What's even more interesting is that interlocking directorates in the same industry are illegal in the US per the Clayton Act, however the article points out that 1 in 8 interlocks are indeed in the same industry. There's simply no enforcement of this. Thanks again, Obama.
And the previous four administrations. This didn't happen in just the past 6 years. It started a long long time ago, and the Clayton Act, like the Sherman Act, has been out of favor for decades, because it inconveniences people with money.
Thank you Supreme Court for making sure people with money will always have the best government their money can buy.
How do we know women aren't contributing to open source? Open source outside of the Linux kernel and a few other corporate-supported projects is primarily done at home as a hobby. Open source has a very long tail in that respect.
So for projects done entirely at home, people publish their results by creating an account on SourceForge or GitHub or Tigris and upload their source. A good many of those account names are gender neutral, and regardless, neutral or not, the account doesn't contain the data concerning the gender of the owner. Male, female, or any of the other possibilities, most of the systems don't even ask, and for those that do, people can pick whatever they want. So how do we know women aren't contributing?
If anything, I'd say it's likely there are more women contributing to open source than is generally known. Open source publishing is exceedingly friendly to anonymous and pseudonymous contributions (with the exception of projects with paranoid copyright assignment requirements). How do you know fyunkclick783 isn't female? The default assumption is a developer is male, so any woman wishing to avoid notice as a female open source contributor need do nothing at all to maintain that assumption.
Perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Maybe you'd like to ask, why would a female open source programmer choose to conceal her gender? I can answer that question with a question. Why would a male open source programmer choose to explicitly assert his gender? You realize that rarely happens? Pick any random project on SourceForge. Odds are it's a sole maintainer project. Now tell me, male or female? Odds are they're male, but you don't know. Now tell me, are you likely to stop using an open source tool if you discover the maintainer is female? How about if you discover they're male? Want to bet people who make that decision on that basis are vanishingly rare? So why do you care what the sex of the maintainer is? You don't.
No one cares what the sex of the maintainer of an open source project is. We care about whether or not the tool does what we need done, whether or not its stable, whether or not it eats our data, and whether or not its available in our Linux distribution. The sex of the maintainer is irrelevant to all of those factors. It's not "Don't Ask, Don't Tell'—it's "Don't Give a Damn."
It turns out that local political hacks arent good at setting up and running a broadband network.
It's a co-op, not a municipal network. It's certainly possible that the people that control the municipality also control the co-op, since rural areas have a tendency to have Boss Hogs, but it's by no means a given. This is certainly an example of co-op directors making some incredibly poor choices. Whether or not the members can hold a vote and fix the problem depends on the bylaws of the co-op (and their own motivation to do something about the situation). Neither of those things has anything to do with any municipality.
On my way home from work today, I saw four separate vehicles all stranded by the side of the road. Every single one of them was a gasoline car. What was your point again? Something about the drivers being at risk of being eaten by wolves?
Employees of armed federal agencies depend to a large extent on the rest of the armed federal agency and the implicit promise that "if you mess with one of ours, you mess with all of us." Federal agencies have acquired a certain aroma of lawlessness when it comes to avenging their own, thanks in large part to Hollywood, but aided and abetted by them any time Hollywood comes asking for an adviser. That and there are news reports of just enough jack-booted thuggery that people assume all the rest of it is true.
It's more than a little unfortunate that they've chosen to go that route since 9/11. Now instead of the promise that "we will find you and bring you to justice,' it's "we will find you and kill your dog and probably you too at the slightest provocation." The ongoing militarization of police has many downsides, and make no mistake, the FBI are only police. They should act like it. Sadly, they don't.
And I thought platypus was a screwy word... I'd never seen their genus name before.
But you should remember that no one other than two handlers and our villain knows of Perry's efforts to thwart him. So of course no one spotted him on this raid.
You guessed it... a lifetime on an offender registry for doing something that would have been perfectly legal just a mile away.
It's even worse than that. From a state where the age of consent is higher, go to one where it's lower for a weekend, perform an act that would have been legal in that state if you were a resident, go home and get arrested for the "crime" of transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sex.
People like nothing better than to get outraged about sex.
