It takes no effort at all to see that CA HSR is an unmitigated disaster. It takes much more effort to figure out a coherent policy common denominator that shames CA for outsourcing the project to consultants while praising OWS for doing the same.
Klein notes that one project is a dismal failure and the other a stunning success. Both are true statements, and there's really nothing you can say to make that not true. The idea that there's a single coherent set of policy prescriptions that gets you reliably to the successes and away from the failures is exactly the thing Klein doesn't claim to be offering --- in fact, you open your review by complaining about exactly that.
I've asked before and you didn't answer: can you identify anything in the book that Klein and Thompson are wrong about? Are we doing better deploying transportation than we think? Should we be more careful about where to site wind and solar, not less? Do we lean too heavily on private industry in the development of vaccines?
A positive vision of the outcomes of a Democratic coalition that focuses on demonstrating competence and a willingness to build to suit the needs of its constituents: housing affordability in blue states, clean energy, modern transportation systems, new vaccines, &c.
I think you'd get near-universal agreement that some regulations somewhere are ineffective and/or counterproductive. If that's all the book is attempting to achieve, it's an extremely modest goal IMO.
The problem is getting that same level of agreement about specific regulations - or, failing that, making a strong case for a specific reason why a regulation that many people think is necessary and good is actually bad. But Klein and Thompson, for the most part, avoid doing this.
The book identifies a problem that you yourself agree with: the Democratic coalition can't build anything, can't satisfy the needs of its constituents, is losing those constituents to Republican states that can, and is losing the faith of the electorate. It also offers a diagnosis (or rather, a set of them): the unintended consequences of localism, a legislative and regulatory system that oriented more than checking boxes with every faction of the coalition than having coherent goals like "house people" or "deploy clean energy", and an unwillingness of the coalition to revisit the decisions of previous generations in light of current challenges.
Do you think any of these diagnoses are wrong? Or are you just bored by them?
He's just asking what are the specific proposals that should be enacted... That's it...
Like know that you've read the book which exact law has to be passed / destroyed to increase housing supply... Without causing mass civil unrest... Which law has to be passed to get the high speed rail build in the next 3 years... Without destroying nature / being routed through poor people's home under eminent domain and not through some rich ass hole with the right connections...
He's coming at if from his pov that he's aware of the problem but is looking for solutions... Which the author's don't give...
The problem is that human made laws deal with... Human beings... And hence with game theory...
So the intent of the law != Outcome of the law.
If you just throw away the law without considering Chesterton's fence etc you are probably throwing away the baby with the bathwater... And to fix it perfectly is basically impossible as it always is in complex matters... (if it was possible ie there wouldn't be accountants who can save millions/billions for cooperations...)
The book is describing problems that a lot of people, especially on this forum, are well aware off. However instead of saying - we need to do this, or even proposing a wiki/forum/whatever to specifically fix all those individual problems/ laws it just repeats what a lot of people are already aware off in a long spun out book.
Best other book I can think of that is similar in a way (and a best seller) is thinking fast and slow with the end conclusion being ~~~ eeeuhm there is no actual way to fix your thinking but hey maybe being aware off the 2 systems might help even though we've said this whole time that it doesn't really work.
So yeah, what specific solutions have you found in this book?
If you agree that there aren't any... Maybe you just were looking for A and got A and he was hoping to get B and only got A ?
He's saying it's a problem book instead of a solution book and you are repeating but yes it's a great problem book... Why does there need to be a solution book.
So maybe the marketing is at fault ?
(Anyway written at night on a phone so sorry for the badly written reply, I just noticed how you repeated more or less the same message and felt like communication was not being achieved despite lots of words being exchanged - I will clarify with a clearer head tomorrow to any reply - Hanoi time zone)
This is a weird response - that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.) I'm also a YIMBY - although, as a renter, it doesn't exactly take any moral courage.
As I state clearly in the review, I share Klein and Thompson's view of the housing issue and I called that part the strongest section of the book.
