Kaveren (u/Kaveren) - Readit News

Kaveren commented on Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming tillis.senate.gov/2020/12... · Posted by u/totaldude87

ddevault · 5 years ago

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.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

> Citizen's United infamously set that in stone.

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.

Kaveren commented on Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming tillis.senate.gov/2020/12... · Posted by u/totaldude87

ulisesrmzroche · 5 years ago

You don't have any data backing your claims.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

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.

Not to mention the Electoral College and Senate.

What data do you expect?

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-vs-affordable-care-... [2] https://econofact.org/voting-and-income

Kaveren commented on Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming tillis.senate.gov/2020/12... · Posted by u/totaldude87

theonemind · 5 years ago

> 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.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

> 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.

Kaveren commented on Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming tillis.senate.gov/2020/12... · Posted by u/totaldude87

Futurebot · 5 years ago

We're an oligarchy, that's why:

'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'

Kaveren · 5 years ago

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.

Kaveren commented on To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language news.mit.edu/2020/brain-r... · Posted by u/chmaynard

beowulfey · 5 years ago

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.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

The better alternative is just to learn thoroughly and apply knowledge as much as you can. You can explore without guesswork.

Kaveren commented on To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language news.mit.edu/2020/brain-r... · Posted by u/chmaynard

beowulfey · 5 years ago

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. I’m relearning C++ now and am doing it a similar way (albeit I have to be a little more careful because compilation makes it a lot slower).

At one point, I wondered if this same strategy would make for a good (human) language learning app. Kind of like you described... rather than something like Duolingo where you have to memorize answers, it might help to have a conversational app where you see the results of your attempts in real time.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

> 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.

Kaveren commented on Amazon hires 427,000 people in 10 months nytimes.com/2020/11/27/te... · Posted by u/brian_herman

CPLX · 5 years ago

Exactly. In ecological systems we don't get confused when a single species or type of cell replicates out of control and crowds out everything else. It's instantly, and intuitively, understandable as a pathology. A lesson that seems to suddenly get forgotten when we see it happening in an economic ecosystem.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

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.

Kaveren commented on Roblox S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... · Posted by u/xoxoy

ehnto · 5 years ago

I think it would be naive to not imagine advertising as part of the long term strategy for a platform like this. After they go public, it's going to be a big tool in their toolkit for profitability.

Kaveren · 5 years ago

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.

_kxbd commented on Roblox S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... · Posted by u/xoxoy

modeless · 5 years ago

That's a very good question. Also it seems that Roblox games are scripted in Lua. How do they get away with running downloaded user scripts inside their app?

The App Store review guidelines prohibit this very clearly:

> Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not [...] download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app [...]

There is only one narrow exception which clearly does not apply to Roblox for several reasons; for example it's only for HTML5 content.

Tim Cook just testified to Congress that all developers are treated equally, but this seems like a clear case where an app that is "too big to fail" gets special treatment.

_kxbd · 5 years ago

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.