Slashdot Mirror
Text Comments Out In YouTube "National Discussion" of Health Care
theodp writes "While the White House has invited the nation to Join the National Online Discussion on Health Care Reform, it is currently only accepting 20-30 second YouTube video responses — text comments have been disabled. Which raises a question: Should a video camera be the price of admission for participating in an open government discussion, especially when issues may hit those with lower incomes the hardest? BTW, the response-to-date has been underwhelming — 101 video responses and counting — and is certainly a mixed-bag, including a one-finger salute, a talking butt, a woman "Showing my Apples", and other off-topic rants and unrelated videos."
It sounds to me like the administration is looking for raw material they can put into commercials to run in districts that oppose Obama's plans.
I.e,. this might be a huge casting call in disguise.
I'm fairly skeptical these days when Obama says he wants to involve the general population in a discussion. His modus operandi became evident when he ignored the highly voted Internet town hall topic of legalizing marijuana. It appears that at least sometimes, he's only pretending to take the general citizenry's views into account, even when he's saying otherwise.
Apparently it's not working.
Have you ever looked at the comment section of a YouTube video? I wouldn't want a low-level staffer to spend half a second wading through that pile of drooling morons. Posting a video at least requires minimal effort.
From TFA:
If I were the staff member in charge of wading through the discussion, I wouldn't want to have to use Youtube's craptastic comment system either.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
You can open up your favorite video editing software and just put some slides of text. No camera involved.
Yes, as a technical question it's now easy for everyone to communicate with their public officials! But what exactly are these officials supposed to do with ten thousand poor-quality comments? Institute a Slashdot-style moderate system? A digg-style voting system? (Obama did actually try that last one.) Develop a new version of spam filter that is some sort of "shitty comment with no useful content" filter? It seems what they're trying here is exactly what the submitter criticizes, a "barrier to entry" filter, with the hope that people who bother to make a video about their idea at least have an idea they've thought through for 5 minutes. Looks like that may have failed, too, but I can't blame them for trying.
In a different context, Gerhard Fischer pointed out in 1996 something similar about the internet not being a magical solution for education:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I often hear (on NPR, usually) politicians calling for a "national discussion" or a "national debate" on some topic.
Exactly what is a "national discussion/debate"?
It seems to me like things usually work out this way: news organizations cover some topic, congress and the President start discussing it, lobbyists come onto the scene, and in the end the Congress either (a) sells us out to lobbyists, or (b) makes a completely irrational piece of legislation.
So is calling for a "national discussion/debate" really just an attempt to dress, as democratic, a decision which the common citizen has no capacity to influence? That is, like what happens with so-called "town-hall meetings"?
If your opinion is so valuable then write a letter and mail it to the President or your elected representative.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Its YouTube though... Compared to YouTube, 4chan is a refuge of sanity and even /. trolls end up sounding like something out of a scientific journal.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... only from Facebook users via their Facebook site. The link is on the referenced page.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Am I the only person who's concerned that the Whitehouse has been allowed to be the moderator of such discussions?
After all, the administration has a political agenda, and therefore an incentive to bias the discussions on any particular topic of debate. Deciding details such as the length and form of submissions can be a powerful device for controlling the topic and direction of debate. At that point, it's a rather useless vehicle for arguing a side that the administration doesn't want advanced.
I think we can tolerate the absence of people who can afford computers and not cellphone cameras.
The libraries near me are full of poor people using internet connected computers. My cell phone has a camera, but it doesn't do video and the only way to get images off of it is to pay absurd data transfer rates. Many people I see only have pay as you gocell phones with no camera capabilities. I think you might be a little disconnected from the realities of the lower class and their access to video cameras.
Should a video camera be the price of admission for participating in an open government discussion, especially when issues may hit those with lower incomes the hardest?
Yes. I think we can tolerate the absence of people who can afford computers and not cellphone cameras.
And only land-owners should have the right to vote?
I know people that can afford a computer (at the public library), but who can not afford a cell phone (regular monthly expenses).
> The "Nobel Prize winner" myth: Every school child will have access to a Nobel Prize winner
In some ways yes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn8PNMTSlwo
Plenty of other lectures/talks from MIT, Stanford, and other universities around the world are available online.
> it is doubtful that Nobel Prize winners will look forward to getting a few thousand e-mail messages a day.