Fancy heavy-weight offset printer, so yes. The press is what enables that difference, and this is one of those presses. Who gets to even buy these presses if quite tightly controlled. The fact that authorities spent years looking for it meant that its purchase was very carefully done and it was probably disassembled and moved after initial delivery. A difficult and expensive operation, but presumably the years it was in operation paid for it.
Because the game is all about who gets to have the money, not how good the money is. If counterfeiting were legal, peons could print their way to financial independence, and we can't be havin' with that. Any mechanism by which large numbers of the population can escape from debt will be carefully stamped out, no matter what it is. Counterfeit printing is only one of many victims of this policy.
First we need to ensure that everyone is competent in analytical reasoning and the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in human language.
I have bad news for you. Natural languages aren't any good at all for communicating clearly or accurately. Every single natural language is about nuance, and feelings, and innuendo, and multiple layers and multiple audiences and a whole host of dreck. Accurate descriptions of the world are not any part of natural language. Hence, mathematical language and programming language. We had to invent entirely artificial languages to even come close to your desire.
Yes... but the other piece of the puzzle is that the user has to be computer-savvy enough to know, or at least suspect, that there is a better way to accomplish a task.
At last, the real value in this rather silly education push. No, most people are not going to actually learn how to code, even if they take a class with the ostensible purpose of learning. But they will, at least, get a grasp on what's possible. It's amazing to me, after 20 years of so-called Information Age, exactly how few people have this basic grasp. It's just not there. The possibility that the machine can do repetitious things for them never crosses most people's minds. People think what they want done can't be automated because one part is unique each time, if they even give any consideration to the possibility of automation at all.
Primary school is about teaching people the basics, numeracy and literacy. Secondary school is as much about about teaching people what's possible as it is teaching any particular thing, and in this day and age, learning what a computer can do is at least as important at learning what chemistry can do.
A few years ago a bunch of people from Sweden announced they would create a distributed, non-trackeable DNS system. What happened to that?
The problem of fraudulent servers being introduced becomes significant. An authoritative hierarchical system means there's one and only one place to go to start looking up a new domain: the root servers. Distributed systems have no such authoritative root, so the process of figuring out what the real address is in such a system is complex. Complex enough that nobody has really finished the job, though there are detailed research papers and some fairly good proposals.
In short, people are assholes, and that's why we can't have nice things.
Oona had better be glad she's Finnish. If she did that in the US, she could expect jack-booted thugs from Homeland Security bashing her door down. That data is SEKRET! The fact that it's only perceived as secret by said ignorant thugs because the marketing department of the vendor told them so is completely lost in the general panic. TUR'RISTS could FOLLOW the HELICOPTER! Beat to quarters and man guns!
I'd like to think I was exaggerating for effect, but judging by the past decade, I'm really not. The current security apparatus really is self-parodying.
(For those who want to bitch about how this perception runs contrary to Slashdot groupthink about the threat posed by that apparatus, I say only this: some of us are capable of projecting into the future. We want the spying and the blundering belligerence stopped because it might not always be blundering or incompetent. It still manages to be mortally dangerous even now. It could get much much worse.)
Do you have more info on that? Seriously, no snark, but I'll admit that I'm skeptical. I've never heard of human perception time being less than 30ms. I hate slow responses in UI's with a passion, but 1ms?
See, for instance, John Carmack's analysis of head mounted display latency. Under 20 ms is acceptable for most people. 30 ms is too high, and leads to motion sickness.
For ~1 ms latencies, experiment with a mouse on an old CRT running at 180Hz. Try out a hardware rendered mouse, then a software rendered mouse. You can indeed see the difference.
Also for time perception that accurate, see a competent analysis of a fighting game. Many fighting games feature reaction windows no more than 5 ms wide, and some have windows ~1 ms wide. And players can hit them.
Human visual perception and motor reaction is a very complex, multipath system with a lot of variance between individuals. Some of those paths are very slow. Some of them are suprisingly fast. Touch screen systems are some of the worst high latency offenders, in a visual perceptive/motor reactive realm that is least tolerant of it. When you touch something in the real world, it responds instantly. Push a marble and it rolls, no delay. Touch screens can't do that. Not even close. It's really really jarring, and it makes the choice of scripting languages on mobile devices particularly unfortunate, since they're not capable of executing fast enough to solve the problem. Your entire reaction and perception system is definitely slower than it feels, but it is also equipped with compensation for that slowness. Your brain conceals the lag from you when interacting with the real world. That process of concealment has a lot to do with expectations. Touch screens especially have a tendency to violate those expectations.
