Ya know, I'm not so sure about that. The whole premise of democracy is that we are, collectively, smarter than any of us individually. Somehow, the average of the guesses comes out as closer to the truth than any of the guesses. Uninformed voters on one side of the issue cancel out uninformed voters on the other side of the issue.

There's a lot of reason to be dubious about that, but to be frank, the vast majority of voters are very uninformed about practically every issue. Any significant topic requires years or decades of study to be really expert on. And most voters will go in with nothing more than they've read in the newspaper, or worse, on TV. Take any topic you actually know in detail; do you think that any reporter has ever understood it? Here on Slashdot we regularly complain about how science and technology are misrepresented and misunderstood. Do you really think that reporting on energy issues, the economy, or foreign affairs is any better?

I'm always glad for people to want to know more, but practically everybody goes into the voting booth with a massive case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, convinced that they know the topic far better than they actually do. The whole point of democracy is to try to take that into account. Usually, we're actually voting for people to represent us, and they often know it a bit better than we do (or at least, they have advisers who do), but in the end we're really just hoping that the representative on the side of the truth will have slightly more followers than the representative who has it wrong. Democracy is designed to expose a slight bias towards reality, even if few of the individuals involved can actually justify that bias.

I'd love to live in a meritocracy where only the best experts are making decisions... but who's going to pick those experts? I'd be happy if it were me, but I bet you wouldn't be. Democracy is the closest thing I've ever seen to a fair way to pick. And if so, it only works because everybody gets to take their best guess. I suspect that the ones who know enough to know that they don't know very much are better qualified to take their guess than those who don't even know that they don't know.

Especially when you've got a news media which gets its best viewership by telling them how smart they are and that all of the smart people agree with them. They're the most dangerous voters of them all, and they vote in droves. And I can't think of any fair way to keep them out of the polls. So everybody might as well go out and vote.

Obama, by himself, can't do anything legislatively. As I explained above, the Democrats couldn't do anything by themselves except during a brief period in 2009, during which time they managed to produce one epoch-making piece of legislation.

It's true that Democrats don't work well together, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The Democratic party represents a number of different points of view. The health care bill that we did get is driven by the fact that a number of Democrats are genuinely uncomfortable with single-payer legislation. You can call that "in the pockets of big business" but they were genuinely reflecting their constituents desires (as demonstrated by the fact that most of them got creamed anyway by accusations of "soshulizm" in the next election). The Democrats' big-tent mentality is what wins them the Presidency; Republican insistence on ideology is keeping them from scoring a national majority.

The Republicans have been seen as highly effective, but only in banding together as the "party of no". You're going to see them produce little to no real legislation over the next two years, unless they radically change. The few positive ideas they have are not broadly acceptable (lowering taxes on the wealthy, eliminating social safety nets). You'll notice that they haven't been touting any alternative to the ACA, and if they try to repeal without replacing they'll find that a lot of people like actual provisions of the act. (The one they don't like is the one that pays for it, and I'd be tickled to see them eliminate *just* the coverage requirement, which would be hilarious.)

Now the Democrats get to spend two years filibustering everything the Republicans try to do (primarily eliminating environmental and safety regulations) and look more or less unified in the process. They still won't look unified, because they've got more than enough votes for the filibuster, which means that some Senators who imagine their seats are vulnerable will cross lines, but they'll be there when they need to be. And that's as the Democrats come into what should be a strong 2016, as they take back some seats that they shouldn't have lost in the 2010 wave election (just as the Republicans last year took back some seats they shouldn't have lost in 2008).

Which returns us to a Democratic Senate, probably a Democratic President, and probably a Republican House come 2017. At which point the Democrats will again fail to push a liberal agenda because they're not really a liberal party, and haven't been for a very long time. They're the party of everybody driven away by the batshit right-wing agenda of the Republicans.

Well... there is the competition from the other TV suppliers, who will try to undercut them in order to get the business for a slightly reduced profit margin.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sniff. I kill me.

No, seriously... I don't expect that this is going to dramatically cut bills on average. Some people will pay less; some will pay more. The total amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on their TV won't change, and this doesn't alter either the supply or the demand.

The cable and satellite companies do compete with each other, a little. Customers who do watch a lot of channels are going to want to continue their package deals, and won't want to pay higher prices. The customers who want individual channels will probably find that that prices are pretty high, and while they can threaten to switch to their competitor, they too will be willing to sacrifice their bottom line only so far to attract that customer. So expect it to be pretty high from both providers.

When was that, exactly? The Democrats haven't had control of the House since 2010. They did have a brief period where they had a veto-proof majority, back in 2009, but that only lasted a couple of months (after the Minnesota election was finally resolved, and before Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by a Republican). They devoted that time to health care. They didn't expect to maintain that advantage long, though they didn't expect it to end quite so soon.

Since then, there has been no chance of anything passing. Nothing has passed since then, aside from naming a few post offices and re-authorizing existing laws. I agree that the Democrats don't expect this bill to pass, and that this is more publicity stunt than serious attempt at legislation, but they might well be willing to pass it (or something like it) if they could. But they can't; the last Congress was the least productive in history and this Congress may manage to be even worse.

It's short only because it's telling the FCC to do the real work. The key bit is:

A lot of major laws are like that. The law itself grants some kind of authority to an executive branch department, and they come up with the regulations that implement that authority. That can often run into many thousands of pages, and they can change literally every single day. Regulated industries often have employees whose sole job it is to ensure that they're in compliance with the regulations.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Congress aren't experts in the domain. The executive branch employees are (or at least, are supposed to be). They work with the industry experts to clarify all of the corner cases and vaguenesses that make up any complex issue. And the issues are complex; they often seem simple to outsiders but only because they don't know what they're looking at. The same thing probably happens in your job.

