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Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

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Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#751

Post by snowwrestler »

erichocean wrote: post #731
snowwrestler wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your theory is that the U.S. is a distributed consensus system but for some reason the company of Amazon.com, Inc. does not participate as a node?

Let me put it this way: I can give Amazon zero attention and still know what they are going to do, simply by paying attention elsewhere. Can you? I suspect you could too. We all can, none of this is a secret. So…is Amazon a node in the political decision making apparatus if you can ignore them entirely and still predict their behavior? I would argue that is strong evidence Amazon is not a decision node when it comes…

I think your attempt at categorizing political vs non-political decisions is arbitrary and harming the utility of your computing analogy.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#752

Post by shadowgovt »

tjr225 wrote: post #728
lostlogin wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it though? Compare other hard problems and how they have been handled. Healthcare comes to mind immediately.

Lol this is kind of funny given my other post but in addition to having worked in government I’ve also worked in healthcare. I made about 50% of what I do now at that vendor and was glad to leave. I truly think if people had an incentive to make things better in government and healthcare then things would get better. It was a terrible job but a good starting point. I wonder if health care vendors paid as much as goog…

A former Googler got called in by the Obama administration to try and put healthcare.gov back on its rails after the disastrous launch, and the things he learned about it were fascinating. He talks about some of them here

https://youtu.be/0albm_hhQzM

It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.

One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#753

Post by alsetmusic »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #734
alsetmusic wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by that bar looting a Target - which we witnessed the whole 2020 You’re exaggerating and it’s deliberate, which revels the intent of your argument is dishonest. Well-documented events in the summer of 2020 kicked off unrest. There was no mass-looting before that.

> Well-documented events Was is it? Did George Floyd have a lethal amount of fentanyl in his system at time of death? Did the medical examiner not mention any damage to Floyd’s neck? Did the video show Floyd asking to be put on ground after resisting getting in the vehicle like the police asked? Did Keith Ellison do everything he could to keep the video of the arrest from coming out? Was Breanna Taylor‘s name on the…

> “Well documented” is a very misleading way to describe this summer’s violent unrest.

I’d say the murder of George Floyd was well-documented. That was my meaning.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#754

Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

nyolfen wrote: post #710
XorNot wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean pipe bombs were found at both political party headquarters, so how many bombs is enough to be serious?

puerto rican nationalists stormed the capitol and shot congressmen in 1954; leftists literally bombed the senate chamber in 1983; we somehow managed to persist without restricting civil liberties both times. have you ever even heard of these events? i would wager most of us haven't. this time though, they had a 10,000 page anti-terror bill waiting in the wings and ready to push through, a dark reminder of the patriot…

Violence against the institutions isn't great, but can you honestly not see the difference between; - 1983, goal: end war in Grenada via terror/threat, action: set bomb off at 11pm (0 deaths, 0 injuries) - 2021, goal: keep former President in office after losing election, kill VP, kill Speaker of House, action: storm capitol (5 deaths, over 100 injuries), bonus: incited by sitting President

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#755

Post by slg »

imgabe wrote: post #675
vharuck wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you realize that numerous times throughout history people have successfully killed the actual president and it didn't end democracy? I'm no historian, so was there ever a time the killing was instigated by a sitting politician who then was not punished? (Yes, the Senate has yet to decide, but chances are they won't vote for removal or banning from office). Because politicians trying to have their political oppone…

> Because politicians trying to have their political opponents harmed or killed is basically all one needs to have fake democracy. I don't follow this logic. Assume for the sake of argument that politician A attempts to have politician B killed (also not a historian, but I feel there has to be at least one instance of this happening somewhere, at some point in US history). Based on this event, we now conclude that th…

Here are some questions based entirely on the procedural process of electing a president. We don't even have to get into any potential illegal actions by Trump.

The vice president presides over the counting of electoral college votes. Tradition says this role is largely ceremonial. Trump disagrees. What would a conservative Supreme Court, with 3 justices appointed by Trump, say about this?

What were to happen if the VP was murdered by a mob while the president is arguing in bad faith that he won the election and the VP is needed to certify the true winner?

Can the president pro tempore take the place of the VP in counting votes? We would likely be back in the Supreme Court to decide. What if they say only the VP can serve this role? Would Trump and Congress be able to agree on a new VP?

