Slashdot Mirror
Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause?
theodp writes "The press has been filled with wide-eyed articles about how Obama's tech team pulled out the stops in their race against the Republicans. But as exciting as some of the new techniques dreamed up may be, Tom Steinberg points out it's important to reflect on the difference between choosing to use tech skills to win a particular fight, versus trying to improve the workings of the democratic system, or helping people to self-organize and take some control of their own lives. 'I am still filled with an excitement about the prospects for non-partisan technologies that I can't muster for even the coolest uses of randomized control trial-driven political messaging,' writes Steinberg. 'The reason why all comes down to the fact that major partisan digital campaigns change the world, but they don't do it in the way that services like eBay, TripAdvisor and Match.com do. What all these sites have in common – helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people that is not directly opposed by a counter-shift.'"
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?
Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.
All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.
But all of the sites he mentioned are not in the business to "help" anyone. They're all in it to make money. The difference is that the Democratic party used the internet in a way that didn't involve Money. Now that's a neat trick!! I wonder if by next election someone will have thought of a way to make a business out of "getting out the vote" over the net.
Its a matter of who manages to leverage it to their advantage that makes a difference. At one point, the GOP and Karl Rove were ahead of the Democrats at using databases and software to rally support and gerrymander voting districts. But it appears that they have run out of steam.
One wonders why the Republicans haven't been the ones pushing publicly funded broadband. They are missing quite a bit of their base out in the trailer parks.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's not entirely fair: there's also the religious conservatives who believe that the government should run your private life!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's because it's just a Libertarian or Republican anti-Obama Won because of tech argument. It's not even a question for Slashdot, but rather a Troll post to see how much flame or non-flame will be generated. From my position, since my job is in survey research, I'm happy that Obama's team has figured out how to poll the Youth and Young Adult groups. Those groups have always been hard, but because of trends over the last 10 years its become a big blind spot in research. Complaining that Obama won because they figured out how to measure 18-30 year old better is foolish.
Here in the civilised world we laugh at the pitiful entitlements that you give your poor, while shaking our heads in disgust at the short-sighted greed of your rich. The "entitlements" that exist in the US, even under "communist" Obama, are laughably small.
What if neither is optimal? Maybe decision making at the highest levels shouldn't involve people at all. However poorly skynet ends up performing, can't be worse than what we currently see in both government and corporations.
Yeah, one party rule works great EVERYWHERE it's tried. The Soviets thought they were righteously correct too.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
Actually, I took it as "if they can use tech to divide us, why can't they use tech to unite us?"
Some government websites are plainly painful to try to find information on. Most early alert systems for weather, disaster and Amber alerts are second rate stuff that would have never gotten out of Zuckerberg's dorm room. Why shouldn't we expect better from our elected officials? Where is the transparency we've heard so much about?
You keep beating the drum of the one party system... I want something better. Not more of the same. Your partisan rant isn't going to change my mind on that.
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
Yet, all the stupid Libertarians go apeshit about Obamacare, which was designed to cut back the 45,000 deaths annually due to lack of health insurance.
Sorry, but 45,000 American lives saved > Pakistani drone executions.
We liberals consider the drones to be the least important thing ever, because we worry about the 45,000 American lives due to lack of health insurance, which for some reason the libertarians ignore, probably because they can't process death that isn't scary.
We liberals only consider numbers, unlike the emotional libertarians that can't rationalize their beliefs.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
Where they actually that different from the "permanent Republican majority" fantasists who they swept out of office in 2008? Hubristic interpretation of immediate political gains as portents of inevitable future victory is foolish; but seems extremely common.
It's like the actual product doesn't matter anymore.
Our city council had a very bitter election this year, but I could determine nothing about the candidates' positions from their campaign literature. But then I noticed the flyers from the public employee unions were only attacking one of them, so I voted for her. So we cannot judge candidates by what they say, but we can judge them by their enemies.
if you seriously think that our government or any government the democratic party would reasonbly instate represents public intrest, you gotta be shitting me.
The democratic party is just as corporate sponsored as the republican party, if only exceptions being to make government a private non-corporate entity that responds of a few with connections instead of money.
Where were they on SOPA and PIPA?
What about with monsanto's little debacle?
I am sure its "public intrest" where they completely ignored there campaign promises to stop the world wide war on civil liberties with the stated goal of fighting terrorism, and scale back domestic spying and unconstitutional policing.
By "popular intrest" you mean worship to whatever celebrities who normally tell people what products they should buy told them, so a few leaders can sit around paying $20 for drinks and not face consequences of insane social mores.
Or mabey you still believe in privlidege for a stated upper class.
Obamacare, which was designed to cut back the 45,000 deaths annually due to lack of health insurance.
If all government programs did what they were designed to do, the world would be a perfect place.
