Yes, and they are throwing it at all kinds of ideas hoping something pays off big before it dawns on all the marketing folks that "Internet advertising" is practically worthless, and the market collapses.
Actually, the reason Google got so big was precisely because they were (and are) able prove to marketing folks that they were getting a lot of value from their Internet advertising. A big part of what makes Google so popular among advertisers is the tools that allow them to quantify with a fair degree of precision how many of the clicks they pay for translate into sales and of what amount. In the advertising space this was Google's big innovation: a way to overcome the problem implied by the marketing saw "I know that half of what I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". With Google's ads, advertisers (at least those selling online) can measure exactly how much return they're getting on their advertising investment, and use that to manage their online ad strategy. So... if it didn't have good ROI, it would already be dead.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the stuff I work on has no direct relation to ads. My comments here are actually derived mostly from comments by businesspeople I know who operate online stores and use Google's ad services -- and love them.)
By your argument we need to regulate the number of dairies and cows or there will be boom and bust cycles of milk availability in the grocery store. After all, there are substantial barriers to entry in getting into the dairy business. That's ridiculous, of course, because the fact is that optimizing such marginal differences in provisioning and pricing is what markets are best at. Markets have their disadvantages but this area, specifically, is where they really shine and have been proven to be vastly more efficient and responsive than central planning.
It's possible that there is something about taxi service that demands central planning, but you haven't identified it, so if we were to accept your argument then we'd have to conclude that every industry with non-trivial barriers to entry must be regulated at least as tightly as taxi service. Indeed, most industries have far higher barriers to entry.
The level of training German taxi drivers go through is far more rigorous than just paying for a medallion. In the US your argument makes a lot of sense (the taxis I've had in the US have usually been terrible), but in Germany it's just not the German way. Taxi drivers are highly regulated, and part of that is the extended driving test and accreditation process, which provides a great taxi service.
So what?
Why should riders not be allowed to choose lesser service at a lower price if that's what they prefer?
Don't claim that your 'innovative new paradigm' renders those rules obselete and ignore them.
And what if the innovative new paradigm does render those rules obsolete? That is the case in this situation. Oh, not all of the rules, but most of them, because they were established in order to provide customers with confidence that cabs that look reputable are reputable. Those rules indeed are obsolete given a different mechanism for riders to determine if the cabs are trustworthy.
I suppose one answer to this dilemma is "Work with regulators to change the law", but that's going to be pretty difficult until you have some evidence that your new paradigm works. Particularly since there are entrenched interests who are going to be fighting you to protect their business model.
To me, the bottom line here is that the regulations are overreaching, even for the old paradigm. They don't need to actually prevent fly-by-night cabbies from operating, they just need to ensure that people -- even people from out of town who don't know the local rules -- can tell the difference between an "official" cab and one that may not be trustworthy. For example, don't allow any vehicle that isn't a certified cab to look like one. Given that, then old and new systems can compete fairly. The new system will have an advantage of lower costs, but the operators of old services can choose to adopt a similar model and cost structure if they like. Or maybe the vast majority of people will prefer the old way, and most cabbies will stick with it, too. Or some mixture. Let the market sort that out.
Perhaps someone will convince all the cabbies to paint a QR code on their cab that can just be scanned in and then sites can go directly to the cab in question. That would certainly make the process more tenable but I don't know how you'd convince cabbies to bother with it.
QR code, image of license plate number, Wifi/blueooth beacon... there are lots of options. Cabbies may not want to do any of this, of course, in fact they probably won't. But that's no reason to impede progress by other people who are more open to change.
And that gets to the root of much of this, Uber supporters WANT it to be unfair out of some feeling that the incumbents must be keeping competition out through unfair means
I think it's more that the rules don't make sense for Uber, but did -- and do -- make sense for the incumbents, unless the incumbents also change their model. Let me explain.
