This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough.
What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice side effect of the prior sweat.
The votes in both the house and the senate were almost entirely along party lines. Every republican in the senate that voted, voted for this act and every democrat in the senate that voted, voted against this act.
The reality is more nuanced--the time to stop this legislation was by preventing it coming to vote in the senate. Typically the senate needs 60 votes to forcefully end debate[0], then merely majority to pass it. Once can disguise support for a bill by approving to end debate, then voting "Nay" given it will get the necessary 50 to be approved.
For JS 34 [1] Mitch McConnell (R, KY) limited debate to 10 minutes--I'm unclear from the transcript exactly how this was allowed. Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) offered resistance to limiting debate, and Kamala Harris (D, CA) and Patrick Leahy (D, VT) requested the role be called several times as a delaying tactic, but the limiting of debate went through.
Just prior to the vote, Brian Schatz (D, HI) offered some debate, but this is cosmetic given the known votes.
My read there is little to be gained by trying to legislate implementation power that has been ceded to the executive branch and the various agencies that are run by appointment, and therefore a costly filibuster and fight was not worth the time, effort and political mud.
The law provides a procedure for expedited consideration in the Senate. If the committee to which a joint resolution is referred has not reported it out within 20 calendar days after referral, it may be discharged from further consideration by a written petition of 30 Members of the Senate, at which point the measure is placed on the calendar, and it is in order at any time for a Senator to move to proceed to the joint resolution.[7] If the Senate agrees to the motion to proceed, debate on the floor is limited to 10 hours and no amendments to the resolution or motions to proceed to other business are in order, and so the Senate may pass the joint resolution with a simple majority.[7] A joint resolution of disapproval meeting certain criteria cannot be filibustered.[8]
Probably with good reason too, since if I'm understanding the US system correctly proposed regulations are created by unelected officials and can come into effect without any congressional vote whatsoever. Allowing filibustering of CRA votes would mean that regulations could be created despite the majority of the Senate and House strongly opposing them.
Not really -- rulemaking from the executive branch agencies is supposed to be what takes laws and implements them into concrete policy. The CRA is supposed to allow Congress the ability to void the rules that are perceived as going against the spirit of the law that was passed.
I haven't seen any reporting on a specific law that these rules were tied to, but I have seen references made to laws predating the public internet that mandate privacy on phone calls that.
People don't seem to like this comment, but that is a great link. Browsing around the site, I found this list of common English language errors: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html
Most of those are made up prescriptive guidelines, mixed in with some common misspellings. One grumpy person does not get to decide how the rest of us choose to use and evolve language. The "forceful" / "forcible" example is particularly inane and pedantic but hardly the worst on that page. I'll continue to say "being that", "ice tea", "center around", etc. as I please.
In linguistics the illustrative analogy is that prescriptivism is akin to an anthropologist entering into a foreign culture and rather than simply observing, they instruct the members of this culture on how to cook, dress, cut their hair, etc. Most modern dictionaries (including the Oxford English dictionary) take a descriptive approach to the study of language.
By that argument, we should all just be able to say and write whatever we want however we want to, even if it's technically or factually incorrect, like Humpty Dumpty or Donald Trump.
Why bother hewing to "elitist" rules of grammar and accepted spellings, being that it's just prescriptivism?
How does one decide objectively if something is just plain wrong, or merely prescriptive?
Case in point: "premises". So many people treat this singular noun as a plural and use horrors like "on-premise", which is so utterly wrong that it is painful for me to look at. What's worse is that "premise" is a real word and an entirely different thing and is most definitely not the singular of "premises".
This word came about (as many English words do) as a corruption of the Latin "praemissus", meaning something like "the aforementioned", and was used often in legal agreements for properties, and so became a word in itself that meant "the property".
Now we are corrupting it yet again, this time without the excuse of it being a different language, on the basis that "I'll say it however I please." People I have mentioned this to have told me that it is so difficult to get people to use the right word that they've just gone with "on-prem".
Now readers can take this comment as the rant of a "grammar nazi" or a pedant, but it wasn't meant that way, and I'll respond in advance with this: why is it not ok to identify something that is wrong? Because it's mere nitpicking?
Maybe so - but that's how matters devolve, over the decades, back to widespread ignorance and intolerance: one little oversight at a time.
Sorry, I didn't mean to get on the soapbox - sometimes it's just frustrating for those of us who are perhaps overly detail-oriented. But the world needs "pedantic" people like us more than it likes to admit.
The irony of course being that "being that" in the way you've used it is one of the examples of "incorrect English" given by the op. And you're using it to support the idea that these things are important...
> This word came about ... as a
> corruption ... without the excuse
> of it being a different language
You have some unorthodox ideas about how language came into being.
Point taken, I made a mistake, but I think you're so focused on picking apart the comment that you've ignored the meat of it. That's ok, I said my piece and expected it to be downvoted - and it was.
I'll upvote you (although technically HN doesn't like meta-commentary about upvotes / downvotes) because you made your point well.
