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Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

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Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good education system does not neatly translate to, say, economic success. Italy has top-class university system, much older than Columbus, and yet the country seems to be stuck in stagnation for last 20 years and the talented fresh graduates of those top schools move abroad.

You still need a government that can get out of it's own way, legislatively, while still providing an environment (or the right incentives for one) where business can and does get done.

Among many things. Recent governments in the US have been very ineffective. Legislators are more interested in making each other look bad than actually doing their job.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted because discourse should never be narrowed, period. Ideas should be thrown into the public square, in the full light of day, and judged on their merits.

Hopefully you realize the hypocrisy of graying out my comment in the name of promoting discourse, but I doubt it. Ideas should absolutely be judged on their merits; here we agree. Too bad that's not how humans work. Instead, they tend to choose whichever truth they like best based on how it makes them feel; politicians know this, which is why they don't bother crafting logically sound arguments backed with evidence.…

> You attend as a student, which means you are there to learn, not to share your thoughts like it's a real-life HN thread. Don't want to learn the material?

This is entirely wrong. You're describing indoctrination, not learning.

Truth is not injected into students, spoken from on-high. Get out of here for suggesting that.

Go to a monastery if that's what you think learning is.

Truth is discovered and spread through dialogue.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#223
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely clear on how many nations are able to be compared with the US within the developed world. Given its size, configuration, and geopolitical contexts, the US has few comparable nations against which we can test. I guess we can say Russia is closest, followed by Canada & Mexico, then the entire EU and the CCP. India maybe? > boiling all education down to humanities degrees is a blatant strawman No, it is…

Are you the OP posting under a different account? > Given its size, configuration, and geopolitical contexts, the US has few comparable nations against which we can test. Why does country size affect academic performance of students? Russia, China, India, and Mexico are not developed nations. I wouldn't compare their educational results with the US. I'd be more interested in Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Aus…

> Are you the OP posting under a different account?

No... are you?

That's easily the strangest question I have ever been asked on HN.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public education in the US is funded by neighborhood, so wealthy neighborhoods have far better schools and poverty stricken regions have terrible schools.

> Public education in the US is funded by neighborhood Sometimes, usually not. It's often (but not always) funded by “school district”, which is often much larger than a neighborhood and may be a large metro area, and often with statewide funding mechanisms that reduce disparity between districts to less than it would be on its own.

But even within a single school district there are "good schools" and "bad schools" and not terribly surprisingly, rents and home prices are more expensive in the neighborhoods with the higher rated schools. Many people move within the same city in order to get their kids in them.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public education in the US is funded by neighborhood Sometimes, usually not. It's often (but not always) funded by “school district”, which is often much larger than a neighborhood and may be a large metro area, and often with statewide funding mechanisms that reduce disparity between districts to less than it would be on its own.

But even within a single school district there are "good schools" and "bad schools" and not terribly surprisingly, rents and home prices are more expensive in the neighborhoods with the higher rated schools. Many people move within the same city in order to get their kids in them.

> But even within a single school district there are "good schools" and "bad schools" and not terribly surprisingly, rents and home prices are more expensive in the neighborhoods with the higher rated schools.

Yes, that’s true, but it's not a product of funding by neighborhood, because that's not how the schools in that case are funded.

It's been fairly strongly argued that that's actually because the schools themselves make almost no difference at all on average, and school outcomes are pretty much determined by socioeconomic background and other personal traits of the student with ransome variation, and the “good schools” are just the ones attended by the students with the traits that would produce, on average, good outcomes independent of what school they attend.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#226

See also Samuel P. Huntington: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of…

There's a fundamental imbalance in our attempts at using marks, tokens, & bills to simulate resources & desires, and it is thus: the natural world doesn't work this way at all. In the natural world, living things die. Living things die because things never actually stay exactly the same, so nothing goes on forever, and to achieve something like forever, living things copy themselves before they die, bestowing their resources upon this copy. But, in the natural world these resources stop right there and don't compound. Capital, because it exhibits no entropy outside of inflation, does compound and will always send us right back here again to societal collapse in eternal return. Our desire, birthed in hunting & gathering, which was formed to stand in opposition to entropy, like entropy, has no limit. Thus our desires will always lead to excess capital accumulation, until such a time that our tokens and assets can become entropic or until we collapse. The lion will lay with the lamb, or we will be the hand of our own destruction, enabled by technology, or in the language of the Daodejing:

"To understand others is to have knowledge;

To understand oneself is to be illumined.

To conquer others needs strength;

To conquer oneself is harder still.

To be content with what one has is to be rich.

He that works through violence may get his way;

But only what stays in its place

Can endure.

When one dies one is not lost; there is no other longevity."

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#227
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again - the best educated voter still only has two choices, and neither of these represent the poor. Do people on HN really think the very rich or the very poor were at all bothered by the Capitol riots? Government is irrelevant to both groups, in different ways.

The best educated voter -- any voter in fact -- can also run for office and transform the party. I dislike the rhetoric you're using that implies the parties are outside and beyond the reach of "normal" citizens. Of course they are institutions with substantial inertia and aims of their own. But as the elections of people as diverse as Cori Bush and Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene show, it is certainly s…

Not op, but while you are not wrong, I would argue that the critique of the FPTP-voting system is very relevant here.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#228
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best educated voter -- any voter in fact -- can also run for office and transform the party. I dislike the rhetoric you're using that implies the parties are outside and beyond the reach of "normal" citizens. Of course they are institutions with substantial inertia and aims of their own. But as the elections of people as diverse as Cori Bush and Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene show, it is certainly s…

What do you make of this study by professors from Princeton and Northwestern that finds that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence"? Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... What do you make of Jimmy…

You, like many others have some really good arguments to why the current american system doesn't work.

But where is the american movement to end the FPTP-voting system?

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. That's why education is the most important pillar of democracy…

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one pa…

Well, maybe they can learn that there are other alternatives besides the american political system during those studies, and actually do something to change your broken system...

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are increasingly beyond the reach of normal citizens. If your views do not align 100% with either party, you are increasingly marginalized. See the treatment of Donald Trump (a republican outsider, and not a traditional conservative by any means, but not a democrat in principle either) by the Republican party. For the past four years, republicans have refused to pass bills due to not matching ideological purity…

i would have replaced Trump with Ron Paul (remember him?) as a Republican/Libertarian with strong support via grassroots and youth (that wanted real change) that the party did not want and did everything they could to destroy or co-opt. When we saw the same thing being done to Sanders by the Democratic party (almost an exact mirror of what happended to Paul) it was a strong hint as to what is really going on. Neither…

Yes, you're right. The casting out of Ron Paul made me really mad. Thanks for reminding me.

No, no party is better really. The GOP is the same. It's run by the same kinds of old farts. My main source of good feelings towards the GOP is that I tend to agree with their unelected members. But more and more I'm seeing those members also hate the GOP establishment. I wouldn't be surprised to see the party fracture heavily soon. I hope the democrat party also has the same split. There are good, decent democrats that share common principles and who I'm sure cannot stand their party leadership. I mean, the DNC is so bad, that I actually feel sorry for my left-leaning friends who also seem unable to get any representation.

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