Nothing is ever enough for anyone. Look at any discussion here. "This software should be fully free without ads", "this license isn't permissive enough", it's not distrbuted, it's not blockchain, it is blockchain, it's written in java. And I think it's fine. We need people on the extremes in order to put pressure and advance things, as extremes rarely get implemented, but meeting in the middle does.
Human nature is very hard to change. What we really need is a societal mechanism that somehow forces (or persuades) those on the extremes to compromise. The U.S. Constitution was designed to be such a mechanism, but it doesn't seem to be standing up well to new technologies.
> What we really need is a societal mechanism that somehow forces (or persuades) those on the extremes to compromise
This isn't how social change happens. The extremes stay planted. They define the Overton window. The centre is the bulk that moves. It's the part that decides. The extremes effect change by persuading the centre, not by talking to other extremists.
This is the problem with partisan-fueled premature dichotomization. It creates lots of immovable people. The only solution to that system is to punt the problem for a generation in the hope that more people drift to the centre.
> The centre is the bulk that moves. It's the part that decides.
No, it isn't. That's exactly the problem. Trump found a bug in the system, a security hole, in the form of leveraging the non-linearity built in to the current system. The Constitution was designed to produce minority rule, on the assumption that if the minority abused that power too much the majority would rise up and force them out of power. The problem is that this bias is amplified by modern communications technologies, which allow a determined person to leverage a fairly small minority into effective dictatorial power. The Constitutional bias towards minority rule is amplified by party politics, gerrymandering, echo chambers, etc. to the point where you only need a few million motivated followers to effectively control the agenda. All you need is enough voters following you that you can pose a credible threat to unseat any politician in your party at the next primary. Those few million motivated followers are much more likely to be found at the extremes than in the center, and they are much more likely to be found in rural areas and hence be conservative. Given enough time, this influence can be leveraged into enough disenfranchisement through legitimate-seeming voter suppression efforts that unseating the minority becomes effectively impossible through any legal means. At that point, the minority no longer needs to compromise. And since it is the most radical members of the minority who are the foundation of this strategy, the result is extreme radicalization. And all this can happen without moving the center. That's the problem.
seems to me the constitution is pretty much working as designed. during polarized times, it makes it very difficult to change things. if you believe all the terrible things written about trump in the news (I do, with some reservations), it's sort of remarkable how little damage he managed to do. we (probably) just elected joe biden, who is almost the definition of a compromise candidate.
> it's sort of remarkable how little damage he managed to do
I think it's much too early to assess the totality of (let me put this in the least inflammatory way that I can think of) Trump's long-term impact. At the very least, he has re-formed the American judiciary, delayed action on climate change by four years, and eroded or eliminated many of the societal and governmental norms that are essential for the functioning of our society (e.g. accepting the results of elections).
But even now, we have North Korea with ICBMs and more nuclear weapons than before, Iran closer to a nuclear weapon than before, and probably a hundred thousand people or so dead from Covid who might not have died if Trump had not politicized the wearing of masks. That's not "little damage" by my reckoning.
There are also a few hundred innocent children who were forcibly separated from their parents and likely will never see them again because of shoddy record-keeping. Despite the relatively small numbers, the sheer monstrousness of this makes it impossible to sweep it under the rug. Trump effectively abandoned the moral high ground that America has held since the end of World War II. America is no longer perceived as a reliable partner, leader of the free world, and beacon of hope. I suppose reasonable people can disagree in their assessment of the long-term impact of this, but in my book, that's not "little damage."
[ADDENDUM] Something else Trump has done is form a significant contingent of the citizenry who now equate the interests of the country with Trump's personal interests, i.e. who believe Trump when he says that we face existential threats that he alone can fix. Ironically, they do this in the name of patriotism and freedom, utterly oblivious to the historical precedents that show time and time again that cults of personality lead to tyranny and ruin. Thankfully, we have not yet crossed that threshold. But we were standing on the brink, and it won't take much to bring us back to it.
Was just an example, but I feel like there is a very anti java sentiment on HN. I have near no Java experience, but it's certainly on undertone that if you aren't using Go, Rust, Elxir, whatever you're doing it wrong. Which is nonsense, anything can be good.
