ago I still would have put it in the trash unfortunately, in the ensuring period, my landlord violated an implicit element of our contract: "don't be a dick"
Show this thread -
there are still elements of the building that I am incentivized to care about because they are protected by my deposit or by explicit terms of the lease, but because the landlord Defected this is the limit to which I am willing to big-c Cooperate
Show this thread -
and this is bad for both of us, because the cost of replacing the pipes in the building is far greater than the $25 the landlord strong armed from me; and I was happy to pay epsilon seconds to not degrade the property in exchange for not being strongarmed https://twitter.com/_djpn/status/1387940764278149120?s=19 …
This Tweet is unavailable.Show this thread -
why would the landlord do this? well frankly he has no idea who I am, no context for my rental history, and apparently no bandwidth to read his fucking emails he's operating at scale and impersonally. for him this was Tuesday
Show this thread -
anyway generalizing, it seems to me that scaled organizations necessarily have a difficult time adhering to implicit contractual terms when interacting with individuals firms employ managers to facilitate this and the best managers keep firms and employees Cooperating
Show this thread -
nonlocal governments however struggle here. most individuals mean nothing to them until they stop paying taxes or become Inconvenient, and their main mode of interfacing is rigid bureaucracy do you enjoy calls from the FBI or the IRS?
Show this thread -
so basically a major problem of government is cultivating a relationship with its citizens that is Cooperative to avoid these contracting problems
Show this thread -
governments can do this by not imposing hateful terms, by keeping its operation as local as possible, by keeping the contract space predictable and limited, and by cultivating a sense of shared intetest and identity
Show this thread -
noting all of this it seems like (i) representative governments probably have advantages over nonrepresentative, (ii) the US really has probably fucked up by nationalizing and bureaucratizing everything instead of keeping most operation small scale and devolved to localities
Show this thread -
tldr today im mad about the twentieth century thanks for listening
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.