Actually, I'm certain that the Chinese government is delighted by Trump's victory. You are correct that they could not sustain the economic growth, but now they get to point at the Donald and say it's all HIS fault. Patriotism against the Americans negates the traces of old friendships.
From the Chinese LONG perspective of history, it's only normal for them to lead civilization with the most advanced, prosperous, and civilized society. It's just that they've had a couple of bad centuries. About time to get back to normal, as the Chinese see things. Sneaky westerners pulled a fast one with all that scientific jazz, but they've got that stuff figured out now.
Only insightful-rated comment that even came close to the roots of the problem. The BitHub financial models are failing.
Why doesn't anyone offer a project-centered cost-recovery system to fund the software people are willing to pay for? The hosting organization (AKA BitHub in this case) should EARN a percentage of the project funding my making sure the project proposals are complete, by evaluating the results against the success criteria, and by reporting the results to the donors (and the world). Complete proposals would include the budget, the resources (including people), the schedule, testing requirements (with testing priority given to the actual donors), and, most importantly to me, the success criteria.
This could be done with a kind of "charity share brokerage" where BitHub would hold your donated money while you are picking the projects you want to support. The notion of project should be broad enough to include new software projects, bug repair projects, support projects, enhancement projects, and even ongoing cost projects (for example in such cases as when server-side support is needed to run the feature).
From the donors' perspective, you could review all of the projects you'd supported and even look for related projects to support. Hopefully you'd see how many good things you'd helped with and be motivated to donate for the next year, too.
Details available upon request, but right now it looks like Microsoft and Apple win again. They may have terrible software, but their business models are pretty good. Not like GitHub's.
Used to be IBM policy to stay out of politics, but did you read Rometty's fawning open letter to Trump after. There's a copy on the IBM website, too, but I suspect the main effort was emailing it to all the employees to keep them quiet. At least one employee did respond by quitting.
Actually IBM used to be one of the nice companies, and they are still milking that reputation as hard as they can. However, being nice almost broke the company and they have come around to the evil side these years.
Being an evil company doesn't guarantee profits, but being a nice company guarantees failure. I think the best examples are NetScape, Palm, Sun, and Nokia. I'm still trying to decide whether Toshiba and Motorola deserve to make that list. Not sure if Toshiba is toast yet, and not sure if Motorola ever deserved to be called nice.
You must still be working to choose AC status? Afraid of the retribution?
I spent much of my career in various parts of the Big Blue machine, and it was sad to watch the devolution. I still think "respect for the individual, customer service, and quality" were good principles to build a company on. Last I heard the buzzword was something like "cognitive solutions in the cloud", though that didn't get much mention in the CEO's post-election fawning letter. (I actually interpreted the primary objective as a warning to current employees to shut up about the Donald.)
Anyway, seems clear to me that IBM is in another transition. As noted in the first comment, promising to hire 25,000 people doesn't mean much if you fire 26,000 during that same period. IBM used to be a career employer, but the new model is completely different. They hired 70,000 last year without growing the company. When you do the math, that translates into "excess attrition" around 50,000, but I think it's a new steady state. A few people will have long careers, but most will be in and out as needed or not. Last I heard, the IBM lingo for that approach is onboarding and offboarding. They will actually hire a fair number of new graduates, but try to get rid of most of them within a few years, and most of the actual project work for the actual customers will be handled by short-term contractors. (I predict the main beneficiaries will actually be the Chinese, but I better not say why and how... Then I would need the AC status.)
This part seems to be addressed to me? If so, my response is that it differs little from the current obligation to provide proof of medical insurance. Of course there are problems in emergency situations, as when dealing with an unconscious patient, but we already have mechanisms to deal with such medical emergencies first and worry about the payment afterwards.
Actually a sound point, but my focus is on "possession is nine points of the law". It can be quite difficult to prove that a steward has been insufficiently cautious, but if you possess something, then there is a strong (legal) presumption you should continue to possess it. From that perspective, unauthorized possession can already be regarded as the crime without worrying too much about how it happened.
Mostly doesn't appear to be a productive discussion, but let me try to at least clarify my position on some of the issues that have been discussed.
I do think you should have the right to designate where your personal information is stored, but I am willing to accept that sufficiently secure encryption with the patient's control over the key is an adequate substitute for physical possession of the storage devices. I also think this same basic principle should apply to all of your personal data, not just your medical data.
