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

informationdiet.com

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

darklajid wrote: post #31
waqf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, individual Americans also have little control over Congress. I think we're all in the same boat here (and I don't even think the article implied otherwise).

I think the GP refers mostly to the title. No, the 'internet' doesn't need to learn about Congress, since the internet is a world-wide thing. I won't learn about politics in the USA anytime soon (no disrespect here, it's just of no interest to me and that's how I like it), but the article addresses me too.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by _gd3l »

sp332 wrote: post #37
_gd3l wrote: post #25

"I don't complain about politicians because everyone does. This politician sucks, that politician is a fucking idiot. Yeah, we'll guess what asshole? YOU KEEP VOTING FOR THESE MORONS! You keep arguing about democrat vs. republican, you keep asking for things from the government, you keep on voting for the people you complain about. You legitimize the bullshit. This is what you get for wanting to be led like little ch…

Give https://soundcloud.com/ a try?

Thanks, I'm trying to find the original clip on my computer. Lotta Carlin audio in my iTunes...

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

#123

Post by snowwrestler »

jameskilton wrote: post #4

No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.

If you actually believe this then I would argue that you don't actually know how Congress works. There are numerous examples of citizen action overcoming superior funding on the other side; the entire environmental movement is one example.

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

#124

Post by nitrogen »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #77
JonnieCache wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Maybe they'd be forced to do so in order to compete with the new cohort of younger, technology-embracing politicians which will sweep to power on the crest of a wave of louis ck-style "OMG finally someone who understands" sentiment from the reddit ge…

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.

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

#125

Post by darklajid »

brycecolquitt wrote: post #83
darklajid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the GP refers mostly to the title. No, the 'internet' doesn't need to learn about Congress, since the internet is a world-wide thing. I won't learn about politics in the USA anytime soon (no disrespect here, it's just of no interest to me and that's how I like it), but the article addresses me too.

I personally think that the "internet" does need to learn about Congress, or at least be aware of what is going on. ICANN controls the root DNS servers for TLDs, and before ICANN, the US government did.

(addressing both you and waqf, bringing up the same point: The US is in control of some nice part of the internet infrastructure):

You are right, of course. That means that I care about a world-wide disruption caused by (local) laws in the US. I read about those and follow the development of these laws to a point.

The article addresses the internet first (me included) and then talks about educating the US congress and throwing money at US lobbyists, while fixing the US system so that it doesn't _need_ this kind of involvement anymore.

I'm sorry, but that leaves me out.

- I cannot take part in the education of statesman overseas/abroad and doubt that they'd listen to me

- I certainly won't (especially on an individual level, but even corporate that would be waaaay weird and wrong) throw money at lobbyists in another country

- I'm not allowed to take part in the political system in the US, so I cannot realistically help with any systematic change

I think while you are, as I already admitted, entirely correct about the fact that Congress might affect the whole world, the article is still wrong in calling out to 'The Internet' to fix it. The issues have to be resolved locally. My way of influencing it _might_ be voting for a party that wants to wrangle for informational freedom in the EU and more independence from the US, but that's about it.

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

#126

Post by ComputerGuru »

boredguy8 wrote: post #56

Attempting to post this link to facebook breaks it. http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works- deletes the trailing hyphen and becomes http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works

Post it with a trailing slash:

     http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-/

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

#127

Post by robryan »

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.

Could you get around that though, what if foreigners could say buy an overpriced piece of software from the group?

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

#128

Post by groaner »

JanezStupar wrote: post #117
klbarry wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: There are some strong arguments that a senate operating behind closed doors would be more effective at ignoring special interests and working together than otherwise. The writers of the constitution did just this (they swore secrecy of anything they talked about in the convention to avoid voter backlash) [1] This is why they initially wanted health care debates behind closed doors - the lobbyists can ma…

Let them work however they want. I don't care how law comes to be. Be it invoking satanic rituals, getting it written by the lobbyists or just copied off 4chan. Just use the goddamn source control. And write the freaking commit messages.

If even programmers write crappy commit messages, there's not much to be optimistic about legislators' commit messages.

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

#129

Post by snowwrestler »

JamisonM wrote: post #47

All the freaking out about SOPA reveals something very interesting about the technology crowd in general I think. Whatever happened to all those people who were always crowing about how legislation would never keep up to technology? Are there experts going in front of the committee explaining how technology will make circumventing these restrictions seamless for end users? Or are we admitting that this legislation ha…

Along these same lines, I remember the fight over the DMCA. It's kind of funny to see the tech industry defending it so strongly today. There was a while there when it was probably the most hated law on the web.

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

#130

Post by cellularmitosis »

eli wrote: post #80
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…

Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list. http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/

Holy cow! The clerk of the house will start hosting all bills in XML on Jan 1st 2012! http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/house-approves-sweeping-op...
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