The reason for all of the old rules is that they were necessary to ensure that the cab services were trustworthy. There was no way for users to find out whether or not a random cab was reputable and trustworthy, so government intervened to regulate. The regulations vary, but their ultimate goal is to erect obstacles to becoming a cab service, as well as to identify who the "legitimate" services are, and punish anyone who doesn't jump through the hoops. All of this means that if you see a cabbie with a medallion, you know that he's serious about building and maintaining a long-term business, and that he's identifiable to the government, which means he isn't going to rob you or rip you off. Whatever he could get that way is miniscule compared to his investment in his business, so it's not worth it.
But the Internet changes that. Riders now have another mechanism for determining the trustworthiness of a random car offering them a ride, if it's affiliated with a ride service, or even if it's just registered on some sort of reputation site (though in that case getting into a car which hasn't yet established a good reputation is extremely risky). So given that there is another solution to the problem that motivated the original requirements, it doesn't makes sense to impose the requirements on users of the new solution.
Fairness dictates that the incumbents also be able to take advantage of the new approach, of course. And there's nothing stopping them. But they don't want to because they like their business the way it is.
Its only a matter of time before I can make payments via NFC on my Android phone.
Oh, I should have mentioned... I've been making payments via NFC on my Android phones for nearly three years. Actually, these days I'd say about 80% of my in-person retail purchases are made with my phone.
The real problem is the lack of standards. Japan has e-wallets, there is Google Wallet and now it looks like there will be a third and incompatible Apple wallet.
There are standards. Japan is its own world, but the Google Wallet and ISIS (a consortium of mobile network operators and banks who created the ISIS wallet -- yes they're looking for a new name) relies on standard EMV payment protocols -- slightly modified by the US Visa, MC, AMEX and Discover organizations, but not incompatibly so. Apple will follow the EMV standards as well, or they'll get nowhere, because retailers are a slow-moving, cost-conscious group.
Visa and MasterCard announced two years ago that they'll implement the "liability shift" the end of 2015, which means that from 2016 onward 100% of fraud will be charged to whichever entity in the chain (merchant, merchant acquirer, clearing house, issuer) does not have the EMV smart chip technology implemented. Since merchants get stuck with 98% of fraud, and other links in the chain are moving slowly, this will provide a huge incentive for merchants to install EMV-capable point of sale terminals. That doesn't require them to deploy NFC-capable terminals, but they will, and many of them are.
Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.
His comic appeal to people who merely believe themselves to be above average.
Bah.
It's got nothing to do with intelligence, or even knowledge in a general sense. It's that his comics so often rely on specialized knowledge. For example, a couple of my favorite strips are the "sudo" strip and the "Bobby Tables" strip. The former is only understandable to someone who has at least a passing acquaintance with *nix system administration, and the latter requires some knowledge of SQL and SQL injection attacks. Neither of those things is hard to understand. They don't require great intelligence. But they're not generally known. And to people who require an explanation, they're not funny (I have t-shirts of both, and I have never gotten so much as a chuckle from anyone to whom I have to explain the basis for the jokes).
You'll note, of course, that I'm not actually addressing your real point, which is a snarky argument that only people who like to feel themselves smarter or more knowledgeable than most would enjoy the strip. That's because it's not worth addressing.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority.
I should have qualified this to point out I'm talking about his comics, more than What If. HIs What If series is very accessible, by design.
Randal Munroe is evidence that if you draw stick figures for long enough you will eventually gain recognition.
Sure, as long as your stick figures are saying and doing incredibly witty things.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority. But there's enough that is only understandable to people who know more than most about computers, mathematics, physics, etc., that none of the non-geeks I know really like it.
it has everything to do with it. they didnt JUST pass amendments and laws.
they then had to back up those laws with the threat of force many, many times because the states refused to to do it.
Global warming exists. Anyone who denies that is also a moron. But it's certainly not manmade.
I don't get the focus on whether or not the warming is anthropogenic. Should we ignore all problems that we didn't make?
Supposing that the warming isn't primarily anthropogenic, there's still plenty of reason to believe that the greenhouse gases we're adding are making it worse, and in fact we can even make some reasonable estimates of how much worse they're making it.