There's a lot of work yet to be done in human-computer interaction, and getting touch screen responsiveness down to the equivalent of the venerable mouse is seriously important, at this point. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be much of a priority. See complaints about hipster programmers elsewhere in this thread.
The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.
Most of us are too good at math to fall for the lottery false hope.
Instead, most of us think we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. Most of us think we're so smart that we can invent the Next Big Thing. Most of us think we can get rich through intelligently applied hard work. Most of us think that being smart and determined is all you need. Most of us are wrong. Most of us haven't noticed that the odds of achieving financial independence by that route are no better than the odds of achieving it via the lottery.
Most of us are worse at math than we think we are.
Outsource the whole thing to private arbitrators...
Were you born this stupid, or do you have to practice? Seriously, Judge Dredd? That's your solution to the inefficiencies of the law profession? At least right now, the populace has some say over who gets to be judge, either by direct election or by election of people who do the appointing. At least right now, those judges have no financial incentive to make judgements one way or another, and if they do, they recuse themselves because there's a higher court watching their activities that also has no financial incentive to make judgements. You think dismantling all that would help?
Criticize the practice of billing by the hour, by all means. Criticize prosecutors who insist that one particular person of interest travel to another country just to be interviewed, while no other is subject to that requirement. Criticize judges who make judgements in problem domains in which they have zero understanding. But don't even pretend that universal private arbitration fixes any of that. Don't even pretend that there aren't a whole host of absolutely awful problems associated with private arbitration.
I have yet to see any plan for reaching said Libertarian Fantasyland that doesn't involve completely turning over the reins of power to an oligarchical elite, and just hoping they'll be fair-minded and play nice.
I have yet to see how that plan is in any way different from what we already have. See, for instance, the Kansas state legislature considering a bill to effectively outlaw municipal internet services, a bill written by telecom lobbyists. Given how every government organization, from the town council to the state legislature to the federal government, dances to the tune of oligarchs already, haven't we already proved, by experiment, that the Libertarian Fantasyland is not only impossible to achieve, but the process of attempting it is actively harmful to most everybody? I think we have.
how about a bill which bans government from providing or subsidizing broadband in any county in which broadband (at least 5Mb/s) is available to 100% of residences.
Sounds great, but don't set an absolute value for the definition of broadband. Use a formula. Preferably one that takes into account the average available bandwidth in South Korea.
This... most people think 'their' representative(s) are not that bad, it's the others that suck, so they vote theirs in again. All a politician has to do is sell himself to his constituents on a few issues, say look at what I have done for you (if an incumbent or holder of other political positions), and smear everyone else into oblivion. It gets lapped up, and the cycle repeats ad nauseum.
All true. So the correct solution is to amend first each state constitution to impose term limits at all levels, then use the newly elected state legislatures to amend the federal constitution similarly.
If that asshole Grover Norquist had spent his time campaigning for term limits instead of no new taxes, there might be a potential solution on the horizon. As it is, there's no Norquist equivalent for term limits, and there's unlikely ever to be one, for lack of money. Rich people are happy to pay Norquist's expenses. Not so happy to pay the expenses of someone campaigning to cut off their easy access to the halls of power.
Ah the age-old cry of "work within the system." Do people actually believe that methodology still works?
Until we prove it doesn't work, we have a moral obligation to try it. Violent revolution is a very nasty alternative, especially since it so seldom results in the right bastards getting killed and instead kills innocents.
Unfortunately, we're unlikely to fulfill our moral obligation, because the possibility of actually throwing out all of the incumbents in a legitimate vote is essentially zero, especially at state and local levels, where many incumbents (especially judges, in states they're elected) run unopposed.
Technological progress happens in every society irrespective of politics no matter how much you consistently want to ride that particular hobby-horse.
