Small problem with that is even benign changes to other components on a car (intake, exhaust, cams, etc.) usually require changes to the ECU, and this legislation effectively locks out tuner shops, who are qualified to make changes to the ECU.

If you are to go down the route of lowest common denominator of what people have the experience or knowledge to do, do we outlaw doing your own lawn care, since you might misuse the chemicals involved? Do we outlaw people canning their own foods, since most people are not trained to federal safety standards regarding? Or wiping your own butt, since people have not been trained in the transmission of E Coli. and Hep A?

Next will be telling me I can't change a lighting fixture since I'm not an electrician.

Too much of being even moderately bright is banging your head against convention and a society that doesn't cater to you, but the lowest common denominator. A lot of motivation is simply having the will to work out a better method and hoping others will adopt it. Mostly they don't, and remember these are the same people by whom you judge your success. As one of my instructors put it, it doesn't matter if you are the smartest person in the world if no one else glimpses the horizon you see.

Even the very brightest have their determination beat out of them simply because they realize how pointless it is. The best and brightest mostly don't rise to the top. They simply create defensive strategies to get by as best as possible on their own terms, and display their intellect in ways that doesn't get much reward or attention unless it is furthering the status quo.

Yeah, but that has its own set of problems, vis-à-vis “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for making difficult subjects easier to approach, but when you have to dress it up with celebrity and T&A, it seem to be missing the point that these things are interesting and worth knowing about in their own right, and not because it has some celebrity endorsement.

There already has been enough problems with dumbing down in regards to science reporting that I'm not certain moving even further down that path is a good idea.

It's a bit more than that.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely already had a history of sensationalistic sexual abuse stories, but she was award-winning and pretty much beyond reproach.

That no one decided to maybe look into her past history of negligent reporting was suspect, but rape culture is the zeitgeist of the times. Can't let something like facts and accountability get in the way.

And even now, the campus rape epidemic has taken on the tenor of the satanic ritual sexual abuse moral panic of the 80s. And just like McMartin, the allegations have proven to be false, yet people seem hellbent on continuing this witch hunt with ever more extreme tactics. People old enough remember how every media outlet joined the fray as they quietly swept the sexual abuse by priests under the rug. This is bigger than Rolling Stone, who are just patsies to the madness of the times.

Method could be as involved as, I forget the name, but the system was people chosen at random to then choose the next group of people to choose the next group of people, and seven iterations that group then finally choose the representatives. Or you could just select from the social security numbers in a state. Fairly anonymous then.

As other people have mentioned, increasing the numbers of representatives makes it cost prohibitive to buy legislation. If people are chosen randomly, you get a broad section of the population who don't have re-election campaigns to donate to. They serve three years and then they are gone, replaced by the next lot who have no allegiances to previous backroom deals. Downside is it also makes it near impossible to pass legislation, so you need clear delineations of authority, and even greater checks and balances. Citizen juries have already been used in lower government functions to good effect, so it's not like it is unprecedented.

Regarding fairness, it isn't absolute, as it will still have a strong element of majority rule, except for the occasional fluke, however, it is proven to be more effective:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455

There is too much vested interest in maintaining the current power structure for any substantive legislative change to happen within my lifetime. At this point, short of open revolt, there will be nothing except for a dog and pony show, with a token reform here and there.

Nope, I'm looking more for future generations, and up and coming countries to learn from our mistakes and institute something new. We are not even a federal republic anymore, but an oligarchy, and as with all corrupted governments, a footnote on the way towards a better society.

I'd be in favor of creating a third branch of congress, made up solely of people chosen at random from their respective states.

Give them the right to veto legislation, maybe not create bills, and otherwise oversee congress.

We'd have a federal democratic republic then.

A bit slow on the uptake, ain't 'cha?

In the grand scheme of things, who is responsible for passenger safety? Is it the GAO? Is it the FAA? Is it aircraft manufacturers who design inflight entertainment systems? Is it the airlines that purchase said systems?

Yes.

Um, no.

As is the case libertarians make, regulations should be a measure of last resort, when corporations have proven to be too incompetent to address a problem themselves, and require the gentle guiding hand of government to urge them to get their shit together.

If anything, regulations set a standard of a bare minimum, which isn't exactly what you want in this age of TSA gropings, omnibus metadata collection, and meddling government at 40,000 feet in the air.