At the end of the day, you'd really better hope that you're wrong about our ability to modify the climate. Because the current climate of Earth is not typical. In fact, there isn't really a "typical" climate for the planet. Ice core histories show us that it swings between much hotter than it is, and much, much colder (by "colder", think "equatorial oceans frozen 30 feet deep for millenia"). Both extremes will be unpleasant for us, and I say "will", not "would", because it's gonna happen. When? We have no idea. We know that climate changes can happen very rapidly (couple of decades), even without an obvious precipitating event (big meteor, supervolcano eruption, etc.), and that they come at apparently-random intervals.
So if we want this planet to be nice for us long-term, we'd better learn to engineer our climate. Or get even better at adapting our local environment. Or both.
Climate has always changed, the concept of "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it.
You mean, the same way as asteroids of various sizes have impacted into the Earth throughout the history of the planet, and "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it?
Yes, I agree.
Yep. In the long run, the climate will change no matter what we do... unless we learn to actively manage it. Similarly, we will get hit by a catastrophically-destructive meteor, unless we develop the technology need to identify and deflect dangerous asteroids. It's worth noting that while without our intervention the climate may stay as it is for thousands of years, it may also change in decades. The ice core records tell us that the planet is capable of warming or cooling as much as 7C in as little as 20-30 years, even without any obvious catastrophic event, and even faster given a supervolcano eruption, or a big meteor. It WILL happen.
IMO, while it certainly makes sense to take reasonable steps to limit greenhouse gas production, we really need to focus on investing heavily in climate research, with an eventual goal of learning not only to understand but to manage our planet's climate. Actually, we should also invest a little in more strategies to cope with unpleasant climate. I say "more" strategies, because we already have a lot of them. The regions of Earth in which humans can survive comfortably without technological assistance are really small. The "natural" human carrying capacity of most of the places people live is basically zero, but we're very good at modifying our environment to adapt it to our needs. When the planet warms substantially, no doubt we'll have to apply more of those skills, so we should be thinking about which ones and how to improve our capabilities.
I really appreciate the scientific method and I agree it's a major milestone but it's not our most important discovery, that would be rule of law. Without rule of law there can be no civilization and without civilization there wouldn't be much science going on.
I'd argue that the rule of law is a result of applying the scientific method to social structure and governance.
The scientific method really consists of making conjectures and analyzing them critically. Some of the criticism comes from experimentation and analysis, but most conjectures never reach that point because simple thought can identify reasons they should be discarded. This process is closely related to (but vastly more powerful than) the mutation and selection process of evolution. At bottom, both are about creating and testing ideas, and selecting the ones that are objectively better (for the relevant definition of "better"). The scientific method does the selection through a tradition of criticism, natural evolution does it via replication (favoring the gene that replicates itself better).
How does this apply to the rule of law? Three ways. First of all, applying the same principle of progress to social structure, trying new methods and keeping those which work well while discarding those which don't, will lead to rule of law because it clearly is a superior social structure "technology". Second, without the rule of law, you really can't apply the scientific method to social structures, because there is no defined structure beyond the whim of the ruler(s). You have to fix the rules firmly so you can see what the outcomes are, and you can observe how to vary them. So any attempt to apply scientific reasoning to governance demands rule of law.
Third, and most important, the tradition of criticism inherent in and necessary to scientific progress inevitably leads people to criticize their government and to demand, among other things, the ability to understand the rules by which they're governed. I don't believe it's possible for any society with a significant number of scientific thinkers with any sort of influence to remain governed by fiat.
I think history bolsters my argument, too, simply based on the sequence of events. The Enlightenment was all about scientific reasoning and learning how to apply it to nearly all areas of human endeavor, not just science, and the Enlightenment came before the spread of the rule of law, not after.