I don't have an issue with every "error" on that page and I have no problem with style guidelines for writing, but the problem comes when the prescriptivists think that logic is on their side when they opine on subjective stylistic and dialectic issues. "Ice tea" is a perfect example. The author of that site argues that "iced tea is not literally made of ice, it simply is 'iced': has ice put into it.". Apparently he is unaware of English's enormous fondness for attributive nouns. By his reasoning, we should all be saying "appled pie", or "apple-infused pie", or something crazy like that.
I also have a more general problem with prescriptivism because frequently it is used to justify a certain type of racist and classist thought.
"Ice" is not a type of tea, but ice tea is a type of tea just as apple pie is a type of pie. I see no difference. Ice tea is tea with ice in it, apple pie is pie with apples in it.
Ok, even if I accept that, it's not a reason to prefer the term "iced tea" to "ice tea".
Ice algae are not made from ice, for example -- they are algae that are found in ice. The point is that in noun-noun compounding, the semantic relationship between the two nouns varies widely from case to case (far more widely than the distinction we are nitpicking over between "apple pie" and "ice(d) tea").
Which makes sense, because it's referring to a type of algae found in ice.
If there were a type of tea that only grew or were only found in ice, then it might make sense to call it 'ice tea'. However, that's not the case because it's regular tea that has been 'iced'.
The relationship between two nouns in a noun-noun compound is very flexible. Sometimes it means the head noun is made out of the attributive noun ("apple pie"), sometimes it means the head noun is found in the attributive noun ("ice algae"), sometimes it means something completely different (how about "ice axe"?). So, because that relationship is so flexible, it's just not absurd to consider that in the case of "ice tea" the relationship is that the head noun contains the attributive noun, as is exactly the case with "bubble tea" and many other NN compound examples.
And I will say again that the semantic relationship between "is made out of" and "contains" is so, so similar. Given the huge variety of acceptable semantic relationships between two nouns in a NN compound, it's really ridiculous to claim that "contains" is not acceptable whereas "is made out of" is, especially so when there are tons of examples of the "contains" relationship that staunch prescriptivists never object to (again, "bubble tea").
Sometimes it can be useful to expand the compound noun to see if it makes sense.
Apple pie:
- Pie found in apple(s)? Nope.
- Apple that is used to do something to pie! Hmm, no.
- Pie that is modified by an apple. No...
- Pie that is made with apple the primary ingredient? Yes
Ice algae:
- Algae found in ice? Bingo.
- Algae that is used to do something to ice? No.
- Algae that is modified by ice? Nope.
- Algae that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No again.
Ice axe:
- Axe found in ice? No.
- Axe that is used to do something to ice! Yes.
- Axe that is modified by ice? Definitely not.
- Axe that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Finally...
Ice tea:
- Tea found in ice? No.
- Tea that is used to do something to ice? Not that I've heard of.
- Tea that is modified by ice? Mmm... it's not modified. It's still tea, only cold, not hot. Its temperature, a non-essential property of tea, has been modified. So wouldn't that be "iced tea", as in, "tea that is normally served hot but has been cooled down, namely, iced"?
- Tea that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
I regret I have honestly never heard of bubble tea (but I have heard of bubble gum), so I have no clue what it is, other than it has something to do with tea and bubble(s).
That is the relationship... "contains". There are many other examples in English of that relationship in NN compounds, and I guarantee you use them unconsciously without a second thought. You are also not getting my point, please reread my last post.
> Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
This is how I know you and others in this thread have not spent a lot of time thinking about language. When has ambiguity ever prevented humans from using and understanding language? If you look at any piece of writing deeply, it is filled with an unimaginable amount of nuanced ambiguity. That's exactly why NLP is so hard.
But iced tea typically does not contain ice unless you add it. Buy a can of Lipton's Iced Tea - it's still iced tea, with no ice in it. But whatever, this is getting to angels on the head of a pin territory :)
I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time.
I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point.
But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words?
Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?
Sorry for being a bit rude. And yeah, this is the most hair-splitting argument I've ever been involved in on HN :)
My work in linguistics and NLP is strongly related to ambiguity, so I tend to see things in those terms and I do not see resolving ambiguity as an impediment to understanding language (for humans at least, but for computers it is an enormous problem). We'll agree to disagree!
What you call corruption, others call evolution. The fact of the matter is that there is no authority defining English. As a result, there is no way of objecctively deterimining if something is plain wrong. The best we can do is going by usage. You can try to influence usage, certainly, but some of those battles are simply not winnable.
Note that the prominent English dictionaries have usage panels that make judgements about whether the usage of a certain form of a word is sufficiently wide as their criteria for inclusion.
It's not that it is not ok to identify something as wrong, but you will need to accept that people will disagree with it, and that what is wrong to you now may very well have enough support in usage that the battle is already lost. When you then opt for comparisons to Trump, then it is not surprising that you get downvotes.
A lot of the "I'll say it however I please" is down to usage. I'll drag out my favourite example: "begs the question". It's my favourite because I didn't even know about the original meaning until I started seeing rants about how horrible the new meaning was. Do a search for it today, and the results are dominated by sites complaining about how awful the change is, and articles about it.
To date, I can recall only one instance where I've seen the original meaning used outside of such a rant. It's basically a lost battle, where people will often respond along the lines of "I'll say it however I please" for the simple reason that to most people the original meaning is entirely foreign because of its niche usage.