The part of the discussion about specifying the usage of your data is in the area of "privacy policies", which could be largely automated. I'd prefer to use a financial records example to make this clear, but I think it would potentially muddle the discussion, so I'm just going to try to summarize it by saying that any entity that wants to access your personal data should be required to explain why, and the ultimate decision should be yours, even if you have delegated most of the routine decisions to a privacy-policy enforcer (which might be software or even a lawyer).
I agree that there is a need to consider backups, including ways to recover from a lost key (which usually means some kind of escrow system), but I think that is mostly a solved problem. Basically the appeals to the escrow mechanism must be publicly visible, not secret. There is a layer of protection in the selection of your preferred escrow mechanism.
(As a general principle, I think that most of the "justified" appeals to secrecy and anonymity are based on prior secrecy and prior anonymity. However, the desire for privacy is ultimately justified as part of "personal freedom", which I value highly.)
Two responses at this time, but I'm going to bypass them because I feel like they were misdirected in a way that indicates I failed to make my main point clearly.
Under the current situation, your personal information becomes the property of someone else. I'm not saying that the doctors are insincere or that they don't want to help patients, but in business terms there are secondary factors that influence how the data is handled. Essentially it is not in their interests to share your data too easily because that would make it too easy for patients to seek other hospitals. Even worse when you start considering the involvement of the insurance companies, whose primary profit-driven interest is in screwing the expensive patients.
The patient has the strongest vested interest in maximizing the effective sharing of the information. That is why I think the patient should have effective control over the information and the valid feeling of ownership. I actually think it should be augmented with the patient's own data for mining by physicians seeking evidence for and against various possible diagnoses. (However, I take a similar position as regards all of our personal information, per my sig.)
I'm also sure that Quest Diagnostics had no desire to leak the information--but it wasn't really THEIR information that was being leaked. It was other people's information that they are allowed to claim ownership over.
Gee, what if patients could actually control their own information? Dream on, you silly fool.
I gotta stop thinking about solutions, eh?
Imagine that all of your personal medical information was stored where YOU wanted it to be. One implementation would involve a decryption key in a smartcard that you would use to give permission to a doctor or hospital when they need to access your information.
Never happen. Too much like giving the patients actual rights. You know, like that Bill of Rights thing. Possession is nine points of the law, and you don't have the lawyers to make it happen, eh?
If I ever got a mod point, I'd give one to you. Probably "insightful" in that case. Pretty sure you are wasting the rationality on a Libertarian holier-and-smarter-than-thou fanatic.
I would have worded your point slightly differently, in that for most of human history the vast majority of people were engaged in subsistence agriculture (or subsistence hunting and gathering before that). Scientific progress depended on the accumulation of the tiny surpluses of large numbers of workers, many of whom actually were slaves. Most of the accumulation was done via various forms of taxation.
The Libertarian view of history starts with Ayn Rand. They live in a peculiar fantasy.
I'm responding on the theory that you are a victim of the kind of bad education that I described. Specifically, you don't seem to read well.
Rather than actually respond to your misunderstandings, which would be basically to repeat what I already wrote, I'm just going to ask you to reread my comment. If you are still unable to understand it, then you should ask questions about the parts you cannot understand. If you still think you disagree (and that is the apparent tone of your reply, even if there was no substance there), then state your disagreement clearly. (Apparently it would be too much to request civility in your response, but that's probably another deficiency of your training.)
I will expand on one point regarding teaching. When I first started teaching I thought there were two important aspects: (1) Knowledge of the topic, and (2) Skill in the techniques of teaching. I was partly right, because the great teachers have (3) Ability to inspire. Great teachers handle the entire spectrum, but I tended to focus too much at the bottom, and I accepted my kids as they were, including their motivational levels. I was lucky enough to have had quite a number of great teachers over the years, but I realized I was never going to get to their level, so in a sense it was a relief to go back into industrial research.
I suppose the part that is most relevant here is how I was lucky enough to get some great teachers even in my days at a public school, because the answer was money. Accidental money. My folks shopped around and picked a large school district that was just being developed, so they had LOTS of property tax revenue and few students. I have heard that during those years it may have been the second richest public school district in the country on a per student basis, and even though most of the money was being invested in buildings for the rapidly growing student population, they still had (in those ancient days) enough money to be extremely competitive for the very best teachers.
