Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time, killing 1M people - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/02/mosul-dam-engineers-warn-it-could-fail-at-any-time-killing-1m-people <comment><USER2> I was a Marine in Iraq from 06-09. We constantly built plans for the inevitable demise of this dam. Mostly just estimates of how screwed people would be.

I'm surprised it's not blown yet, I was constantly worried someone would bomb it somehow, but 7 years later, it's still standing, so I'm unsure about any estimates given now - the Iraqis were fairly liberal in their estimates in 2006 (it'll fall by 2007) and the same predictions followed every year. Of course, they wanted vast quantities of money to fix it (and skim off the top for themselves) so there was some bias.

Check out the Haditha Dam too. Another large body of water held back by aging infrastructure further destroyed by looters who dismantled huge pieces of machinery to sell as scrap for $0.05/lb.

<comment><USER3> Surprised that some big infrastructure company like Halli or Bechtel didn't see an opportunity to scheme some business from this.

<comment><USER4> Rebuilding Mosul is more lucrative that maintenance on Mosul dam?

<comment><USER3> Indeed! Good thinking. Rebuild dam and city. Funded by US loans of course.

<comment><USER5> That's the business model of the IMF.

Would you prefer to be paved in gold or bombs?

<comment><USER6> Fun fact: The gold is almost certainly cheaper in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German- > Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it > became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants > had predicted.

I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project.

Successive foreign consultants warned about the risk of building this dam on water-soluble bedrock. The risk was not subtle.

The planning documents for this dam should be scrutinized very closely for evidence of omission or manipulation of data, and the firms involved should be investigated. And if they are found culpable, they should participate in the costs of shoring up the dam. They have played a part in this mess.

<comment><USER8> I just don't understand why you assume that the risks were not disclosed to the government. In my eyes, it's way more likely that the government decided to go ahead anyway. This was one of Saddam Hussein's prestige projects - telling him that it couldn't be done could've been fatal.

<comment><USER9> So, crazy idea (and completely inapplicable here, because dictatorship). Is there any government in the word that has an empowered "science" branch of government as a check and balance?

I'm not suggesting science is apolitical, but I feel like there's some merit to "We wanted to build a broken dam because {political considerations}, but the {science branch} vetoed it."

Kind of like a Supreme Court, except informed by scientific knowledge rather than law.

<comment><USER10> I wish! Though implementation would be tricky and might heavily politicize science in a bad way (as opposed to a good way; which could also happen). The closest I've seen anywhere to that is in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Here's an excerpt from the "Martian Constitution" in the accompanying book "The Martians": """All laws passed by the congress shall also be subject to review by the constitutional and environmental courts, and a veto by these courts cannot be overridden, but shall be grounds for rewriting the law if the congress sees fit, after which the process of passing the law shall begin again."""

I found the rest here: [http://pastebin.com/YeR74Yyb](http://pastebin.com/YeR74Yyb)

<comment><USER9> Good find. I remember the constitution they hammered out in the books was interesting, as there was a lot of Aldo Leopold "think like a mountain" stuff.

(Of course, in the book, they've discovered a genetic repair mechanism that effectively makes people immortal, so I suppose it's still self interest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This picture on wikipedia of the dam has a really beautiful contrast between the water and the land around it ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Mo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/MosulDam- July2012-01.JPG/1920px-MosulDam-July2012-01.JPG)) Also draws attention to the fact that there's a massive amount of water behind the dam.

edit: wiki link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam), to save you the effort of googling :)

<comment><USER12> > formerly known as Saddam Dam

such an opportunity lost to call it SadDam

<comment><USER13> :( Damn.

<comment><USER14> SadDamnit!

<comment><USER15> If the dam knew how it was built, it would be a sad dam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So many indignant comments here by people who've surely never seen how large construction projects work in third world countries.

Try to keep in mind that the average civil engineer has the same amount of integrity as you do. Maybe more because lives are at stake. How construction projects get green lit in third world countries often follows an unorthodox set of practices far removed from the engineers who are told to "just make it work". Sound familiar?

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a paper by some professors at Mosul Univ discussing the dam. Apparently it's built on gypsum and has been patched by continuous filling with cement; the current problems stem from incorrect construction in the 80s.

The professors game out 5 catastrophic failures. They range from a wall of water 25m high that would eventually cover over 50% of Mosul city (high) to a mere 34% of the city (best case.) Maximal water levels would be reached within 6 hours. Reading between the lines, I get the sense there is no serious and/or realistic evacuation plan. Not to mention I think Mosul is ruled by ISIS, so coordination with the Iraqi government and/or external dam repair personnel is presumably limited.

edit: with much of Baghdad itself under 4m water within 3 days after collapse. Which probably allows time for evacuation at least, though that's small comfort.

[http://www.iwtc.info/2009_pdf/4-1.pdf](http://www.iwtc.info/2009_pdf/4-1.pdf)

<comment><USER18> This sounds like biblical history in the making...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If the dam breaks, ISIS will be judged responsible for more deaths than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maintenance on the dam almost entirely stopped when ISIS took over, and the grouting machines required for maintaining it were looted. And the dead will be Sunni Muslims--their own "citizens", those who didn't flee when ISIS took control of Mosul.

It will be the lasting legacy of ISIS.

Surely this is a factor in the timing of the US-led effort currently underway to retake Mosul from ISIS, backed by the Iraqi Army.

<comment><USER20> I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's not how this will be viewed in a local/regional context. My guess is the local boys just trying to survive won't be seen as the problem when compared to the international imperialists and dictators we seem to be viewed as.

Just a guess, really, but on an international level, we'll know the truth. But, I'm guessing this dam(n) failure will be yet another successful recruiting tool for ISIS and the like.

Anyone with a head for middle-eastern politics and terrorist recruiting tactics around to respond?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> John Oliver did a pretty good piece on infrastructure:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8)

No politician gets to cut a ribbon with a giant pair of scissors when they fund routine maintenance. So why bother.

<comment><USER22> The fix seems easy - do cut the ribbon in such cases.

<comment><USER21> That was the thought that went through my mind when I first watched that piece. I think I'm unusually excited by incremental improvement and routine maintenance though.

<comment><USER23> Me too. There is something wrong with us. :)

<comment><USER22> You're not alone. [http://www.skyscrapercity.com/](http://www.skyscrapercity.com/) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the bigger version of the Vajont Dam's tragedy of the '60s that killed two thousand people and wrecked an entire province. [1]

> At 10:39 P.M., a massive landslide of about 260,000,000 cubic metres > (340,000,000 cu yd) of forest, earth, and rock fell into the reservoir at up > to 110 kilometres per hour (68 mph), completely filling the narrow reservoir > behind the dam. The landslide was complete in just 45 seconds, much faster > than predicted, and the resulting displacement of water caused 50,000,000 > cubic metres (65,000,000 cu yd) of water to overtop the dam in a 250-metre > (820 ft) high wave.

> This event occurred when the company and the Italian government dismissed > evidence and concealed reports describing the geological instability of > Monte Toc on the southern side of the basin, and other early warning signs > reported prior to the disaster.

> Numerous warnings, signs of danger, and negative appraisals had been > disregarded, and the eventual attempt to safely control the landslide into > the lake by lowering its level came when the landslide was almost imminent > and was too late to prevent it.

and also

> On 12 February 2008, while launching the International Year of Planet Earth, > UNESCO cited the Vajont Dam tragedy as one of five "cautionary tales", > caused by "the failure of engineers and geologists".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam)

<comment><USER25> Except that in the case of the Vajont Dam disaster that dam didn't actually fail and is mostly still there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Drain it. Seriously.

Any other response is either unrealistically expensive/complicated or reckless.

Sure, the Italian company could maintain it if they aren't attacked by ISIS, but that is a big if when failure is immanent.

<comment><USER27> Remember that the sluice gates are seized. Obviously they should still drain it but it's not as simple as making the call.

<comment><USER28> Would it suffice to just take a stick of dynamite to one of the seized gates?

<comment><USER29> What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER30> Various forms of shaped charges and explosives could be used to open the sluice gates but that would leave them permanently opened.

The main fear here is that if the dam reaches its design head, the water will tunnel underneath and around the dam through the water soluble rocks. The dam can't exceed the design head because of the spillway that is visible to the south east of the dam.

So explosives could well be used to force open the sluice gates.

<comment><USER31> > So explosives could well be used to force open the sluice gates.

This would make for a great Michael Bay movie, but real life doesn't work that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For the nearest comparable disaster, look up the Banqiao Dam Failure, occurring in 1975 in China. It resulted in the deaths of 171,000 people in the densly-populated downstream valley.

The circumstances of the failure are themselves instructive. Poor planning, poor design, ignored engineering warnings (and banishment of the engineer in question), inadequate safety presentations, a true monster of a storm (over 1 meter of water in 24 hours), miscommunications, _failed_ communications, no downstream warning system, the inevitable dam failure, and a further cascade of _additional_ dam failures, including many of which were blasted open with artillery.