I'm sure Feynman isn't too worried about that :).
FWIW, you can learn a lot from people without sending email to them, or communicating with them.
Raising the technical bar weeds out the sincere from the rest.
At least that was the idea until the talking butt came along.
You are the person who invented sending four line comments in powerpoints aren't you. Now we have your ID we are going to hunt you to the ends of the internet. You can't run and you can't hide. Our advance team is in Montréal already. They will be arriving at your home soon. Stay there so that at least you die surrounded by the things you know.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The Obama administration is far, far better than any Bush administration.
I agree. They are much, much better liars. Listening to Bush lie was boring. It was obvious. It insulted my intelligence. While Obama's lies are grandiose. They are eloquent. They take at least 10-15 seconds to parse through before the waaaait-a-minute moment. It's a pleasure. We are very fortunate to have a much more skillful entertainer in the White House.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
bleh... I'll stop... I am sure you'll want to jump in and divert attention from what I said to some way of saying that "but look at what the crazy evil stupid Republicans are doing." After all, it's Sunday night. And Timothy posted this one with what I can only suspect was a bucket of pop corn ready at his side.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
you make a good point about Toyota jobs in the US. your conclusion as to the reason (unionization) is totally unsupported, but at least the question is interesting, and is something not talked enough about.
on the financial situation, though, you're way, way off. the "Fannie Mae regulation" you're thinking of wasn't a Fannie Mae regulation - otherwise it wouldn't have applied to other banks. you're presumably thinking of the CRA, which did apply to other banks, but wasn't designed either to put banks at the crazy risk they put themselves in (it contained explicit language against such behavior) or to support securitization of the loans (enabled by a later amendment). the numbers on CRA default rates, compared to the "general population" also doesn't support putting much blame there.
the notion that there is some idealized money supply inherently consistent with a given level of economic activity is laughably naive. you set monetary policy as a tool to achieve a given end; the current economic level is context for that activity. i've not seen (but would be quite interested in seeing) any serious, quantitive analysis of the Fed's handling of money supply that makes a strong case that they could have avoided the housing bubble without serious consequences (like astronomical inflation).
and no, of course greed is not new. but we've spent 20+ years disassembling the regulatory structure designed to keep our greed in check, which had worked very well for about 50 years before that. greed drove the disassembly, of course, coupled with a religious devotion to a particularly warped conception of the free market and crypto corporatism.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Keynes is absolutely wrong for what is happening right now - destruction of currency based on overspending, borrowing without having any collateral, losing the manufacturing capacity and generally becoming uncompetitive in the global market.
What is happening right now not a normal situation, so your normal theories are not valid.
You can't handle the truth.
It absolutely *stuns* me, I mean jaw drops, cannot move holy shit WTFOMGBBQ that still to this day after millions of man hours dedicated to and billions of pages written dissecting each and every micrometer of the global mess that is known as the financial meltdown. That there are *still* individuals such as yourself so self assured in your absolute delusion drooling "freddie and fannie forced to give loans" even makes sense, let alone was what brought the entire worlds economy to its knees.
Truly you are an intellectual giant. To somehow miss the entirety of the worlds press output and conclusions in dissecting the cause of the crash and manage to attribute it to a few US home mortgages that were given due to some legislation in the 90's takes some *serious* mental horsepower.
Here's the cause of the financial meltdown for you in easy to digest pieces.
1. Banks begin selling mortgages directly to investors.
2. This makes banks a huge amount of money, and so they start handing out mortgages willy nilly so they can sell even more, even to people who they would *never* have lent to before. But now they don't care AS THEY DON"T OWN THE MORTGAGES. -- see that's the bit where they *chose* to give out the crap mortgages. But of course now they try and blame it on the government so corporate lick-spittle dimwits would sell themselves down the river to protect said banks.
3. They package these BAD mortgages up as AAA rated mortgages with the complicity of criminally fradulent ratings agencies.
4. They sell these corrupt mortgage package on to investors rated AAA when in fact they should be rated -ZZZ GTFO.
5. Investors then on sell them, sometimes even *back* to the banks, the packages stop representing any sort of true wealth at all and become fake paper wealth, only held up by the stupidity of huge investment firms and financial institutions.
5. A few people default on their mortgages...investors suddenly realize that their AAA rated mortgages actually are mixed up with extremely high risk mortgages as well.