Usage panels, which often lags trends like this, for good reason, have in recent years started tipping towards the new usage for "begs the question", often marking the original form as "formal", because ultimately language is about communication, and you can not communicate effectively if you pretend the most common form doesn't exist. Here [1] is an article at Merriam Webster discussing the issue.
Yeah, look, I'm aware of language evolution (or devolution, as it may be), and that there's no formal authority for the language. I mean, there are already at least two major dialects of English (British and American), and there's enough of a difference between the two to cause problems for the unwary.
What I'm railing against is more that there appears to be little interest, in general, even to try to get things right. I see this not just in human language, but in business, software development, publishing, pretty much everywhere.
I'm really tired, so I'm not expressing myself as well as I should, so perhaps I should just wrap this up and get some sleep. An iPad is also not the best UI for writing on HN.
Thanks for your thoughtful and thought-provoking response.
> What I'm railing against is more that there appears to be little interest, in general, even to try to get things right.
Language is a means to an end. If my entire audience understands what I am saying, and is not put-off by how I say it, then I did, in fact, get things right.
Language is a set of tools. In the same way it can be annoying to watch someone hammer in a nail with the end of a wrench, it can be annoying to watch someone sort through their linguistic toolset, ignore the finely-honed implement meant for the job and grab another.
But when you're writing something down (especially for publication), you can not know your entire audience. Not using reasonable care in your written language communicates exactly that: that you care not for your audience.
Or that you care for a specific audience. I, for one, do not care about any audience members who get up in arms if I use "begs the question" in the sense of "raises the question", for example. The use has become so common, that I expect anyone who finds that offensive will not be worth the trouble for me to try to cater to.
You need to draw a line somewhere, or you will end up spending your life obsessing over unimportant details of what you write instead of actually communicating.
If your omission of what you assume is "unimportant detail" leads to your audience misunderstanding the "important" detail, you actually are failing to communicate.
It may also happen that the one person who you felt was not "worth the trouble" turns out to be someone who will be very important to you one day, like a potential business partner or investor, and who interprets your misuse of language as ignorance.
There's a difference between obsessing over unimportant detail and being thorough, IMHO.
Prescriptivism is dumb. I think everyone here gets that.
However, I like tools in my arsenal that enable me to express myself precisely. Prescriptivist rants often open my eyes to subtle shades of possible meaning that I otherwise would not have seen.
I don't quite agree with "typically". The numbers of filibusters (and cloture votes) has radically increased in recent history, but I'm not sure if you can really call it the default behavior yet.
You're correct and I edited my comment. I suspect that that may just be a tactic to save face in vulnerable districts rather than a sincere desire to oppose the bill.
>I suspect that that may just be a tactic to save face in vulnerable districts rather than a sincere desire to oppose the bill.
And the only reason Democrats voted against it was a tactic to save face for their constituents back home.
Why in the world would you think some politicians are magically sincere while others are not just by the little letter in parenthesis after their name?
Hyper partisan people that think this way are the reason political discourse has gone to shit and everything turns into some childish red team vs blue team ideology. As you keep propagating this mindset, people on both sides keep turning up the volume on their echo chamber and we get the most partisan congress (on both sides) in a hundred years[1].
Hard won congressional seats will often sit out or sometimes even vote against their parties legislation but coordinate their votes inch a way that ensures that their parties legislation still passes.
Say you have 54 democrats in the senate, and a democratic president 4 democrats that had difficult races can abstain or vote against the bill while 50 democrats can vote for it, with the vice president being the tiebreaker.
I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties.
Two.
So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says.
That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free", we still think that this is a good solution.
Apologies for veering off topic. Had to get it off my chest for once, as I don't normally voice this stuff. (Because I'm sure others have said it better before.)
This is definitely something worth pushing for, if you're an American. Figuring out how to shift our system into one where viable third parties can play ball would be frigging grand.
I'd like to see the GOP split into the 2-3 parties it shelters, and the Democrats go their 3 or so ways as well. I'd bet it'd significantly stabilize US policy and reduce the zero sum power plays that are becoming quite common.
just found out about "approval voting" last night, so i'm experiencing baader-meinhof thanks to your comment. found out that The ACM and IEEE use this type of voting system (i think), and maybe there are some scientists out there that could start spreading the word about this form of voting.
If you go out and talk to these actual Democrats and Republicans, the bipartisan distinction seems more and more like a fraud.
Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?
> Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?
The people around me are not mega-rich. It is not a problem of that people being "bad people". It is a circumstance problem. The situation is that they have so much money that can change the laws.
Cut lobbing, redistribute wealth and you will stop this cartoon evil behavior. Keep people so rich that they don't understand what being middle class is, and they will continue pressing for ridiculous reductions on our rights.
If poor people stopped voting for the most lobbied politicians, that would stop it too. It's voters who ultimately choose, and they consistently demonstrate that they prefer lobbying - for both major parties.
Americans keep complaining about their politicians, then elect the same parties they complain about over and over again. I work with an American who explained it - she voted for a party she didn't like because she was desperate to do anything she could to prevent the other party winning. It turned out the other party won afterall so her efforts just went towards entrenching the two party system and discouraging anyone else from voting for what they actually want next time.
