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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Btfsplk who wrote (54579)	10/6/2013 5:33:28 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	1 Recommendation Recommended By sm1th Respond to of 85487

Those things really get to the core of why a government that is set up to protect the rights of the individuals rather than provide for the needs of the population, is so important. The simple fact is that any government that promises and/or tries to provide the needs that each individual rightfully should provide for themselves, is destined to failure. It doesn't matter if the system is a democracy, theocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship or monarchy. It also doesn't even matter if it is socialistic, communistic, capitalistic or any combination thereof. Where a centralized provider of the needs of individuals who cannot provide for themselves may seem manageable in the beginning, it is impossible to stem the tide of individuals who define themselves as being unable to provide for themselves. Basically, the job is too big, too complex and too varied to try to provide for the needs from a centralized authority. The best that we can hope for is a government that provides the framework that allows individuals who are providing for their needs and the needs of their families to interact with others who are doing the same thing, in a way that reduces conflict and then provides for conflict resolution when it arises. When you look at this as a system, it is a decentralized form of government. The federal government was intended to be a bare bones framework that provided the protections needed for individuals to provide for themselves, express themselves, protect themselve, trade with others. And it defines the basics on conflict resolution and the obligations that the government has in protecting rights within that system. The people then have the option to give their states, counties and some additional powers, but the rights and responsibilities of the individual remain intact. A distributed government is scalable. A highly centralized government will eventually collapse under its own weight. It may take a long time, but during the process it must trample on the rights of the individual in order to fulfill the obligation of providing for the needs of an entire population. Computer systems and networks are an interesting parallel. In the early days of computers we had mainframes as the centralized intelligence and a bunch of dumb terminals hanging off of it. Eventually as the number of dumb terminals increased and the number of tasks also increased while becoming more complex, the central processor simply wasn't able to service every task on every terminal in a timely manner. So we then moved away from a centralized intelligence to a distributed intelligence. Everybody has a smart computer on their desktop that can run whatever tasks they need locally. When information needs to be shared between computers, the data goes over a network that has a defined set of protocols on how they interact. Networks in the early days often had a central controller too. But as we can see with the internet, the most efficient network turned out to be the distributed architecture that is almost chaotic in its structure. But by providing the basic framework on how everything interacts with everything else, we have a very resilient system that facilitates business, entertainment and random rantings on message boards. In the real world I work with meshed wireless networks. Most of the products available today do have a central controller. These systems tend to have too much delay for any real time applications. They also require a fair amount of configuration to be functional. And any changes require more configuration. IT Managers love this as it guarantees job security. The next generation has the mesh nodes as intelligent endpoints that can automatically configure themselves into structured tree configurations with a central node that makes the decision on all traffic as to whether the packets go to the wired network or back out to a different destination on the wired network. so even though much of the intelligence is distributed to the endpoints, that one central node is a bottleneck if there is excessive traffic and it is also a single point of failure. The best performance in meshed wireless networks is where all of the intelligence is distributed and each node on the network has the ability to determine locally, the best route to send data to any given destination. No delay caused by an overloaded centralized controller, no single point of failure, scalable and tolerant to a changing network environment. I don't bring this up as a random parallel. I actually believe that the universe is set up as a random, chaotic distributed system. But within the random, chaotic distributed system, the individual components organize themselves into a system that has an amazing amount of order. I believe that systems that operate within a universe that is itself a distributed, random, chaotic system, will operate most efficiently if they have the same characteristics. When we try to implement systems that are highly centralized, whether human, computer, rail or whatever, we quickly run into the limitations of a system that is inherently unstable and unscalable. (and yes, I know that many, most or all of these thoughts are not original)