Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today, with people getting arrested for their political views instead of just deported. not to mention segregation and such.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
> Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today,
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
it was a good witch hunt. we very much almost lost the Cold War to the soviets. the US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR. The majority of intellectuals glazed the Soviet Union.
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.
I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
Yes they are trying to change the laws to be more oppressive which I don't like, but at least they aren't doing that illegally.
I feel the EU level is not very democratic since its more removed from voters, similar to the US federal level, I see the same kinds of problems in both. As long as the EU doesn't get the same level of power as the US federals I am happy though since local lawmakers can fix things.
Direct vendor download? Sure, as long as it’s signed with an attestation key that’s countersigned by Apple. Running an app not signed this way is definitely possible, but requires invoking a hidden menu and then still has startup delay as the attestation check fails.
HN as always drastically overstates how hard it is to run non-AppStore software.
Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.
HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.
It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.
You need to think bigger. Once we have separate lanes just for the waymos, we don't need them to be regular roadways. We can scale up the waymo even more and size the lane exactly to the vehicle, maybe even radically redesign the road surface for lower rolling resistance. What a future it will be.
By forming those waymos like aerodynamic bullets, they could reach ridiculously high speeds on those special lanes. Something like 200 mph should be possible.
Maybe the waymos could be powered by overhead wires?
I'm having a hard time even picturing such a thing, but I have no doubt that Waymo could manage to operate them in cities across the nation, with sufficient re-training.
Now, sir, you're in pure fantasy land. Next you'll be asking for columns of them chained together to carry hundreds of people together, stopping at designated locations.
You joke, but the reality is going to be dynamic self-driving buses that don't have preset routes or stops but respond to instant demand.
You'll pay $$$ for a nonstop ride into midtown in a dedicated vehicle, or $ for a short dedicated ride to a self-driving bus you only need to wait a few minutes for, and which will drop you off on your destination block.
So yes -- self-driving buses seamlessly integrated into ride sharing are certainly going to be a major part of 21st century urban transportation. Which will save a ton of time compared to current buses.
I could also see potential efficiencies to scheduling your bus stops in advance, maybe with some configuration to set how far you're willing to walk, how long you're willing to wait, how long a grace period you want in the event that you're running late, what time you need to arrive by, how many seats you need, and whether or not you need access to luggage/bike storage. (Each of these values would of course impact the cost of your trip; in the worst case scenario, if your configuration couldn't be reconciled with enough other people's to fit you into an efficient bus ride, then you might just be offered a regular car ride.)
You could even set that up on a recurring schedule, sort of like a school bus system that dynamically adjusts to everyone's locations and requirements and instantly remaps routes as passengers are added and removed to the schedule.
I would like that just as much as the next guy but the problem of public transport cannot be addressed until you first address the problem of anti social behavior on public transport.
That’s just being around people. We gotta live together as people; the idea that we can atomize ourselves away from the society we live in is more disastrous to the shared social fabric than any amount of people listening to music without headphones.
One of the big, big advantages of Waymo is not being in a car with a stranger. I know quite a few women who don’t mind paying extra for Waymo over Uber/Lyft.
Far more people might able to afford a Waymo than a personal (in person) chauffeur.
Contrast Apple TV with YouTube; or Crunchyroll vs Youtube. Then step it up to BD. There is such a huge difference between 4K “fast”, 4K “main”, and the 4K “high” used on BDs.
“Strong moderation” and “manual checks” and pro-active age verification are exactly the burdens that would prevent someone from running a small community forum.
You do not need age verification in the vast majority of cases.
Moderation is part and parcel of running forums and all platforms and software provide tools for this, it's nothing new. If someone is not prepared to read submissions or to react quickly when one is flagged then perhaps running a forum is too much of a commitment for them but I would not blame the law.
In fact I believe that forum operators in the UK already got in legal trouble in the past, long before the Online Safety Act, because they ignored flagging reports.
Not the OP but I don’t recall the actual law saying 24/7 moderation was required.
Given the UK already has a “watershed” time where terrestrial TV can broadcast mature content between set hours (from 9pm), I cannot see why the same expectation shouldn’t exist that moderation isn’t happening outside of reasonable hours.
Typically with laws in the UK (and EU too) is to use more generalised language to allow the law a little more flexibility to apply correctly for more nuanced circumstances. Such as what is practical for a small forum to achieve when its specialty isn’t anything to do with adult content.
You’ll definitely find examples where such laws are abused from time to time. But they’re uncommon enough that they make national news and create an uproar. Thus the case goes nowhere due to the political embarrassment that department draws to itself.
Though to be clear, I’m not defending this particular law. It’s stupid and shouldn’t exist.
Reacting quickly means what's proportionate and reasonable. This is quite standard wording for a law.
The Act (section 10 about illegal content) says that "In determining what is proportionate for the purposes of this section, the following factors, in particular, are relevant—
(a) all the findings of the most recent illegal content risk assessment
(b) the size and capacity of the provider of a service."
"24 hour coverage" is the maximum that can be achieved so it's not going to be proportionate in many, if not most, cases. People have to ask themselves if it is proportionate for a one-man gardening forum to react within 5 minutes at 3am, and the answer is not going to be "yes".
Obviously you can also automatically hide a flagged submission until it is reviewed or have keywords-based checks, etc. I believe these are a common functionalities and they will likely develop more (and yes, a consequence might be to push more people towards big platforms).
People need to have a calm analysis, not hysteria or politically-induced obtuseness whatever one might think of this Act. If they are a small and not in the UK they can probably completely ignore in any case.
I'm not an expert, but isn't that exactly what rich people who live off interest rates do? Why is bad when a country does the same? I understand the risks mentioned, but why are they acceptable when people with capital does that?
Lets take the extreme, lets assume that Norway is an island and has a $50t wealth for 5m people. $10m each. Assume 2% return on that wealth, $200k a year income. Great, everyone is happy.
Who empties the bins? Or repairs the road?
You end up importing those people from elsewhere, just like the wealthy parasites do. Oil countries like Qatar are like this. It's not a good thing.
A centi-millionaire, in Qatar, Norway or New York, can live for free without doing any work, and will see their wealth grow about $10m a year off the backs of other people, people who won't earn anywhere near $10m in a lifetime.
Other people who aren't as wealthy do the work.
Imagine you are on an island with 10 billionaire CEOs and 10 people who have no net worth but know how to fish, cook, build etc.
It doesn't matter how rich the billionaires are, their wealth is worthless, the person with the skills is whats valuable.
The real numbers are $340,000 per person in the fund, which at a safe withdrawal rate would be $10-13,000 per year if turned into an income stream. So not exactly fuck you money, and there's a very long way to go before they have problems with bin collection.
It's questionable the amount of fun. Norway has fairly high depression rates and doing almost anything is very expensive. Even fully employed Norwegians on average go out to eat only a couple of times a year. They also travel less and have comparatively fewer recreational activities. I'm pretty sure that anyone living almost entirely on government assistance isn't doing much else but existing.
Welfare states work best when the majority of the population has that attitude. It keeps the most people in the “producer” column and fewer people in the “being supported” column.
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