Right, I think you have to change the dynamics. Voting ought to better capture citizens preferences, it like we vote with one hand tied behind our backs. Why can't we at least rank the candidates?
Because that would empower minor candidates. The parties that are in power aren't going to change the system in a way that disadvantages themselves and perhaps even poses an existential risk. That means if you vote democrat or republican, you're voting against your proposal. Neither party is so kind-hearted that they'll cut off the branch they're sitting on!
My country has ranked voting. Compulsory ranked voting. No-one seems to have any difficulties with it. What's so hard to understand about rank the candidates in the order that you want them?
I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.
I think his points are pretty good ones. There was a lot of anger and unhappiness after the 2010 election and the role preferences played in it. I'm not going to change my mind entirely on one poll which hasn't ever been repeated when there are valid objections to the question and the signal isn't even that large. You could have polled people on if the electoral college should be gotten rid of after the last US election and you'd probably get a similar sort of polarised answer for the same reasons.
More importantly, I don't really care about what people prefer in their voting system. That probably sounds bad, and I think it's important that people trust it but it's a technical answer to the question of how we discover what people want. That's what I care about, which is why I support compulsory voting which ensures a more representative government at the cost of forcing everyone on the rolls to vote.
I'm also not some weird person who thinks we have it perfect here. Obviously optional preferential voting in all cases would be better, not just for the federal senate, and Hare-Clark nationwide would be even cooler than that. There's always improvements to be made.
The problem with approval voting is that game-theoretically it devolves to plurality voting once everyone understands the system. Approval voting violates the later-no-harm principle: indicating approval for secondary candidates can harm the chance that your primary candidate is elected. Knowing this, why would anyone approve of more than one candidate?
Absolutely false. Strategic Plurality Voting means NOT voting for your favorite, e.g. a Green voting Democrat. With Approval Voting, that same voter's best strategy is to vote Democrat AND Green. THAT is why you'd vote for more than one candidate.
Later-no-harm is a silly "anti-criterion" that causes more harm than benefit. See explanation by a Princeton math PhD who co-founded the Center for Election Science.
Thanks for posting all this info. In the youtube video, I liked the end where you talked about an objective satisfaction measure for these systems. For someone who wants to be able to provide more preference information at the ballot, and is not married to any particular method, it does make you wonder, why not directly use the objective measure for voting? You'd get a 1-1 correspondence. Wouldn't that maximize satisfaction and the voting method objective function?
I would think that given different peoples' standards of "approval", ranked-choice voting is much simpler for the genreal public to grasp, and a more useful metric to base an election on.
I suppose we'll see how Maine handers their newly-implemented ranked-choice scheme in the coming election cycles.
Ah I meant not hard to vote your preferences, it can definitely be hard to understand the outcomes. I think you might be right that that's what the parent was talking about. Nice work injecting some research into this thread.
it's that it is the only stable equilibrium of the winner-takes all parts of our elections.
True, but equilibrium is not the goal. The mere fact that a political system has been around long enough to approach equilibrium means that people have been sleeping at the wheel for a long time.
In the general. But you also have to look at the primaries. For instance, this year we had 22 major candidates running for president in the two major parties. And people like Trump and Sanders show that there is plenty of room for heterodox candidates to be successful.
Primaries are part of the problem, not the solution. If I'm a member of party A, I can't voice a preference for the failed candidates of party B or A. I can only pick between the winners.
For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump. Ranked voting might have allowed them to vote Sanders > Trump > Hillary in 2016. Others may have preferred Rand Paul, or Gary Johnson, etc.
FPTP is directly responsible for our dichotomous and increasingly unstable political system. We need more choice at the ballot box.
> For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump.
If there's a sizeable proportion of people like that, they'd be able to get their candidate in the primary. By and large you need far fewer votes to win the primary than to win the general.
It always surprises me that there are people who don't bother to vote in the first round of voting, and then complain about the quality of candidates that made it to the second round. Well, yeah; you can't sit things out and hope that other people will pick the person you like. Only 28.5% of eligible voters voted in the presidential primary in 2016 (and non-presidential primaries often have lower turnout).
> If there's a sizeable proportion of people like that, they'd be able to get their candidate in the primary.
This was the focus of my post, though I guess it wasn't clear...
What you're suggesting doesn't work across party lines. The Democrat primaries don't care whether Republicans would have voted for Sanders over Trump, and the Republican primaries have a similar problem. Primary systems acts to amplify the passionate voices within each party at the cost of bipartisan preferences.
Except when the government effectively becomes, collectively, the king, and represents nothing more than their royal self-interest. Which is how I see things going in the USA, for all intents and purposes.
It's not that the Democrats are pure good. Far from it. It's that the Republican party of the last few decades is horrifically awful in basically every possible way.
The choice is extremely clear. Activism plus voting against the worst option.