Only a relatively small number of the deaths were direcectly precipitated by the flooding. Many resulted from disease and starvation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam?wprov=sfla1)

The Mosul Dam could potentially dwarf this tragedy.

<comment><USER33> >over 1 meter of water in 24 hours

That's the first time I've seen rain measured in _metres_ instead of millimetres.

<comment><USER32> Well, the official reports were in mm. But there were over a thousand of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> To give some sense of the scale of the disaster that would follow a failure, the US considered bombing that dam and releasing all that water in response to a potential chemical attack on US troops during Gulf War I, according to Colin Powell ([http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html) \- search for dams).

<comment><USER35> They considered an attack that would have killed ~1M people, presumably mainly civilians? _sigh_ smh

<comment><USER36> To play devil's advocate here, any competent military would consider possibilities like this. "War is hell" is said so often these days as to be blasé, but it really is true.

<comment><USER37> Are you saying that any competent military would consider racking up a civilian death toll on the order of the Auschwitz death camp in the matter of days?

Thank god the US military isn't competent then.

<comment><USER25> Most major militaries have considered options that are orders of magnitude worse.

<comment><USER36> Not most, all.

Again, the concept that "war _is_ hell" doesn't seem to hit home for some people.

<comment><USER35> It's hell because of stuff like this. What doesn't seem to hit home for some people is that maybe your country isn't always "the good guys", and seriously considering a plan like this (beyond investigating what would happen so you can make the right decision when things start happening quickly) is precisely what makes you the bad guy.

<comment><USER36> The crux of your argument seems to rest on what "seriously considered" means. Not saying the US is the "good guys" here, but they're doing their due diligence, not trying to inflict the most damage purely out of rage or spite.

<comment><USER37> In my opinion, that's the point. Acknowledging that there is a dam whose collapse is capable of killing a million people is very different from actively assigning military personnel to study how to compromise the dam and flood the population for strategic gain. As the GP said, the statement "war is hell" is only made true by our own behavior during wartime, not by any universal law of the universe.

This is very murky territory no matter how you swing it

<comment><USER38> ...What?

That dam generates a lot of electricity. In war, power plants are strategic targets. It would be an obvious potential target to weaken the Iraqi military and war machine.

So, the U.S. military studies the potential effects of destroying the dam. In the end, it does not destroy the dam.

Fast forward a few years, and people like you are condemning the U.S. military for...what? Figuring out that doing so would have resulted in many deaths, and not doing so?

You're saying that they shouldn't have even studied the issue? What if the enemy starts using it as a base of operations because they don't think it will be attacked? Like people have said, war is hell, it's unpredictable. Something unexpected could happen, something undesirable could become necessary. Without having information like this already available, sound strategic decisions can't be made. Then people like you would be complaining that they acted rashly without studying the issue first.

If you're saying that the very act of studying the issue is wrong, that's simply thoughtcrime, as well as incredibly naive.

<comment><USER35> There's a huge difference between "thinking" something and actively assigning resources to study it in depth. And I don't see anyone calling for prosecution in this entire thread. Criticizing, sure, but wouldn't you criticize me if I spent time and resources trying to figure out how to kill tons of people? And GP acknowledges the difference between studying what would happen if the dam failed and how to simply kill massive numbers of civilians. Our point is that you can't just say it's okay to kill 1M civilians because "war is hell", "war is hell" because of stuff like that.

<comment><USER38> You've completely missed the point. "Whoosh."

And--perhaps ironically, from your point of view--the data and conclusions from the military study of the dam probably lends weight to the urgency of repairing it, thereby actually contributing to saving lives.

You've also neglected to consider that the dam could be attacked by _anyone_ , including terrorists, competing regional forces, and (perhaps in Desert Storm) the Iraqis themselves. Imagine if Saddam Hussein had threatened to destroy the dam and kill millions of people unless the invading armies left.

Without knowing what would happen, it would not be possible to make a sound strategic decision, prepare for relief and evacuation, etc. It's better for everyone to know what would happen if the dam were attacked.

What you're advocating is naive ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've had six civil engineers tell me that that dam has 6-months at maximum. The odds of collapse within that period ranged from 80-95% in estimates.

<comment><USER40> Is it because of the coming snow melt? Or just time is running out?

<comment><USER39> Unexhaustively: snow melt, fighting season, lack of maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting that Hoover Dam mentioned elsewhere in the thread also had problems with geology of the rocks under it and had to be fixed in a hacky way by additional grouting for 12 years after completion

[http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/hoover_dam/Grout%20Curtain%20Fa...](http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/hoover_dam/Grout%20Curtain%20Failure- Hoover%20Dam.pdf)

<comment><USER38> Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Has/could someone at least set up some cameras recording 24/7 to document the inevitable collapse in detail?

<comment><USER43> I am afraid that the amount of vapor would not let us to see too much. But I totally agree, somebody please set up some cameras.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Iraq was altogether a different country when it was built, but infrastructure that can fail killing 1M people unless maintained 24/7 by a 300 person crew sounds like it has way too many failure scenario for comfort.

AFAIK you can abandon the Hoover dam and it will still be there in 500 years. It looks like the Mosul dam engineers couldn't achieve remotely the same result given the soil it's built on, but there must have been overwhelming reasons to build it despite the risks...

<comment><USER45> > AFAIK you can abandon the Hoover dam and it will still be there in 500 > years.

Yes, Hoover dam is quite the civil engineering and project management feat. It's structural lifespan in the absence of maintenance (the turbines will go inoperative in months to years in the absence of maintenance) is estimated in the thousands of years range. [1]

[http://zidbits.com/2013/05/how-long-will-the-hoover-dam- last...](http://zidbits.com/2013/05/how-long-will-the-hoover-dam-last/)

<comment><USER46> I never got to the Hoover dam in New Vegas... I wonder how realistically it was depicted.

<comment><USER19> About as realistically as the National Mall in Fallout 3, that is, smaller in scale and very simplified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> An article from 2007:

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7069109.stm

With a similar conclusion mentions that the water resources minister kept much of the discussions about how to proceed with the dam maintenance out of the public eye to avoid bringing the issues to the attention of insurgents.

<comment><USER48> That still has nothing to do with the obligations of the US who were in charge of Iraq since 2003.

Salgernon posted the link documenting how much the US engaged (hint: minimally, compared to what was needed to fix the issue):

[http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2007/10/god-really-doesnt-l...](http://the- reaction.blogspot.com/2007/10/god-really-doesnt-like-bush-much.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Here is a 2015 paper with a detailed technical analysis. The first author on this paper is the Iraqi engineer interviewed in this Guardian article.

[http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/102425643/Vol_5_3_8.pdf](http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/102425643/Vol_5_3_8.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER50> They should call the Dutch. They're the best at dams.

EDIT: Retrospectively, my comment is not necessarily appropriate. As much as the Dutch are good at building dams, it's obvious that the situation is dire and has more to do with security and military conflict. My apologies for being insensitive.

<comment><USER51> We're very good at dikes. We don't have much practice with hydroelectric dams though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Are there any articles about how/why the sluice gates are seized? Is it sediment blocking them? Or did something mechanical break? I would like to hear from an engineer. I know that the US Corps of Engineers has probably been to it during the various wars. I know the overall problem is the porous rock and whole dam collapsing (which is horrible for the locals), I am just curious what the best way to relieve the pressure to buy time.

<comment><USER53> Software engineer here (chuckle). I spent a lot of time in Iraq, some of that time guarding infrastructure. The thing about most of that stuff -- and my guess in this case -- is that the machinery is rusted. The door may be physically jammed by silt or something, as well, but I would put my money on the machinery to open the doors being rusted or otherwise destroyed/removed by looters. This is the case with the vast majority of stuff like that in Iraq: If you weren't standing next to it with a machine gun, someone would carry off the parts to sell for scrap. Or at least nobody would come by to oil the parts and make sure they function properly. The thing with rusting machinery also is something of a cultural/religious phenomena, i.e. "it is the will of Allah" that this equipment is rusting, and therefore I should not perform maintenance on it. The Iraqi Army was hard to train for a number of reasons, but particularly in equipment maintenance for this reason. "Clean your weapon" ... "But it is the will of Allah that it is rusting" ...

<comment><USER54> > "Clean your weapon" ... "But it is the will of Allah that it is rusting"

Oh :)

Not a cultural/religious phenomena. That is just a sarcastic way to ignore someone. This way of passive resistance is kinder (and safer in context) than to outright say "piss off". Everything is considered will of God in Islam anyways - from someone moving a finger to celestial events.

When an Arab tells you "if it's the will of God" or "tomorrow" you are most likely on your own, nothing is going to get done. True for most of the muslims; more true for most of the Arabs. Source: a muslim.

