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.
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.
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.
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.
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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make install -not war
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.
You do realize that the Republican majority in the House is due to gerrymandering? The machine still did them some good. It shouldn't be a surprise that Pennsylvania is one of the worst offenders WRT this, after all that's the same state where a new voter ID law was enacted which the republican majority leader famously described with the words "[enact a law that] will allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done!"
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
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.
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.