SOPA/PIPA was not as clearly Republican vs. Democrat as you make it out to be, either. Whenever a law is dressed up as IP protections and backed by the entertainment industry, you will probably see a lot of support from CA's representatives, which means a lot of Democrats. However, there were a lot of people from both sides supporting (and eventually opposing) those bills. SOPA was introduced by a Republican, and 8 of its 12 sponsors were Republicans.
Of course, since I live in California, both of "my" senators are Democrats, one of which has been in office since I started high school (24 years ago); it would have been both if the younger of the two (Boxer) hadn't retired.
Somehow, "my" representative is a Republican, though I still think most of the people in this district don't realize that he replaced his father (who held the office from 1981-2009). Maybe the DoJ investigation into his use of campaign finances for personal expenses will open some eyes, but it seems more likely that, if he is removed from office, whoever gets on the ballot with the R next to their name will get the seat (or maybe we'll get multiple people with an R next to their name, like most of the local races).
SOPA was introduced by a republican. 8/12 of the initial sponsors were republican.
Not sure how you can hang this on the democrats.
PIPA was introduced by Leahy. Still had some republican sponsors.
They didn't vote on either.
I'm really not sure why you had to be condescending about this. You could have made the same point by bringing up SOPA/PIPA. No need to start talking about other posters being young and immature.
It's about the person, not the party. Plenty of profit motivated democrats and republicans who care about their districts. This kind of tribalism prevents us from finding middle ground; we should be against ideas and practices, and be principled instead of loyal to a party.
Ow, how I would have loved for not only Sanders, but also Trump to have been cheated out of their primary election, and then them both to have started a new party, America would have been a four-party system, overnight. One can dream...
Withdrawal from politics certainly is an important factor that has made America a currently sinking ship.
But the problem is more systemic. It's at the center of the culture of this society: it's the fact that MONEY (== DOMINATION) has been made the most central and culturally venerated value.
To change that, a lot of suffering will have to occur, because those who benefit from MONEY (== DOMINATION) will use exactly that to defend this (sick) cultural value by - you guessed it - dominating everybody who's against it. And for that, other sick things like mass surveillance technology, a militarized police force, perfectly controlled media, and pressure on your economic wellbeing and your physical and mental health will be used.
I would argue that the withdrawal is the core problem and the money is the symptom of that problem. Same with gerrymandering, election systems, distribution of power, and other key talking points.
Active and rational political conversations would, in my mind, have mitigated a lot of the problems with money in politics. Gerrymandering would not be (as large as) a problem if the masses had not been asleep at the wheel.
>I would argue that the withdrawal is the core problem and the money is the symptom of that problem.
Upon what do you base this hypothesis? Because history shows otherwise. The oligarchy/aristocracy has always had disproportionate influence in the US. It has always been an uphill fight for the average citizen.
>I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced, and such has been its progress in the minds of the many, that this truth gradually gains ground. This government has for its object public strength and individual security. It is said with us to be unattainable. All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.
-Alexander Hamilton, Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299.1787-06-19
Yeah this has a lot to do with the disaster called the Citizens United decision giving corporation's unlimited ability to donate to politicians. Back in the 50s that still had the concept of the crime of bribery.
I have consistently found rms to be the most prescient tech voice. A lone prophet, if you will. He always bears careful thought in his vision of where tech and politics will play out - even if you disagree with him.
Ironically, not that I can compare to RMS, but my senior thesis in college (2003) was "the politics of information technology are disruptive to organizations". I had no idea then how much worse it would get.
This whole discussion is disheartening. When I first heard about this is came to HN to get the facts and try to actually form an opinion, because honestly I can't figure out what the bill is supposed to change and how. Instead I find people pontificating along party lines like every comments section across the internet. Where's the analysis and insight? Where's the objectivity? I've come to expect more from this site and I know we can do better.
The bill allows ISPs to sell their customers' data, among other things. The article says enough about what the bill does.
Your complaints about "people pontificating along party lines" do nothing but reveal your own biases when the vote is so starkly along party lines. In a case like this, the objective analysis is clearly that the Republicans are wrong and the Democrats are right.
The party claiming to represent "personal liberty" and "responsibility" has now voted to have your browser history sold on data-markets. Ever looked at anything particular embarrassing? Welcome to blackmailsville.
I really hope hackers obtain records of every Republican Congresscritter's creepiest porn viewing.
> Instead I find people pontificating along party lines
The vote was along party lines. You are asking for non-partisan insight where there is literally none to be had. There are good guys and bad guys in this issue, and they wear uniforms to tell you who they are.
At 73 pages, it's a doozy. I don't know exactly what the effects would have been, but one important thing to note that I did not see mentioned once in any of the reporting about this is that the rule has only been in effect for 84 days. So I wouldn't expect any changes to be too noticeable.
Also worth noting is that whatever restrictions on ISPs are removed by this, it doesn't guarantee that ISPs will start doing that thing immediately, if at all. I also haven't seen reporting on what past behavior ISPs have already engaged in that this rule would have stopped.
The first fifth of the linked resolution addresses what is customer personal information (protocols, ports, IP addresses, MAC addresses, contained information, etc.)
Paragraph 106 mandates that the information released should not be able to be de-identified, and third parties must be contractually obligated to not de-identify customers from the data.