<comment><USER53> Sure, that much is obvious, I just felt like "cultural/religious phenomena" was the best descriptor instead of saying something like "Them A-rabs are just super lazy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This reminded me of this story in the current issue of The New Yorker <[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-man-who- mad...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-man-who-made- millions-off-the-afghan-war>)

</comment><comment><USER56> It seems to be a lost cause why not break open the jammed sluice gates one at a time to gradually let water through and let off at least some of the pressure? And then just leave them open.

It seems pointless to continually fix a dam with such design flaws and needing constant repair.

</comment><comment><USER57> It sounds like having a dam is riskier than the alternative of not having a dam. Why not try draining the resouvoir and dismantling the dam?

</comment><comment><USER58> Either do an emergency maintenance now or do a real evacuation.

</comment><comment><USER59> To add to my prior comment, it seems like expending military resources to retake this area is a waste, since the citizens there support ISIS. Instead of getting soldiers killed fighting to "liberate" people who probably don't want to be liberated, maybe they should have just dropped a bunch of leaflets on Mosul, explaining that the dam isn't being maintained under ISIS control, and without maintenance will fail in a few years, causing a massive flood and killing most of the people in Mosul. So if they want to avoid this, it's up to them to rise up and revolt against ISIS. If they don't, oh well. If you're not willing to fight for your own survival and freedom, then maybe you don't deserve it, and you really have no right to expect others to do the dirty work for you and hand you these things on a silver platter.

<comment><USER60> _So if they want to avoid this, it 's up to them to rise up and revolt against ISIS. If they don't, oh well. If you're not willing to fight for your own survival and freedom, then maybe you don't deserve it, and you really have no right to expect others to do the dirty work for you and hand you these things on a silver platter._

And these people back in 2003 were asking for the USA-led coalition to invade their own country, topple the government, wreck the country's infrastructure, and leave a power-vacuum in its place? A vacuum filled in by local warlords and ethnic-cleansing militias?

I dispute the idea that we in the West have no responsibility here to help.

<comment><USER59> Unless you're a GOP voter (and not a Trump voter), then it's obvious that in 2003, Iraqis were not asking for their country to be invaded.

However, since we made such a mess of it before, what makes you think we're going to do any better with another invasion and setting up another unpopular government? The people in that region don't like the government we set up because the Shias are too powerful; they want a government like what they had before, where the Sunnis have all the power, and the Shias and Kurds get stomped on. Are you willing to give them that government? If not, you're not going to get their support, and ISIS (or similar) is.

You may claim that the West has a responsibility to help, but I claim that the West _cannot_ help, and that there is no way for us, a bunch of outsiders, to make the situation better. Only the people there can fix the problem for themselves. We cannot do it for them. If we try, we will fail, and they will not appreciate it or agree with our methods.

<comment><USER61> > The people in that region don't like the government we set up [...]

And they didn't like all those borders we drew for them.

Ungrateful lot, I say.

<comment><USER59> Well, that goes right back to what I said about them not appreciating our methods.

Yes, a lot of this mess is due to the way the British drew the borders there in the wake of WWI. However, has there been any effort to redraw those borders? Hell no. The Kurds would certainly like to see the borders redrawn; it's obvious to anyone with a brain and some idea of the situation there that the borders are making the problems worse, but no one with power wants to change the borders. There's too many vested interests who want to keep their borders: Turkey doesn't want to cede any land to the Kurds (it has oil on it IIRC). Iraq doesn't want to cede any land to the Kurds (oil again). The Sunnis in Iraq don't want to lose control of the country because their portion has no oil. The Shias in Iraq would be happy to separate from the Sunnis because they do have oil. Saudi Arabia doesn't want the Shias to take control of the oil- rich areas and leave the Sunnis with a bunch of sand, because the Saudis are also Sunni and hate Shias. It's just a total mess, and pushing ourselves on the place yet again to try to fix it is going to be just as successful as the last time we tried. The only way to really fix it is to invade the whole region, take it ALL over (including SA and Iran and Turkey too, even though this could start a war with Europe, might as well throw in Egypt and Israel while we're at it), then redraw all the borders and set up all new governments run by dictators for a while. Obviously that's not going to happen, so the only sane alternative is to just stay out of it, except maybe for lending a little assistance here and there to deal with really awful groups like ISIS where pretty much everyone (including Russia) agrees that they need to go.

<comment><USER61> > everyone (including Russia) agrees

Russia doesn't care about ISIS - Russian soldiers shot down a commercial airliner.

> the only sane alternative is to just stay out of it

"Stay" implies that we're out and not going in. Cutting and running would be closer to the truth in this case...

Your argument is that we should just walk away from the mess we've created because it looks hard to solve. "Whups, pouring gasoline on it didn't put it out, let's take off and grab a beer."

None of these "leave the area to solve its own problems" ever include actually leaving, just continuing our meddling from a distance. It'd do a lot of good if we simply stopped backing the wrong side. We give Turkey a fair bit of assistance in keeping the kurdish areas under control, not the least of which is calling Kurdish independence movements terrorists.

> However, has there been any effort to redraw those borders? Hell no.

Well actually, yes. You know the Kurds - they've been trying to redraw them since the ink was wet. Something about genocide...

<comment><USER59> >Russia doesn't care about ISIS - Russian soldiers shot down a commercial airliner.

WTF does that have to do with ISIS? That was in Ukraine.

Russia didn't mean to shoot down a commercial airliner. They thought it was a Ukrainian military cargo plane. Of course, when they found out it wasn't, they tried to cover it up because they were claiming the Russian army wasn't in Ukraine to begin with and that those were Ukrainian "rebels". But it's not like they actually meant to shoot down a passenger plane.

As for ISIS, yes they do care about ISIS. Russia backs the Assad regime, because they want access to Syria's port on the Mediterranian Sea. ISIS threatens the Assad regime, so ISIS is their natural enemy, along with anyone else who threatens the Assad regime.

And honestly, we should be backing the Assad regime too (or at least now working against it). It's the best hope that country has for stability. All the rebel groups are Islamists, so they're worse for stability and worse for human rights and worse for minority group rights. This happens every time we topple some "evil dictator" over there: it turns out the dictator was actually very tolerant of religious or ethnic minorities, as long as they didn't try to overthrow him (case in point: the Yazidis in Iraq). But then we topple the dictator, some "democratic" government gets installed that's mostly Islamists, and the minorities get stomped on. Nations in that region need dictators, not democracy.

>"Stay" implies that we're out and not going in. Cutting and running would be closer to the truth in this case...

Any why is that wrong? We're not willing to improve the situation there, we're only willing to make it worse. Proof: that's all we've done.

>It'd do a lot of good if we simply stopped backing the wrong side.

Yeah, and it'd do a lot of good if humans stopped having wars, and stopped being selfish. I don't see that happening any time soon.

>We give Turkey a fair bit of assistance in keeping the kurdish areas under control, not the least of which is calling Kurdish independence movements terrorists.

Exactly. So how do we change that? Simple: we don't, because we're not willing to change that. The politics are too complicated (Turkey is a NATO member after all), so we're not willing to directly oppose Turkey and ally ourselves with the Kurds and promote independence there.

As I see it, we have options: 1) stop backing the wrong side as you say, and start working to improve things there, or 2) get out. Well, we're obviously not willing to do #1, we've been doing the opposite of #1 for decades now, no matter who gets elected President, so that only leaves one choice, #2.

>Well actually, yes. You know the Kurds

 _They 've_ been trying to redraw borders, yes; what I meant was, has there been any effort by Western powers to redraw those borders (since the complaint here is how we screwed up in how we (after WWI) drew those borders to begin with. And the answer there is no. The western powers have done absolutely nothing to try to redraw the borders. Some groups there would like new borders, but other groups don't (the ones who want new borders usually sit on valuable resources that the other ones want to maintain control of), and we back the wrong sides consistently, so we don't.

<comment><USER61> > Russia didn't mean to shoot down a commercial airliner. They thought it was > a Ukrainian military cargo plane. Of course, when they found out it wasn't, > they tried to cover it up because

But when they were found to have done it, it was covered up. And yes, because it would have interfered with another lie of theirs, not that it's a defense.

> Russia backs the Assad regime, because they want access to Syria's port on > the Mediterranian Sea. ISIS threatens the Assad regime

As I said. Russia doesn't care about ISIS, Russia cares about a handy puppet state. If ISIS turned back-around into Iraq Russia would stop fighting them. If Russia kills more people than ISIS in freeing the country they won't care at all.

> we should be backing the Assad regime too

Hmmm, yeah. No. Shooting ISIS is awesome, helping a dictator is not. If we actually collaborate to help Assad hold the Syrians hostage, we're as bad as ISIS.

> Exactly. So how do we change that? Simple: we don't, because we're not > willing to

Because you're far enough from the problem that blowback rarely hits you. If you actually faced even a small percentage of the problems you caused from it you wouldn't be able to lose interest so often.

