This is true, and nothing new. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been at least partially gutted from the inside before. The Republicans were not the bastion of big business and evangelical Christianity prior to the 1950s and 1970s, not even close. The Democrats were the party of the segregated South and of Jim Crow - I wonder whether some younger voters are even aware of that, now. You would've have caught a black person in the South dead voting for the Democrats prior to the 1970s...if the Democrats weren't actively preventing them from voting...
The Tea Party is just continuing what appears to be a grand tradition of 20th century U.S. politics; using one of the two big parties as a host and then eating it from the inside out.
er, just realized that second paragraph was a bit confusing. First I mentioned American history - the U.S. Whigs and Federalists (you could add many other expired parties to that list) - then I switched to U.K. history, which had a *different* Whig party. Sorry for the confusion. The point was that both the U.S. and U.K. have had much more complex party histories than the two-party theory really allows for.
This always sounds like a great argument, except that the evidence we have doesn't really bear it out.
Even in 'two-party system' countries, the two parties seem to change far more than that theory would allow for. Where are the Whigs and the Federalists now? In the U.K., the Whigs transformed into the rather different Liberals, who were decimated by the rise of Labour yet persist as the smaller third party, the Liberal Democrats, after a merger with the Social Democrats.
Often the 'two-party system' theorists excuse these changes by constructing narratives where there are periods of stability followed by some kind of 'exceptional event' which causes a 'realignment', but to me, this is really just retrospectively imposing a narrative on much messier events, to fit your convenient belief.
Most strikingly, consider this country, Canada. We have an identical electoral system to the U.K., which is often argued to be a two-party system (notwithstanding the changes I noted above), just as much as the U.S. system - the same arguments are made, that people believe only two parties can possibly attain power, so they only vote for those two parties, and the electoral system reinforces this.
Yet here, at the last federal election, the Liberals - who had been one of the main parties for over a century, and were considered to be part of a two-party system along with the Conservatives, the only two parties realistically capable of attaining power - were virtually destroyed at the polls. They now have just 34 seats in a 308 seat chamber, and got 18.9% of the popular vote; they'd never previously in their 140+ year history polled under 20%. The strangest thing is there isn't even the possibility to construct any kind of narrative of an 'exceptional event' leading to this - people just flat out got sick of the Liberals and felt they ran a terrible campaign with a terrible leader, and so they just up and voted for other parties. Even though according to the two party theorists, they shouldn't have done, because they shouldn't have believed those parties could possibly win. But they did, and now the NDP - a party which had never previously gained more than 43 seats, or just over 20% of the vote - is the second party, with 103 seats and over 30% of the popular vote. That's only the most recent example; Canada has had a much more turbulent party history than the U.S. or the U.K., despite sharing the same system as the U.K., with all the arguments about it encouraging two-party stability.
I don't have all the answers as to how things _do_ work, but I think the two-party theory is pretty weak and not really borne out by a close reading of the history of mature democracies, even ones that are commonly considered to be two-party systems.
It is one of the most indisputable facts of the historical record that crime is massively more strongly linked with economic factors than with anything else. In other words, more poor people are caught for crimes. This isn't because they're more evil than rich people; it's because they have more need to commit crimes (as a philosopher once pointed out, the law forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread or sleep under bridges), they are less likely to be able to get off when charged with a crime (they can't afford good legal representation), and as the rich are usually in positions of political power, the crimes typically committed by poor people - burglary, shoplifting etc - are treated as far higher priorities by the authorities than the crimes typically committed by rich people - white collar fraud, for instance. (Other forms of criminal behaviour committed by the richer classes have been outsourced to corporations; you can bet your bottom dollar that if the Exxon Valdez oil spill had somehow been caused by poor people, it would've been a crime. But as it was caused by rich people, it's just corporate malfeasance. Convenient, no?)
Texas, for one place. They've finally figured out that throwing a large proportion of the male population in jail isn't a great plan in the long term. There's some interesting articles on the organized plan to reduce the use of heavy jail time for a wide range of - usually male - offenders. Read up.
On the violent deaths point; you might want to check the gender of the _assailant_ as well as the _victim_ in all those cases. But there are certainly lots of government dollars for anti-gang programs, tough-on-crime programs and so on.