Paragraph 117 says the clause must be transferable to third-parties all the way down the list, but a middle-man can hire a company in a different country to do the necessary work, outside the jurisdiction of the FCC.
Paragraph 115 says the ISP can share the IP address, and no other identifying data, and meet the requirements of de-identification. A clause to "revisit this topic later" is present. Damn right you better -- combined with other data sources from social media and search engines, I can trivially combine multiple data sources using the IP address and build a "personal profile" of your entire Internet usage, including those really unique "outlier" destinations.
Paragraph 143 says that no periodic reminder is required, so expect the "privacy notice" to be buried in a sea of required checkboxes at point-of-sale, and never seen again. There are provisions that it be available on a website and via other methods, etc., but "available" versus "easily found" are two different things.
Most of these rules will take effect in 12 months, not immediately. (The rule of preventing ISP services requiring you waive your privacy to provide service is 30 days (paragraph 295, § 64.2011), data security requirements in 90 days (§ 64.2005), and data breach notifications and requirements in 6 months (§ 64.2006).)
> but one important thing to note that I did not see mentioned once in any of the reporting about this is that the rule has only been in effect for 84 days. So I wouldn't expect any changes to be too noticeable.
Isn't that just because the agency responsible changed from the FTC to the FCC?
I always interpreted that resignation as "both sides are terrible, so I'm going to keep voting for my side". I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone.
That attitude is true to a point, but surely people don't think that Gore would have invaded Iraq? That difference alone strikes me as so obvious and tangible, that there's no excuse for these kinds of false equivalences anymore.
He also would have kept us in Kyoto, which may have been even more consequential. I voted Nader in a blue state and regret it. Voting third party without IRV is naivety.
I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone.
Since both sides are astonishingly bad, I usually end up voting third party in races where there is one.
The third parties are even worse than the two parties. The Libertarians ran Bob Barr, a Clinton House prosecutor and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes. Jill Stein supports Putin.
> and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes.
...what? Gary Johnson is himself a marijuana user who has long been am advocate of drug policy reform (not just for marijuana, but for other drugs as well).
When running for governor, Johnson campaigned on a platform of marijuana decriminalization and harm reduction for all other drugs. This was during the height of the Clinton-era anti-drug hysteria - you'd be hard pressed to find many other politicians who supported harm reduction at that point.
There are things to dislike about Johnson, but criticizing him on drug policy is really bizarre. He's been one of the strongest (if not the strongest) political advocate for abolishing the War on Drugs for over two decades - much more vocally so and for far longer than any other politician I can name offhand.
What did he actually do when he was twice elected as the Republican governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. I give credit for what people do rather than what they say.
Also, he didn't campaign on legalization. He gave a speech about it in his second term. Did he parole any non-violent drug offenders? Did he use the powers of his office?
It's sensible to ask whether a specific 3rd-party vote had a chance of affecting the outcome in a positive way. E.g., one of the more effective arguments against the current Green party in the US is they don't seem to try very hard in local elections, where they might stand a chance; but they always run someone for president who stands no chance. If we have a hope of getting out of this, it's going to start on school boards and city councils. Prop up your 3rd parties there, but vote the lesser of two evils when it's the most effective thing to do.
Very much this. There are many de facto one party districts in the U.S. where a third party wouldn't run into the issue of being a spoiler. The Vermont Progressive Party only runs candidates like this. The result is that thought they're only active in Vermont, they have 11 seats in the Vermont state legislature. In contrast, the Libertarian Party and the Green Party are across in the entire U.S., and out of all 50 state legislatures they have a combined total of 2 seats (2 for the Libertarians, 0 for the Greens).
And it's this kind of impetus that creates voter apathy. If you insist on trying to shove square pegs into a round or triangular hole, you're just going to end up with vote tallies similar to the one you just saw with the national election.
As someone who didn't vote, no, I would not have changed my decision given the outcome, and this "lesser of two evils" justification crap is exactly why. Enjoy your shitty country.
third party voters can wind up choosing which of the two parties win. in 2016, they gave Trump the win, because they equated him and the Republicans with Hillary in terms of deleterious effects.
> third party voters can wind up choosing which of the two parties win. in 2016, they gave Trump the win, because they equated him and the Republicans with Hillary in terms of deleterious effects.
This is a common line used by leftists who are angry that Trump won and are looking for someone to blame. Third party voters make an easy target, and the left has long felt entitled to the support of third-party voters.
But this entitlement assumes that third party voters would otherwise have voted for Clinton, which is a pretty strong assumption that also doesn't really hold up against the polling data from late in the election. Johnson took more than half of the third-party vote, and had he not been running, most Johnson voters would either have voted Trump or not voted at all.
Trump didn't win because of the few voters who voted third party. He won because of the 63 million people who voted for him. If you want to blame someone for Trump's victory, blame them, not the 7 million who chose not to vote for Trump.
No, the Republican Party. Policy for the last decade has been that Democrats mustn't be allowed to win elections, and should they somehow manage to win elections, they mustn't be allowed to govern.
Of course, the Democrats have themselves totally acceded to this scheme.
Effectively, in a first past the post electoral system, any vote that isn't for the major party that most closely aligns with your views is a vote that supports the views least aligned with your preference.