Except in societies that have religious objections to technological progress. Islam from the late Medieval period and radical Islam in the present day come to mind.
But if your local gov isn't working in your best interesst, organize something so an other party can pick this up in the next election. Whining on./ for sure isn't a solution to get something fixed.
He's not trying to get anything fixed. He's got his hobby horse and his belief that all government is bad (he's one of these anarcho-capitalist-style libertarians, rather than a small-government-style libertarian) and he's bound and determined to keep it that way, to his own detriment. The idiom is "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Anti-government hardliners are great for that.
They can only do that when government is so small as to make no difference.
You know, I keep hearing this claim, because a certain segment of the population cuddles the talking point to their breast like a teddy bear, but you know what? I've never seen any empirical evidence that there is any truth to the claim whatsoever. And in fact, I think it's false.
I think that a government that is radically smaller than the largest organization it is supposed to regulate is incapable of regulating that organization because it can't keep up. For evidence, I point to the current state of affairs. I say, our bank regulators are understaffed. There should be more people with more government jobs specifically to regulate the banks, and because the part of the government that is supposed to do that job is so small, it's helpless to rein in behemoth multinational banks that can generate paper faster than a regulator can read it.
You want your small government? Forbid megacorporations. Forbid too-big-to-fail. If a business gets bigger than its corresponding regulatory agency X 5 (we can argue about the scale factor), mandate that it be broken up, by law, no excuses, no dodges, no exceptions or exemptions, and only the most minimal of grace periods.
I also think that small government is in no way immune to the corruption we currently see. On the contrary, if you look around at the world, small government corruption runs in lockstep with big government corruption. You get the same percentages, regardless of the size of the government entity. And this makes sense, because government organizations are made of people, and the percentage of people in the population who are morally bankrupt is the same for both.
Or get over the small government lunacy, and admit that we need honest government, and the size should be whatever it takes to get the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
And they get a perverse incentive to deliberately deliver broken products from the outset.
No they don't.
Yes they do.
The vast majority will then have them for another 2 years.
Which they paid extra for. Incentive.
A sizeable chunk for probably another year or two after that.
Which they again paid extra for. Yet more incentive. And still perverse.
What's even more interesting is that interlocking directorates in the same industry are illegal in the US per the Clayton Act, however the article points out that 1 in 8 interlocks are indeed in the same industry. There's simply no enforcement of this. Thanks again, Obama.
And the previous four administrations. This didn't happen in just the past 6 years. It started a long long time ago, and the Clayton Act, like the Sherman Act, has been out of favor for decades, because it inconveniences people with money.
Thank you Supreme Court for making sure people with money will always have the best government their money can buy.
Yes. In the future, there was a Back to the Future 4.
How do we know women aren't contributing to open source? Open source outside of the Linux kernel and a few other corporate-supported projects is primarily done at home as a hobby. Open source has a very long tail in that respect.
So for projects done entirely at home, people publish their results by creating an account on SourceForge or GitHub or Tigris and upload their source. A good many of those account names are gender neutral, and regardless, neutral or not, the account doesn't contain the data concerning the gender of the owner. Male, female, or any of the other possibilities, most of the systems don't even ask, and for those that do, people can pick whatever they want. So how do we know women aren't contributing?
If anything, I'd say it's likely there are more women contributing to open source than is generally known. Open source publishing is exceedingly friendly to anonymous and pseudonymous contributions (with the exception of projects with paranoid copyright assignment requirements). How do you know fyunkclick783 isn't female? The default assumption is a developer is male, so any woman wishing to avoid notice as a female open source contributor need do nothing at all to maintain that assumption.
Perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Maybe you'd like to ask, why would a female open source programmer choose to conceal her gender? I can answer that question with a question. Why would a male open source programmer choose to explicitly assert his gender? You realize that rarely happens? Pick any random project on SourceForge. Odds are it's a sole maintainer project. Now tell me, male or female? Odds are they're male, but you don't know. Now tell me, are you likely to stop using an open source tool if you discover the maintainer is female? How about if you discover they're male? Want to bet people who make that decision on that basis are vanishingly rare? So why do you care what the sex of the maintainer is? You don't.
