151–160 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but they were far from being a place I'd like to revisit, especially not on election day. The Internet is the community commons of today just as much as a library or city building was 30-40 years ago.
Are you really saying that high school was so bad you'd rather not vote than go back there for an hour or 3?
Where is google/facebook in all of this? They are the dictators of the internet. Why aren't they educating the crap out of our representatives?
Truth be told, SOPA is actually beneficial for the big players, it actually gives the big players a competitive advantage. No court or congress is going to harm the Facebook.com DNS -- that's political suicide. But the public is not going to care/notice if Facebook-Competitor.com gets shut down.
These laws will be used to crush sapling startups, which actually just eliminates the competition for Facebook/YouTube.
It's Congress's way of saying: you can have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This is all the social media anyone should ever need. Anyone who wants more social media options than the Big3 is obviously some kind of criminal.
SOPA essentially freezes the social media internet as it is and makes new social media companies impossible. It also makes borderline-popular social media companies like reddit unlikely to survive. Reddit is too free speech tolerating to survive this legislation. Facebook is borderline, but they're untouchable. YouTube is in violation. Twitter is shallow enough to be safe.
TLDR: They do not want to be educated, their goal is to obtain money.
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…
Huh. I'm the author of the post. I'll think about it.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The important barrier to (effective) participation is not the drive to an inconvenient polling location. The barrier is learning about the candidates and the issues, and enough background to fit all the pieces together. That is, making an optimal choice for your vote is an extremely expensive undertaking. Thus, relatively few people do it well.
Clearly people don't agree with my original comment. I'll see if I can figure out where I've strayed, and make my original idea clearer. If I may, I'd like to squish the content of your comment into the single word "motivation." At present, it takes a high enough amount of motivation to either take time off work to vote early, vote by mail, or wait in excessively long lines after work, that far fewer than a majority…
In your second link, it notes two problems. First, it says that Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics. I submit that this is quite the opposite of political questions.
But more importantly, it also discusses one of the big problems of "Wisdom of the crowd", although it couches it as an advantage. The effect is enhanced through communication between individuals, as would (and should) be the case in any political question. To this I reply with two words: "witch hunt".
History is replete with examples wherein the common, accepted ideas of society have stood in the way of progress -- I don't think I even need to recite any. And the whole point of the United States is to protect the minority, or even the one, against the will of a strong majority. So I don't think it's wise to strengthen further the crowd-based aspect of our political system.
I wrote a post about this last week saying why this sort of thought is wrong. In summary it is basically this: As people of power in a position to make important decisions it is their PROFESSIONAL. ETHICAL. DUTY. to know all the facts that pertain to the situation. At no point is it our fault to not understand their system in its entirety but it IS their fault to be making conscious decisions that effect people and s…
In principle, I agree with you. But that gets us nowhere. Would you prefer to be "right" and not get what you want, or concede that this is just how things work and get what you want? I agree with the author of the article: we need to figure out a better way of educating Congress. I don't know how, but their ignorance makes this obvious. Blaming Congress for being ignorant does not get us what we want. I'm going to a…
Mission: We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states.
Technology:
Our proprietary “Educate the Powerful System”SM (EPS) is not sending an email on your behalf. Usually, our system fills out the web forms located at the Congressperson's website. Our system gives your letter a more personalized feel — even increases the odds that it will be read.
(I copied the above from their website.)
So - you fill out a simple web form, personalize with your comments if you like, and DownsizeDC will deliver it to all your Senate and House representatives using their own Congressional web sites and web forms. All you have to provide is your address and DownsizeDC will figure out who your reps are.
It makes it much easier for public to communicate with their representatives, which allows for the communication to occur more frequently and in greater volume.
This is a cool hack and I use it several times a week every week to express my disapproval of the erosion of civil liberties in the USA attendant to the War on Terror.