491–500 of 534 posts
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Of course, the math says that with the current voting system, any third party that emerges as a major force will always consume one of the existing major parties, leading the nation back to a two party system. I wonder why people always ignore this inconvenient theorem.
To which theorem do you refer ...?
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No, what matters is tradeoffs. Is one party's set of policies far more problematic than those of the other party?
"The lesser of two evils" is an important consideration in who to support politically, but the "absolute values" are even moreso--otherwise you're merely being blown about by trends, only ever getting closer to good policy by chance, rather than actively pursuing good policy. If neither party's policies are good, that absolutely matters.
If Hillary Clinton was president or if the Democrats had control of one chamber of Congress, this bill never would have passed.
This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…
I supported the FCC's move to assist with consumer privacy, although it was a tough call. I oppose what the Republican Congress is doing. Having said all of that, the FCC has no freaking business defining privacy. The system was terribly out of whack to have them do this in the first place. My support of their move and my opposition to what Congress is currently doing is simply because I'm trying to pick the lesser o…
I would agree that the remit of Congress is to govern the people, by the people, and privacy falls under that umbrella. The executive branch should not be operating as an independent law-making body, as it has been.
I would gently suggest that when geeks look at politics, it's much like looking at a huge codebase written for decades - our reaction is that it's corrupt and needs a rewrite. I have learned through very careful study and hard experience that often there are good reasons for codebases to be "crufty", and similar with politics. Doesn't mean reform can't be done, but it means we have to work within the codebase, and with the current web of loyalties to some extent.
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> I'd just like to register my opinion that I don't see Washington Post is an objective, nor even a trustworthy source at this point. That's because you probably believe that the Illuminati or clockwork elves are real.
Or maybe its because operation mockingbird never went away and wapo is quantifiably part of that core narrative group. Yours is the kind of negative, noncontributory comment I would'nt be surprised to see dang flag.
Your comment consists entirely of conspiracy theories and personal attacks.
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>but ice tea is a type of tea No it's not. "Ice" or (more appropriately IMO) "iced" a state of tea. Find me 'ice' or 'iced' on this page: https://www.teasource.com/pages/types-of-tea Nobody is making tea from ice. If they were, then you could call it 'ice tea'.
Ok, even if I accept that, it's not a reason to prefer the term "iced tea" to "ice tea". Ice algae are not made from ice, for example -- they are algae that are found in ice. The point is that in noun-noun compounding, the semantic relationship between the two nouns varies widely from case to case (far more widely than the distinction we are nitpicking over between "apple pie" and "ice(d) tea"). https://en.wikipedia.…
Which makes sense, because it's referring to a type of algae found in ice.
If there were a type of tea that only grew or were only found in ice, then it might make sense to call it 'ice tea'. However, that's not the case because it's regular tea that has been 'iced'.
This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…
I agree. Do you have any particular recommendations for how we might engage on this particular problem?
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Although this is mostly true, it's not entirely true (at least in the house).
You're correct and I edited my comment. I suspect that that may just be a tactic to save face in vulnerable districts rather than a sincere desire to oppose the bill.
And the only reason Democrats voted against it was a tactic to save face for their constituents back home.
Why in the world would you think some politicians are magically sincere while others are not just by the little letter in parenthesis after their name?
Hyper partisan people that think this way are the reason political discourse has gone to shit and everything turns into some childish red team vs blue team ideology. As you keep propagating this mindset, people on both sides keep turning up the volume on their echo chamber and we get the most partisan congress (on both sides) in a hundred years[1].
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/13/he...
This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…
When was this earlier time?
The culture has shifted and moved, but the "avoid politics, it's evil" mentality still hangs around, a lot.
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This vote had a bad result, and the Rs were pushing the bad thing. But a bit of puttering around older newspaper articles reveals the Democrats have also done their fair share of problematic votes here. Obama's Administration was not particularly sympathetic to these sorts of concerns, although more so than the current Administration. The EFF had more than a few things to say. I don't mean to exculpate the Rs or go "…
The rules in place were put in by the Obama administration FCC. The same people who setup net neutrality rules that are waiting to be gutted. "I'm trying to be fair" is exactly the problem with whataboutism.
But I think I'm done with this conversation. Thank you for your time.
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If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it. Of course, since you don't know the fi…
You are embarrassing yourself. Care to offer a testable hypothesis? You appear to predict that the market, with this rule repeal, will not yield any non-tracking ISP options. Is that your prediction? You may wish to read this (now antiquated) document, which details why verticalization was market-motivated in the oil industry in the industrial age: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Vertical-Inte... And,…
Also, I was talking about the oil industry 110 years ago, not the modern energy industry. A similar modern industry to ISPs is telecom, and the only reason that those companies haven't all merged together is because of antitrust law (which you would also want repealed if you were consistent at all).