No one cares what the sex of the maintainer of an open source project is. We care about whether or not the tool does what we need done, whether or not its stable, whether or not it eats our data, and whether or not its available in our Linux distribution. The sex of the maintainer is irrelevant to all of those factors. It's not "Don't Ask, Don't Tell'—it's "Don't Give a Damn."
It turns out that local political hacks arent good at setting up and running a broadband network.
It's a co-op, not a municipal network. It's certainly possible that the people that control the municipality also control the co-op, since rural areas have a tendency to have Boss Hogs, but it's by no means a given. This is certainly an example of co-op directors making some incredibly poor choices. Whether or not the members can hold a vote and fix the problem depends on the bylaws of the co-op (and their own motivation to do something about the situation). Neither of those things has anything to do with any municipality.
On my way home from work today, I saw four separate vehicles all stranded by the side of the road. Every single one of them was a gasoline car. What was your point again? Something about the drivers being at risk of being eaten by wolves?
Employees of armed federal agencies depend to a large extent on the rest of the armed federal agency and the implicit promise that "if you mess with one of ours, you mess with all of us." Federal agencies have acquired a certain aroma of lawlessness when it comes to avenging their own, thanks in large part to Hollywood, but aided and abetted by them any time Hollywood comes asking for an adviser. That and there are news reports of just enough jack-booted thuggery that people assume all the rest of it is true.
It's more than a little unfortunate that they've chosen to go that route since 9/11. Now instead of the promise that "we will find you and bring you to justice,' it's "we will find you and kill your dog and probably you too at the slightest provocation." The ongoing militarization of police has many downsides, and make no mistake, the FBI are only police. They should act like it. Sadly, they don't.
Did anyone spot an ornithorynque...
And I thought platypus was a screwy word... I'd never seen their genus name before.
But you should remember that no one other than two handlers and our villain knows of Perry's efforts to thwart him. So of course no one spotted him on this raid.
You guessed it... a lifetime on an offender registry for doing something that would have been perfectly legal just a mile away.
It's even worse than that. From a state where the age of consent is higher, go to one where it's lower for a weekend, perform an act that would have been legal in that state if you were a resident, go home and get arrested for the "crime" of transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sex.
People like nothing better than to get outraged about sex.
Fancy heavy-weight offset printer, so yes. The press is what enables that difference, and this is one of those presses. Who gets to even buy these presses if quite tightly controlled. The fact that authorities spent years looking for it meant that its purchase was very carefully done and it was probably disassembled and moved after initial delivery. A difficult and expensive operation, but presumably the years it was in operation paid for it.
Because the game is all about who gets to have the money, not how good the money is. If counterfeiting were legal, peons could print their way to financial independence, and we can't be havin' with that. Any mechanism by which large numbers of the population can escape from debt will be carefully stamped out, no matter what it is. Counterfeit printing is only one of many victims of this policy.
First we need to ensure that everyone is competent in analytical reasoning and the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in human language.
I have bad news for you. Natural languages aren't any good at all for communicating clearly or accurately. Every single natural language is about nuance, and feelings, and innuendo, and multiple layers and multiple audiences and a whole host of dreck. Accurate descriptions of the world are not any part of natural language. Hence, mathematical language and programming language. We had to invent entirely artificial languages to even come close to your desire.
So what's wrong with teaching programming, again?
Yes... but the other piece of the puzzle is that the user has to be computer-savvy enough to know, or at least suspect, that there is a better way to accomplish a task.
At last, the real value in this rather silly education push. No, most people are not going to actually learn how to code, even if they take a class with the ostensible purpose of learning. But they will, at least, get a grasp on what's possible. It's amazing to me, after 20 years of so-called Information Age, exactly how few people have this basic grasp. It's just not there. The possibility that the machine can do repetitious things for them never crosses most people's minds. People think what they want done can't be automated because one part is unique each time, if they even give any consideration to the possibility of automation at all.
Primary school is about teaching people the basics, numeracy and literacy. Secondary school is as much about about teaching people what's possible as it is teaching any particular thing, and in this day and age, learning what a computer can do is at least as important at learning what chemistry can do.
A few years ago a bunch of people from Sweden announced they would create a distributed, non-trackeable DNS system. What happened to that?