The truth is that ISIS isn't a big issue to the USA as long as oil flows. You're not willing to - for the cost/benefit in this case.

> has there been any effort by Western powers to redraw those borders

No, in fact Western powers sold Iraq poison gas to avoid the issue.

But the fact of the matter is that isolationism doesn't work. Terrorists will bring the war to you, especially if you're perceived as having meddled.

Commit to fixing it, or expect to paying for more over time as you continually half-fix it.

<comment><USER59> >But when they were found to have done it, it was covered up. And yes, because it would have interfered with another lie of theirs, not that it's a defense.

You were trying to claim that Russia intentionally shot down a passenger plane, when it's obvious that they didn't.

>As I said. Russia doesn't care about ISIS, Russia cares about a handy puppet state. If ISIS turned back-around into Iraq Russia would stop fighting them. If Russia kills more people than ISIS in freeing the country they won't care at all.

So, yes, Russia _DOES_ care about ISIS. If ISIS magically teleported to the Moon and turned into pink unicorns, then Russia would stop caring about them, but that's about as likely as ISIS turning around and staying in Iraq, so it's pointless to discuss such possibilities.

>Hmmm, yeah. No. Shooting ISIS is awesome, helping a dictator is not. If we actually collaborate to help Assad hold the Syrians hostage, we're as bad as ISIS.

And you're as clueless as George W Bush. How do you propose to deal with the power vacuum when you get rid of ISIS and Assad? Just let the other Islamist groups like Al Nusra take over? Great plan! Or no, I know, let's have elections and set up a democracy!! Yeah, that worked so great in Egypt, where they elected the Muslim Brotherhood!

And how are the Syrians being "held hostage" anyway? A large chunk of the Syrian population wants the Assad regime, just like a large chunk of the Iraqi population was happy with the Saddam regime.

You have three choices: back a dictator, help Islamists overthrow the dictator, or stay out of it. I don't see how #2, your choice, is at all morally defensible.

>Commit to fixing it, or expect to paying for more over time as you continually half-fix it.

You haven't actually come up with any kind of viable plan to "fix" the problem, other than putting more people like ISIS and Al Qaeda in charge.

<comment><USER61> > You were trying

I know what I'm trying. And you're wrong. I'm not claiming Putin wanted an airliner shot down. I'm saying that when Putin's forces shot down an airliner he kept supporting them.

In other words, Russia doesn't care.

> So, yes, Russia DOES care about ISIS.

No. Because if ISIS wandered off into Iraq, they'd be done.

>> If we actually collaborate > How do you propose to deal with the power vacuum

You want to plug it with a dictator? Brilliant.

> how are the Syrians being "held hostage" anyway?

Their dictator has ordered his security forces to fire on civilians.

> A large chunk of the Syrian population wants the Assad regime

Got a fair vote that shows that? And see below.

> just like a large chunk of the Iraqi population was happy with the Saddam > regime.

Yeah, those in his good books, whose power came from him.

But it's irrelevant anyways because even popular support for an illegal government (ie, not recognizing human rights) doesn't legitimize it.

> You haven't actually come up with any kind of viable plan to "fix" the > problem

Move the goalposts much? It's not the job of the guy who says "Stop throwing gas on the fire" to have the entire roadmap planned out.

You're the one who proposes we take an active stance - to shift our alliances and protect a dictator we'd previously told to leave power. You want to commit military resources. The burden of proof is on _you_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> You can blame ISIS all you want, but aren't the 1M people who'll be affected by this basically supporters of ISIS? As you said, they're ISIS's own citizens. So basically they're being hoist by their own petard.

Every nation gets the government it deserves.

<comment><USER62> Do you seriously believe that an organization known for publicly beheading people, imposing arbitrary violent pseudo-Islamic rule, cultural genocide, etc... is supported by a significant part of the population of the territory they took over?

The answer is - no, they are not basically supporters of ISIS. A few certainly are, but not many. They're people trapped under the tyrannical rule of strongmen who came to power in a vacuum because ... the people did not have the government they deserve.

<comment><USER59> They may or may not have the government they _want_ , but they certainly have the government they _deserve_. Every nation of people does.

If you're not willing to stand up and fight when a tiny number of people is oppressing you, then why do you deserve anything better? Who else is supposed to liberate you? Do you think that you're entitled to having a bunch of foreigners come risk their lives to liberate you from your own people (ISIS is headed by people who are native to the area, they're not foreigners, though many of their fighters are). That sounds like a pretty big entitlement mentality to me.

The power vacuum you talk of only existed because the people in that area allowed it to exist.

And yes, I do believe that a significant part of the population of their territory supports their actions. And no, their ruls is not "pseudo-Islamic", it's Islamic in the truest sense. Go read the Islamic holy books: they're following them to the letter. They're doing Islam correctly, just like every fundamentalist does their religion correctly; everyone else just cherry-picks the parts they like and ignores or whitewashes the really horrible parts.

<comment><USER63> At some point, a government will have an insurmountable military advantage, against which any resistance by its population is futile.

<comment><USER64> > At some point, a government will have an insurmountable military advantage, > against which any resistance by its population is futile.

Most successful resistance by populations against the government have had the resisting part of the population overlapping the military. (Conversely, most popular resistance where this has not been the case has failed.)

So this is, generally, _already_ the case, but in a sense somewhat less significant than is implied.

I suppose if you have an entirely automated and tamper-proof, self-maintaining and reproducing, military with the senior government decision makers as the only humans in the loop the situation becomes a bit different and there becomes a qualitative difference where popular resistance can no longer spread to include the military.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Who cares. It's been known about for decades and predictions of impending disaster made for a dozen years. At this point I don't care one bit what happens to anyone. This is totally and utterly foreseeable. Not my problem. Liquidate your assets and send your donations to Iraq if you want to help; quit trying to whip up the bleeding hearts to spend other people's money.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra "pressure on the dam's compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir"

Do they really have snow worth to speak of in Iraq?

<comment><USER66> The Mosul dam is on the Tigris river which originates in the Taurus mountains of Turkey. We had a fairly regular winter as far as snowfall goes, but the spring has arrived very early this year.

<comment><USER67> So this is Turkey's fault. They ought to redirect the river into the Black Sea or directly into the Mediterranean Sea. Other solutions are selling it as bottled water (with a suitably high price: buy this water or the children die!) or boiling it off to cool a power plant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> According to the Paul Krugmans and other neo-Keynesians, it would be an economic boon. Imagine all the destruction that would need to be re-built!

</comment><comment><USER69> So they were working on fixing this but the west imposed sanctions in the 90s and stopped work.

"There is no permanent solution except building another dam," Ansari said. A second structure, the Badush dam, was started 20km downstream, to prevent a catastrophe in the event of the Mosul dam's failure. But work on Badush halted in the 1990s because of the pressure of sanctions, leaving it only 40% complete."

<comment><USER70> Interesting that you can find a way to blame this on the West when Saddam could just have complied with the UN (who imposed the sanctions, not the "West"), had the sactions removed, and given his people a better life.

<comment><USER48> Actually, the US wanted Saddam away just the same like they wanted Assad away. There was nothing Saddam could do except for allowing the US to take over the whole country and prosecute (and kill) him.

That's why the info about WMD was faked, both by the US and the UK. The UK was extreme, doing copy paste of the works of students from the internet. It's an interesting read.

The UK articles from 2003(!):

[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jun/08/media.openup](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jun/08/media.openup)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-159314/No-10-admits-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-159314/No-10-admits- mistake-Iraq-dossier.html)

"The Government was accused of attempting to mislead Parliament and the general public after it emerged a dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein was largely lifted from a Californian postgraduate student's outdated thesis."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Something tells me they want to use the risk of a failing dam as a weapon to pursue Mosul population to rise against ISIS. Or that they just don't care if 1M+ died in an ISIS stronghold.

<comment><USER72> I think chances of ISIS themselves blowing it up when pushed away are greater.

Those guys are crazy. Not very competent, but crazy.

<comment><USER73> How difficult is it to blow up the dam such that the water rushes out? I mean bombing a place to kill people is easy, but I have no idea if you have to hit specific spots on the dam or whether it is enough to just hit any area.

<comment><USER74> The allies (the RAF) had fairly specialized bombs in WWII to blow dams. They would fly in from upstream and drop a bomb shaped like a barrel (picture a barrel of oil) from very low altitude. The bomb would skip along the surface as it lost momentum and then sink close to the dam wall. At a certain pressure it would blow and take advantage of the hydrostatic shock to break up the wall.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise)

<comment><USER75> "Bouncing Bettys"

<comment><USER76> That's slang for a jumping anti-personnel mine

<comment><USER75> Yes, they are also called that. I think the dam-buster bombs had the nickname first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> The article says the Iraqi government has hired an Italian contractor to reinforce and maintain the dam. This presumably makes the massive-disaster scenario described in the Guardian's rather clickbaity headline somewhat less likely.