I just re-read that article again, and don't really see your claims in in anywhere. I can kinda see how you might draw that conclusion, but I think it's an oversimplification and not really that accurate.
I do see some listed counterexamples to the "law", and also a note about occasional upsets where the parties get completely rearranged.
If both major parties suck, how do I ask for an upset? Is it by fuming quietly and voting for the lesser of the two evils, or by saying "no, fuck you both"? Or does the fact that any upset probably won't happen this election mean that it's part of "the long run" where per Keynes we're all dead, and so it doesn't actually matter?
Do the major parties just ignore any non-major-party vote, or do they analyze it to tweak their platforms for next time? (And, is this consistent over time and space? I'm hearing that it seems to be the case in the US now, but in the same breath I'm hearing that that's a recent localized disaster.)
The Wikipedia page is a tremendously short summary, and yes, doesn't go into depth about the implications of duverger's law.
I strongly suggest digging into the literature around it, which does bear out the thesis I states above.
If both parties suck equally and no party is more closely aligned to your preferences than another, I suggest you enter politics yourself. It's just made up of people not too different from yourself.
If both parties suck equally and no party is more closely aligned to your preferences than another, I suggest you enter politics yourself. It's just made up of people not too different from yourself.
I've actually thought about that a bit, and don't think I'd enjoy it enough to consistently put in the time needed to ever really get good at it.
Fairvote.org works on electoral reform issues that are meant to help with issues like this. I think that "the marketplace of ideas" in the US is too much of an oligopoly. Ideas like single transferable vote seem like realistic options for improving the situation. (I'm excited to see how thing go in Maine now that they've adopted some of these measures.)
I vote 3rd-party in every contest I can. At this point, I'd vote for a puppy dog, if it wasn't a D or an R. It makes my wife, family, and friends mad, but I will not waste my vote on the status quo. I'm voting to send a signal that I want other options.
I believe that if we can get to the point of just having a 3rd party on the platform for a presidential debate, we can open the door to other parties having a non-negligible effect on the election process. Of course, that's the Election Commision's fear as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/09...
To paraphrase A. Einstein?, When intelligent people refuse to participate in politics, they'll be governed by the less intelligent members of society.
That's apparent in the US where elections results are influenced more by those with barely a high school education than by their more educated fellow citizens.
The most important qualification one needs to have, it seems, to be elected to the Texas Education Agency, is to be a "true conservation". That board practically decides what your children study in school.
And over here on HN, the policy is to not get into political discussions.
Off-topic: Always better to quote the earliest reference. Plato said practically the same think around 347BC. Maybe there was someone before him too when we had no written texts. History repeats itself.
Taking the bait: Why is it better? If one is attempting to persuade, I would suggest using the attribution that most strongly connects with the audience's sense of expertise and/or power. So, given that, I'd wager that Einstein is better reference than Plato for many in the modern world.
I get what you're saying, the idea is much older than Einstein but do you want to be right or do you want to be truthful and persuade?
At least nod the prior. "As Einstein's improvement on Plato's dictum says, ...".
By comparison, I was reading a paper on an alternative fuels process and found that its citations were all to 1990s and subsequent work.
This actively obscured the fact that the underlying concepts and idea dated from the 1960s, and excluded considerable significant prior research.
It would be ... like a study of evolutionary biology failing to credit Charles Darwin, and giving the impression, say, that the entire field grew out of recombinant DNA efforts of the 1970s.
Here is an alternative account of what has happened.
The government is trying to reduce protections of civil liberties, the environment, etc.
Why?
Because the party in control of the legislative and executive branches are removing those protections.
Why?
Because it is in their best interest and because they promised to do so in their election campaigns.
Why?
A. Because their corporate sponsors want less regulation.
B. Because their supporters want less regulation.
Why?
Because less regulation means more profits (If you ignore the environmental and human costs).
And, because many Americans equate regulation with infringement of their personal freedom.
We need to stop assuming that bad things are happening because a few bad apples tricked roughly half the population to support them. They are making America great again. Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered. And no one was fooled. It is straight up whathalf the population asked for.
I'm sorry for not responding to your post earlier.
> We need to stop assuming that bad things are happening because a few bad apples tricked roughly half the population to support them. They are making America great again. Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered. And no one was fooled. It is straight up what half the population asked for.
You're correct by and large. I won't get into the remarks on the (effective) propaganda efforts Fox & crew have done. Much deception has happened there.
But, this specific bill is troublesome in part because the lawmakers often are very ignorant of what's going on, much like many of the senior judges in the US. This is one part generational divide, one part tech avoiding law, and one part lobbying. Some of that is avoidable by engagement, and if adult geeks had realized this in the 80s & 90s instead of disengaging from politics, the world would be different.
> Because less regulation means more profits (If you ignore the environmental and human costs).
This is completely false. Less regulations helps the status-quo as companies stop to need to be innovative. And it helps old-fashioned contaminating industries.
> Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered.
Yes. That's it. And that's why so much powerful people want bad schools and worse education. If people knew how the world works, they will be less prone to populism.
A core problem is that it's much easier to break things than to build or maintain things, so huge amounts of work can be eliminated very easily, whether through neglect or design.