Searched for funny comments. Not quite nothing, but the few that were moderated funny were barely.
Searched for "evil", but only referenced in a sig.
Searched the insightful comments. Not.
Searched for references to any of the books I've read about Amazon. Nothing.
Several hundred comments. The article is probably about to expire. Wanted to find some part of the discussion that was worth participating in. Failed.
Oh well. Capsule summary. I stopped doing business with Amazon many years ago because I felt they were abusing my privacy and my personal information. (Also no visible references to those two terms as of this writing.) Just went through a 16-month episode of Amazon spamming that was only stopped (if it has been stopped) by appeal to jeff@ himself. Yet in conclusion, I don't really blame Amazon for becoming evil. That's just the rules of the business game these decades. If a company fails to become sufficiently evil, then it gets destroyed like roadkill. (I think NetScape, Sun, Palm, and Nokia are examples of such destruction.)
What this really represents is yet another way to attack education, especially public education. If you've actually been a teacher, then you should know that the most important thing about the best students is to avoid holding them back. Thiel is just exploiting this reality to make public education look bad: "See you don't need an education so the government should stop taxing rich people like me to educate you bums."
The people Thiel is picking for this program would have been extremely successful even if they had gotten more of that traditional education. However, if you take the very best and brightest with the highest motivation, and then you make sure they have the resources to learn whatever they need for their work, they are almost certain to succeed. In this case, I'm sure the house (Thiel) is even rigging the game, pumping in extra money and guidance to make sure there aren't any failures because the REAL point is to make education look like the failure.
This is just an extension of the dismembering of public education that has been going on for many decades. The best students are streamed into elite schools and most of the students are given obedience training to make them docile wage slaves, easily handled prison inmates, and obedient consumers who will buy the right soap and vote for the right political candidates, just the way the ads tell them to behave.
Worked pretty much exactly as they wanted it to and now it's time to harvest the whirlwind. Most American workers can't compete, and it's only going to get worse going forward. Much worse.
But the richest 0.1% will do better than ever. Government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% shall rule the earth?
On what basis do you think a legal challenge would be possible? Near as I can tell, it seems quite clear and explicit that the states are free to award their Electoral College votes according to their own preferences. It seems like you would have to make some kind of argument that the citizens of some states have an absolute Constitutional privilege that their votes for president should could more than other citizens' votes.
Then again, when you consider the legal reasoning of Bush v Gore, Citizens United, or Dred Scott, I have to admit that judges and lawyers can be pretty creative in twisting the law to suit their preferences.
Having said all of that, I'm doubtful the National Vote Interstate Compact will ever be adopted unless the legislation is long-lived. The states that have already accepted are obviously the ones that have the most to gain, and by the time it swings the other way, they may well decide to change their minds again. Obviously a Constitutional amendment for direct popular vote for president would be a cleaner solution, but I think it has a much lower chance of adoption for basically the same reasons.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the Electoral College is already on it's last legs. If states with at least 105 more Electoral College votes adopt this compact, then the Electoral College will have been eliminated. No need to amend the Constitution.
Yours was one of the more insightful posts mentioning the Electoral College, though it received no favorable mods. Typical for today's Slashdot. Your sig was interesting, however.
Seriously, unless the personal reputation of the raters as actual human beings is taken into account, then the system will be worthless. There has to be symmetry between the reliability of the raters for their ratings to have any reliability.
Almost all of these systems get polluted by gamesters and trolls, often using sock puppets. I'm not saying that anonymity needs to be eliminated, but if you do elect to be anonymous, then your opinions should be discounted as not really representing your public position. However in a situation like this, I do think that anonymous raters should be discounted to zero.
However, I've made basically the same argument as regards fixing the Slashdot moderation system. Haven't noticed any progress yet.
Most insightful of the comments that got the mod. More deserving if you considered the topic a bit more broadly, for example by appealing to the orange counterexample who is about to occupy the White House.
I think the answers to your question largely revolve around economic models. Or you might prefer to see the situation in terms of the "military-industrial complex" that Ike warned us about, but I still think that's just another version of the money thing. I don't want to call it a "money problem" because I think problems should be defined in terms of solutions, and there is no solution for infinite greed, just as there is no final digit of pi. People like Trump will never have enough money.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm certain that the Chinese government is delighted by Trump's victory. You are correct that they could not sustain the economic growth, but now they get to point at the Donald and say it's all HIS fault. Patriotism against the Americans negates the traces of old friendships.
