Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech • Hacker News Board

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#31

Post by gameman144 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #29

gameman144 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather not have the laws change radically as I cross the border. This is a fair preference, but many people prefer the exact opposite. For instance, people leaving high-tax states for lower-tax ones, or people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones.

> but many people prefer the exact opposite > people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones It's incorrect to claim that people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones have the opposite preference to me. My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion. The idea that a woman leaving her own state to get an abortion has…

> My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion.

Yes, but that is the preference of anyone who believes that they're right and the others are wrong. Federalist pro-life voters certainly bemoan that any state allows for abortion.

The whole point of making constitutional amendments is that you either have to:

A.) Have over three-quarters of representatives or states willing to vote with you, demonstrating overwhelming will of the people, or B.) Understand that others disagree with you that the given thing should be codified as a right. In this case, being able to move to places with the rights you want to have enshrined is a good option.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#32

Post by User23 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #4

On the edge of political rules for the site; and blunt cynicism. Congress seems woefully unprepared to regulate X; Committees have limited effectiveness; even if some members carefully listened to all testimony; partisan gridlock at present would be a limiting factor over the last 10 years. - Privacy Laws; Congress proposed laws including device manufacturers giving encryption certificates to the government; at a sim…

H-2B isn't an immigrant visa. It's for seasonal labor who comes when there is work to be done and leaves when there isn't.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#33

Post by User23 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

nh23423fefe wrote: post #13

lockhouse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founding fathers would tell you that this is a feature, not a bug. They really didn't want it to be easy for the federal government to do much. The states were meant to hold most of the power as they were closer to the people.

Fetishizing the founders and imagining that current times are playing out as they intended makes no sense. In less than 100 years the system they set up resulted in civil war. They aren't smarter than us and they don't know anything about the present. I don't care what the founders thought nor what people today imagine they would think.

Benjamin Franklin at least was smarter than the vast majority of people today and smarter than a majority of people who use this site.

I assume that you're a relatively recent migrant or descendent of migrants with no ties to the historical American nation, so I'm not surprised you wouldn't care what somebody else's ancestors think.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#34

Post by User23 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

lockhouse wrote: post #14

nh23423fefe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fetishizing the founders and imagining that current times are playing out as they intended makes no sense. In less than 100 years the system they set up resulted in civil war. They aren't smarter than us and they don't know anything about the present. I don't care what the founders thought nor what people today imagine they would think.

I don’t think current times are playing out at all as they intended. The federal government is much too large and too powerful, and Congress is too insulated from their constituents. This emboldens their corruption and playing to special interests instead of the people they are supposed to represent. This is more an indictment of 20th and 21st century politicians than it is the founders.

Congress doesn't govern. None of our "legislators" writes any substantial legislation. They just go on junkets and sign off on what the bag men tell them to. This is evidenced by how all of the fake partisan conflict instantly disappears when the shot-callers want something done, like, say, sending weapons to Ukraine.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#35

Post by lockhouse » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #30

gameman144 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the way the system is designed, a small minority can block almost any action. Again, this is a feature, not a bug. If over three-quarters of states or representatives can agree, then an amendment can get passed. If over a quarter of states or representatives don't want to codify something in the constitution, that is not a small minority. > How exactly are you interpreting that? I'm not interpreting that portio…

> If over a quarter of states or representatives don't want to codify something in the constitution, that is not a small minority. I'd say that 25% of states is a small minority of states, but in any case that's ignoring the population of states, which vary dramatically (California 39M, Wyoming 580K). 25% of the states is not necessarily 25% of the US population; it's possibly much smaller than 25%. > Every single pe…

Just because a state’s population is lower doesn’t mean their needs are less important.

Would you apply a similar standard to the LGBT community? They are approximately 7% of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#36

Post by lapcat » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:32 PM UTC

gameman144 wrote: post #31

lapcat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but many people prefer the exact opposite > people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones It's incorrect to claim that people leaving abortion-restricting states to less restrictive ones have the opposite preference to me. My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion. The idea that a woman leaving her own state to get an abortion has…

> My preference, and I'd guess their preference in most cases, is to not allow any state to outlaw abortion. Yes, but that is the preference of anyone who believes that they're right and the others are wrong. Federalist pro-life voters certainly bemoan that any state allows for abortion. The whole point of making constitutional amendments is that you either have to: A.) Have over three-quarters of representatives or…

> Yes, but that is the preference of anyone who believes that they're right and the others are wrong. Federalist pro-life voters certainly bemoan that any state allows for abortion.

Yes, I said something similar in my own comment.

> demonstrating overwhelming will of the people

The bar for "overwhelming" is too high. The status quo always benefits certain people over other people. So under this system, the status quo, and the people who already benefit from it, almost always win. And thus I claim, contrary to yours, that the country as a whole never benefits from the system.

> In this case, being able to move to places with the rights you want to have enshrined is a good option.

There's actually an important difference between having a freedom and having a right, and not every freedom needs to be a right. That's because freedom is the default in our system. No action is illegal unless a specific law is passed to outlaw that action. A Constitutional right means that the government cannot pass a law to outlaw an action. The Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion, but it did not thereby make abortion illegal. Women are still free to get an abortion, unless some government passes a law against it, which is now allowed. My point here is that you don't have to support a national Constitutional right to abortion in order to support the freedom to get an abortion. Consequently, there's still no reason to support the right of individual states to outlaw abortion, regardless of the Dobbs decision. The only reason that abortion is illegal anywhere is because individual states have passed specific laws banning it. It's a restriction of the default freedom. The states are the problem here, not the solution. There's no federal law banning abortion.