My point is that what the book calls "abundance" is an incoherent mishmash of ideologically incoherent anecdotes. It's not a policy framework and it's not an agenda. So what is it?
> that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.)
tptacek's summary seems spot on to me. It may be not what you meant to say, but it's an accurate summary of how at least 2 readers are interpreting what you're saying. You can try and blame the readers if you wish, but we're not mind readers and can only go by the words you've written on the page and the context in which you've written them.
What exactly does Marc Andreesen have to do with Klein and Thompson's advocacy for zoning reform?
The answer to your question is simple. In fact, you dance around it in your review! The politics of reform are about navigating the disagreements in the Democratic coalition. Indeed! The point of the book is to present a positive vision of what a Democratic coalition focused around an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish. The book is about the persuasive effort.
It doesn't seem plausible that you'd be so unfamiliar with Klein that you didn't know he records one of the most popular policy-driven shows in the country.
What does his podcast have to do with anything? I'm reviewing his book, not his entire bibliography.
As I stated already, the vision is incoherent. It's fine to cherrypick specific anecdotes as examples of competent governance. But if, for example, one of the stories is about how outsourcing large infrastructure projects led to its demise while doing the same for a vaccine logistics project was the cause of its success, this isn't really much of a vision at all, is it?
You say the point is to show what "an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish." So where is that agenda?
Why can't you answer the question I asked? It seems straightforward. And it's a point I made --- led off with, even --- in the original comment you replied to.
This is quite literally already explained in the review but I'll repeat it here. I used Andreessen's essay as a microcosm for the problem with Abundance: at the level of fuzzy, non-specific exhortations to "build," everyone can agree. Once you get into specifics, that's where the brass tacks are. In Andreessen's case, it means building is fine unless it's near his house. In Klein and Thompson's case, it's not even clear what they're proposing much of the time.
Is it your claim that Klein is unaware of the dynamic where people are sanguine about new housing being built anywhere but near their house? I feel like there's a name for that phenomenon. If that's not your claim, then I ask again, what was your point, other than to suggest that Klein's commitments are as artificial as Marc Andreesen's, someone who is in no way affiliated with Klein?
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
In this case, it might help to add some detail about what it is you think I may have missed.
I once read an explanation of the Fourier transformation as akin to looking at a fully blended smoothie and being able to calculate exactly how much of each ingredient went into it.
I don't profess to be a DSP expert whatsoever, but the more familiar I've become with Fourier transformations, the more apt that analogy seems. Once you grasp that all sound is just a large addition problem of many, many sine waves, the ability to distinguish between them to a fairly high degree of fidelity feels almost like magic.
This might be a weird analogy but this product feels like it recreates the NFT problem -- meaning that it's inherently self-referential and doesn't actually solve the problem it purports to.
NFTs are supposed to be an irrefutable, immutable record of ownership. But the only thing they can actually "prove" is the ownership of the NFT itself. It's like having a receipt that says "I own this receipt."
It's a similar story here: using a QR code is proof that at one point you got this QR code from qrdate.org, but it doesn't prove you didn't manipulate the image or video, in which case what value is it providing?
I think it depends much of expectations. It actually exceeded my expectations. I recently built a small and useless program in solidity and deployed it within few hours. It's definitely better than what we had available years ago (i.e. on bitcoin platform) and I see a future for it. I think it has chances to survive in this age of censorship and surveillance.
Something that really surprised me was the signing/metamask integration(a kind of webauthn). I would definitely use that to login into various websites instead of the invasive facebook/google login plugins we see all over the web. There is even something akin to oauth2 but without the requirement to have "developer keys".
Agreed (and I agree that ENS and the SSO stuff looks interesting). The problem here is that the crypto community are the ones setting the high expectations.
"Sign-In with Ethereum" will be huge. I purposefully avoid "Sign-in with Google" because putting too much power in a centralized authority terrifies me.
I'd much rather have the convenience of "Sign-In with X" but backed by something I have control over.