"Dale Brill says tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education and that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate."
Right, because the only possible return on investment comes in the form of short-term economic growth.
To me he made a very weak argument and then intentionally misunderstands the commenters who point out the flaws in his argument.
The U.S. system for dealing with government privacy concerns is like the U.S. government system in general - it's based on checks and balances. Some of them are more 'generally understood' than 'explicitly codified', but even that caveat doesn't apply to many, and he blithely ignores that.
He simplifies massively when he says 'the government already knows all these things about you'. A lot of the data he refers to is census data: there are very strict restrictions on the use of census data outside of general statistical evaluation by the census bureau. It's not like they can (legally) just hand over your census return to the FBI. A lot of the other forms are data are gathered by different government departments - or even different levels of government entirely, local vs. state vs. federal - for different purposes and are legally siloed, they can't be combined and passed off to other government levels or departments with abandon. This is repeatedly pointed out in the comments, but Scott handwaves it away with a stupid 'counter-argument' that this is just inefficiency which raises taxes - an absurd argument.
Finally he ignores the fact that even in the limited cases when different branches of government _can_ use the forms of data he mentions to persecute/prosecute you, there are significant legislative restrictions on doing that: usually some form of legal authorization, like a warrant, is required. Scott again handwaves this away with the 'it's just inefficiency' argument, which completely misses the point that this is a de facto balance and this is well-understood among legislators.
Making the police or FBI jump through hoops to request certain data, and making those hoops somewhat arduous. isn't just bureaucratic inefficiency, it's quite intentional. If there's only five judges who can issue a certain type of warrant in a given jurisdiction, and it takes a day for everyone to jump through the requisite hoops for the warrant to be granted, that means the police or FBI can only invade the privacy of five people a day. This may seem like a fuzzy way to protect privacy, but it's quite legitimate and, by this point in time, intentional. You can't build the Stasi on five requests a day.
It's very difficult to 'work around', either. Attempts to make it easier, faster and cheaper to grant such warrants are usually difficult to pass, in American politics. Attempts to raise the budgets of the relevant departments drastically in order to let them do more requests within the existing system would similarly require legislative approval and be highly unlikely to succeed.
This is a legitimate check-and-balance arrangement just as much as the constitutional separation of powers is. It's well understood in the relevant circles, has pretty strong consensus support, and has been the case for a long time. Scott would like to just hand-wave this all away so he can sustain his 'the guvmint already knows everything about you!' argument, but it just doesn't really work. 'The guvmint' can potentially put together all its information about 'you' and persecute you, yeah, but this only applies for a very _small_ number of 'yous'. It can't do it for everyone. This is massively different from a system where all the records in question are associated together and available to all government agencies as a matter of course...see, again, East Germany.
quite a lot of cables don't like to kinked like that. you might have trouble getting a gigabit signal down a cable with 180 degree bends, and hdmi cables *hate* it.
you, uh, do realize that most poor people do not have cable HDTV, two cars, closets with name brand clothing, or a 2000 sq. ft house - certainly not *all* of those things? it is painfully evident from your post that you don't know any poor people. especially if you're in the U.S., where you have a frankly shocking number of people who are flat out homeless and unable to afford food at market prices. never mind big houses and brand name clothes.
the Americans do insist on voting for the district flowerbox waterer and initiatives on two cent tax increases, which kind of complicates matters. Our elections are pretty much just 'pick one from Douchebag A or Douchebag B'.
Technology caught up to that problem about a year ago. Go into any electronics store now and there's a whole rack of stylii for capacitive screens, and gloves with pads that work on capacitative screens were North Face stuff two years ago and bargain basement stuff last year. This year you probably get a pair in a box of Cheerios.
seriously, you're using those crappy resistive touchscreens that other countries use for frustrating train ticket purchases _for national elections_? where do you get these ideas?
Then Bush got elected (okay, to be fair, Clinton was hardly a big regulator either), and cut all the regulations, because they were just unnecessary government interference and red tape, needlessly restricting the efficient movement of capital.
Not to worry, the free market will take care of that for you. Competing payment sites will emerge, offer better security and customer protection, and eat PayPal's lunch. Everything will be fine!
