that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy. it doesn't make society in "oligarchy". our democracy actually works really well, even with gerrymandering and some voter disenfranchisement. if all those people actually voted frequently, the policy outcomes would be a lot different.
compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.
and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.
> that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy
That does not seem correct based on the study. 100% popular support increases chances of a measure passing by 0%. If even a small percentage remains politically active, 100% population support should make some difference, and it doesn't.
Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect. At some level, people have cognizance that their efforts make no difference, so they don't bother.
Denying access to elections and legitimate election fraud seem worse. However, I feel this underestimates invisible power. It doesn't take overt violence or the threat thereof to thwart democracy. In American politics, money does the trick. We need lobbying outlawed, and to prevent the revolving door between government and big industry allowing for things like regulatory capture. Pointing to lack of overtly violent means used to thwart democracy proves nothing.
As for regular people determining policy, you might have a point. However, between regular people and ultra wealthy people making the laws for their own benefit, I'll take the flawed-from-ignorance laws of the common man over the flawed-by-greed laws of the elite. We should also perhaps try democracy before writing it off. We haven't gotten there yet.
> Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect.
People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.
People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.
Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.
What data do you want? Look at the way people change their answers to whether or not they support Medicare For All based on how the question is phrased, or support for the Affordable Care Act [1]. What you are asking for is asinine. The data is the results of elections. You are the one who has provided no evidence for your claim.
If you think what someone answers to an opinion poll matters here, you're just wrong. Show me people voting based on these issues as a primary factor and not seeing results because politicians magically change their minds after winning.
"economic elite" is literally defined as anyone in the top 10% of income by that study. Guess what income group always votes? Those same people. And they're going to be the ones pressing for action the most. [2] And they are more educated, so it's stupid to compare public opinion like this. You need to compare expert consensus to policy and public opinion.
It's not because people aren't voting - it's because our votes are not equal. We don't have "one person, one vote" here - we have "one dollar, one vote", and those with more dollars get more votes. Citizen's United infamously set that in stone. Meanwhile, rampant gerrymandering, court packing, and other anti-democratic tactics have been heavily abused over the past few decades of Republican control to further erode and cement that. Though Republicans are not the only ones accountable - Democrats are just as responsible for accepting PAC money, for instance - and the two party system is mathematically guaranteed to be intractible as a consequence of our voting system. Even if every eligible voter voted in every election, the two party system is an inevitable conseqeunce of any election outcome, and both parties are dogs of the rich.
That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.
> That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.
People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).
Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.
Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.
Ranked choice was rejected in MA because it was poorly explained to voters and they voted against it because they didn't understand it. A vote against ranked choice is a vote against your best interests, and that's an objective fact.
It’s not really debatable that money has an influence in US politics and elections. It’s also pretty clear that for presidential elections, votes are not equal for people living in different states. But to say “We don’t have ‘one person, one vote’” in this context is pretty blatantly false.
The primary reason that dollars have such an impact on elections is because dollars get spent on advertising and on canvassing and on outreach, and the impact of those things is that it gets your candidate more votes from more people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to vote. The way that dollars buy elections is via people voting.
There’s plenty of rational debate to be had about gerrymandering and campaign finance and a whole host of topics, but to throw our hands in the air and say that votes don’t matter is nonsense.
I don’t completely disagree with you: people do have agency at the end of the day in the US. That said, let’s be careful not to fall into Scotsman fallacies where we don’t accept more subtle forms of oligarchy because they don’t fit our “1984”-esque imagination. Southern states have long histories of subtle voter disenfranchisement (requiring licenses or certificates that Black Americans have in lower percentages, placing polling stations in strategic locations, requiring money to discourage the poor from voting (who lean left), etc.) and it’s short-sighted to “No true Scotsman” that and say “well, it’s not an actual oligarchy because technically people still can vote.” One, in the vein of Niemoller’s “First they came...”, it ignores warning signs or red flags difficult to reverse until it’s too late. Second, it puts the focus on the individual. Sure, people can still vote. They can take off their $#!@ job for a few hours even though their boss is an @$$#@!€ and they need every dollar they can get, take the bus to the voting station 30 minutes away, wait in the line for potentially hours (I waited in just the primary line for 8 hours and I lived in West LA (Democrat, richer, etc.) at the time), only to be told they need a driver’s license which they’ve never had because they’ve never been able to afford a car. Or they actually do have, but this is just one person and most of their friends aren’t voting. Sure, this is possible. But then I ask you to reflect on the purpose of a democratic government if not to enable fair, free, and accessible elections? Especially now that the incumbent president is sueing and refusing to accept the results in a - I don’t way to say decisive, but clear perhaps - election, I guess I would like to know what it takes to consider that “legitimate election fraud”? Is it simply missing the f@$cist aesthetic of red, black, echo-y microphones over a rabid crowd, tanks and semi-automatics down the streets? Once again, once things progress to that level, it might be too late, but that doesn’t mean our current circumstances are any “less” of an “actual oligarchy” just because theyre not as obvious. IMO
> That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again.