1. A lot more people are using Sign In With Ethereum than other kinds of signature-based auth to log into websites. The UX, while not perfect, is a lot more figured out.
2. SIWE lets the user share a cryptographically verified shared state of the user. For example, digital asset collections, reputation in a group etc.
Isn’t sign in with U2F exactly the same guarantees and issues? (Cryptographically proven pseudonymous identities, but no recourse if you lose your keys)
A key "ah-ha" moment for me was realizing that your wallet is your login on every dApp that's ever existed or ever will exist. It's pseudonymous and developers sort of get various things for free out of it as a result(payments, authorization, authentication)
There's also the potentially interesting idea of wallet-as-resume. IE allowing different types of access depending on what sorts of things you've done with your wallet in the past. Certainly not for all applications, but a certain level of implied competency might be appropriate in some cases.
I've heard that one before... I've yet to hear a "how is it better" set down in a way that describes the architecture in a way that can be explored with more than handwavium.
How does "wallet as resume" solve the implied competency better than a GitHub repo with signed commits?
How does the wallet-as-resume solve the "I copied a project" or "I followed the tutorial line for line?" One can create a NFT or whatever equivalent for code you wrote just as easily as code you copied (be it with cp or typing it all in yourself). Can only one person would be verify a particular implementation of FizzBuzz? If the code is copied, can the original author usurp the "I wrote this" from a pretender?
Does anyone reading resumes actually think that this is a problem that needs solving?
"Service X preemptively bans me because I signed up for service Y with my wallet" sounds like the opposite of censorship resistance and decentralization.
It should be possible for each person to create multiple digital identities and have them linked using zero-knowledge proofs. If we can solve the messy problem of giving everyone (arbitrarily many uncensorable pseudonymous) IDs with their own key pairs, it should be relatively simple to layer on top of that all the functionality and privacy guarantees we would want from an ID system.
For example, once a reasonable digital ID system exists, we can start to build trust systems, such that your good reputation among one community can be used to bootstrap your reputation in a new community. Again, zero-knowledge proofs should be a viable mechanism for conveying trust relationships without having to reveal your social graph.
Some of this data would have to be stored off-chain, or only in encrypted form on-chain, but I don't think there are any practical limits of blockchain technology which prevent this.
I'm all for services making that kind of decision as opposed to government, but this is also a bit of a misnomer because you can have multiple wallets.
I’m a long time blockchain skeptic (check my comment history) but I recently came around on the SSO stuff and can vouch for it enough to say the magic words: it is in fact a novel thing that cannot be done without blockchain using pre-existing crypto or auth tech.
The reason is: With private key auth alone, you don’t have identity, just a non-human readable public key, and no universally known exclusive association with a particular username. With OpenID or WebAuthn or any of that, you would still need a company or org to keep a centralized database of everyone’s credentials and user info. With Blockchain you don’t: As long as the Ethereum blockchain keeps going, your info (username: “johndoe.eth” public_key: “420abc” avatar: “some HTTP or IPFS url”) will stay stored. This is the exact precise thing blockchains are unusually good at doing, and given how much people these days are hating on big tech companies managing their identities and harvesting data in the process, “SSO with no company attached” seems like a thing people actually want.
I’m still highly skeptical of art NFTs and crypto as currency and lots of other blockchain stuff, but in this one case they’ve won me over. This seems legit.
The potential for doxing in this is... so here's your identity so that you can be the same individual on multiple sites.
Someone else posts into the blockchain that jondoe.eth public_key "420abc..." is {this real data about the person}.
And now that identity and every login it is associated with has been doxed in a permeant, public, and unalterable way.
If someone doxes my gmail account, I can go through the process of dissociating myself with that identity and hopefully the provider were that doxing is stored could be persuaded to delete that content (yes, the internet has a long memory).
This would seem to be much harder if not impossible with an identity stored on a public blockchain (that also allows for other data to be stored).
This isn't about transactions or being able to see where you're logged in from.