It'd be nice if that were the case, but it isn't. Patent lawyers actively lobby for legislation which will produce more lucrative employment for patent lawyers.
Lawyers aren't general-purpose. 'Patent lawyer' is an occupation in and of itself; increasingly, so is 'software patent lawyer'. Any time there is a debate about patent-related legislation where one side can generally be characterized as 'pro-patent' and the other can be generally characterized as 'anti-patent', you will find a large horde of patent lawyers on the 'pro-patent' side. There isn't just a neutral cadre of general-purpose lawyers who don't care whether there are lots of patent lawsuits or not. That's not how the system works. Particularly the American system.
If you read the article, it's not about that at all. It's about _new_ Silicon Valley: the startup culture. This is massively different to the culture that existed when Intel, Dell, IBM, HP and TI were founded.
Those companies are all fairly traditional companies in organization and goals. They were typical old-school American corporate structures built to achieve modern results. HP wasn't crowdfunded, hyped into a bubble and then pushed into an IPO to make the founders and a couple of venture capitalists into multi-millionaires. It was a long-term endeavour built around providing serious engineering for serious ends. It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
This article is more about the culture of quick-hit startups in Silicon Valley these days, which are built more around buzz, hype and marketing vapidity than they are around serious engineering or any kind of long-term planning. It's questioning the culture of founding a company around a cute idea with the aim of selling out in two years to become a millionaire. That is not what Hewlett and Packard were about. They built a company around engineering on the basis of a belief that they could provide a benefit over the long term.
If anything I'd say the weakness of the article lies in its evidence, which isn't really sufficient. It has one useful and accurate case study - Uber - but it really needs more than that to talk about any kind of trend. I rather think, though, that if the author had tried, he could have come up with lots of other examples. Uber was a great case study, though. It's 'innovative' and 'disruptive'...where you read 'disruptive' to mean 'doesn't see the point in complying with regulations meant to ensure public safety'. There's a _reason_ taxi services are strongly licensed and regulated virtually the world over (and you probably wouldn't feel great taking a cab in a place where they aren't).
Most Silicon Valley companies aren't public, and are instead money making tools for the venture capitalists. Which is, if anything, worse.
What this author is taking issue with is not this fact _per se_ but the unthinking embrace of anything new, revolutionary and 'disruptive' that comes out of Silicon Valley without any consideration of more humdrum, everyday concerns like law and order, privacy etc...
"And solar works remarkably well on cloudy days. the heat-based aggregators with tracking mirrors and such take a hit because they are focusing the heat of the sun, which is diffused, but PV doesn't take nearly the hit."
I don't know why people always seem so terribly surprised by this. I don't know about you, but I can still _see_ on cloudy days. Where do people think the photons are coming from?
One, if a security guard wants to forcefully take you down and search your belongings then they're going to do so. It doesn't matter what you 'reasonably say' to them.
Two, security guards don't enforce the law, so whether you've committed a crime is entirely besides the point.
Three, a mall is technically private property and private property owners have some (fuzzy) rights to enforce policies like 'no photography', and forcibly to remove people they don't want on their property - like people taking photographs.
So, nice theory, but really rather besides the point.
"So what is stopping the NY Times of *altering* the content rights and making that report something like Public Domain and then power-posting it to 100 Chinese news agencies?"
The fact that there aren't 100 Chinese news agencies? China has two official news agencies. Both of which are owned by the state. You can connect the dots from there.
PBS isn't state owned. I don't know how so many Americans don't actually understand that. It gets a modest amount of state funding. Most of its funding is from viewers/listeners.
You're right. I believe it differs for initial transmission and later re-broadcast (and things may be even more liberal for initial *live* transmission, as in SNL's case). All sorts of shows have to be cut for re-broadcast for music reasons, it's nothing new, it's gone on for years. I was reading just the other day that re-runs of The Gong Show are and always have been cut for music licensing reasons. That's decades old.
Slashdot Mirror
after all, the Republicans have always been big fans of the popular vote. :P
This is true, and nothing new. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been at least partially gutted from the inside before. The Republicans were not the bastion of big business and evangelical Christianity prior to the 1950s and 1970s, not even close. The Democrats were the party of the segregated South and of Jim Crow - I wonder whether some younger voters are even aware of that, now. You would've have caught a black person in the South dead voting for the Democrats prior to the 1970s...if the Democrats weren't actively preventing them from voting...