If no VP is in place, would the election end up in the House? Would they have time to vote before 1/20? Who would they vote for?

If we don't have a clear president by 1/20, the line of succession passes to the speaker of the House. What happens if she was murdered too? Would the House vote on a new speaker quick enough or would the line of succession go to the 4th person, the president pro tempore of the Senate?

Would this create perverse incentives for the the president pro tempore to reject EC votes if the Supreme Court decided in his favor several steps back in this hypothetical?

There are obviously a lot of hypotheticals there, but what they are meant to show is there are a lot of ways for this to go wrong and for the next president to be in doubt. Do you see how this is bad for a healthy democracy? Would you be confident that Trump would sit idly by and wait for this situation to play out without putting his fingers on the scale, inciting more violence, or potentially something even more drastic?

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#756

Post by ddingus »

tjr225 wrote: post #557
Lucasoato wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea is honorable, but do governments have the know-how to do it? It's not only about costs and responsibility, I don't think this could be feasible in most countries, maybe only in China and US.

If they paid better, sure they could. That would require more taxes though.

This is just a priority problem. There are plenty of tradeoffs that could be made to fund this kind of thing.

Fact is computer and software, services lobby groups want the business. In the US, said business can be bought, and is.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#757

Post by jclulow »

slg wrote: post #652
voicedYoda wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a revolving door for a long long time

The question is how do you fix that? We should want domain experts in a lot of these government roles, but the primary way you become an expert in an industry is working in that industry. Let's image we put a ban in place to prevent this revolving door. Why would someone working in the industry be willing to forfeit their post-government career, especially if they are a political appointee and might only have the rol…

I think for starters it's important to recognise that the expectation of a "post-government" career is itself a part of this problem. If we instead built long term competence within public institutions, including competitive remuneration and career development like training programmes, there wouldn't be a need to have a door between the private and public sector quite as much in the first place. The reward should be delivered in situ for continued constructive service, not be an upgrade to a private sector gig after holding your nose and/or making decisions you feel will be looked upon favourably by future employers.

Private and public sector employees could collaborate where it makes sense, just like companies sometimes collaborate on shared initiatives like working groups or open source projects.

Government can actually work better than it does in the US -- as it does in other countries -- but one must first accept the ideological premise, which seems to be what holds the country back.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#758

Post by geofft »

geofft wrote: post #388
smsm42 wrote: post #257

That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened with overwhelming force. They don't need to be threatened with death, starvation or torture. They don't need to be threatened by economic ruin or untold suffering. No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to gi…

I don't object to free speech because I'm scared and I want the government and the media to protect me from the scary people I see on TV. I object to freedom of speech because it doesn't still seem like an ideal to me in the first place. Don't attack a straw man. What is the argument that free speech is an ideal? That it promotes a more vibrant discourse? That it permits political positions that the powerful dislike…

I'd like to thank the folks who downvoted this comment to the point of invisibility for making my point for me more eloquently than I ever could. This community is a better place because it does not treat free speech as an ideal and people don't have to see ideas they disagree with. :)

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#759

Post by ZGDUwpqEWpUZ »

pixl97 wrote: post #335
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " If your position is genuinely that you believe website operators should be mandated by law to host content they do not want to host except when that content has been specifically determined to be illegal, then we simply disagree on that point. " That's another meme I see repeated a lot. If we go back before 1950, the same argument you are making was used justify businesses refusing to provide service to women, mi…

Calls for violence are a political affiliation?

The person you're replying to is talking about legal speech as determined through the democratic process, and made that distinction explicitly.

I'm curious why you're pretending he didn't - are you secretly a free speech absolutist trying to make your opponents look illiterate?

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#760

Post by djvu9 »

trident5000 wrote: post #407
acdha wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because that “storming” only happened in your imagination. The protests were hundreds of feet away and the violence started when the police tried to clear the public park for Trump to have a photo op. If you look at the footage from the journalists who were assaulted, there was nothing like a risk to the White House perimeter: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-02/channel-7-journalists... If the Trump supporters…

Yes the secret service made the call to take the president into a bunker because it never happened. Just wanted a little adventure that day.

And the media made fun of it.
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