This is about having a public, centralized source of identities that cannot be erased.
Yes, you can have multiple identities on it - but if an identity on that chain is doxed, it is forever doxed.
If you are maintaining one identity per application... then what is the advantage of having the identity in a place where it can be accessed by multiple applications?
I have difficulty seeing the advantage of a public, append only, identity provider compared to say... setting up your own auth server on AWS and managing your identities out of there.
I don't see how this is beneficial compared to signature-based auth. Didn't people all recoil in horror at the real-names policy that Google performed ages ago? Making it fundamentally difficult to separate my identity on various platforms is bad. And further, I really don't see the benefit of having my username stored on a blockchain rather than in an application database. Is the goal to prevent other people from making an account using the same username that I use on other platforms?
The overlap here is the centralization of identity, not the actual real name part. Is it desirable to have my hn handle also match my wow character name?
Who said you need to only have one ENS name either? You could have one that you use for personal tech-related stuff, one that you use for work stuff, one that you use for gaming-related stuff, etc. (although for that kind of usage to really take off, Gas fees will need to come down).
It’s not about storing your public key, it’s about storing your username and the fact that you (the owner of that key pair) exclusively own that username (for any system that federates with ENS).
Your public key is available to everyone on the internet so anyone can verify your signed message. You can't do that without a blockchain unless a trusted third party is used.
OpenID is a closed system both to the end-user and the website owner based on secrets(`state` `code`, developer keys) from identity providers(google/facebook) not cryptography.
What's the recovery if your private Ethereum key gets deleted, or worse, stolen?
If you're signing in via some other 3rd party, you can change your password.
I'm just trying to think of how "Sign in with Ethereum" would work if you're trying to get your technophobic grandma that clicks on phishing links and responds to the County Password Inspectors [0] when they call to use it.
I think smart wallets will help with that. You’ll be able to create a set of recovery tokens such that you only need a subset of the tokens to recover your wallet.
For example, you can generate 7 tokens and only need 5 to reset your wallet keys. You can give 3 to your relatives, 1 in a safe-deposit box, etc.
Grandma’s kids can help her set it up.
Edit: Or, for people who really prefer centralization, you can give all 7 tokens to Bank of America. The point is you have a choice and can design the security system you want.
Surprised actually this doesn't exist in a more general sense -- just X of N decryption of arbitrary files. Could be your private key recovery, or just mundane corporate documents with provable "two man rule"
And I imagine the "recovery tokens" part being abstracted away. There will be a bunch of apps that work this, and there's no reason it couldn't be as simple as checking a few boxes to select the people you want to be able to help you with recovery, with some default rules that you can change.
ETH is expensive but there are other "cheaper" blockchains compatible with ETH whose "gas" price is negligible. You can also deploy for free on the "testnet"
A major reason why those blockchains have lower fees is because speculators have not driven up their token price. Unless there is some fundamental reason why the fees will stay low, you've got a time bomb on your hands as soon as people decide that this blockchain is a major speculation vehicle.
This is an interesting topic that I feel like doesn't get discussed often. Vitalik Buterin posted today about Ethereum's expensive gas fees and the reasoning for it. It boiled down to decentralization vs. more operations per block. Blockchains like Algorand and Solana have large block sizes, so they can keep fees low per block (which they both do a very good job of doing so far, although exactly how cheap they'd be with Ethereum's adoption numbers is still uncertain). Tezos has had more adoptions through NFTs and they've managed to keep transaction fees low as well (although arguably running a Tezos node now requires better hardware specs than it did a few years ago). The tradeoff is that beefy hardware is needed to run a node, which hurts decentralization, as the average participant without deep pockets can't compete. This is part of why Ethereum has high gas costs.
Or run your own private chain/node for trying things out.
Recently I've been working at converting an existing web business to web3 (at least my interpretation of web3), with the goal of making it all decentralized. My impression at this point is that it's mostly possible but not all that practical.
It might make more sense if I reimagine what the business is, which is part of my exploration here.