The Tea Party is just continuing what appears to be a grand tradition of 20th century U.S. politics; using one of the two big parties as a host and then eating it from the inside out.
er, just realized that second paragraph was a bit confusing. First I mentioned American history - the U.S. Whigs and Federalists (you could add many other expired parties to that list) - then I switched to U.K. history, which had a *different* Whig party. Sorry for the confusion. The point was that both the U.S. and U.K. have had much more complex party histories than the two-party theory really allows for.
This always sounds like a great argument, except that the evidence we have doesn't really bear it out.
Even in 'two-party system' countries, the two parties seem to change far more than that theory would allow for. Where are the Whigs and the Federalists now? In the U.K., the Whigs transformed into the rather different Liberals, who were decimated by the rise of Labour yet persist as the smaller third party, the Liberal Democrats, after a merger with the Social Democrats.
Often the 'two-party system' theorists excuse these changes by constructing narratives where there are periods of stability followed by some kind of 'exceptional event' which causes a 'realignment', but to me, this is really just retrospectively imposing a narrative on much messier events, to fit your convenient belief.
Most strikingly, consider this country, Canada. We have an identical electoral system to the U.K., which is often argued to be a two-party system (notwithstanding the changes I noted above), just as much as the U.S. system - the same arguments are made, that people believe only two parties can possibly attain power, so they only vote for those two parties, and the electoral system reinforces this.
Yet here, at the last federal election, the Liberals - who had been one of the main parties for over a century, and were considered to be part of a two-party system along with the Conservatives, the only two parties realistically capable of attaining power - were virtually destroyed at the polls. They now have just 34 seats in a 308 seat chamber, and got 18.9% of the popular vote; they'd never previously in their 140+ year history polled under 20%. The strangest thing is there isn't even the possibility to construct any kind of narrative of an 'exceptional event' leading to this - people just flat out got sick of the Liberals and felt they ran a terrible campaign with a terrible leader, and so they just up and voted for other parties. Even though according to the two party theorists, they shouldn't have done, because they shouldn't have believed those parties could possibly win. But they did, and now the NDP - a party which had never previously gained more than 43 seats, or just over 20% of the vote - is the second party, with 103 seats and over 30% of the popular vote. That's only the most recent example; Canada has had a much more turbulent party history than the U.S. or the U.K., despite sharing the same system as the U.K., with all the arguments about it encouraging two-party stability.
I don't have all the answers as to how things _do_ work, but I think the two-party theory is pretty weak and not really borne out by a close reading of the history of mature democracies, even ones that are commonly considered to be two-party systems.
It is one of the most indisputable facts of the historical record that crime is massively more strongly linked with economic factors than with anything else. In other words, more poor people are caught for crimes. This isn't because they're more evil than rich people; it's because they have more need to commit crimes (as a philosopher once pointed out, the law forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread or sleep under bridges), they are less likely to be able to get off when charged with a crime (they can't afford good legal representation), and as the rich are usually in positions of political power, the crimes typically committed by poor people - burglary, shoplifting etc - are treated as far higher priorities by the authorities than the crimes typically committed by rich people - white collar fraud, for instance. (Other forms of criminal behaviour committed by the richer classes have been outsourced to corporations; you can bet your bottom dollar that if the Exxon Valdez oil spill had somehow been caused by poor people, it would've been a crime. But as it was caused by rich people, it's just corporate malfeasance. Convenient, no?)
Texas, for one place. They've finally figured out that throwing a large proportion of the male population in jail isn't a great plan in the long term. There's some interesting articles on the organized plan to reduce the use of heavy jail time for a wide range of - usually male - offenders. Read up.
On the violent deaths point; you might want to check the gender of the _assailant_ as well as the _victim_ in all those cases. But there are certainly lots of government dollars for anti-gang programs, tough-on-crime programs and so on.
"Dale Brill says tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education and that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate."
Right, because the only possible return on investment comes in the form of short-term economic growth.
*sigh*
To me he made a very weak argument and then intentionally misunderstands the commenters who point out the flaws in his argument.