Edit: fair enough, it might not be as simple as just hiring some engineers to fix it; I hadn't considered the location. But still: when the news event that happened yesterday is that some engineers were hired to fix the dam, I think it's a bit disingenuous to therefore run a story with a headline saying "dam on brink of collapse, may kill one million."

<comment><USER78> The problem is that the Italian contractor refuses to work unless the Italian army is allowed to send a unit to defend them. Last I'd heard, the Iraqi government is withholding their approval for this.

<comment><USER79> Considering the propension of the Iraqi military to run away when faced with ill-equipped, outnumbered opponents, I can't blame the contractor.

<comment><USER25> Some Soviet engineers ended up having a particularly nasty end when they were captured while working on the infamous Kajaki dam in Afghanistan.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-ridley/down-with-doom-how-the-wo_b_630792.html

<comment><USER2> Written by the poster-boy for all that's wrong with the world's economies.

This is is the man who exploited lax regulation, using strategies later called 'reckless' by inquiry, ultimately requiring the 27bn bailout of Northern Rock. His latest book attacks governments who bail out corporations, and calls for less regulation. His opinions are beneath contempt.

[http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/06/19/ridleyed-with- err...](http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/06/19/ridleyed-with-errors/)

<comment><USER3> Is that the sort of thing a non-executive chairman of a board does? (I don't know that that means in U.K. corporate governance.)

For a more balanced view of the man see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley>

But all that really matters for this discussion is that he was born in 1958, about 3 years earlier than me. Like him, I too was subjected to the same "we're all going to die!" mantra decade by decade, and like him I've noted that none of the dire predictions have come true.

<comment><USER2> I'll defer to the inquiry as to how executive his chairmanship was, but you're right, I was writing off his argument due to something other than the argument itself, to my discredit.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to persuade a traditional Java company to use Node.js - <AUTHOR> I realise this is a very subjective topic but IMO node.js from a development point of view, is much faster to market for a traditional web app than a Java application.
There's been many blogs and topics over the last few years espousing why it's a more productive environment to work in. I'm sure Amazon and possibly Ebay 3 or so years ago officially blogged the benefits of using node.js for prototyping applications in the sense of agile development. I can't remember exactly but I think Amazon wrote how they were able to reduce their development resource requirements to 10% of what was needed previously by Java developers (for a particular app they wrote), using the same developers after they were retrained.
I love the fact that I can write isomorphic applications and debug them both front and back end in the same environment. For many Java/C# etc developers this loose typing and functional type programming is alien to them but IMO, developers once they understand the language semantics, should be able to cope with that easily. I'd like any opinions from others who've worked in the same legacy environment and moved to node.js to discuss the pro's and cons.
For me, there are a few cons. Moving to a weakly/loosely typed language. No precompilation. Functional/callback design. An ever changing world of ECMA compliance. Lack of tooling. I can argue all day the opposite of those cons (e.g. typescript) but one of the issues I struggle to defend is the churn rate in any libraries you depend on.
I wholly support express.js becoming the standardised web framework API in the node.js foundation, however there's huge churn in the number of required libraries you may depend on and which inexperienced devs may add without researching their suitability or how stable they are.
NPM is great but those modules might be useless in 6 month, a year or later depending on how they're supported. <comment><USER2> When considering bringing in a new technology, start off small. Start tinkering on something with low risk, low profile. Heroku is a great place to put an app you're working on, without having to also worry about the hosting stack side of things.

Often, getting people to think about new technology is about showing them what you can do with it, after actually building something useful they see value in.

It's about winning people, not winning technology.

</comment><comment><USER3> you could always run node on the jvm [http://nodyn.io/](http://nodyn.io/)</comment>


Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization? - <AUTHOR> The past couple years have been dominated by the hype cycle of cryptocurrencies as an incentive mechanism for decentralization. Hundreds of "N sided marketplace" problems have been reframed to fit within decentralized solutions. And yet, none of them have really succeeded. There is no "killer app" representing the decentralized marketplace du-jour.
I can't help but wonder if many of these projects are approaching the solution the wrong way. The fundamental problem underpinning decentralization is one of governance and direction. Too many cooks in the kitchen means solutions can become diluted with unnecessarily indirect incentive mechanisms.
Decentralization is a spectrum. There is a middle ground between a decentralized solution and a centralized solution. That middle ground is federation.
To me, federation has always seemed a better solution for decentralized marketplaces than full decentralization, because it decouples economic incentives from those of technology suppliers. As long as we live in a world where fiat currency and nation states dominate transactional and regulatory environments, it is unavoidable that any large enterprise pursuing legitimacy will need to interact within the bounds of laws and regulations. Given that, it seems that federation offers a better solution than decentralization because it allows service operators to define their own economic processes according to their own jurisdictions and regulations, whereas decentralization is more of a free-for-all that can meet only the lowest common denominator of regulatory and economic restrictions.
What does HN think? Is decentralization overhyped? Would many projects be better suited to a hybrid model of decentralized infrastructure and federated transactions? <comment><USER2> Here's the core of the problem and also why most of crypto / blockchain technology will go down the drain soon:

Decentralization isn't a business model. The opposite is.

That's it. How you get to any competitive edge in a market is: 1) Be better than your competitors in a field. 2) Own that field and displace everyone else. 3) Extract value.

The Crypto hype happened because a super elegant technical solution (-> Blockchain) that nobody really understands was (and IMHO still is) waiting for a problem met a visionary hippie fantasy of a world of inefficient, evil companies that somehow will be made better by some form of decentralization.

The problem is: There wasn't ever an inefficiency and none of those "huge" competitors has any incentive to leave their market share to someone else. So exactly nothing will happen.

Crypto is nothing more than modern white knight fantasy - in reality all the purpopoted benefits of a blockchain are serious shortcomings. Do you _really_ want a payment that can't be rolled back by a centralized authority because you were defrauded or someone hacked your account? Do you want any kind of accounts for a whole tech-afraid populace that they can't access anymore once they've lost their key?

Most people haven't realized that the current centralization and trust in some large companies and institutions is actually a pretty deep local optimum that will be incredibly hard to displace with something better.

<comment><USER3> Your argument against crypto is one of the more compelling I've read. I like the "deep local optimum" visual you painted. I definitely agree if you're comparing "crypto" directly to centralized companies doing traditional things -- they're not going anywhere.

However, I think it solves a different problem. It's a geopolitical problem. Blockchain technology provide a bulletproof (so far) way of exchanging value across borders without having to trust any middlemen.

There's a quote, I believe by Erik Voorhees, saying roughly: "Bitcoin is separation of money and state".

<comment><USER4> But currently this only works in third world countries where the government lacks resources or care to combat it. Plus their is still a middleman if you don't mine the cryptocurrency yourself. I still have to pay a exchange if I cannot find someone willing to take cash/check from me. You also have the opposite effect where you need the exchange and a bank account to turn that coin I sent into usable cash.

<comment><USER5> Most of the world's population lives in third and second world countries. You're absolutely right that the centralized fiat gateways are the obvious, censurable bottlenecks of crypto-currency, and there's no good way around that, but crypto-currency itself is still an attractive way for many people, to move their money out of very restrictive regimes. The centralized exchange problem is mainly a problem of creating a black/grey market economy, with crypto-currency as it's main unit of value transfer, which of course is a whole other can of worms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: [https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is- moving/](https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

It has some interesting insights into when federation works and when it doesn't.

"Nothing about any of the protocols we've developed requires centralization; it's entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all."

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead.

You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system.

Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibility since 2009, we've got mamy third party clients, everyone hosts their own server — and still we can introduce new features without breakage in a matter of days (at least into beta, QA and translation take a while).

<comment><USER8> If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.

<comment><USER9> One thing I think some people got it wrong: Decentralization is not a feature, it's a method.

(Most) Users won't care whether or not they are using something decentralized, they only care what they can achievement with that software/service. Is it doing better than others on the market?

Back to the topic, about why Slack defeated IRC & XMPP: A product -- whether or not it's a online service or a hardware -- needs to keep up with the world. For example: If one day, people started to sharing photos and videos and voices during their online chat session, and your software can't keep up with that, then you will likely loose those people soon enough.

Currently, centralized software made upgrading very easy. You have all the control you need to force users to upgrade to your newer and richer client. While in the decentralized world, you may need to beg somebody to upgrade their server to support the newer version of your client (Due to that, you may not dare to upgrade your product that often).

Also, decentralized software usually hard to develop, while harder to generate enough revenue to be commercialized or be profitable. When clever people needs to survive, they will save the trouble and feed themselves (make money) first.

I'm not saying work on something decentralized is a bad idea though, we need decentralized service in today's very centralized world for sure. But make sure you can deliver the same level of experience (or be better) of your centralized competitors, then maybe people will start to use it.