Oh, actually I think there's a fourth reason scientific thinking creates the rule of law. It's even deeper, and is probably the truly fundamental reason, though it's a harder argument to make. That is that moral values are scientifically determined (even if we don't realize it), and the rule of law is morally right. It would take me a few pages to detail how and why I think that moral rightness is a real, determinable thing, derivable from the laws of nature, and not merely an artifact of culture, so I won't bother. Note that I'm not arguing that correct morality is easy to derive. It's not, any more than it was easy to derive General Relativity by conjecturing about observations of reality. But it can be derived, and in the same method: by conjecturing moral positions and then criticizing them, both logically and experimentally, discarding positions that lead to undesirable outcomes.
That's a problem. But it's a smaller problem than the one we live with now, which is that there are so many obscure laws that if anyone in a position of authority has it in for you they can find something to nail you for. The rule of law matters.
And just-world-hypothesis believing assholes just go on without thinking they must've deserved it.
The federal government has acted as a check on the tyranny of state governments
Utter red herring.
The tyrannies to which you refer were fought by amending the federal constitution and enacting appropriate federal laws to curb the abuses. That's a Good Thing, both the process and the outcome. But it has nothing to do with mi's point. The things the federal government manipulates through funding are things that it has no authority to control, and for which there is no national political will sufficient to give the government that control. Hence this back door method.
If cop cameras are sufficiently important that the federal government should mandate them, then Congress should pass a law mandating them. If the courts knock the law down as unconstitutional (as they would), then we should amend the constitution to give the federal government the authority required. This sneaky backdoor manipulation of state policy via federal funding, though... it's a tool that has no essential limits and no constitutional controls. It's a bad idea, and we should stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and they are throwing it at all kinds of ideas hoping something pays off big before it dawns on all the marketing folks that "Internet advertising" is practically worthless, and the market collapses.
Actually, the reason Google got so big was precisely because they were (and are) able prove to marketing folks that they were getting a lot of value from their Internet advertising. A big part of what makes Google so popular among advertisers is the tools that allow them to quantify with a fair degree of precision how many of the clicks they pay for translate into sales and of what amount. In the advertising space this was Google's big innovation: a way to overcome the problem implied by the marketing saw "I know that half of what I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". With Google's ads, advertisers (at least those selling online) can measure exactly how much return they're getting on their advertising investment, and use that to manage their online ad strategy. So... if it didn't have good ROI, it would already be dead.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the stuff I work on has no direct relation to ads. My comments here are actually derived mostly from comments by businesspeople I know who operate online stores and use Google's ad services -- and love them.)
By your argument we need to regulate the number of dairies and cows or there will be boom and bust cycles of milk availability in the grocery store. After all, there are substantial barriers to entry in getting into the dairy business. That's ridiculous, of course, because the fact is that optimizing such marginal differences in provisioning and pricing is what markets are best at. Markets have their disadvantages but this area, specifically, is where they really shine and have been proven to be vastly more efficient and responsive than central planning.
It's possible that there is something about taxi service that demands central planning, but you haven't identified it, so if we were to accept your argument then we'd have to conclude that every industry with non-trivial barriers to entry must be regulated at least as tightly as taxi service. Indeed, most industries have far higher barriers to entry.
The level of training German taxi drivers go through is far more rigorous than just paying for a medallion. In the US your argument makes a lot of sense (the taxis I've had in the US have usually been terrible), but in Germany it's just not the German way. Taxi drivers are highly regulated, and part of that is the extended driving test and accreditation process, which provides a great taxi service.
So what?
Why should riders not be allowed to choose lesser service at a lower price if that's what they prefer?
Don't claim that your 'innovative new paradigm' renders those rules obselete and ignore them.
And what if the innovative new paradigm does render those rules obsolete? That is the case in this situation. Oh, not all of the rules, but most of them, because they were established in order to provide customers with confidence that cabs that look reputable are reputable. Those rules indeed are obsolete given a different mechanism for riders to determine if the cabs are trustworthy.
I suppose one answer to this dilemma is "Work with regulators to change the law", but that's going to be pretty difficult until you have some evidence that your new paradigm works. Particularly since there are entrenched interests who are going to be fighting you to protect their business model.