The U.S. system for dealing with government privacy concerns is like the U.S. government system in general - it's based on checks and balances. Some of them are more 'generally understood' than 'explicitly codified', but even that caveat doesn't apply to many, and he blithely ignores that.
He simplifies massively when he says 'the government already knows all these things about you'. A lot of the data he refers to is census data: there are very strict restrictions on the use of census data outside of general statistical evaluation by the census bureau. It's not like they can (legally) just hand over your census return to the FBI. A lot of the other forms are data are gathered by different government departments - or even different levels of government entirely, local vs. state vs. federal - for different purposes and are legally siloed, they can't be combined and passed off to other government levels or departments with abandon. This is repeatedly pointed out in the comments, but Scott handwaves it away with a stupid 'counter-argument' that this is just inefficiency which raises taxes - an absurd argument.
Finally he ignores the fact that even in the limited cases when different branches of government _can_ use the forms of data he mentions to persecute/prosecute you, there are significant legislative restrictions on doing that: usually some form of legal authorization, like a warrant, is required. Scott again handwaves this away with the 'it's just inefficiency' argument, which completely misses the point that this is a de facto balance and this is well-understood among legislators.
Making the police or FBI jump through hoops to request certain data, and making those hoops somewhat arduous. isn't just bureaucratic inefficiency, it's quite intentional. If there's only five judges who can issue a certain type of warrant in a given jurisdiction, and it takes a day for everyone to jump through the requisite hoops for the warrant to be granted, that means the police or FBI can only invade the privacy of five people a day. This may seem like a fuzzy way to protect privacy, but it's quite legitimate and, by this point in time, intentional. You can't build the Stasi on five requests a day.
It's very difficult to 'work around', either. Attempts to make it easier, faster and cheaper to grant such warrants are usually difficult to pass, in American politics. Attempts to raise the budgets of the relevant departments drastically in order to let them do more requests within the existing system would similarly require legislative approval and be highly unlikely to succeed.
This is a legitimate check-and-balance arrangement just as much as the constitutional separation of powers is. It's well understood in the relevant circles, has pretty strong consensus support, and has been the case for a long time. Scott would like to just hand-wave this all away so he can sustain his 'the guvmint already knows everything about you!' argument, but it just doesn't really work. 'The guvmint' can potentially put together all its information about 'you' and persecute you, yeah, but this only applies for a very _small_ number of 'yous'. It can't do it for everyone. This is massively different from a system where all the records in question are associated together and available to all government agencies as a matter of course...see, again, East Germany.
quite a lot of cables don't like to kinked like that. you might have trouble getting a gigabit signal down a cable with 180 degree bends, and hdmi cables *hate* it.
you, uh, do realize that most poor people do not have cable HDTV, two cars, closets with name brand clothing, or a 2000 sq. ft house - certainly not *all* of those things? it is painfully evident from your post that you don't know any poor people. especially if you're in the U.S., where you have a frankly shocking number of people who are flat out homeless and unable to afford food at market prices. never mind big houses and brand name clothes.
the Americans do insist on voting for the district flowerbox waterer and initiatives on two cent tax increases, which kind of complicates matters. Our elections are pretty much just 'pick one from Douchebag A or Douchebag B'.
Technology caught up to that problem about a year ago. Go into any electronics store now and there's a whole rack of stylii for capacitive screens, and gloves with pads that work on capacitative screens were North Face stuff two years ago and bargain basement stuff last year. This year you probably get a pair in a box of Cheerios.
or at least, _buttons_.
seriously, you're using those crappy resistive touchscreens that other countries use for frustrating train ticket purchases _for national elections_? where do you get these ideas?
Wall Street *had* lots of regulations.
Then Bush got elected (okay, to be fair, Clinton was hardly a big regulator either), and cut all the regulations, because they were just unnecessary government interference and red tape, needlessly restricting the efficient movement of capital.
Witness: the result.
(channels a slashdot libertarian)
Not to worry, the free market will take care of that for you. Competing payment sites will emerge, offer better security and customer protection, and eat PayPal's lunch. Everything will be fine!
(stops channelling slashdot libertarian)
Notice how that hasn't happened.
It'd be nice if that were the case, but it isn't. Patent lawyers actively lobby for legislation which will produce more lucrative employment for patent lawyers.
