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Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

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131–140 of 166 posts

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#131

Post by nl »

mseebach wrote: post #82
tomelders wrote: post #66

Who wants to sign up as the first ever crowd funded, open source lobbyist? I'd do it myself, but I'm not American. I will pay you £5 though. Get another 100,000 like me and you're making a cool £500,000 gross. Just be sure to properly document what you're doing and what you intend to do. I'll also give you £5 worth of slush money to grease palms and what not. And if you meet certain objectives and milestones, I may e…

You'd also land your lobbyist in jail pretty quick. I'm fairly certain it's more than a little illegal (on the order of treason) to accept foreign money to influence congress.

There are plenty of ways for a foreigner to lobby in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#132

Post by rickmb »

Been there, done that, and guess what: they really don't want to hear from their constituents. Period. (And this was on a local level in the Netherlands, which I'm pretty confident is considerable more accessible and less corrupt than US Congress.)

This is about power, holding on to it and increasing it. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else matters these people, no matter how nice, intelligent and understanding they sometimes seem appear to be. Being a politician has become a career path with no goal that has anything to do with representing the will of the people. "Ill will or spite" doesn't come into it: it's just business.

And the people have nothing to offer them in that respect except votes and obedience. As long as they get both despite everything, no strategy will give us any more access because there is simply no need for them to give it to us.

The only way this will change is if it no longer pays to ignore the people.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#133

Post by beatpanda »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #34
gasull wrote: post #21

This is an invitation to play the lobby game. To me it reads like "we should bribe Congress too". But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want. If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in Ca…

Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens vo…

It's even worse than that. Ballot initiatives, like all electoral endeavors, are extremely expensive, so most of what actually makes it onto the ballot are bills written by the exact same monied interests that would otherwise be lobbying the state government if we didn't have the initiative system.

In a way, every "innovation" in democracy becomes a cheaper, simpler pathway for the same interests to run the game in their favor.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#134

Post by wwweston »

turtle4 wrote: post #108
jaysonelliot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens vo…

Couldn't this be addressed by requiring all spending bills to have their funding built in? ie, the bill must include what they are proposing to spend, and where the funding will come from (tax hike). This would also help people understand the costs of what they are voting for.

I think it's a particularly interesting idea for citizen initiatives to have to be in the black, but a lot of times when it comes to policy/program issues, there's disagreement over whether or not budget figures are realistic.

Think about how hard it often is for developers to estimate the time and effort involved in a project. Programs that involve putting together networks of people, hard assets, and information systems are going to be just as hard to estimate properly if not harder.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#135

Post by charlieok »

To the extent that power over the internet is in the hands of a controlling few, we engineers haven't done a good enough job of engineering.

Sure, educating congress is a good idea. But there is a lot of room for improvement on the engineering too. The more decentralized our creations, the less opportunity for congress to get their grubby hands on them.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#136

Post by LeafStorm »

nitrogen wrote: post #124
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never happen because too few of the Reddit generation are willing and/or capable of pulling out their checkbook (err, PayPal account) to cover the cost of that. In fact, too few of them are even willing to show up at the polls (40ish% compared to over 70% for age 55+[1]). Until those change, nobody is getting kicked out by the Reddit generation. [1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications…

One problem is that the 55+ demographic is able to vote in the civic centers they grew up with. Let us vote from our civic centers (e.g. the net) and we'll do so in much higher numbers. Increasing the barrier to political participation has the effect of excluding all but the highly motivated, thus pushing politics toward extremes.

> One problem is that the 55+ demographic is able to vote in the civic centers they grew up with.

You didn't go to high school or the library growing up?

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#137

Post by danenania »

mseebach wrote: post #82
tomelders wrote: post #66

Who wants to sign up as the first ever crowd funded, open source lobbyist? I'd do it myself, but I'm not American. I will pay you £5 though. Get another 100,000 like me and you're making a cool £500,000 gross. Just be sure to properly document what you're doing and what you intend to do. I'll also give you £5 worth of slush money to grease palms and what not. And if you meet certain objectives and milestones, I may e…

You'd also land your lobbyist in jail pretty quick. I'm fairly certain it's more than a little illegal (on the order of treason) to accept foreign money to influence congress.

This hasn't slowed down Israel much.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#138

Post by danenania »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #34
gasull wrote: post #21

This is an invitation to play the lobby game. To me it reads like "we should bribe Congress too". But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want. If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in Ca…

Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens vo…

Congress has also created an essentially unsolvable budget crisis, so I don't see much difference there.

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#139

Post by chimeracoder »

JonnieCache wrote: post #106
untog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad? Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad. In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system…

>I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is. The only argument against this is a statistical one, akin to how entropy works: One should engage in revolution only when the set of likely worse systems is larger than the set of likely better systems. (I could probably state this better if I…

You don't really need matrix terminology - just a bit of economic theory and an understanding of basic statistics.

Essentially, you want to measure the 'quality' of each outcome (utility), and the likelihood of each outcome. Then, you calculate the expected utility (which is different from the utility of the expected value - you apply the function before taking the dot product, not afterwards).

I'm blanking on the TeX at the moment, but you basically take the sum of p(i)*U(I), where p(i) is the probability of the i-th outcome occuring, and U(I) is the utility ('benefit') associated with the i-th outcome. Utility is unique to a monotonically increasing function, so that means the individual values are arbitrary, as long as the relative order is preserved.

Then, see if that expected utility is better than the status quo. (Of course, this assumes that you already have a well-defined utility function, which is easy in theory but hard in practice).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_utility_hypothesis

Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

#140

Post by pillbug88 »

JonnieCache wrote: post #11

American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses d…

It's funny cos before Obama was elected I told my friends that under this administration the internet would become regulated.

This is in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach the Bush administration took towards the internet.

You can argue whatever else you want about him, but it is undeniable that more legislation regarding the internet has passed under the current administration than under Bush -- he even fought off the UN's (read: china/russia) attempt at taking over ICANN.

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