To me, the bottom line here is that the regulations are overreaching, even for the old paradigm. They don't need to actually prevent fly-by-night cabbies from operating, they just need to ensure that people -- even people from out of town who don't know the local rules -- can tell the difference between an "official" cab and one that may not be trustworthy. For example, don't allow any vehicle that isn't a certified cab to look like one. Given that, then old and new systems can compete fairly. The new system will have an advantage of lower costs, but the operators of old services can choose to adopt a similar model and cost structure if they like. Or maybe the vast majority of people will prefer the old way, and most cabbies will stick with it, too. Or some mixture. Let the market sort that out.
Perhaps someone will convince all the cabbies to paint a QR code on their cab that can just be scanned in and then sites can go directly to the cab in question. That would certainly make the process more tenable but I don't know how you'd convince cabbies to bother with it.
QR code, image of license plate number, Wifi/blueooth beacon... there are lots of options. Cabbies may not want to do any of this, of course, in fact they probably won't. But that's no reason to impede progress by other people who are more open to change.
And that gets to the root of much of this, Uber supporters WANT it to be unfair out of some feeling that the incumbents must be keeping competition out through unfair means
I think it's more that the rules don't make sense for Uber, but did -- and do -- make sense for the incumbents, unless the incumbents also change their model. Let me explain.
The reason for all of the old rules is that they were necessary to ensure that the cab services were trustworthy. There was no way for users to find out whether or not a random cab was reputable and trustworthy, so government intervened to regulate. The regulations vary, but their ultimate goal is to erect obstacles to becoming a cab service, as well as to identify who the "legitimate" services are, and punish anyone who doesn't jump through the hoops. All of this means that if you see a cabbie with a medallion, you know that he's serious about building and maintaining a long-term business, and that he's identifiable to the government, which means he isn't going to rob you or rip you off. Whatever he could get that way is miniscule compared to his investment in his business, so it's not worth it.
But the Internet changes that. Riders now have another mechanism for determining the trustworthiness of a random car offering them a ride, if it's affiliated with a ride service, or even if it's just registered on some sort of reputation site (though in that case getting into a car which hasn't yet established a good reputation is extremely risky). So given that there is another solution to the problem that motivated the original requirements, it doesn't makes sense to impose the requirements on users of the new solution.
Fairness dictates that the incumbents also be able to take advantage of the new approach, of course. And there's nothing stopping them. But they don't want to because they like their business the way it is.
Apple doesn't follow standards.
Bluetooth, USB, GSM/CDMA? Apple follows standards just fine when they need to.
USB with a dongle. To call that "following a standard" would seem a trifle on the generous side.
What are you talking about?
Its only a matter of time before I can make payments via NFC on my Android phone.
Oh, I should have mentioned... I've been making payments via NFC on my Android phones for nearly three years. Actually, these days I'd say about 80% of my in-person retail purchases are made with my phone.
Apple doesn't follow standards.
Bluetooth, USB, GSM/CDMA? Apple follows standards just fine when they need to.
The real problem is the lack of standards. Japan has e-wallets, there is Google Wallet and now it looks like there will be a third and incompatible Apple wallet.
There are standards. Japan is its own world, but the Google Wallet and ISIS (a consortium of mobile network operators and banks who created the ISIS wallet -- yes they're looking for a new name) relies on standard EMV payment protocols -- slightly modified by the US Visa, MC, AMEX and Discover organizations, but not incompatibly so. Apple will follow the EMV standards as well, or they'll get nowhere, because retailers are a slow-moving, cost-conscious group.
Visa and MasterCard announced two years ago that they'll implement the "liability shift" the end of 2015, which means that from 2016 onward 100% of fraud will be charged to whichever entity in the chain (merchant, merchant acquirer, clearing house, issuer) does not have the EMV smart chip technology implemented. Since merchants get stuck with 98% of fraud, and other links in the chain are moving slowly, this will provide a huge incentive for merchants to install EMV-capable point of sale terminals. That doesn't require them to deploy NFC-capable terminals, but they will, and many of them are.
Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.
I haven't found one.
Ah, you have no sense of humor. That explains a great deal.
The more niche your work are the easier it is to get traction because no one else will bother to cater to that niche.
Traction, yes. Broad attention, no.
His comic appeal to people who merely believe themselves to be above average.
Bah.
It's got nothing to do with intelligence, or even knowledge in a general sense. It's that his comics so often rely on specialized knowledge. For example, a couple of my favorite strips are the "sudo" strip and the "Bobby Tables" strip. The former is only understandable to someone who has at least a passing acquaintance with *nix system administration, and the latter requires some knowledge of SQL and SQL injection attacks. Neither of those things is hard to understand. They don't require great intelligence. But they're not generally known. And to people who require an explanation, they're not funny (I have t-shirts of both, and I have never gotten so much as a chuckle from anyone to whom I have to explain the basis for the jokes).
You'll note, of course, that I'm not actually addressing your real point, which is a snarky argument that only people who like to feel themselves smarter or more knowledgeable than most would enjoy the strip. That's because it's not worth addressing.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority.
I should have qualified this to point out I'm talking about his comics, more than What If. HIs What If series is very accessible, by design.
Randal Munroe is evidence that if you draw stick figures for long enough you will eventually gain recognition.
Sure, as long as your stick figures are saying and doing incredibly witty things.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority. But there's enough that is only understandable to people who know more than most about computers, mathematics, physics, etc., that none of the non-geeks I know really like it.
Exactly what I came here to say. Well put.
If you push people, it is expected that they will act, regardless of the law preventing certain actions.
Well, then pretty soon those people so lacking in self control will do all their acting behind bars.
Why is this sneaky? Being very clear and saying..."If you want YOUR money back, we expect this to be done" is perfectly acceptable.
FTFY.
it has everything to do with it. they didnt JUST pass amendments and laws. they then had to back up those laws with the threat of force many, many times because the states refused to to do it.
True, but still an utter red herring.
Global warming exists. Anyone who denies that is also a moron. But it's certainly not manmade.
I don't get the focus on whether or not the warming is anthropogenic. Should we ignore all problems that we didn't make?
Supposing that the warming isn't primarily anthropogenic, there's still plenty of reason to believe that the greenhouse gases we're adding are making it worse, and in fact we can even make some reasonable estimates of how much worse they're making it.
At the end of the day, you'd really better hope that you're wrong about our ability to modify the climate. Because the current climate of Earth is not typical. In fact, there isn't really a "typical" climate for the planet. Ice core histories show us that it swings between much hotter than it is, and much, much colder (by "colder", think "equatorial oceans frozen 30 feet deep for millenia"). Both extremes will be unpleasant for us, and I say "will", not "would", because it's gonna happen. When? We have no idea. We know that climate changes can happen very rapidly (couple of decades), even without an obvious precipitating event (big meteor, supervolcano eruption, etc.), and that they come at apparently-random intervals.
So if we want this planet to be nice for us long-term, we'd better learn to engineer our climate. Or get even better at adapting our local environment. Or both.
Climate has always changed, the concept of "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it.
You mean, the same way as asteroids of various sizes have impacted into the Earth throughout the history of the planet, and "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it?
Yes, I agree.
Yep. In the long run, the climate will change no matter what we do... unless we learn to actively manage it. Similarly, we will get hit by a catastrophically-destructive meteor, unless we develop the technology need to identify and deflect dangerous asteroids. It's worth noting that while without our intervention the climate may stay as it is for thousands of years, it may also change in decades. The ice core records tell us that the planet is capable of warming or cooling as much as 7C in as little as 20-30 years, even without any obvious catastrophic event, and even faster given a supervolcano eruption, or a big meteor. It WILL happen.