From the Chinese LONG perspective of history, it's only normal for them to lead civilization with the most advanced, prosperous, and civilized society. It's just that they've had a couple of bad centuries. About time to get back to normal, as the Chinese see things. Sneaky westerners pulled a fast one with all that scientific jazz, but they've got that stuff figured out now.
Only insightful-rated comment that even came close to the roots of the problem. The BitHub financial models are failing.
Why doesn't anyone offer a project-centered cost-recovery system to fund the software people are willing to pay for? The hosting organization (AKA BitHub in this case) should EARN a percentage of the project funding my making sure the project proposals are complete, by evaluating the results against the success criteria, and by reporting the results to the donors (and the world). Complete proposals would include the budget, the resources (including people), the schedule, testing requirements (with testing priority given to the actual donors), and, most importantly to me, the success criteria.
This could be done with a kind of "charity share brokerage" where BitHub would hold your donated money while you are picking the projects you want to support. The notion of project should be broad enough to include new software projects, bug repair projects, support projects, enhancement projects, and even ongoing cost projects (for example in such cases as when server-side support is needed to run the feature).
From the donors' perspective, you could review all of the projects you'd supported and even look for related projects to support. Hopefully you'd see how many good things you'd helped with and be motivated to donate for the next year, too.
Details available upon request, but right now it looks like Microsoft and Apple win again. They may have terrible software, but their business models are pretty good. Not like GitHub's.
ZZ
Z^7
Used to be IBM policy to stay out of politics, but did you read Rometty's fawning open letter to Trump after. There's a copy on the IBM website, too, but I suspect the main effort was emailing it to all the employees to keep them quiet. At least one employee did respond by quitting.
Actually IBM used to be one of the nice companies, and they are still milking that reputation as hard as they can. However, being nice almost broke the company and they have come around to the evil side these years.
Being an evil company doesn't guarantee profits, but being a nice company guarantees failure. I think the best examples are NetScape, Palm, Sun, and Nokia. I'm still trying to decide whether Toshiba and Motorola deserve to make that list. Not sure if Toshiba is toast yet, and not sure if Motorola ever deserved to be called nice.
You must still be working to choose AC status? Afraid of the retribution?
I spent much of my career in various parts of the Big Blue machine, and it was sad to watch the devolution. I still think "respect for the individual, customer service, and quality" were good principles to build a company on. Last I heard the buzzword was something like "cognitive solutions in the cloud", though that didn't get much mention in the CEO's post-election fawning letter. (I actually interpreted the primary objective as a warning to current employees to shut up about the Donald.)
Anyway, seems clear to me that IBM is in another transition. As noted in the first comment, promising to hire 25,000 people doesn't mean much if you fire 26,000 during that same period. IBM used to be a career employer, but the new model is completely different. They hired 70,000 last year without growing the company. When you do the math, that translates into "excess attrition" around 50,000, but I think it's a new steady state. A few people will have long careers, but most will be in and out as needed or not. Last I heard, the IBM lingo for that approach is onboarding and offboarding. They will actually hire a fair number of new graduates, but try to get rid of most of them within a few years, and most of the actual project work for the actual customers will be handled by short-term contractors. (I predict the main beneficiaries will actually be the Chinese, but I better not say why and how... Then I would need the AC status.)
This part seems to be addressed to me? If so, my response is that it differs little from the current obligation to provide proof of medical insurance. Of course there are problems in emergency situations, as when dealing with an unconscious patient, but we already have mechanisms to deal with such medical emergencies first and worry about the payment afterwards.
Actually a sound point, but my focus is on "possession is nine points of the law". It can be quite difficult to prove that a steward has been insufficiently cautious, but if you possess something, then there is a strong (legal) presumption you should continue to possess it. From that perspective, unauthorized possession can already be regarded as the crime without worrying too much about how it happened.
Reply noticed, but excessive rudeness justifies (and even calls for) no substantive response. Perhaps if you could only add a touch of wittiness?
Mostly doesn't appear to be a productive discussion, but let me try to at least clarify my position on some of the issues that have been discussed.
I do think you should have the right to designate where your personal information is stored, but I am willing to accept that sufficiently secure encryption with the patient's control over the key is an adequate substitute for physical possession of the storage devices. I also think this same basic principle should apply to all of your personal data, not just your medical data.
