Long long before the cloud and smart contracts I was fooling around with a DSL with the mission to measure what was consumed precisely (cpu cycles, kb*s worth of memory, storage, read/write, bandwidth) so that anyone may exchange the idle cycles of any computer for currency.

It was identified as a stupid idea from the start but I was curious what kind of concessions it involves. Like you cant just call a useful method anymore, it has to be known what it costs precisely given the exact work load.

It didn't take long for my mind to be blown by the completely insane overhead. Counting consumption of system resources is consumption too! While exact calculation is not very complicated every step of the way I felt tempted to just estimate it. Sorting out micro transactions in a secure way???...

Eventually I got distracted by the parallels with our society. Job agencies here charge 95% of the salary earned but the administrative overhead hardly ends there! The real cost is hidden in the estimated stuff. After all the taxes and subsidies are calculated someone at the tax office has to repeat the calculations. In some almost fixed percentage of cases mistakes are made and it takes judges, lawyers, law makers, lobby groups. Tons of expensive transactions along the way.

Before you can even get to work there are licenses, permissions, diplomas, certifications, health and sanity checks.

If your job is to dig holes one would think it involves little more than a pair of good boots and a shovel. End of the day you want a shower, a good meal, a roof over your head and some guarantee you don't have to dig holes the entire year round. (We are mistaken to think people in poorly paid grunt work are interested in trying to make ends meet.)

If you have just 20 people digging holes their performance becomes extremely measurable. They know exactly how good they are at their job. Rewarding them involves such an enormous clusterfuck of fuzzy params which may accumulate to 10 fold their salary (or more!) that their performance becomes irrelevant to their reward. The cost of accounting for it would be much larger than the cost of poor performance.

What we can do is reward their boss or their supervisor. We do that to maintain the illusion that every bit of overhead needs to be there. It is all there for a reason ofc, it is a legacy system slowly migrating from manual paperwork to automation.

You could have a very simple government app like Uber so that those who dig holes may dig holes. Customers and hole diggers can review the quality of the holes themselves. Contractors can use the API to have expensive fast holes, cheaper slow ones, an all you can eat rate or a hybrid between the 3.

But that is not going to happen, in stead we build machines to dig the holes, deploy even more administration, engineers, designers, repair shops etc lots of complicated skills required and the hole diggers can get social support while looking for other work which involves even more circus of estimates portrayed as measurement.

Some sub set of the bean counting is incredibly important and their work makes modern society what it is. Don't ask me to measure it tho.

Simplicity has its appeal. We could build monasteries where each monk maintains 1 module. If it worked for kung fu why not for array sort?