Counterpoint, I read this interesting article recently contrasting two progressive mayors in the USA, Brandon Johnson (~6% approval rating) and Michelle Wu (66% approval rating)
Is it really? Local approval rating is in no correlation with national name recognition. You don't get your name in the national news by just fixing potholes. I guess you have to do it in order to not get voted out, and some ideological mayors fail to do it.
Famously, the US founding fathers warned against the dangers of political parties, only to see them spring up in the US anyways. You really need to design your political system carefully so that there is no incentive to form political parties. I don't know if anyone has ever successfully done this. People should be thinking about it more though.
Specifically, I think a political party happens when two politicians make a bargain that they will each vote for some of the other politician's policies. They don't have to call it "the X party" for it to be a de facto political party.
There are some offices which are designated as nonpartisan here in the US too, I think they are typically offices which don't have a lot of scope for this sort of bargaining. If they did have scope for such bargaining, I wouldn't want to rely on the honor system in the long term. I would want to codify it into law somehow. But how? The best way is probably to reduce the incentive for striking bargains somehow? Again, how? Or maybe bargains are just a distraction, and the real problem lies elsewhere? As I said, people should be thinking more.
The warning about factions wasn't to avoid them. It was that with humans factions are inevitable. The argument was to design a government were the power of factions are minimized or pitted against each other.
I assume jjcm was talking about Valve shipping dedicated hardware, e.g. a Valve-branded gaming laptop which boots into SteamOS. That could help them achieve the same level of "Just Works" that Apple gets with macOS.
One of the best arguments in favor of ads is that high-quality ads act as an honest/credible signal that a firm is a serious business offering a serious product. Through making the production of high-quality ads cheap, people who are truly passionate about their small business will be "disrupted", and scammers/fly-by-night operations will be "supercharged".
I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity.
For one, alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Second, most recent studies that look at the question classify gambling as more dangerous and addictive. There is much more of a path from gambling to suicide.
>alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified.
Not sure what this means. Why can't gambling taxes just be applied at point of sale to create friction?
It's interesting how so many online discussions of internet privacy devolve into nationalist chest-beating. I'm beginning to suspect that people don't inherently value privacy all that much -- they just want to brag about how their country is the most private.
Recall that the premise of this thread is that the EU should sponsor an alternative to Android. The EU vs US question isn't really topical, since no one suggested that the US government should sponsor an alternative to Android instead.
If chat control is a good-faith effort to stop crime, why can't Android developer verification be a good-faith effort to stop cybercrime?
If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses?
Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app.
This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?
I think the issue is not about distribution in the Play Store (I don't actually have any problem with that: their playground, their rules) but the fact that they are going to break sideloading and alternative app sources like F-Droid.
I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.
Just because the government is enforcing laws you don't like does not make it oppression. Imagine if everyone started using firearms in response to laws they considered oppressive, e.g. business owners who found regulation oppressive might say "come and enforce it". You would probably refer to this as "undermining democracy" if it was a law that you actually agreed with.
I think if you were to look at how often a government is rebuffed by the courts, that's a pretty good indicator of how much they're trying to bend the rules or outright ignore them.
Also, "come and enforce it" is not undermining democracy. A law is only a piece of paper until a court upholds it. Even the federal government can write whatever it wants, if it's then ruled unconstitutional that's the end of that.
The problem going on right now is that so much is being broken that the already slow court system just cannot keep up.
Using firearms against the state never works. However, the oppression isn't in the enforcement of laws it is in how those laws are being enforced, selectively, against brown and black people. Also, something being a law doesn't make it right or just. For examples of this just look at slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, etc at a certain point in time all of those things were against the law but people agonized, organized and resisted enough to change the law. By your logic those groups weren't oppressed since the law allowed for their oppression.
False equivalence. The scenario with immigration is more like: Someone builds a house on your land. You tell the cops to kick them out. Protesters disrupt the cops, stating: "OMG you'll make them homeless!"
The job of the US Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution, not pass laws. "Interpreting" the Constitution and concluding that it contains a right to abortion, when the constitution says nothing whatsoever about abortion, was an absurdly "creative" interpretation. The left was undermining the constitution long before Donald Trump started to do so.
The US Supreme Court has engaged in "creative interpretations" for a very, very long time, considering that amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible. There's been no meaningful changes in over half a century. So, the flawed system in the country has led to probably over a hundred years of picking apart largely arcane documents that are utterly disconnected from modern life in attempts to map brand new concepts and ideas to those old documents, no matter what. Hell, the current leading school of thought of conservative-aligned law is that interpreting the constitution should be done by imagining what people surely must've thought all those centuries ago. Oddly enough, doing so allows you to make those imaginary historical figures think in whatever way you like!
So, "the left" hasn't done it first, it's a practice that's much older than Roe v. Wade. Just see all the fun games that have long been played with using the Commerce Clause. And besides, your equation isn't fair in the slightest, where one of your sides undeniably grants people rights (even if on shaky grounds), while the other consolidates power and takes those rights away. But oddly enough, only the transgressions of the left have been mercifully corrected by the court, while some other new developments are to be left undisturbed for the foreseeable future. I wonder why?
I think you are unnecessarily dismissive about the past and its lessons. Human nature and nature of power hasn't changed that much since the 18th century.