The part of the discussion about specifying the usage of your data is in the area of "privacy policies", which could be largely automated. I'd prefer to use a financial records example to make this clear, but I think it would potentially muddle the discussion, so I'm just going to try to summarize it by saying that any entity that wants to access your personal data should be required to explain why, and the ultimate decision should be yours, even if you have delegated most of the routine decisions to a privacy-policy enforcer (which might be software or even a lawyer).
I agree that there is a need to consider backups, including ways to recover from a lost key (which usually means some kind of escrow system), but I think that is mostly a solved problem. Basically the appeals to the escrow mechanism must be publicly visible, not secret. There is a layer of protection in the selection of your preferred escrow mechanism.
(As a general principle, I think that most of the "justified" appeals to secrecy and anonymity are based on prior secrecy and prior anonymity. However, the desire for privacy is ultimately justified as part of "personal freedom", which I value highly.)
Z^6
Two responses at this time, but I'm going to bypass them because I feel like they were misdirected in a way that indicates I failed to make my main point clearly.
Under the current situation, your personal information becomes the property of someone else. I'm not saying that the doctors are insincere or that they don't want to help patients, but in business terms there are secondary factors that influence how the data is handled. Essentially it is not in their interests to share your data too easily because that would make it too easy for patients to seek other hospitals. Even worse when you start considering the involvement of the insurance companies, whose primary profit-driven interest is in screwing the expensive patients.
The patient has the strongest vested interest in maximizing the effective sharing of the information. That is why I think the patient should have effective control over the information and the valid feeling of ownership. I actually think it should be augmented with the patient's own data for mining by physicians seeking evidence for and against various possible diagnoses. (However, I take a similar position as regards all of our personal information, per my sig.)
I'm also sure that Quest Diagnostics had no desire to leak the information--but it wasn't really THEIR information that was being leaked. It was other people's information that they are allowed to claim ownership over.
Gee, what if patients could actually control their own information? Dream on, you silly fool.
I gotta stop thinking about solutions, eh?
Imagine that all of your personal medical information was stored where YOU wanted it to be. One implementation would involve a decryption key in a smartcard that you would use to give permission to a doctor or hospital when they need to access your information.
Never happen. Too much like giving the patients actual rights. You know, like that Bill of Rights thing. Possession is nine points of the law, and you don't have the lawyers to make it happen, eh?
All those "eh"s? I'm not Canadian. Just wishing.
Z^5
If I ever got a mod point, I'd give one to you. Probably "insightful" in that case. Pretty sure you are wasting the rationality on a Libertarian holier-and-smarter-than-thou fanatic.
I would have worded your point slightly differently, in that for most of human history the vast majority of people were engaged in subsistence agriculture (or subsistence hunting and gathering before that). Scientific progress depended on the accumulation of the tiny surpluses of large numbers of workers, many of whom actually were slaves. Most of the accumulation was done via various forms of taxation.
The Libertarian view of history starts with Ayn Rand. They live in a peculiar fantasy.
I'm responding on the theory that you are a victim of the kind of bad education that I described. Specifically, you don't seem to read well.
Rather than actually respond to your misunderstandings, which would be basically to repeat what I already wrote, I'm just going to ask you to reread my comment. If you are still unable to understand it, then you should ask questions about the parts you cannot understand. If you still think you disagree (and that is the apparent tone of your reply, even if there was no substance there), then state your disagreement clearly. (Apparently it would be too much to request civility in your response, but that's probably another deficiency of your training.)
I will expand on one point regarding teaching. When I first started teaching I thought there were two important aspects: (1) Knowledge of the topic, and (2) Skill in the techniques of teaching. I was partly right, because the great teachers have (3) Ability to inspire. Great teachers handle the entire spectrum, but I tended to focus too much at the bottom, and I accepted my kids as they were, including their motivational levels. I was lucky enough to have had quite a number of great teachers over the years, but I realized I was never going to get to their level, so in a sense it was a relief to go back into industrial research.
I suppose the part that is most relevant here is how I was lucky enough to get some great teachers even in my days at a public school, because the answer was money. Accidental money. My folks shopped around and picked a large school district that was just being developed, so they had LOTS of property tax revenue and few students. I have heard that during those years it may have been the second richest public school district in the country on a per student basis, and even though most of the money was being invested in buildings for the rapidly growing student population, they still had (in those ancient days) enough money to be extremely competitive for the very best teachers.