Lawyers aren't general-purpose. 'Patent lawyer' is an occupation in and of itself; increasingly, so is 'software patent lawyer'. Any time there is a debate about patent-related legislation where one side can generally be characterized as 'pro-patent' and the other can be generally characterized as 'anti-patent', you will find a large horde of patent lawyers on the 'pro-patent' side. There isn't just a neutral cadre of general-purpose lawyers who don't care whether there are lots of patent lawsuits or not. That's not how the system works. Particularly the American system.
If you read the article, it's not about that at all. It's about _new_ Silicon Valley: the startup culture. This is massively different to the culture that existed when Intel, Dell, IBM, HP and TI were founded.
Those companies are all fairly traditional companies in organization and goals. They were typical old-school American corporate structures built to achieve modern results. HP wasn't crowdfunded, hyped into a bubble and then pushed into an IPO to make the founders and a couple of venture capitalists into multi-millionaires. It was a long-term endeavour built around providing serious engineering for serious ends. It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
This article is more about the culture of quick-hit startups in Silicon Valley these days, which are built more around buzz, hype and marketing vapidity than they are around serious engineering or any kind of long-term planning. It's questioning the culture of founding a company around a cute idea with the aim of selling out in two years to become a millionaire. That is not what Hewlett and Packard were about. They built a company around engineering on the basis of a belief that they could provide a benefit over the long term.
If anything I'd say the weakness of the article lies in its evidence, which isn't really sufficient. It has one useful and accurate case study - Uber - but it really needs more than that to talk about any kind of trend. I rather think, though, that if the author had tried, he could have come up with lots of other examples. Uber was a great case study, though. It's 'innovative' and 'disruptive'...where you read 'disruptive' to mean 'doesn't see the point in complying with regulations meant to ensure public safety'. There's a _reason_ taxi services are strongly licensed and regulated virtually the world over (and you probably wouldn't feel great taking a cab in a place where they aren't).
Most Silicon Valley companies aren't public, and are instead money making tools for the venture capitalists. Which is, if anything, worse.
What this author is taking issue with is not this fact _per se_ but the unthinking embrace of anything new, revolutionary and 'disruptive' that comes out of Silicon Valley without any consideration of more humdrum, everyday concerns like law and order, privacy etc...
Compare and contrast:
http://readwrite.com/2012/10/23/readwriteweb-deathwatch-one-laptop-per-child-olpc
Funny how that one didn't make Slashdot.
"And solar works remarkably well on cloudy days. the heat-based aggregators with tracking mirrors and such take a hit because they are focusing the heat of the sun, which is diffused, but PV doesn't take nearly the hit."
I don't know why people always seem so terribly surprised by this. I don't know about you, but I can still _see_ on cloudy days. Where do people think the photons are coming from?
Then wear your spy sunglasses everywhere forever just in case you happen to see something you want to take a picture of?
The kid wasn't following mall security around taking pictures, he just happened to see the thing go down and think 'oh hey, i'll take some pictures'.
One, if a security guard wants to forcefully take you down and search your belongings then they're going to do so. It doesn't matter what you 'reasonably say' to them.
Two, security guards don't enforce the law, so whether you've committed a crime is entirely besides the point.
Three, a mall is technically private property and private property owners have some (fuzzy) rights to enforce policies like 'no photography', and forcibly to remove people they don't want on their property - like people taking photographs.
So, nice theory, but really rather besides the point.
"So what is stopping the NY Times of *altering* the content rights and making that report something like Public Domain and then power-posting it to 100 Chinese news agencies?"
The fact that there aren't 100 Chinese news agencies? China has two official news agencies. Both of which are owned by the state. You can connect the dots from there.
PBS isn't state owned. I don't know how so many Americans don't actually understand that. It gets a modest amount of state funding. Most of its funding is from viewers/listeners.
"If I recall, that isn't actually true, sadly."
You're right. I believe it differs for initial transmission and later re-broadcast (and things may be even more liberal for initial *live* transmission, as in SNL's case). All sorts of shows have to be cut for re-broadcast for music reasons, it's nothing new, it's gone on for years. I was reading just the other day that re-runs of The Gong Show are and always have been cut for music licensing reasons. That's decades old.