The departments aren't completely unsupervised. They report, ultimately, to Presidential appointees, who have to be approved by Congress and produce regular reports to the Congress. And when things go wrong, they get hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves.

Er, digression aside... what would have happened were the bill to pass (it won't) is that the FCC would produce a lengthy set of regulations, which would surely provoke all kinds of outrage as the actual nitty-gritty details are less pleasant than the overall sentiment. In fact, I'd say that they're aware that it won't pass, which is why they get to make it so vague. Real bills, the kind where they want to strictly limit the authority of the departments to get exactly what they want, are the result of compromises within the legislature and are usually much more detailed. You can get the details in legislation or in regulation; the former is more permanent and the latter is more flexible, which can be good or bad depending on your point of view of the matter at hand. But there will be details, and they're going to be voluminous.

The summary and the Ars article are wrong. Or rather, they might well be capable of such things, but that's not what the FBI is arguing for in this case. If you click through to the original article that Ars is basing this on, they are not making a claim that it's legal to do so. They're claiming that the envelope information is legal for them to record.

Strictly, this is recording only the fact of a conversation, rather than the content. It's "envelope information", the kind of thing that would also be visible in public on a letter, recording timestamp, location, and addresses (though technically a letter doesn't require a return address the way a phone call does.) It's more akin to a record of everybody you've spoken to, rather than a record of everything you've said.

Not saying that there isn't still a qualitative difference, am I'm in no position to make a legal judgment. I'm just clarifying that they're not arguing for the right to actually record the conversation.

I agree that it *needs* to be changed, but the idea of it actually being changed strikes me as unlikely. The law of the land, as defined by the Supreme Court (which has the sole power to decide what the Second Amendment means), is basically, "Yay, guns".

And enough people agree with them on that that it is effectively impossible to get any law passed. There is a pretty high bar to passing legislation (half the House PLUS 60% of the Senate PLUS the President, plus a review by the Supreme Court). Altering the Second Amendment sets an even higher bar. A fairly trivial and widely popular bit of gun legislation failed a few years ago, and I don't think anything has changed since then.

So while I'd love to see basically any new kind of legislation passed to cope with the fact that a gun is a very different thing in 2015 than in 1791, I just don't see it happening. Maybe if these guys took their newly-printed guns and started popping off shots at the Capitol itself, but I honestly don't believe that even that would suffice.

OK, that makes sense. Thanks.

What I'm not getting: OK, so there's a new kind of plane up there, flying especially high. Does it look that much more like a UFO than other planes? Up that high, isn't it just a speck? People are calling in to report, "Look, I saw a speck in the sky, it must be aliens"?

This is very true, but one difference is that the battles took up more "screen time" in the films. Tolkien's battles were epic but abstract. Jackson's aimed to humanize the characters but the outlandish stunts contradicted that.

It worked better for LOTR than Hobbit.

Your description sounds most like Deep Space Nine, and yeah, I thought that was the best-written show of the series. (TOS is still my sentimental favorite.)

But it never made the jump to movies, and probably couldn't. TOS and TNG both got a lot more action-oriented on the big screen. The bigger screen raises the stakes, which is usually going to mean some kind of world-ending conflict rather than a mere interpersonal conflict. Even movie 4, which is the most personal and scaled-back of the films, had an apocalyptic frame story and a few good action sequences. And while Khan (the good one) was also a very personal story, it was also a classic Horatio Hornblower ship battle.

I'd love to see a new Trek series set in a place where they could tell smaller stories. I think that Starfleet would be kind of inevitable, since I don't see them ever giving up on the ability to tell action stories, but there are ways to make that less focused on the epic. There was, decades ago, a notion of a series set at Starfleet Academy, which could be good if done well. That's just one idea.

As long as it's all about the films, I expect them to continue looking a lot like they have been. They can do better than they have been, especially now that they've spent two films introducing the characters (who bear only a thin resemblance to the TOS characters), they can start to make the relationships work. (As opposed to pretending that we're going to care about a fake death sequence crammed full of fan service.)

Yeah, you can try. Of my two cats, one would have nothing whatsoever to do with it, and the other one made it about a week before freaking out and peeing on the floor instead.

Not everybody's cats are as dumb as mine (these are among the dumbest cats I've ever met), but at least anecdotally the whole cat-toilet idea isn't as easy as it sounds.

Thanks for that. I find myself increasingly bugged by this kind of argument by misleading analogy. "X is like Y. You agree with me about Y. Therefore you must agree with me about X." It basically frames the entire argument around the differences between X and Y, rather than taking X on its own terms.

It's kind of galling, since it basically assumes that I'll agree that X is identical to Y. Therefore, either I'm stupid for not realizing that X and Y are identical, or you're stupid for not recognizing that there are meaningful differences. I'm betting it's the latter, but even without that assumption, it's hard to see how we proceed from the demonstration that at least one of the parties to the conversation is stupid.

Oh, it definitely sounds like the majority of humanity the majority of the time. I just don't think it's one of our more admirable traits.

In our case, it's necessary, because we evolved with mediocre brains. I'd like to see our successors do better. They aren't yet, which is what this article is pointing out. This promising system isn't ready yet. It's just not wrong for the reasons that the GGP post thought.