Z^4
Just a meta-comment on a couple of points.
Searched for funny comments. Not quite nothing, but the few that were moderated funny were barely.
Searched for "evil", but only referenced in a sig.
Searched the insightful comments. Not.
Searched for references to any of the books I've read about Amazon. Nothing.
Several hundred comments. The article is probably about to expire. Wanted to find some part of the discussion that was worth participating in. Failed.
Oh well. Capsule summary. I stopped doing business with Amazon many years ago because I felt they were abusing my privacy and my personal information. (Also no visible references to those two terms as of this writing.) Just went through a 16-month episode of Amazon spamming that was only stopped (if it has been stopped) by appeal to jeff@ himself. Yet in conclusion, I don't really blame Amazon for becoming evil. That's just the rules of the business game these decades. If a company fails to become sufficiently evil, then it gets destroyed like roadkill. (I think NetScape, Sun, Palm, and Nokia are examples of such destruction.)
What this really represents is yet another way to attack education, especially public education. If you've actually been a teacher, then you should know that the most important thing about the best students is to avoid holding them back. Thiel is just exploiting this reality to make public education look bad: "See you don't need an education so the government should stop taxing rich people like me to educate you bums."
The people Thiel is picking for this program would have been extremely successful even if they had gotten more of that traditional education. However, if you take the very best and brightest with the highest motivation, and then you make sure they have the resources to learn whatever they need for their work, they are almost certain to succeed. In this case, I'm sure the house (Thiel) is even rigging the game, pumping in extra money and guidance to make sure there aren't any failures because the REAL point is to make education look like the failure.
This is just an extension of the dismembering of public education that has been going on for many decades. The best students are streamed into elite schools and most of the students are given obedience training to make them docile wage slaves, easily handled prison inmates, and obedient consumers who will buy the right soap and vote for the right political candidates, just the way the ads tell them to behave.
Worked pretty much exactly as they wanted it to and now it's time to harvest the whirlwind. Most American workers can't compete, and it's only going to get worse going forward. Much worse.
But the richest 0.1% will do better than ever. Government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% shall rule the earth?
On what basis do you think a legal challenge would be possible? Near as I can tell, it seems quite clear and explicit that the states are free to award their Electoral College votes according to their own preferences. It seems like you would have to make some kind of argument that the citizens of some states have an absolute Constitutional privilege that their votes for president should could more than other citizens' votes.
Then again, when you consider the legal reasoning of Bush v Gore, Citizens United, or Dred Scott, I have to admit that judges and lawyers can be pretty creative in twisting the law to suit their preferences.
Having said all of that, I'm doubtful the National Vote Interstate Compact will ever be adopted unless the legislation is long-lived. The states that have already accepted are obviously the ones that have the most to gain, and by the time it swings the other way, they may well decide to change their minds again. Obviously a Constitutional amendment for direct popular vote for president would be a cleaner solution, but I think it has a much lower chance of adoption for basically the same reasons.
Z^3
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the Electoral College is already on it's last legs. If states with at least 105 more Electoral College votes adopt this compact, then the Electoral College will have been eliminated. No need to amend the Constitution.
Yours was one of the more insightful posts mentioning the Electoral College, though it received no favorable mods. Typical for today's Slashdot. Your sig was interesting, however.
Seriously, unless the personal reputation of the raters as actual human beings is taken into account, then the system will be worthless. There has to be symmetry between the reliability of the raters for their ratings to have any reliability.
Almost all of these systems get polluted by gamesters and trolls, often using sock puppets. I'm not saying that anonymity needs to be eliminated, but if you do elect to be anonymous, then your opinions should be discounted as not really representing your public position. However in a situation like this, I do think that anonymous raters should be discounted to zero.
However, I've made basically the same argument as regards fixing the Slashdot moderation system. Haven't noticed any progress yet.
Most insightful of the comments that got the mod. More deserving if you considered the topic a bit more broadly, for example by appealing to the orange counterexample who is about to occupy the White House.
I think the answers to your question largely revolve around economic models. Or you might prefer to see the situation in terms of the "military-industrial complex" that Ike warned us about, but I still think that's just another version of the money thing. I don't want to call it a "money problem" because I think problems should be defined in terms of solutions, and there is no solution for infinite greed, just as there is no final digit of pi. People like Trump will never have enough money.