Of course there's a tradeoff here, because going back to the original long lost topic of the submitted article, regulating tech, if states have the right to pass more restrictive legislation than the federal government, that allows individual states to regulate tech in a way that Congress won't.

On the other hand, big tech companies have already shown the inclination to completely bypass entire states or indeed entire countries, so it's unclear how effectively individual states can regulate tech. And my personal opinion is that it's not a good tradeoff to allow state's rights for good causes when they have been so obviously and pervasively abused for bad causes.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#37

Post by lapcat » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

lockhouse wrote: post #35

lapcat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If over a quarter of states or representatives don't want to codify something in the constitution, that is not a small minority. I'd say that 25% of states is a small minority of states, but in any case that's ignoring the population of states, which vary dramatically (California 39M, Wyoming 580K). 25% of the states is not necessarily 25% of the US population; it's possibly much smaller than 25%. > Every single pe…

Just because a state’s population is lower doesn’t mean their needs are less important. Would you apply a similar standard to the LGBT community? They are approximately 7% of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

> Just because a state’s population is lower doesn’t mean their needs are less important.

> Would you apply a similar standard to the LGBT community? They are approximately 7% of the population.

You're mixing up rights and voting. The LGBT community doesn't get to pass or veto any laws.

A person has rights. A state is not a person. Corporations are not people, my friend. I don't believe in the concept of state's rights, so I don't accept the analogy. A state is just an arbitrary set of lines on a map. It doesn't have needs.

In the case of voting, I think the majority should decide rather than the minority, otherwise it's not really democratic. If the 7% LGBT community ruled the country, that would also be a tyranny, not a democracy.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#38

Post by tnecniv » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

gameman144 wrote: post #12

lapcat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had a lot of great ideas for the prevention of tyranny. c/had/borrowed > some parts of the Constitution as originally ratified were simply a product of reaching a compromise that both Northern and Southern states would both be on board with. A compromise that didn't even work well or last, as violently evidenced by the Civil War. > The beauty of the Constitution is that it can be changed via amendments In the…

> Amendments to the Constitution have become practically nonexistent. It seems that you're taking this as a sign that the Constitution isn't still relevant. I'd ask you to consider that this might be a sign of the exact opposite, and that we can't get broad buy-in on the things that some groups see as obvious additions. If the MLB were trying to update the rules of baseball to make it more exciting, and one camp want…

This is an aside but the MLB has been actively modifying rules the past few years. Some of them have been quite good, but others seem to contradict each other in purpose and leave me wondering what they actually want. For example, they have attempted to increase action on the bases by increasing base size and banning the shift, but they also deadened the ball so that it travels a few feet less on average.

The latter decreased home runs (at least early in the season last year, I forget end of season results), but just turns them into boring fly outs. It also didn’t really increase base running, since it wasn’t dead enough to cause most players to change their approach (mainly, try and hit a home run). I’m unsure how the ball has been this year but it’s seemed to carry more based on my casual viewing, and the MLB has been suspected of tampering with the ball for seasons / games for a few years now without discussing it (e.g., putting juiced balls in big games and tweaking the formula season to season for one reason or another).

They also mandated motion capture cameras be present in every stadium to collect data for teams and push that data to both teams and viewers, yet bemoan that baseball has become too analytics driven. Manfred (the commissioner) has complained about decisions like starting pitchers facing fewer batters, pitchers being too good in general, the shift before it was banned, and more, but these tactics have largely come about due analyzing the data.

As an organization, they generally seem confused about what they want and how to achieve it. I’m not sure if that’s due to factions within the ownership group (maybe you can draw some political parallels there), or something within the MLB leadership.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#39

Post by bwestergard » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

lockhouse wrote: post #17

jfengel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's so resistant that there isn't any debate. Those in favor of "no change" have a huge thumb on the scale, both in amendments and in legislation. There is no reason for them to ever engage in debate when simply saying "no" suits them. Even when something has overwhelming support, it can be nearly impossible. Often, people will support something (as they indicate to pollsters) but vote against it…

This is mostly due to the Democrat and Republican Party focusing on wedge issues to get reelected instead of compromising on the real national issues (common defense and interstate commerce mostly) and leaving these wedge issues to the state level instead.

The difficulty with this vision is that the states have grown continuously more economically integrated over time.

Re: Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech

#40

Post by nh23423fefe » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #33

nh23423fefe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fetishizing the founders and imagining that current times are playing out as they intended makes no sense. In less than 100 years the system they set up resulted in civil war. They aren't smarter than us and they don't know anything about the present. I don't care what the founders thought nor what people today imagine they would think.

Benjamin Franklin at least was smarter than the vast majority of people today and smarter than a majority of people who use this site. I assume that you're a relatively recent migrant or descendent of migrants with no ties to the historical American nation, so I'm not surprised you wouldn't care what somebody else's ancestors think.

This is 2 unrelated thoughts glued together. Neither of which is relevant to anything I've said.