As a libertarian, and someone who can do something called math, and who understands at a moderate level this thing called economics, I can assure you that libertarians are in the right for having issues with obamacare. Answer this honestly, how is it going to improve health care? Making insurance mandatory, according to basics of economics means you've increased demand for insurance, and by making it required by law, created a very, very inelastic supply curve. According to economics 101, the only thing that can happen is that prices will sky rocket.
Then throw in the whole concept of health insurance. I'm pretty sure it's meant to cover extremely expensive, yet fairly unlikely disasters. Car accidents, house burning down, etc. I don't expect my car insurance to pay for regular maintenance for my car such as oil changes or putting gas in it. That's just adding an unneeded middle man which will do nothing but increase the price without need. Why not pay for maintenance straight up? Then rather then employer offered health insurance, that gets changed to employer offered health account, used to directly pay for care, doesn't go through middle men, and keeps everything cheaper. But NO. Libertarians are idiots for identifying that the real problem with our system is that everything is covered through insurance, rather than in any sane way everything else is handled. Leave health insurance for catastrophic care, and pay for basic care the same way you would for everything else in life.
You will undoubtedly counter that all health care should be run by government, well now all health care workers are government employees, now you're heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works.
Not really. There are many libertarians that have said views, but I'd not say that the Libertarian party embraces them. If anything, the problem the libertarians have is that they aren't in any way unified. There's a variety of people that vote libertarian: There's the freedom worshippers, that wouldn't even allow the state to set immigration laws. But in front of them are nativists, that hate immigrants. Some would leave a minimal army, and dismantle the rest of the state. Others would allow the state to do anything to foreign nationals to protect the freedom of US citizens. Unsurprisingly, when libertarians meet to come up with a program, they end up being unable to agree on much.
So to grow, they need a clear message, and to get a clear message, they will piss off a good chunk of their membership: Not a bad thing though, as being mostly a collection of white males will be as bad for their election choices as it will be for the Republicans.
Either way, no political party really stands against the torture and the executions. People do (like me, for instance), but this wars are won by public opinion, not by following a schizophrenic party.
It's a horribly corporatist troll. Commercial tech is nothing but good, because it makes people's lives better "without opposition". Political tech is bad because there's opposition, or because it doesn't fix everything. What a load of CXO worshipping propaganda.
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So you blindly voted for whatever crook was opposed by the people who actually work in your local government. You've proved Republicans don't need their disintegrating party: you only care about what you imagine are liberals.
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Because Obamacare does a lot more than just insure more people. Though for those newly insured, it has improved their healthcare by funding what couldn't be bought before, already proving you wrong.
Obamacare also requires insurers provide contraception for the price of insurance premiums, which is preventive medicine that reduces costs due to unexpected pregnancies and STDs.
You're pretty sure that health insurance is meant to cover only catastrophes, but it's not. It's to cover spikes in health care costs that come from occasional expensive events. It's just like car collision insurance: it's a financing strategy that allows people to keep moving through life in a way they can afford, based on statistics. In fact car insurance should pay for routine maintenance that prevents catastrophic costs like engines seizing or bald tires skidding into something.
The financing costs money to operate, plus salaries and profits to motivate people to dedicate the time it requires to do it properly. Though not as much as the insurers charge (up to 20% of premiums, even under Obamacare). What every one of our foreign competitors has chosen over the past several generations is a public health insurance system like unemployment insurance, which we already have for a lot of Americans in either Medicare, Medicaid, VA insurance and some others.
In fact you have called for public health insurance in what you have detailed. Except for some reason you want an "employer offered health account". Why should the employer have anything whatsoever to do with health? Why should an employer even know when you have drawn on payments for medicine? Why should you have to move it when you change employers? Why should employers spend one minute administering health financing when their business is totally unrelated? Obviously that "account" should be Medicare/Medicaid/VA insurance, paid by taxes, administered without profit by the government that already does so very well for many millions of Americans.
What's wrong with you libertarians is that you cannot accept that government is the people joined together to protect ourselves, at a great scale economy. You're obsessed with authoritarian private corporations that demonstrate daily the vast waste they layer atop most widespread services, especially those that are equally available to all. You reduce actual life experiences demonstrated everywhere to inane sloganeering like "heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works". No, you have merely cherrypicked history and called things names without regard to their meaning.
There's more to economics than economics 101. There's more to reality than the libertarian mayor of Sim City bothers to carp about.
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You actually sounded very lucid and correct until that last paragraph where you displayed your staggering ignorance about universal healthcare. Obamacare just furthers the agenda of crony capitalism (which is the only type of capitalism that ever has or ever CAN arise). A true UHC would put all aspects of healthcare back in the hands of the people who are getting that care, as evidenced by every civilized nation in the world with UHC that is vastly popular with said nation's citizenry.
