RE: Is Hive Watcher's doing a good job?

"He simply enacts one "law" after another because he thinks that is what is expected of him..."

That is a problem with Legislatures. Once you have 10 commandments, you don't need more commandments, but legislators are paid to create laws, so they keep creating commandments that are not only unnecessary, but - because each law criminalizes an action, create breaches of these unjust laws that are treated as crimes - are actually crimes themselves.

I don't recall the actual statistics, but the various jurisdictions in the US create a stack of laws head high yearly, all of which further deprecate freedom and are crimes because they are unjust. Worse, corruption inevitably infests institutions, and some laws are intended to be crimes crooked legislators effect because they're bribed or blackmailed to do so, using saving children, terrorists, or smth to justify their enactment.

After a couple centuries this pile of tyrannies and oppressions really stacks up and turns a free country into a totalitarian despotism that societies either destroy, or are destroyed by. I reckon this is the reason we see specific evils repeated in history, despite the obvious malignance and eventual outcomes of those evils (revolution, hanging crooked politicians from lamp posts, etc.). Since each evil isn't part of some overall master plan to attain anything but some benefit desirable to the corrupters, the holistic concatenation of these evils isn't a goal, but tends to be arrived at consistently anyway.

Weimar Germany, Justinian Byzantium, and the West today all strikingly resemble one another in the specific degeneracies and lapses of just governance that degrade them, and we should not be surprised when the West ends up being resolved in the same way Byzantium, Weimar Germany, and similar degenerate states have been.

However, the technological capabilities of human society do not simply cycle. While polities rise from chaos and proceed to repeat the political cycle, technology only infrequently is reset to the Stone age. Technological advance may pause when polities being reset prevents continued development temporarily, the tech capabilities don't reset to zero, but advance from where they were when they paused.

Decentralization of means of production is quite obviously the cutting edge of every field of industry today. Dispersing production of goods and services across the population dramatically changes the dynamic of power in society. Where overlords have been necessary to manage centralized production for millennia, because the machinery of production has required collective human labor to make it work, when automation enables individuals, or much smaller and more easily managed groups, like individual households, overlords are not only no longer necessary, they are repugnant because they are so expensive.

For example, a movie studio that makes a surfer movie using the big film cameras used in the 60s has huge crews and needs expensive lawyers. Today a surfer with a gopro has no need of expensive lawyers, and would find the claim of the bar that he needed to spend $1m/year on retainers absolutely intolerable. This isn't merely some utopian fantasy. Across every field of industry this is the restructuring being undertaken today, as 3D printers, aquaponics, mesh networks, printable electronics, and the variety of automated means of production available to individuals burgeon and develop.

Add to that the increased productivity of the most advanced technology in each of the fields, such as cooking. In the Stone age you made flour by grinding grain between rocks by hand. For millennia this was the way to make flour, with gradual increases in industrial capacity from a woman with a mortar and pestle being the state of the art to Roman water powered mills built in a row along a flowing stream. Then the industrial revolution introduced the steam engine, and manufacturing capacity advanced from steam donkeys to the digitally controlled electric motors flour mills owned by corporations have today.

However the advent of household grain mills makes it unnecessary to buy bleached enriched flour from corporations that grow GMO grain doused in biocides. People can massively improve the quality of the flour they eat - which has become not just a benefit, but an existential need, because all that bleaching, enriching, and dousing is chemically castrating us to the point that testosterone has plummeted, and fertility has dropped below replacement levels. This means that people that buy or grow organic grain and grind it themselves have a massive advantage over people that buy flour from corporations, because they aren't chemically neutered and successfully breed, while people that do buy flour from overlords go extinct.

Because flour isn't the only source of such chemical pollution, people that take advantage of the most advanced technology which eliminates waste and expenses specific to centralization also gain the most benefit from the products they make themselves, because they make bespoke products exactly to their specifications, rather than mass produced crap that just gets jammed into their use case, and all the myriad ways chemical pollution gets into our diets and environment are reduced across the board. For instance I make my own toothpaste, deodorant, and other household products that don't have emulsifiers, plasticizers, or detergents in them, dramatically reducing the chemical pollution I am exposed to.

In toto, the increased benefit people and societies gain from decentralization isn't merely quantitative, but is qualitative in that it is the difference between reproductive success and failure, between freedom and slavery, between felicity and penury. Because decentralization and automation advance every field of industry this isn't just a minor change, like from land line telephones to mobile phones, but a dramatic evolution of society that is deprecating the master/slave system to replace it with freeholds of peers.

Then add the nascent advent of access to resources that aren't on Earth, like asteroid Psyche, worth ~$1Q (one quadrillion dollar). Because we can automate production of sealed environments, print solar panels, create closed loop ecologies with aquaponics that create food, water, and air, and etc., and today spacecraft are being 3D printed, the obvious result is going to be a diaspora of free people able to provide everything they need themselves to wherever valuable resources are they can develop. Because of the paradigm of centralized hierarchies depends on the entire hierarchy focusing it's abilities on the orders of the overlord, institutions like corporations, governments, and armies aren't capable of conquering and ruling diasporas. Diasporas may have little military power in each of the disparate points, but because they are managed independently there is no central point of failure an army can conquer and thereafter control the diaspora.

IOW, the rule of overlords and polities is becoming impossible, and free people will become prosperous beyond my ability to conceive as they spread out across the universe. I hope that makes more sense than my prior doom/utopian posts have. It's simply evolution of capabilities happening across the board transcending a clinal boundary, and creating new environmental conditions that are dramatically different than existed before.