I supported the FCC's move to assist with consumer privacy, although it was a tough call.
I oppose what the Republican Congress is doing.
Having said all of that, the FCC has no freaking business defining privacy. The system was terribly out of whack to have them do this in the first place. My support of their move and my opposition to what Congress is currently doing is simply because I'm trying to pick the lesser of two evils. It's not because there was simple good position/side and bad position/side. Wish that it were so simple.
Both political parties have screwed over privacy and anonymity online -- in terrible and huge ways. And the system is terribly corrupt. And....we should take action to make our political views clear.
My problem is that "let's take action" turns quickly into "Group X is in the pocket of political party Y"
I would agree that the remit of Congress is to govern the people, by the people, and privacy falls under that umbrella. The executive branch should not be operating as an independent law-making body, as it has been.
I would gently suggest that when geeks look at politics, it's much like looking at a huge codebase written for decades - our reaction is that it's corrupt and needs a rewrite. I have learned through very careful study and hard experience that often there are good reasons for codebases to be "crufty", and similar with politics. Doesn't mean reform can't be done, but it means we have to work within the codebase, and with the current web of loyalties to some extent.
Thank you for your kind reply. As both a geek and a student of history and philosophy, it's nice to hear civility :)
I specialize in helping large organizations of people change and become better, so I've been quite fortunate to have hands-on experience with these kinds of things.
For a good political person who can work contacts, there's always value. I would humbly posit that the system as a whole has overall attributes. I really don't like waving my hands around and saying "we're all going to die", but sometimes the Titanic actually is sinking. I'm sure those guys in the band had a hoot playing those last few songs, though.
So I understand and respect your opinion. Hopefully I'm able to see the tactical as well as strategic situation. Maybe not, but that's what great conversations are for. :)
It's not only complacency, although it is a large part of it. Some of the main issues here is money in politics, gerrymandering, the gutting of the civil rights act. In fact, the most central issue here is probably money in politics.
I'd argue that it's not money in politics. The democrats and republicans get tons of money from tons of different interest groups and industries, yet the the only party that voted whatsoever for this bill were Republicans. The problem isn't the money, it's the ideology.
I would suggest (1) working with the Democrats to focus on removing gerrymandering to using a more algorithmic approach that is party-independent. This helps ensure that seats aren't (in effect) locked to a single party. And, (2) working with political/advocacy organizations locally that help brief officials on tech reality.
That was a huge thrust of the 90s Linux nerd thought. Call it a lazzeiz faire countercultural perspective. esr provides a certain window into that time, although he seems to me to get more and more right-wing libertarian over the years.
The culture has shifted and moved, but the "avoid politics, it's evil" mentality still hangs around, a lot.
This vote had a bad result, and the Rs were pushing the bad thing. But a bit of puttering around older newspaper articles reveals the Democrats have also done their fair share of problematic votes here. Obama's Administration was not particularly sympathetic to these sorts of concerns, although more so than the current Administration. The EFF had more than a few things to say.
I don't mean to exculpate the Rs or go "ruh ruh whatabout those bad Democrats". Lack of understanding of consequences and technology is a cross-party issue, and each party has performs their ignorance differently. I think that part of this is age, as well as the age of the vested interests.
Also, personally, I wish you'd have checked my comments. I am no GOP evangelist/apologist. I'm trying to hew to the truth and be fair.
"The lesser of two evils" is an important consideration in who to support politically, but the "absolute values" are even moreso--otherwise you're merely being blown about by trends, only ever getting closer to good policy by chance, rather than actively pursuing good policy. If neither party's policies are good, that absolutely matters.
In the previous election we had a milquetoast liberal running against a ur-fascist demagogue. It is clear which one was the lesser of two evils, and now we are seeing the effects of America's choice in this bill and others.
If Hillary Clinton was president or if the Democrats had control of one chamber of Congress, this bill never would have passed.
> It is clear which one was the lesser of two evils
Obviously there is significant disagreement on that issue.
> If Hillary Clinton was president or if the Democrats had control of one chamber of Congress, this bill never would have passed.
Yes, because the left is happy for government agencies run by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to continually enlarge their regulatory domain. Other people consider that a bad idea in general.
And if that had happened, FCC regulations would control our privacy--after they would have taken effect, over a year from now--regulations which are not law and can be changed by unelected FCC bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.
I'm no fan of Congress, but it's definitely better for this to be controlled by federal law rather than an agency regulation.
Sometimes the outcomes are better when appointed technocrats to decide things, particularly when the people are manifestly incapable of making good decisions.
Of course, there is something to be said for allowing people to screw up their own government irreparably and be forced to suffer the consequences.
Well, I'd encourage you to look into the expansion of the NSA under the obama administration and how his administration responded to whistle blowers who leaked information related to that expansion.
If you want to compete with other large groups of humans for limited resources, you need to band into a large group yourself, or be overtaken. That's always been the case, and seems likely it will always continue to be the case.
Also, there are certain nice things that we have that are only possible by working together. The national highways, for example.
But at its core, the most basic necessity is the common defense.
What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice side effect of the prior sweat.