Sean Illing: And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: When they first showed up, they hadn’t told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didn’t want them there and they didn’t appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.
But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.
They couldn’t pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.
Sean Illing: Then what happened over the next few years or so?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.
So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.
Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
Sean Illing: When did the bears show up?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.
One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
If the goal was to increase recycling and reduce legal costs, I would agree that seems like a failure but I can't see that being the case. Nor was the goal to reduce the number of sex offenders or homicides. It wasn't to increase the welfare of bears.
The goal was to move there and influence the government towards their own policies. The fact that all these problems showed up is a measure of their success.
If they were inept they would have caused the opposite thing to happen, Grafton would have become more restrictive and the bears stay in the woods.
It doesn't seem at all valid to critique someone for the amount of snow on the roads if they organised as a group specifically to remove snow plowing.
This is as ridiculous as measuring the original Woodstock by its sound quality, or available amenities. Are people who call it the best concert ever wrong? Are they allowed to have a different definition of success?
The libertarian argument is that libertarian policies will result in better outcomes, not "bear attacks are good, actually".
Maybe there are some who are like, "I don't care if bear attacks are way up, the point is that I can choose to be eaten by bears if I want", but for the most part they believe both that more 'liberty' is morally correct and also that it improves society in general.
The decadence of the public services happened within the existing, non-libertarian legal framework that provisioned the publicly-funded police, the monopoly of land, and the public ownership of roads. The input into this model was the starvation of the government by means of cutting its funding, the output was its decline without a viable replacement. No libertarian theory that I've read proposes that social elegance emerges out of the mixture of the new and the ancien régime. Local policing and national defense are often theorized as funded by property contracts, rents, and fees on consumption and on fuel. The distinction from the usual taxation is that the individual retains the freedom to change property and location, and opt out.
It was movement in a libertarian direction, and failed.
True enough, you don't usually get "full blown libertarianism", because, well, hardly anyone wants that, which means people don't vote for it. Would make for an interesting experiment, though.
I love this article being quoted and requoted over the years, yet considering I live not one town over from there, it never fails to amuse at how much of that article is made up whole-cloth. To a rural NH native, this is basically somebody who has never actually lived in rural NH freaking out about rural NH.
- Bears are a problem everywhere, (town police doesn't deal with bears, Fish & Game does generally, and that's not the town's business. Having dealt with problem bears and Fish & Game - their response is usually "You got a gun?")
- somehow the Grafton dump is still operational, despite libertarians existing;
- ignore the appalachian trail that has long been a route for various forest squatting through-hikers that have been shitty about their trash, ignore the multiple camps of people living in the national forest around these parts due to various reasons (seasonal work, just squatting, getting away from life...)...
etc, etc.
It honestly was the first article in any news source that made me really question the journalistic profession. But we'll forever disregard the reality on the ground in favor of sensationalist bullshit.
If I understand, having only 4096 bytes of data per term causes multiple terms in the same query to intersect to little or no results. The purpose seems to cut cost in compromise of completeness.
Yeah. That seems like a design decision that will scale poorly. For reference, even in my dinky 100M index I have individual terms with several gigabytes of associated document references.
In general hash map table index designs don't tend to be very efficient. If you use a skip list or something similar, you can calculate the intersection between sets in sublinear time.
Point is, with a skip list (or similar), the lists don't need to be small. You can intersect data sets that are enormous very quickly using this algo[1] where a single linear read of both lists is the worst case scenario.
How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like?
An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?
Bank deposits of legal tenders are insured by the central bank. In the Eurozone the ECB insures all personal deposits up to 100.000€. When the bank of Nicosia, Cyprus went bankrupt and the account holders could no longer withdraw, their losses were fully subsidized by the ECB, up to the 100.000€ limit.
This undue confidence or trust we bestow in regulated banks comes at the expense of the wider public: when we lose our deposit due to insolvency, everybody is forced to pay for it by the monetary expansion of the ECB, which covers our loss by printing (or by digitally creating) more euro, and distributes this minted money to the affected bank, allowing withdrawals to resume. This intervention of the ECB dilutes the purchasing power of every unrelated person holding euro, regardless of their country of residence, and regardless on how meticulous they are in choosing a reliable bank. Even the CFA franc in West Africa suffers from this enforced depreciation, being pegged against the euro at a fixed ratio.
Thus, the account holders gain an artificially strong confidence in the bank of their choice, regardless of whichever bank that might be, regardless of how much risk exposures the bank takes, regardless of what financial instruments it edges against, and regardless of the size of its fractional reserve compared to its liabilities. It is an insurance whose only purpose is to allow the bank to take undue risk with volatile instruments and to collectivize any resulting losses against the public, while deluding the account holders with the ancillary excuse that their deposits are safe no matter what.
The alternative to having 21 year old Joe running a million-dollar crypto exchange website from a laptop in his basement is to apply fucking due diligence in choosing our counterparty, and prosecute whenever proper fraud and intentional deception take place.
I believe the perception of this dichotomy is something of your own imagination. Anecdotally the term fiat is used exclusively in the context of crypto, but to the best of my understanding its usage doesn't imply that the sole alternative to fiat is BTC, or crypto. Rather, I believe the term solely carries a prejudice against money that is declared valuable as such by political authority rather than by its market adoption and de-facto usage.
How could that be of my imagination when it's used and liked in the parent to my comment? Everyone is a fiat holder but holding (not crypto) does not constitute being a fiat holder.
But yes, I agree with you about where fiat is used. It's almost always used by people that don't quite undersand the concept of value or that of money for that matter.
Money is not declared valuable by political authority. That is just not how it works. Crypto is what's declared valuable by fiat, ironically. Its value is described as derived in terms of a limited supply (it's just like Gold!)
Fiat currency derives its value from network effects, debts and the feeling of safety (or the lack thereof.)
To my knowledge those accumulations of material are composed of eroded debris of adobe, mud or stone bricks from preexisting buildings or towns after centuries of erosion.