6. Investors shit themselves and sell them ASAP.
7. A couple of mammoth financial institutions take big hits.
8. AIG insures said institutions...except AIG actually doesn't actually have any money to give them.
9. Banks, financial "institutions" and half of wall street are stuck with a few trillion dollars worth of "toxic" assets, that is packages that are so extraordinarily complicated and recursive that noone knows who actually owns what and how much is real wealth and how much is fake ponzi bullshit scheme wealth.
10. Dimwits somehow blame all this on some ridiculous 1990's legislation that doesn't even GOVERN 70% of the institutions at the top of the problem.
11. Thieves in said institutions use the ensuing shit fight by useful idiots blaming the "over entitled poor people" to stage the biggest plundering of a public treasury in the history of the world.
12. Occasional dimwits continue to blame the government - in some sort of bizarro world NOT for their lack of regulation in order to prevent such an enormous pyramid scheme from being concocted in the first place...but for somehow *forcing* these institutions to fraudulently package shit mortgages that they *chose* to give out as AAA rated investments, making trillions of dollars profit by doing so and trying to pass them along before it all fell apart as is typical of any ponzi scheme.
13. Give it up and learn FFS.
That said the Federal Reserve bears alot of responsibility for the low cost of money making credit to easy to get for the large firms. Of course the fact that the VERY SAME large firms make up the majority of the seats on the Federal Reserve makes blaming the government even stupider.
Except of course for giving the Federal Reserve that sort of power in the first place. Which is a call for more regulation...not less.
This is somewhat OK, but one of your points is grossly understated and you're missing one. The 'oh the banks are greedy and everything is their fault' is a very popular line these days, and certainly they have their share of responsibility.
#0: A lot of people who can't afford expensive mortgages buy them. This happened before #1 and was, indeed, at the behest of the Federal government (both Clinton and Bush). Fur further information: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19cisneros.html?scp=8&sq=federal%20housing%20clinton&st=cse. I don't know about you, but even if the Feds decide that the national rate of home ownership should be closer to 75-85% as opposed to 50% (to say nothing of why such a number should be arrived at by fiat rather than by, I don't know, what people can afford), and even if banks then begin falling all over themselves taking advantage of government policy that both enables and encourages them to begin (at best) foolish or (at worst) predatory practices, this still required buy-in from untold numbers of individual, real, human beings, who looked at their mortgage like most people look at their credit cards these days: free money! Nobody held a gun to their heads, and obviously a huge squadron of trained, pushy mortgage brokers can have a field day with a chunk of the population that suddenly has access to large dollar amounts and isn't familiar with how everything is going to work 1, 2, or 10 years from when they sign the papers -- but the idea of living according to your means isn't a new one, or even a difficult one.
#7: 'A few people default on their mortgages.'
A year ago, there were 500,000 foreclosures in the two months alone -- (source). It's interesting that you would choose a word like 'few' to play down the impact of the average, everyday joe in this equation. It's as if you feel more comfortable blaming banks and businesspeople (oh noes! they make money so they are evil!) even though you've got quite a few other facts in order here. Don't get me wrong - I'd be happy to line up some of these mortgage brokers or the execs who issued the AAA bond ratings and do terrible things to them, but the government opened the door for all of this to happen. Your description of banks issuing bad mortgages because they don't own them is not really accurate. If the banks actually had no exposure to these mortgages, then WaMu and Countrywide wouldn't have gone under. They 'chose' to give out crap mortgages because the government (via Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) was guaranteeing quite a lot of them. If the market establishes that half of Americans can afford homes and half can't, and then somebody in Washington decides that that number should be 75%, then you are fairly rapidly entering the area where somebody is going to be issuing a mortgage to somebody who can't afford it. No bank in their right mind would do that in a free market -- and even in our market, some banks went hog-wild with the false sense of security and the thought of collecting interest from so many new mortgages, while other banks still got into the deep end but realized a little sooner that you can't wave a magic wand and cause nearly a hundred million people who previously couldn't afford a mortgage to afford one.
The Government waved that wand and so the blame in this picture is theirs in that they opened the door, but it took a lot of self-important bankers and brokers to complete the disaster. It does seem ironic that 'more government regulation' is somehow the answer.
Sincerely,
A dimwit