Your proof is a USA Today opinion piece? Yes, 3.6 million people more had insurance - great for them. But the overall insured percent went from 83.7% to 84.3%. That's what we can expect? 0.6%? For laws that have effectively removed almost any limit on what the Federal government can and cannot tell you what to do, for billions of dollars spent, and for literally destroying private practice medicine, that's what we get?
I'm not a big fan of downmoderation, but the parent is a blatant (and successful) troll. It should not be modded +5 Insightful.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's because Libertarians are about personal choice and freedom and everybody has different personal levels of importance... Not just what their leaders tell them to care about.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It's cute how you think the horde of red-staters who make up the base of the Republican party are all about laissez-faire, as if that is also the defining characteristic of "conservatism".
it depends on the INFORMED consent of the governed
Unfortunately, the current process is all about NOT informing you. It appears to, but for the important stuff, both sides have agreed that there is no need ti inform anybody else.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
Not too fond of Bush or Obama on civil liberties, and concerned that Social Security, Medicare, etc. will get cut. Unless you have a very unusual definition of "libertarian", or by "the only people" you don't literally mean "the only people", your claim appears to be untrue. Even if you argue that by "the only people" you meant "the only political party", there's another party that's opposed to torture, has at least some members opposed to drone attacks, and not exactly fans of free-market solutions for everything.
(Admittedly, what you actually said was "the only poeple", so maybe neither Glenn Greenwald nor anybody in the Green Party are "poeple". :-))
Communist regimes are left- rather than right-leaning.
Communism demonstrated itself to be highly authoritarian ironically under the ostensible goal of anarchy. In the western world, however, authoritarian personalities are almost universally associated with reactionary conservative politices.
Liberalism is starkly different to communism in that liberalism is strongly against government enterprise (which is different to public services), and authoritarianism. Two core beliefs of liberalisms -- going back to the 19thC, is to champion the rights of the individual (against the tyranny of the masses), and also advocated for lassiez-faire economic reforms.
Back then, Liberals advocated for universal health-care, a social safety net, and public education for all. None of these things are inconsistent with each other. Spending money on schools/emergency-services/heath-care/social-security is just a matter of priorities -- not a "statist" stance as the false narrative in the tea party goes.
This just demonstrates the inadequacies of left/right term.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Literally destroying private practice medicine, not the practitioners themselves.
More and more doctors are having to sell their practice and become hospital (or management company) employees to stay afloat because of the changes this has brought about. We've dumped vast sums of money down the rathole of EMR without getting benefits anywhere close to what we should get in return for so large an investment.
You're pretty sure that health insurance is meant to cover only catastrophes, but it's not. It's to cover spikes in health care costs that come from occasional expensive events. It's just like car collision insurance: it's a financing strategy that allows people to keep moving through life in a way they can afford, based on statistics. In fact car insurance should pay for routine maintenance that prevents catastrophic costs like engines seizing or bald tires skidding into something.
Sorry, but no. Insurance, by definition, is there to cover events that are too expensive to be able to afford the immediate expense, and unlikely enough that you don't actually expect to need it very often.
Routine maintenance is by definition routine, and therefore shouldn't be covered by insurance. If you start using insurance for routine events, then the overall cost goes up because the insurance company will want to take a share of the profits.
So for example:
These are the sort of sites Tom Steinberg is talking about -- sites that change the balance between people and government at a grass roots level, by allowing people to work together and see what each other are doing.
I've used eg the FoI tool, and it works. Think of these as force-multipliers for the individual's voice and clout in society.
Steinberg is really thinking about the low-budget, non-commercial, very effective sites that his charity MySociety has set up over the last 10 years in the UK, which aim to help non-party democracy at a grass roots level, by helping make citizens more powerful against government at all levels, by creating systems that give them more information, help them work together, and track and share the outcomes of what happens when they tangle with power.
What Steinberg is saying is that systems like that, that make the citizen more powerful, are far more impressive to him than systems which make a particular political party more effective. It's a bit surprising that so far seemingly every poster here has missed Steinberg's point.
That's only true when you presume that there is a for-profit insurance company involved in the process. My (largish) employer is self insured (with a big company paid a fixed cost to administer the plan), so our VP of HR cuts a check every week to pay to sum total of all employees' health care costs for that week.
Thus, the company is actively trying to encourage and incentivize us to better take care of routine maintenance. Engineers tend to ignore health issues, so the company put a full-time clinic on-site and encourage us to visit if we sneeze once. They want us to not get avoidable diseases so they ban smoking on their property and create lots of free physical activity programs where we can get exercise.
My insurance company, also known as my employer, wants my routine maintenance covered because it saves them money, pushing the overall costs down (not up).
While it's not the case in the U.S. right now, were you to replace "my employer" with "my government", the same arguments could apply.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.