<comment><USER10> > Users won't care whether or not they are using something decentralized

This is a good point, and it is demonstrably the case even among cryptocurrency users who have a coinbase wallet. Coinbase is not decentralized, and for a lot of users this is actually a nice feature because you can transfer BTC balance from one coinbase user to another without incurring any miner fee or waiting a long time for confirmations.

If most people who wanted to use bitcoin actually cared about decentralization, coinbase (and other similar services) would have virtually no users.

<comment><USER11> > If most people who wanted to use bitcoin actually cared about > decentralization, coinbase (and other similar services) would have virtually > no users.

Or maybe Bitcoin isn't good enough just _yet_ (e.g. Lightning)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most decentralized projects are approaching the problem in the wrong way. Blockchains are a new, early technology, and most of the developers building blockchains don't understand them very well and aren't using them correctly. I think the dotcom bubble was much the same way - suddenly everyone had a website, but almost nobody had a useful website, because people didn't really understand how a website was best able to serve a business.

Federation over decentralization makes sense in any context where there is pre-existing trust. Federation is faster, more scalable, more easily upgraded, if something goes wrong it's easier to pause things and make a surgical change to the system. But federations are also easier to subvert, and users more or less end up controlling the maintainers of the system entirely. If you are a group of international banks, that's not a problem. But if you a single human being that expects corporations, banks, and governments to more or less always behave sociopathically, then it doesn't make sense.

Blockchain core infrastructure needs more time. The hype train took off way too early. I think we're looking at 5 to 10 more years of heavy improvements to things like the wallets, custody process, governance models, scripting systems / dapp languages, the cryptography itself, the peer to peer network, cross-chain exchanges, and other big developer and interoperability features, and just general education / common sense about what blockchains can and can't do.

We'll get there. Blockchain technology is absolutely revolutionary, and it's going to change a lot of things about our global infrastructure. But 2018 or even 2020 isn't the year that we see blockchains really start to get traction. There's a lot of groundwork that we still need to put in place.

<comment><USER13> It's been a pretty long time since the Bitcoin paper. About the same or longer than the time between the definition of HTTP and the emergence of the web as a useful mainstream technology. Why does this seem to be developing more slowly than the web? Maybe a better analogy is the time it took arpanet to develop into the modern web? Perhaps analogies like this are not worth looking at?

I'm not sure about any of this, but I feel like lots of people recently have been making the argument that it's really early, hasn't had time to develop, etc., when I've been waiting for it to turn into something for a long time now and becoming increasingly skeptical as the goal posts have continued to move.

<comment><USER14> I believe this has to do with the level of fuck you money made by early devs of these systems and the nature of liquidity in crypto. I'm sitting here working on my non-blockchain product, exhausted after a long weekend of work and mentally preparing for another week of it. I can assure you if there were 10 million plus in my bank account I would have taken the weekend off and explored some of my less profitable interests. I would have written code, read papers, and all of that, just in a more relaxed way. Instead I focused solely on making the product of my business better. Unlike a tokenized system, I can only liquidate the value I have created once I have taken it to the finish line. Myself and my team won't be fat and happy until we get there.

I've had a few people hand wave this explanation, but I've been involved with Ethereum for about 2 1/2 years and this absolutely happens. Productive work is rarely the work that makes us happiest in the moment. That's why we must force founders to hold out for liquidity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email.

I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.

<comment><USER16> Certificate authorities seems to follow the same pattern.

I wonder if we might see a crytocurrency someday follow that same pattern: the chain is decentralized and public, but the miners are each replaced by authorities that a user can choose to accept (or not). The downside to this would be disagreements over who actually owns what. You'd only be able to make a transaction if both the buyer and seller agree on who owns the currency being exchanged.

At least then we wouldn't have the insanity of "whoever uses the most electricity is right".

<comment><USER17> There are many chains like this

<comment><USER16> Really? Do tell, I'm quite interested!

<comment><USER18> Look up [Delegated] Proof of Stake

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree with you on that hybrid would be a more sustainable solution.

I want to highlight a technical perspective. That's the scalability issue of Blockchain. Fully decentralization cannot afford scalability, just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal.

In fact, many technical solutions to scale the Blockchain are using the same principle of your idea of federation.

<comment><USER20> > just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal

OT: I think it's about time to end this myth. We have the internetz for a few decades and voting machines (supposedly to make it all simpler) yet somehow direct democracy is impossible and we "need" the democracy as done in the 19th century just because ... well, because no single government is willing to give power back.

Is it possible to have a referendum on every political proposal? Yes.

Is it done? No.

<comment><USER20> Just to be clear:

We don't need a referendum on every issue, we just need a way to

\- change your representative every week or so

\- override your representative's vote within a given time window

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The US Treasury department says trading in Petro cryptocoins would violate US sanctions against Venezuela. So Bitfinex will not trade in it. Coinmarketcap.com lists over 1500 cryptocoins, but not the Petro.

This sort of things shows up the myth of decentralization. Only one cryptocoin with elements of decentralization has been truly challenged, and has basically collapsed under US government pressure. It shows "decentralization" only exists until one powerful country challenges it. Which effectively means all cryptocoins may as well be directed by the US Federal Reserve. Which means you might as well buy dollars if that is the case.

While this is all the case, it can not be proved, so can be dismissed. What it does portend - the complete collapse of Bitcoin at some point - can not be dismissed though.

<comment><USER4> Their is a difference when a hacker/coder creates a cryptocurrency and a government creates one. I do agree with you the weakness of cryptocurrency now a days is it relies on exchanges that need approval from banks/governments to do business. Gone the days when crypto fans would meet in dark alley ways to exchange cash for coin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Blockchains were designed to prevent double-spending, and not to solve other problems. Most blockchain enthusiasm is misplaced.

One subjective (but powerful) reason for blockchain implementations, is that we're all human, and our egos want to avoid making someone else's database The Big Platform. Or maybe that's our rational sense (looking at GOOG/FB), we don't want our application controlled by someone else.

This article spells out a few reasons why new categories of securities make sense to implement on a blockchain:

[https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token- thesis-4c590476106...](https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token- thesis-4c5904761063)

> "Do we need a blockchain for this? Couldn't this be done with a database?" > The answer is yes, some of it could be done with a centralized database, but > it begs the question "why hasn't it already been done?" The answer is that > the current centralized solutions for electronic value transfer lack > compatibility — they don't talk to each other. I can't send value from > PayPal to Venmo, or from E*Trade to RealtyShares. These layers aren't > interoperable.

<comment><USER23> We have seen a 51% double spending attack on Bitcoin Gold just a few days ago. Can we stop claiming that blockchains prevent that?

<comment><USER22> The attacks on the smaller blockchains are good news. Blockchains have the biggest bug bounties in history, and in time we'll all learn what works.

I've never heard anyone claim blockchains are immune to double spending. There's evolutionary value behind all the experiments. And they're all experiments, including Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with a lot of federated platforms (I'm thinking of diaspora, secure scuttlebutt, mastodon etc) is that whole they do provide a way for data to be easily synchronized and replicated, they never answer the question of who is ultimately going to store the data and why. So you end up with a "temporary" list of servers for new users to sign up with, which become centralized in their own right.

<comment><USER24> SSB is distinct from Diaspora and Mastodon in this respect. It's decentralised rather than federated (pub servers are just peers with a public address).

SSB's answer to this question is: your friends are going to store your data, because they want to read it themselves. You are going to store your friends' data, because you want to pass it on to your other friends.

<comment><USER17> Actually, I'm mostly basing this on SSB, since it is the only one of these three I've used seriously, and I've followed its development since when it was just Dominic Tarr and Paul Frazee in an IRC chat.

The system has gotten a lot more complex since the early days, and although I no longer know all the internals, it seems that the pub servers are pretty integral to its operation, and you can't get someone onto the system without one. I agree that an SSB-like system with pub servers removed and replaced by STUN/TURN servers which would only facilitate WebRTC would not have this problem.

Just to be clear, the reason for this is that STUN/TURN servers are so lightweight and have very little to do with the actual operation of the system, so they could be put on a list on the main website and supported by very small donations.

Then again, like you said, one could describe such a system as "decentralized", not "federated". I also suspect it would have performance characteristics that many users would not like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I will say it: Decentralization has definitely been overhyped by certain fringes - that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bath water, though.

The cry to "decentralize all the things" does include moving things incrementally from single choke point to multiple choke points to multiple choke points working together with a byzantium consensus mechanism to a truly decentralized model without a single point of failure. Many projects are better suited to a hybrid model at this point in time by virtue of what is technologically feasible, as well. Example problem people still butt heads with in "decentralization": nothing at stake for PoS.

Lots of food for thought when tackling this - thanks for raising the important question in this hype cycle.

<comment><USER4> If everything started to use blockchains then we could all be decentralized by 2035.

<comment><USER25> What do you feel about this statement/observation: If everyone started to use hybrids then we could all be in electric cars by 2035.