IMO, while it certainly makes sense to take reasonable steps to limit greenhouse gas production, we really need to focus on investing heavily in climate research, with an eventual goal of learning not only to understand but to manage our planet's climate. Actually, we should also invest a little in more strategies to cope with unpleasant climate. I say "more" strategies, because we already have a lot of them. The regions of Earth in which humans can survive comfortably without technological assistance are really small. The "natural" human carrying capacity of most of the places people live is basically zero, but we're very good at modifying our environment to adapt it to our needs. When the planet warms substantially, no doubt we'll have to apply more of those skills, so we should be thinking about which ones and how to improve our capabilities.
I really appreciate the scientific method and I agree it's a major milestone but it's not our most important discovery, that would be rule of law. Without rule of law there can be no civilization and without civilization there wouldn't be much science going on.
I'd argue that the rule of law is a result of applying the scientific method to social structure and governance.
The scientific method really consists of making conjectures and analyzing them critically. Some of the criticism comes from experimentation and analysis, but most conjectures never reach that point because simple thought can identify reasons they should be discarded. This process is closely related to (but vastly more powerful than) the mutation and selection process of evolution. At bottom, both are about creating and testing ideas, and selecting the ones that are objectively better (for the relevant definition of "better"). The scientific method does the selection through a tradition of criticism, natural evolution does it via replication (favoring the gene that replicates itself better).
How does this apply to the rule of law? Three ways. First of all, applying the same principle of progress to social structure, trying new methods and keeping those which work well while discarding those which don't, will lead to rule of law because it clearly is a superior social structure "technology". Second, without the rule of law, you really can't apply the scientific method to social structures, because there is no defined structure beyond the whim of the ruler(s). You have to fix the rules firmly so you can see what the outcomes are, and you can observe how to vary them. So any attempt to apply scientific reasoning to governance demands rule of law.
Third, and most important, the tradition of criticism inherent in and necessary to scientific progress inevitably leads people to criticize their government and to demand, among other things, the ability to understand the rules by which they're governed. I don't believe it's possible for any society with a significant number of scientific thinkers with any sort of influence to remain governed by fiat.
I think history bolsters my argument, too, simply based on the sequence of events. The Enlightenment was all about scientific reasoning and learning how to apply it to nearly all areas of human endeavor, not just science, and the Enlightenment came before the spread of the rule of law, not after.
Oh, actually I think there's a fourth reason scientific thinking creates the rule of law. It's even deeper, and is probably the truly fundamental reason, though it's a harder argument to make. That is that moral values are scientifically determined (even if we don't realize it), and the rule of law is morally right. It would take me a few pages to detail how and why I think that moral rightness is a real, determinable thing, derivable from the laws of nature, and not merely an artifact of culture, so I won't bother. Note that I'm not arguing that correct morality is easy to derive. It's not, any more than it was easy to derive General Relativity by conjecturing about observations of reality. But it can be derived, and in the same method: by conjecturing moral positions and then criticizing them, both logically and experimentally, discarding positions that lead to undesirable outcomes.
That's a problem. But it's a smaller problem than the one we live with now, which is that there are so many obscure laws that if anyone in a position of authority has it in for you they can find something to nail you for. The rule of law matters.
And just-world-hypothesis believing assholes just go on without thinking they must've deserved it.
What an idiot. You kan't reed.
Of course that can't be helped, because sometimes the laws themselves are poorly written or out of date.
Of course it can be helped. Fix the laws. The application of the bad laws will motivate their correction.
The federal government has acted as a check on the tyranny of state governments
Utter red herring.
The tyrannies to which you refer were fought by amending the federal constitution and enacting appropriate federal laws to curb the abuses. That's a Good Thing, both the process and the outcome. But it has nothing to do with mi's point. The things the federal government manipulates through funding are things that it has no authority to control, and for which there is no national political will sufficient to give the government that control. Hence this back door method.
If cop cameras are sufficiently important that the federal government should mandate them, then Congress should pass a law mandating them. If the courts knock the law down as unconstitutional (as they would), then we should amend the constitution to give the federal government the authority required. This sneaky backdoor manipulation of state policy via federal funding, though... it's a tool that has no essential limits and no constitutional controls. It's a bad idea, and we should stop it.