The problem of fraudulent servers being introduced becomes significant. An authoritative hierarchical system means there's one and only one place to go to start looking up a new domain: the root servers. Distributed systems have no such authoritative root, so the process of figuring out what the real address is in such a system is complex. Complex enough that nobody has really finished the job, though there are detailed research papers and some fairly good proposals.
In short, people are assholes, and that's why we can't have nice things.
Oona had better be glad she's Finnish. If she did that in the US, she could expect jack-booted thugs from Homeland Security bashing her door down. That data is SEKRET! The fact that it's only perceived as secret by said ignorant thugs because the marketing department of the vendor told them so is completely lost in the general panic. TUR'RISTS could FOLLOW the HELICOPTER! Beat to quarters and man guns!
I'd like to think I was exaggerating for effect, but judging by the past decade, I'm really not. The current security apparatus really is self-parodying.
(For those who want to bitch about how this perception runs contrary to Slashdot groupthink about the threat posed by that apparatus, I say only this: some of us are capable of projecting into the future. We want the spying and the blundering belligerence stopped because it might not always be blundering or incompetent. It still manages to be mortally dangerous even now. It could get much much worse.)
Do you have more info on that? Seriously, no snark, but I'll admit that I'm skeptical. I've never heard of human perception time being less than 30ms. I hate slow responses in UI's with a passion, but 1ms?
See, for instance, John Carmack's analysis of head mounted display latency. Under 20 ms is acceptable for most people. 30 ms is too high, and leads to motion sickness.
For ~1 ms latencies, experiment with a mouse on an old CRT running at 180Hz. Try out a hardware rendered mouse, then a software rendered mouse. You can indeed see the difference.
Also for time perception that accurate, see a competent analysis of a fighting game. Many fighting games feature reaction windows no more than 5 ms wide, and some have windows ~1 ms wide. And players can hit them.
Human visual perception and motor reaction is a very complex, multipath system with a lot of variance between individuals. Some of those paths are very slow. Some of them are suprisingly fast. Touch screen systems are some of the worst high latency offenders, in a visual perceptive/motor reactive realm that is least tolerant of it. When you touch something in the real world, it responds instantly. Push a marble and it rolls, no delay. Touch screens can't do that. Not even close. It's really really jarring, and it makes the choice of scripting languages on mobile devices particularly unfortunate, since they're not capable of executing fast enough to solve the problem. Your entire reaction and perception system is definitely slower than it feels, but it is also equipped with compensation for that slowness. Your brain conceals the lag from you when interacting with the real world. That process of concealment has a lot to do with expectations. Touch screens especially have a tendency to violate those expectations.
There's a lot of work yet to be done in human-computer interaction, and getting touch screen responsiveness down to the equivalent of the venerable mouse is seriously important, at this point. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be much of a priority. See complaints about hipster programmers elsewhere in this thread.
The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.
Most of us are too good at math to fall for the lottery false hope.
Instead, most of us think we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. Most of us think we're so smart that we can invent the Next Big Thing. Most of us think we can get rich through intelligently applied hard work. Most of us think that being smart and determined is all you need. Most of us are wrong. Most of us haven't noticed that the odds of achieving financial independence by that route are no better than the odds of achieving it via the lottery.
Most of us are worse at math than we think we are.
Outsource the whole thing to private arbitrators...
Were you born this stupid, or do you have to practice? Seriously, Judge Dredd? That's your solution to the inefficiencies of the law profession? At least right now, the populace has some say over who gets to be judge, either by direct election or by election of people who do the appointing. At least right now, those judges have no financial incentive to make judgements one way or another, and if they do, they recuse themselves because there's a higher court watching their activities that also has no financial incentive to make judgements. You think dismantling all that would help?
Criticize the practice of billing by the hour, by all means. Criticize prosecutors who insist that one particular person of interest travel to another country just to be interviewed, while no other is subject to that requirement. Criticize judges who make judgements in problem domains in which they have zero understanding. But don't even pretend that universal private arbitration fixes any of that. Don't even pretend that there aren't a whole host of absolutely awful problems associated with private arbitration.
Talk about the best justice money can buy.....