This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness.
Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2).
The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.
It isn't only guesswork -- there is a lot of reading and researching involved too. I figured that was obvious but perhaps it was not. The point is that it is learning by doing rather than rote memorization and recall. It is easier for me to do something, see the result, and figure out what went wrong if it didn't work. It allows me to understand the function behind something, versus just being told "this is how to do something and you should always do it this way" without an explanation as to why.
What works for you isn't what works for everybody. And I'm absolutely not denying the importance of learning theory.
I have to chorus GP. Learning by doing before I have a great understanding or perhaps sometimes far earlier (of course talking about studies on my own time) makes me think through the how and why more thoroughly partly because there is a tanglible goal of getting the piece of code to function as intended versus a more nebulous guess at having understood or not.
something being popular and eliminating other options is not inherently bad. there is nothing wrong with one company acquiring a monopoly through superior service. you can attack amazon's behavior as anticompetitive, but that's not what you're doing here.
exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)
they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.
for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.
because most companies do not recognize roblox as a platform, they recognize it as a game. nobody realizes that the development of games on it is on a similar level to web development, it's like explaining social media to congressmen.
it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.
apple's policy here is a bad one. if it were fully remove, true web browser diversity could come to iOS, and roblox could finally do JIT compilation of Lua, among so many other possibilities.
> it's not them getting special treatment purposefully. it's been on the iOS app store since 2012.
So they're grandfathered in? I wonder how much of their valuation can be attributed to the fact that it's essentially impossible for anyone to make a competitor available on iOS?
Respectfully, I don't think I'm spending too much time online to be cognizant of the fact that we have an administration that is very much capable of doing so.
Wait, on the one hand there's the perception of "Trump just tweets whatever comes to his mind", and on the other hand he/whoever actually runs it is drafting tweets, they're purposefully leaking these drafts to NK to gather what they'd feel like if that was sent? That doesn't seem to fit together.
I don’t have the means (or time or interest) to do this analysis myself, but it has been claimed that half that accounts’ tweets are him personally and the other half are a team: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/
It’s already been documented that there is a Twitter guy who works closely with Mr. Trump who originates most of the tweets and then gets approval to send them. It was kind of a big deal because he has his own office very close (physically) to the Oval Office. There was a profile of him done a few years ago. I think it was on CBS News.
He's not exactly the only one to 'worry' about on Twitter. Here you have the Supreme leader of Iran who 'actually' posted a tweet as a call to violence to 'destroy' another country via a tweet. [0]
If Trump tweeted just that or something similar, it would have been removed instantly. But this one and others from the supreme leader of Iran are still publicly available for all to see.
But nothing violent here or anything to worry about I guess?
There's pretty reasonable odds that Trump literally murdered Solemani because Soleimani was constantly owning him on Twitter (or more accurately, that Trump said yes to the same set of belligerent Iran war hawks he normally says no to because he recognized the name from Twitter.)
there isn't a tweet you can send that will start a war unless the administration sending it is willing to confirm that is indeed a move they're making. you think diplomats are idiots.
sorry you just don't understand how the world works. nobody is ever starting a war over twitter, not least because people understand that accounts can be hacked. and the president's twitter account tweeting about a war would mean the president gets a call within 2 minutes. it would never happen.
north korea would absolutely never initiate a war over a tweet, they're fully rational.
also nice link to an article about a tweet that the president actually wanted to send, as opposed to a hacker tweeting, which would be denied by the white house within 15 minutes.
I guess on a tech forum, all the techies like to feel powerful. Also, words have never been taken more serious than before. Im sure you have noticed cancel culture. Now it's say what we like or your next!
Stuxnet can/should start wars, your social media app is just that, a social media app, let's not blow too hard.
> you may be unaware of better alternatives because of anticompetitive behaviour by Google
google provides all of the best services in each of its major consumer categories unless you value privacy, except when there's a major competitor. there's no hidden gem better than youtube that would scale as well.
well the nations that saw others that were primitive, were much poorer, for example china and india were the 2 richest nations in the world, whilst britan was very poor and needed the industrial revolution, not india or china.
armed robbers randomly targeting people are not criminal masterminds. they are often hastily planned, or are completely opportunistic. you could easily accidentally shoot someone, or the victim says or does something you didn't expect, or you panic. it's very believable someone would abandon a botched robbery.
bloomingdale, washington d.c., where he got shot, has a rate of robbery almost 4x the national average, and twice the murder rate.
compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.
and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.