It’s when you consider problems like air traffic control (ATC) on a busy continent that practical problems with libertarianism become apparent. It’s a tightly synchronized federated architecture (ie a network of locally centralized entities) that’s hard to “libertarianize”
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There have been technical proposals over last 20 years for distributed ATC protocols (planes coordinating directly with each other) requiring low or zero ground control elements. After all birds fly around without ATCs. The problem is transitioning to such systems.
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The existing solution is decades old, with a lot of metis (tacit knowledge) accumulated over the years. Switching away from it is 1000x harder than switching away from the QWERTY keyboard. It’s about as hard as switching regular money to crypto. Doable in principle, cost unclear.
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Recipe: take some snazzy cutting-edge decentralized ATC ideas (for eg like news.engin.umich.edu/2018/11/decent), throw in AlphaGo to mine all the metis from historical records, re-solve it better starting from blank slate like AlphaGoZero, download to all your planes/drones, fire all ATCs.
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You can imagine the end state: no ATCs at all. Planes and airlines do it all in decentralized software, government gets out of the act, tickets cost a bit more to pay for it all, taxes go down more, everybody wins. The Lords Koch are happy, 1 step closer to night-watchman state.
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Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could have software, decentralization, and blockchain eat ALL government functions this way? Nothing for governments to do, nothing to be shut down. Ayn Rand smiles down from her place in insane heaven.
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Replying to
I realize this thread is about the shutdown, but I think your collapse complete theory is too pessimistic. Mars colonization is going to enable a testbed for modern civilization with a fresh start. We'll adopt Martian improvements after they've failed a time or two.
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Replying to
Well, 2119 is just a stepping stone. I've got goals... But for now, sleep!
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