I have yet to see any plan for reaching said Libertarian Fantasyland that doesn't involve completely turning over the reins of power to an oligarchical elite, and just hoping they'll be fair-minded and play nice.
I have yet to see how that plan is in any way different from what we already have. See, for instance, the Kansas state legislature considering a bill to effectively outlaw municipal internet services, a bill written by telecom lobbyists. Given how every government organization, from the town council to the state legislature to the federal government, dances to the tune of oligarchs already, haven't we already proved, by experiment, that the Libertarian Fantasyland is not only impossible to achieve, but the process of attempting it is actively harmful to most everybody? I think we have.
how about a bill which bans government from providing or subsidizing broadband in any county in which broadband (at least 5Mb/s) is available to 100% of residences.
Sounds great, but don't set an absolute value for the definition of broadband. Use a formula. Preferably one that takes into account the average available bandwidth in South Korea.
This... most people think 'their' representative(s) are not that bad, it's the others that suck, so they vote theirs in again. All a politician has to do is sell himself to his constituents on a few issues, say look at what I have done for you (if an incumbent or holder of other political positions), and smear everyone else into oblivion. It gets lapped up, and the cycle repeats ad nauseum.
All true. So the correct solution is to amend first each state constitution to impose term limits at all levels, then use the newly elected state legislatures to amend the federal constitution similarly.
If that asshole Grover Norquist had spent his time campaigning for term limits instead of no new taxes, there might be a potential solution on the horizon. As it is, there's no Norquist equivalent for term limits, and there's unlikely ever to be one, for lack of money. Rich people are happy to pay Norquist's expenses. Not so happy to pay the expenses of someone campaigning to cut off their easy access to the halls of power.
Ah the age-old cry of "work within the system." Do people actually believe that methodology still works?
Until we prove it doesn't work, we have a moral obligation to try it. Violent revolution is a very nasty alternative, especially since it so seldom results in the right bastards getting killed and instead kills innocents.
Unfortunately, we're unlikely to fulfill our moral obligation, because the possibility of actually throwing out all of the incumbents in a legitimate vote is essentially zero, especially at state and local levels, where many incumbents (especially judges, in states they're elected) run unopposed.
Technological progress happens in every society irrespective of politics no matter how much you consistently want to ride that particular hobby-horse.
Except in societies that have religious objections to technological progress. Islam from the late Medieval period and radical Islam in the present day come to mind.
But if your local gov isn't working in your best interesst, organize something so an other party can pick this up in the next election. Whining on ./ for sure isn't a solution to get something fixed.
He's not trying to get anything fixed. He's got his hobby horse and his belief that all government is bad (he's one of these anarcho-capitalist-style libertarians, rather than a small-government-style libertarian) and he's bound and determined to keep it that way, to his own detriment. The idiom is "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Anti-government hardliners are great for that.
They can only do that when government is so small as to make no difference.
You know, I keep hearing this claim, because a certain segment of the population cuddles the talking point to their breast like a teddy bear, but you know what? I've never seen any empirical evidence that there is any truth to the claim whatsoever. And in fact, I think it's false.
I think that a government that is radically smaller than the largest organization it is supposed to regulate is incapable of regulating that organization because it can't keep up. For evidence, I point to the current state of affairs. I say, our bank regulators are understaffed. There should be more people with more government jobs specifically to regulate the banks, and because the part of the government that is supposed to do that job is so small, it's helpless to rein in behemoth multinational banks that can generate paper faster than a regulator can read it.
You want your small government? Forbid megacorporations. Forbid too-big-to-fail. If a business gets bigger than its corresponding regulatory agency X 5 (we can argue about the scale factor), mandate that it be broken up, by law, no excuses, no dodges, no exceptions or exemptions, and only the most minimal of grace periods.
I also think that small government is in no way immune to the corruption we currently see. On the contrary, if you look around at the world, small government corruption runs in lockstep with big government corruption. You get the same percentages, regardless of the size of the government entity. And this makes sense, because government organizations are made of people, and the percentage of people in the population who are morally bankrupt is the same for both.
Or get over the small government lunacy, and admit that we need honest government, and the size should be whatever it takes to get the job done.