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Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

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Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#151

Post by MichaelZuo »

Mechanical9 wrote: post #65
MichaelZuo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.

It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out: It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.

No?

Clearly there are things desired by the majority of the population that are not desirable because of downstream effects.

There are thousands of comments and posts on HN every year describing examples.

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#152

Post by arrosenberg »

dantheman wrote: post #101
pdonis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority That's one alternative, but not the only one. Another alternative is for the government to not have the power to tyrannize in the first place. As the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. > the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis I don't think this…

If the government followed the constituion this wouldn't be problems: 1. Marijuana would never have been illegal at the federal level because an amendment wasn't passed. 2. Healthcare and any other federal welfare policies could be ennacted by passing an amendment. If there isn't broad consensus across the country to pass an amendment then states can do it independently. There is no reason a state can't have single p…

> Healthcare and any other federal welfare policies could be enacted by passing an amendment.

All federal welfare policies can be enacted under the commerce clause and/or the general welfare clause.

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#153

Post by pksebben »

mistrial9 wrote: post #46
GeekyBear wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're living in the second Gilded Age. >Political corruption was rampant, as business leaders spent significant amounts of money ensuring that government did not regulate the activities of big business—and they more often than not got what they wanted. Such corruption was so commonplace that in 1868 the New York state legislature legalized such bribery. Historian Howard Zinn argues that the U.S. government was acting…

ok - but you could see these things as persistent illness in any civilization of this size.. So, outrage at the existence alone is not constructive; instead treat the illness knowing that it will never completely go away. "checks and balances" you know? there is a tendency to boil over and demand immediate change.. temper that, make longer commitments?

longer commitments are what entrench these patterns. the illness must be allowed to be terminal - we can plant good seeds in fresh ground sooner or wait it out as things get progressively worse and build the pressure of the ending catastrophe ever higher.

An analogue is controlled, regular burns. Look at California - we stopped allowing the dead matter to cull and now we have blazes that take out whole townships.

The only way to break an infinite recursive loop is a crash. That's where we are with money => influence => law => money

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#154

Post by MichaelZuo »

LookReally wrote: post #124
MichaelZuo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the text of this 'chapter amendment'?

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/a1285 I believe it's actually already passed both the assembly + senate.

This appears to be a link to the bill, not to the 'chapter amendment' of the bill?

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#155

Post by LookReally »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #154
LookReally wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/a1285 I believe it's actually already passed both the assembly + senate.

This appears to be a link to the bill, not to the 'chapter amendment' of the bill?

The name of the bill is misleading. This is separate from the bill that passed and was signed into law last year.

The first few lines of the text describe it as "...to amend a chapter of the laws of 2022... as proposed in legislative bills numbers S. 4104-A and A. 7006-B" (A4104A + A7006B are the bills/now law from last year)

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#156

Post by properGander »

acituan wrote: post #143
properGander wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeals to authority of dead people’s political documents is propaganda. Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today. The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill. I wish people would realize how silly they so…

> dead people’s political documents is propaganda. Yours is no less propaganda. People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings. You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from m…

Disagree I have to fight them. Every political system is eventually jettisoned by generational churn.

Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.

As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.

I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!

What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#157

Post by sleton38234234 »

user3939382 wrote: post #7

I’ll remind everyone of the Princeton study that proved our democracy is a sham. Policy outcomes are almost exclusively the product of the preferences of economic elites, not of the People. If you do get a legislative outcome you wanted it’s a coincidence that some big power’s agenda accidentally aligned with your own.

I would say consumers should organize, and target a few of the biggest companies supporting this bill and boycott their products until the bill gets changed. If nobody buys another iphone for 6 months, I don't think they'll have any choice but to get the bill undone. right?

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#158

Post by properGander »

pdonis wrote: post #44
comte7092 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian. On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives. Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for…

> it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian. You say this as if anti majoritarian is a bug. It's not. It's a feature. The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority. That's why there are checks and balances in it. That's why the Constitution limits the powers of the branches of government, and why further limits were put in place in the Bill of Rights. The US system is not supposed…

[dead]

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#159

Post by astrange »

user3939382 wrote: post #7

I’ll remind everyone of the Princeton study that proved our democracy is a sham. Policy outcomes are almost exclusively the product of the preferences of economic elites, not of the People. If you do get a legislative outcome you wanted it’s a coincidence that some big power’s agenda accidentally aligned with your own.

That study didn't prove anything and doesn't reproduce.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...

What it does show is that "the people" and "the elites" agree on almost everything, more than you'd expect them to. Pretty obvious, if you pay attention at all you'd notice most Americans don't vote for economic reasons!

Re: Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

#160

Post by user3939382 »

Aunche wrote: post #111
tines wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number. > So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actuall…

>Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway." Not the GP, but I think that the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to bel…

> the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to believe

If that were true corporate lobbying wouldn't exist, so this theory is obviously false.

We're talking about the money here.

Issues like guns, abortion, gay marriage -- social issues -- are used to divide and distract the public from the financial issues which our uniparty in DC almost always goes the same way on, and which the public generally does Not support.

Big pharma, the banks, the arms industry, big agriculture -- I mean do we really have to list every industry? All of them profit by subverting the interests of the public and they do, to the tune of trillions of dollars. "absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham" -- not absurd, obvious.

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