<comment><USER4> Truth just for the fact most people buy a new vehicle every 10 years or so mattering different things. Plus I hear in certain places they getting rid of the gasoline so people will be more in a rush to purchase something running electricity sooner then later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "As long as we live in a world where fiat currency and nation states dominate transactional and regulatory environments"

Do you think that world will ever end? What will that look like? Will the very, very early stages look something like this?

Cryptocurrencies were not developed as a get rich scheme, nor as a tool for energy efficiency, corporate profits nor so many of the rubrics we use to judge them today.

The idealists that authored the crypto world imagined replacing the fiats of current rulers. Considering how rare a thing that is in history their early, chaotic form of decentralization isn't doing so badly judged on its own merits.

</comment><comment><USER4> Decentralize does work when state doesn't matter. Look at tor for a example. When state matters federation is a better match such as emails. The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network. IPv6 helps with that problem, but still at the end of the day dealing with all the complexity, headaches, and unknowns it is more simple to build a centralize solution then spend the extra time and effort for a federated/decentralize solution.

<comment><USER27> >Look at tor for a example

Is tor not a federation of onion routers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think you're looking in the right direction - governance.

The problems of governance are real. There's a libertarian tendency to just try to define them away, but this underestimates the extent to which abuse questions are important and how a few bad actors can overwhelm a distributed system, requiring considerable dedicated _central_ effort to fight. USENET had its cancels ( [http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/](http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/) , mostly sent by a small group of spam fighters), email had to build centralised DNS blocklists to remain usable.

And as you say, there needs to be a legitimate front organisation to interact with the regulators. Perhaps more than one, to cope with geographically distinct regulations. Or offer people an escape from their local systems of control (until you're blocked at the national level).

To me it seems that the nonprofit/co-operative model is under-explored for this.

A lot of the old Internet that people look back on fondly relied on what I call "Postel decentralisation": people think it was decentralised, but in fact it was managed by hand by John Postel back when he _was_ IANA.

Similarly Linux has "Linus decentralisation": there's an elaborate decentralised version control system, but nonetheless Linus has effective final veto in practice. And Etherum has "Vitalik decentralisation": disasters such as the DAO can be reversed by code changes, because even if the blockchain is immutable the code required to interpret it isn't.

<comment><USER29> > Similarly Linux has "Linus decentralisation": there's an elaborate > decentralised version control system, but nonetheless Linus has effective > final veto in practice. And Etherum has "Vitalik decentralisation": > disasters such as the DAO can be reversed by code changes, because even if > the blockchain is immutable the code required to interpret it isn't.

There is nothing but "sheep mentality" preventing most people from (hard) forking.

Don't like what Ethereum did with the DAO incident? Don't patch. See [https://ethereumclassic.github.io/](https://ethereumclassic.github.io/)

Don't like what Linus did (not) merge? Fork the project, and patch it like you want. See [https://grsecurity.net/features.php](https://grsecurity.net/features.php)

<comment><USER30> Well, yes, except that unless you get a critical mass of people that agree with you, you lose all compatibility. Nobody will buy your Ether-fork and while your Linux fork might work, it's all yours to maintain from that moment on. There is value in standardization, even if the standards aren't perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Agreed. Federation makes a lot of sense to me in many cases, especially those that relate to the enterprise use cases where performance over extreme theoretical security is much more critical. I think some newer consensus algorithms are experimenting with similar concepts as well. For instance, with delegated proof of stake, you can use your funds to elect a federation or a government (a list of nodes), which in turn will stake their funds and resources to validate blocks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is decentralization overhyped? Yes. It is more due to people just scratching the surface of a problem. For example governance is not only about a democratic process - everyone having a say. It is also about public perception. If you need an example, a rather obtuse one is the current US Presidency race. People who hype decentralization go by the book and forget (or don't have) practical knowledge.

On the federation side, ethereum's oracle contracts are meant to be federated feeds. For example you can create a stock price publishing contract which federates feeds from NASDAQ, BATS, NYSE etc. but the end point is a blockchain. I don't know if that is a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER33> Check out Curtis Yarvin's work on this, he problably solved it in an interesting way with how he's configured the current Urbit node system.

<comment><USER34> Urbit is interesting for me in how I first couldn't understand its purpose at all. Since then, I have had several cases of pondering on some difficult problem, only to find myself thinking, "...isn't this what Urbit is attempting to be a (partial) solution to?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> As someone who has _worked exactly with these issues_ for the past 7 years, let me share what I have learned.

Just a bit of background. My first startup, [https://qbix.com](https://qbix.com) focused on letting each community host its own social network, the same way Wordpress powers blogs. Wordpress powers 30% of the Web so it seemed to be a good business model (and it is). Here is a video explaining that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

Last year we started a new company at [https://intercoin.org](https://intercoin.org) focused on letting each community manage its own _currency_. We saw that crypto wasn't solving payments as well as WeChat and all the other centralized social networks, so we figured we could fix that. Here is a video explaining that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbAz29L-FA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbAz29L-FA)

OK, so what have I learned?

First of all, federated is much easier. You simply have one source of truth for each stream of data. It's why it's more prevalent. It also creates "landlords" that you have to trust to host your data, and often their agendas clash with your own. Two months ago I asked why have "communities" at all: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741913)

We are familiar with "landlords" all the time, and their inordinate power within their ecosystems. Consider Amazon's bookstore, Apple's app store, Google's search engine, Facebook's social network, and so on. Federating this would be a very good way of introducing _choice_ , and competition among landlords. You still have to choose a landlord, but now the market can improve everyone's experience through competition.

But it turns out that you can do even better than the market, if you build technology that facilitates _collaboration_ instead of _competition_. Collaboration has entirely different economics, but ultimately wins in the end. Think about Wikipedia vs Britannica, Linux vs Windows, WebKit vs old IE, and so on.

With Collaboration, the infrastructure gets paid for, but not by extracting rents through closed source software. Instead, you distribute the work across many different actors and _none_ of them own their own little fiefdom but they are all intermixed in a grand tapestry. So why would any actor do anything? One answer is that, if they don't do it, someone else will, so they get a little bit of control / money in the beginning, which fades with time. That part is similar to capitalism. But another part is simply because "the main software is designed to facilitate that mode of collaboration by default".

Also the landlord can be a single point of failure for your data. Consider, for instance, how we store files. Imagine you have no backups in the cloud, and all files are stored in your apartment. Now there's a fire. What happened to all your files? They are gone.

But if your'e going to have backups in the cloud, you want to make sure they are encrypted, and only you can access them. Even better would be to blur the distinction between servers run by "the landlord" (even if it's your own apartment) and "the cloud" and just make protocols that find the best server, have it be in a consensus group, encrypt everything end-to-end, and allow reading _and_ writing by multiple parties.

This is _very hard_ to get right. But any such platform would allow people to build communities _on top of_ a reliable foundation, where only members in the communities would be able to access information, and they could have validators who vouch for what actions (e.g. in a game) are valid. Clients that don't agree with a validator can ignore it, and thus the consensus may sometimes split (e.g. a hard fork), with each client choosing which validator to listen to.

This is a strict improvement in terms of resilience and control, removing arbitrary landlord relations, and capable of reducing back to them as a special case. It's just harder to implement.

Consider, for example, why we have domains and DNS. I have files, why do I have to "choose Google Drive" to store my data, and then trust that they will store it, encrypt it, and so on? Why do we have to choose a domain at all? There is a technique called Kademlia, invented in 2002, which was used to power DHTs including BitTorrent and now used in SAFENetwork. SAFENetwork is probably the ultimate example of a benign "landlord" \- a network which encrypts and stores your files redundantly, and prevents them being taken down. (Qbix is moving towards the same thing ([https://qbix.com/blog](https://qbix.com/blog)) except with dynamic data instead of static files.

[https://maidsafe.net/docs/Safe%20Network%20Primer.pdf](https://maidsafe.net/docs/Safe%20Network%20Primer.pdf)

I would say the future is:

      End-to-end encryption
      Kademlia (or similar) for routing
      Consensus groups for each data stream
      Churn (backend groups constantly change to prevent collusion)
      Proof of resource (every so often, within groups)

On top of this, people can build apps that can spread phone-to-phone, taking advantage of a dynamic data layer that lets anyone start their own "stream" and not worry about the arbitrary decision of "which domain hosts it". The participants get determine the rules of each stream (democracy? dictatorship?) and the landlord is just someone they give access to as well. A search engine would just be a guest in many streams.

Do I think Federated systems and market mechanisms are great? Yes. Do I think Distributed systems acting as totally benign landlords are better? Oh yes!

They are more resilient, too. For a crypto-currency, that is a must, or you can have this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1d5VvCa8Fo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1d5VvCa8Fo) (they who know this movie know what happened there.)