In Continental Europe, the tradition is even longer and students of law start by studying Ancient Roman law, precisely in order to understand on which principles modern laws are built.
>amending the US constitution seems to be utterly impossible.
Amending the US constitution is not supposed to be easy. You are supposed to accomplish most tasks through legislation. I see no reason why the legality of abortion should not be accomplished through legislation. In any case, the constitution has been amended 17 times, most recently in 1992. I don't see any slam-dunk amendments which are in need of ratification. If amendments aren't being ratified, maybe it's because we don't have broad consensus on changes which should be made. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
With regard to the rest of your comment, you appear to be responding to something I didn't write. I didn't claim all transgressions were equivalent in magnitude, nor that "new developments" should be "left undisturbed". I think Trump is generally a terrible president. However, I see ways in which the left laid the foundations for Trump's transgressions by undermining the social contract in the US in a lot of different ways, and I want to persuade people that maintaining the social contract is inherently valuable in and of itself, the same way maintaining cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma is valuable.
It should definitely be difficult, the bar for changing a constitution is high in almost any functioning democracy. However, would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either? Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written, it seems undeniable that the rate has slowed dramatically, and the expansion of the country combined with the culture surrounding the constitution has effectively locked it. I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them. No justifications are needed, since the way the American public is taught, the US founders are almost demigods who foresaw every permutation of history centuries into the future, so any explanation that leans on their writing, no matter how contrived, is correct.
(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)
Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.
>would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either?
I agree it shouldn't be impossible.
>Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written
I don't think that's a fair comparison since those initial "amendments" are more like changes to the first draft, and didn't go through the usual amendment process.
>I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them.
Agreed. Although, in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
>the US founders are almost demigods
They aren't demigods. But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results. (Keep in mind that right before the US Constitution was written, the union was on the verge of falling apart, and the main objective was simply to stabilize it.) My [non-expert!] view is something like: The founders' thinking about democracy was more lucid than, say, 90% of conversations about democracy today, but less lucid than, say, the top 1% of conversations about democracy today. I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid. (For example, many people think the President should be chosen based on the popular vote instead of the electoral college, and neglect several important advantages the electoral college has which make it a superior method in my view.)
As a concrete illustration of the "90% of conversations are less lucid" point: Voting systems theorists generally agree that ranked choice voting is inferior to plurality voting, but state ballot initiatives to replace plurality with ranked choice tend to fail. I expect if we rewrote the constitution, decisions would get made in this sort of manner. Perhaps one could handpick a team of experts to write a constitution that's actually better, but that would lack democratic legitimacy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ultimately, the path to improving the constitution lies in small-scale trial runs of better methods, and educating the public about e.g. the advantages of ranked choice over plurality.
>Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years?
They have done so, in many states. (I'm very pro-federalism.)
> in some ways the Supreme Court is actually our least dysfunctional branch of government right now. So, could be worse?
In a cynical way, I think that them being dysfunctional could actually be better at this point. On one hand, new pressing issues might not be seen, but on the other, no more new damage can be done.
> But they were wildly successful in both creating a lasting, successful democracy, and popularizing the idea of democracy worldwide. It's hard to argue with results.
I agree, the results are undeniable in some ways. My intention wasn't necessarily to berate the US founders, but point out the culture that has emerged surrounding them. It's not that they didn't have some good ideas, it's that people often tend to see them as universally infallible. If one can tie their proposal to something the founders thought (no matter how tenuous the connection is), the idea immediately gains merit just based on that alone.
While a nation like the US going on for so long without major reforms in its democracy is a commendable thing, the often-unquestioning reverence for anything from the period of its inception has prevented and will prevent people from patching any cracks that show up in the system with age. A government shouldn't ideally rock the boat too much, but it can't stagnate either, history has plenty of examples of both.
> I expect if we attempted to rewrite the constitution from scratch, we would get a worse result, since the rewrite would be dominated by the 90% of conversations that are less lucid.
I think the modern understanding of most of these systems is unquestionably better, the issue that would prevent a better system from being formed isn't just the variety of conversations, but conflicting interests with overwhelming power. The US as it is today was founded by a fairly cohesive and tightly-knit bunch of people (at least, as far as I can understand), in an extremely different world. If the US was given a shot at complete reform today, you would have every major corporation and foreign government jumping in at the opportunity to pull any levers they could reach to ensure an outcome that's favorable to them. It would be a disaster. Hell, even with your example about people voting against ranked choice systems, it's not like all voters are actually informed (or even know anything) about either system. And every time these proposals crop up internationally, there's always lots of marketing in either direction from entities who would really like one outcome. Hence, the people tend to stay conservative and vote against changes.
If we got a panel of experts (or even just any sane people with a cohesive and compatible set of ideas) together, I think that today we have enough information to create systems that are vastly superior to either. The EC was created to address certain problems, but to me it seems to have interrupt the natural power of a vote too much and make the election system too prone to swings led by immensely tiny margins. But yeah, it wouldn't be strictly democratic in the sense that anyone could offer input - but neither was really the inception of the US, most people just chose what they perceived as the roughly better option as a package.
https://cityjournal.substack.com/p/big-city-progressives-kee...
reply