But they are way harder to do. It took us over 1 year at Intercoin just to come up with the right design. If you want to know more about this topic, you can read about our design decisions (and economics etc) here:

[https://forum.intercoin.org/](https://forum.intercoin.org/)

Also feel free to email me (greg is the username, intercoin.org is the domain) if you have more questions or want to discuss this topic, I geek out on it. Here is a video I made about decentralizing more than just software:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY)

<comment><USER36> I got to say... that looks pretty hopeless. Complementary currencies [0] are not new and they have limited utility -- especially since the currency takers still have to pay taxes in fiat.

It's very _easy_ to design systems where a single node captures the majority of the value in return for doing the majority of the coordination work. This goes deeper than politics. Look at the design of biological organisms and you find big brains capturing 20 percent of the energy. Look at the design of nation states and you find sovereigns capturing 20-30 percent of GDP. Central coordinators seem to inevitably capture 20-50% of the value. One might even argue that they "earn" it too. Distributed coordination is costly and in a world of scarce resources it's silly to entertain additional coordination costs if you can avoid them. Central coordination has _a lot_ going for it -- in terms of speed, efficiency, economies of scale, and even reliability they are very hard to beat.

Decentralization isn't hopeless though. There exists a class of problems where distribution pays off. Problems that can be truly paralellized, indeed ones that when you examine them you realize they are in fact embarassingly parallel [1]. For these problems it's _expensive_ to introduce a central coordinator. Rather than costs being decreased, the central coordinator now _introduces_ costs intothe system. The central coordinator in fact must hire _enforcers_ to go out and impose its will because there is a natural tendency to parallelize and devise local solutions.

Here's the tragedy of cryptocurrencies: currencies are _not_ in this class of "embarassingly parallel" problems. It's just the opposite: currencies absolutely require a single coordinator with currency power. In the absence of a single coordinator the currency (which can be anything from gold to stones) is reduced to a commodity and is subject to mere supply and demand. And demand can always go to zero. This is what ultimately makes a real currency a real currency -- there exists an undying and infinite "demand" for the currency [2].

Playing games with decentralization and federation will not alter these dynamics. You can solve the double spend problem but you cannot generate infinite demand.

It's unfortunate because there are problems that the blockchain could solve that really are "embarrassingly parallel." The hope here is that all of the innovation going into blockchains will live on long after all the cryptocurrencies have gone to zero or been centralized behind trusted gateways. These innovations will be used to solve big problems that aren't currencies. Big problems like journalism (in fact all content generation a la Wikipedia, Youtube), transportation (Uber), lodging and logistics (ie Amazon and Walmart), resource overuse (this includes everything from overfishing to carbon credits) that are embarassingly parallel and are begging for blockchain-based solutions. These problems are truly _global_ problems and it's quite likely no single central coordinator can solve them. The solution to these problems don't require a new currency and indeed if there's any hope for adoption the users will need to be able to transact in fiat. But these problems do require exactly the sort of real-time global coordination and consensus that blockchains can provide.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel)

[2] [http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/07/mmp- blog-8-taxes-...](http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/07/mmp-blog-8-taxes- drive-money.html)

<comment><USER35> If you're talking about Intercoin, then no, it's extremely far from hopeless. (Plus, even "hopeless" projects have been heavily funded in the last 2 years to solve e.g. stablecoins.)

Complementary Currencies aren't new, in fact many of them have been around for a while. Bristol Pounds [1] and Berkshares [2] are just two examples of many. And yes you can pay local taxes with them.

In fact, before the Greenback (the paper dollar) was fiat currency, there was the Free Banking Era [3]. Money was actually federated: banks would keep gold reserves, and issue banknotes. That's what circulated, not the gold. The gold and silver _coins_ were fiat currency, and only Congress could mint them. However, people traded in local community currencies. The Greenback started as a way to finance the Civil War, and was good for paying tarriffs land taxes of the Federal government (the only kind of taxes they had). It became so popular that Congress made it legal tender after the war. That's what you have come to take for granted and think it's the majority of the money. But it's not.

Today, community currencies exist, but it's not as visible. They are federated with "landlords" who can confiscate your money, but no longer location-based. A casino or Disneyland bucks are probably the most visible examples. But actually, Facebook/GMail/iMessage Payments, PayPal, WeChat, and your local bank, are all examples of internal currencies. And you can't pay taxes with them either. Yet we all use them.

The problem is, until now, they've been pretty "dumb" money. Paper currency, or a centralized bank. Not an open platform. For payments, currently, centralized wins. WeChat, PayPal, Facebook, Venmo, as well as all the banks. They know how the money is being spent, you don't. Mint.com was a play for just the data, that's how valuable it is. What if there was a free and open source network for communities to have their own currencies? That would lower the barrier to having your own currency, run your own monetary policy and generally do all the cool things you can do when you are in control.

You know, it's less than 100 years that anyone can print anything without a gatekeeper. In most countries, even in the 80s, you could only typewrite some document on 4 carbon papers, and if you wanted a 5th paper you needed to type it all again. Then XEROX invented the copier and it spread to other countries. Then Steve Jobs and Apple led the way in desktop publishing. Then we got the Internet, and blogs. And then we got cellphones. Now we take it all for granted.

So in the same way, new technologies allow people who previously needed gatekeepers (the post office, print shops, etc.) to do it all themselves (email, blogs). Dangerous stuff for entrenched institutions? Perhaps! Or perhaps they can adapt with the times.

 _It 's just the opposite: currencies absolutely require a single coordinator with currency power._

I think this is the source of most of your confusion. No, you just think they require it because you haven't seen an alternative. At the very least, there is no reason why two people buying coffee in NYC and in Paris should be on the same ledger. But even more to the point, look at what SAFE Network is doing, read the primer I linked to above. It _is_ massively parallel, _and_ it's secure!

I would respond to the rest, but this message is getting pretty long already.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtGEby4ORGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtGEby4ORGM)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzzkDRIjW30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzzkDRIjW30)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_central_banking_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_central_banking_in_the_United_States#1837%E2%80%931862:_%22Free_Banking%22_Era)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> When you need to bridge to any real-world asset

</comment><comment><USER38> If governance and concensus between the diferent actors is your thing, take a look at the Decred cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've thought a lot about this recently so I'll share my 2c

First some semantics; I use decentralization as a term that applies to both distributed and federated systems. That way the aggregate term 'decentralization' contrasts centralisation properly.

Centralized systems usually work quite well until they reach a certain scale. At what scale centralized systems start breaking down is an interesting question that depends on some variables like the underlying information technology and the cultural assumptions of actors.

Federation is a pretty simple way of solving this problem if you can somehow figure out when and how to split up the centralized system and an interface for the various central nodes to communicate.

Distribution is like anarchism, a laudable goal, but each participant must be capable of independence which may be unrealistically optimistic. Having hierarchies as actors in a network seems more realistic if we can just figure out a way to keep those hierarchies bounded.

For example I think the world would be a better place if we had put into place laws early on in capitalism that would limit how many employees a company could have to some smallish amount like 25 - 100, that way the emphasis would have been on the cooperation of small hierarchies ( = individuals in our current system). Many large companies look like this internally but the teams are not autonomous to the extent of being allowed to move across company borders.

A couple of other observations with the max employee idea: nepotism wouldn't happen (wasting a whole slot in the company on someone useless would breed resentment) and tribes would form (loyalty to your tribe and learning to work together would be paramount).

What I'm leading up to here is that ideally the issue of federation vs distribution would be handled culturally. We could have a network like maidsafe or some ethereum based idea to reach distribution automagically but I tend to think something like a activitypub based social network with lots of different social interfaces (tinder, couchsurfing, instagram, language exchange, facebook groups for different interests, microblogging - only one already implemented, second hand shopping/selling and others) then you'd subscribe to a server that'd fit your niche and someone would be able to make a job out of serving a certain community. Basically letting people decide where they outsource their server needs to instead of trying to make the jump to personal servers in one go (a la urbit). Over generations server hosting would become a family thing probably? It seems natural, we'd essentially be back to square one where your family is your social bedrock.

I'm just flow-of-consciousnessing here so a massive grain of salt please but the overarching point is that distribution vs federation is more political than technical in my opinion.

<comment><USER40> Not much to add, but wanted to say you've given me a lot to think about — thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What lists or platforms help match black-owned businesses and investors? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://fundblackfounders.com/](https://fundblackfounders.com/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645544)). The twitter account is from January 2019 so it might already have some traction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! It does look like it's had a little traction. I'm glad to see that. I'll check it out and pass this along to friends who have been asking.</comment></comment>


An Indigenous Man Who Declared His Own Country - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/world/australia/indigenous-walubara-yidinji.html <comment><USER2> This is a powerful message and makes it very evocative for communicating the need for a treaty. Why is the government so inhumane and closed to the idea of reconciling a disgusting history?

<comment><USER3> Because it can open a dangerous door for bigger unknown issues and is easier to just wait for those voices to pass away while integrating their children in your society. Conquer then assimilate, is the number one tool of all empires, past and present.</comment></comment>