If libertarian arguments are to be believed, the invisible hand of airlines and aircraft manufacturers would have come up with safety measures through competition and allowing armed passengers to shoot anyone they believed to hacking into flight controls, and yet here we have the GAO, perhaps the least partisan government office, urging the FAA to even further meddle in the affairs of business. It's not like the passengers couldn't have sued after they crashed.

Not really. Solitary confinement is more a study in sensory deprivation. Child molesters are pretty much cut off from most social interaction, lest they get beat to death, but while away their time reading books, doing crafts and like, and most importantly, have a definite release date, so they get by okay with limited social interaction.

A man can endure most anything as long as he knows it will end eventually, and he has something to occupy himself.

And even then, I'm not certain the emphasis on socialness is all that it seems to be. There is a persistent myth that all humans require social interaction, but they never differentiate it from sensory deprivation, so it is hard to say what exactly they are measuring. More than social interaction, people require novelty and new things to occupy their time. Several people are perfectly at ease with never seeing another face for years at a time. What is going to be hard is seeing the same face, especially locked up in a tin can hurtling through space.

Antarctic research stations usually sign on for 6 month stints. Several usually sign on again and again, so it's clear that the right tight-knit group is able to go long periods without much outside interaction. The data is already there. You just have to be smart enough to look for it.

Which, again, is libertarians unable to differentiate between bad regulation and no regulation, and engaging in FUD.

So please, enlighten me: how will Title II regulation lead to DMCA, SOPA, or hate speech codes? If anything, Title II ensures those things won't happen because, get this, the internet is already regulated (now) under some of the loosest standards under law. Any new regulations coming down the pike will affect much much more than the internet, since it will have to cover all of Title II, and will be a bigger fight.

In fact, I'm rather interested in how Title II will affect mass surveillance, as the laws concerning are much more stringent.

As with most anything, it's a question of tradeoffs. As libertarian utopia isn't coming any time soon, it might behoove libertarians to consider which ones they are willing to make, instead of this thinly veiled corporate pandering of a very narrow reading of libertarian philosophy.

This is one of the areas Reason (and quite a few libertarians to boot) have shot themselves in the foot.

They don't cite specific instances of where Title II will bring about the doomsday scenarios they paint, and instead engage in FUD over any regulation (which, contrary to popular claim, libertarians should be for as long as they are sensible and fair and needed).

Instead of railing against the corporate welfare telecos have gotten or that they have gotten immunity for illegal wiretapping, they planted their flag here, which apparently works for this illiterate brand of libertarianism, and have completely omitted the question that brought this about in the first place: customers not receiving their advertized bandwith.

I mean, they open with a quote from Hayek. Except Hayek was also a proponent of basic income and land value taxes.

Imagine Reason discussing that other aspect of libertarian thought.

Not bloody likely.

Ehh...

You could couch the discussion more broadly as influence, as in even privacy wouldn't matter much except for the broad range of powers government has to act upon it. Someone wealthy enough to have servants has a great deal less privacy, but their underlings don't have (mostly) the power to do anything with that knowledge.

In which case the distinction between left and right is less about privacy per se, but sphere of control- the right has areas where they deem government interference/oversight necessary (which requires government intrusion) and so does the left: the teleco amnesty bill was passed when democrats controlled both houses of congress, and was supported by the prominent members of congress (including one Barack Obama) along with overwhelming support from the republican minority.

Republicans especially should know better that these powers get misused, but when the cause is 'Merica , freedom, and fighting terrorist, principle goes out the window (as it does with both parties), and it is a question of expediency.

Problem is, it isn't expedient anymore, and both parties are suffering from memory loss in how they contributed to the problem.

It's give and take.

You can talk about open labor markets, but the labor from the US (for example) isn't free to move to India, accept a lower wage and lower cost of living). It is unidirectional, and that too distorts the playing field.

I mean if you want to argue for uniform standards like the EU, where any person is free to settle in a member state, that's different I haven't heard about Europe having a shortage of tech works to a point of having to lobby for special visas, so I have to wonder what makes the US a special case, and especially big corporations that have a worldwide presence and should be able to recruit locally seem to only be having this problem.

It's the same issue with taxes, where the wealthy seem to be champions of tax cuts, but only for them. And then they have the gall to demand schools tailored to their needs, forcing the bill on everyone else. That's not competition, that's corruption, and those chickens too are coming home to roost.

Adding-

As with much comedy today, it is a sad commentary that comedy is more informed and can better deconstruct the issues. Hell, there was more actual journalism in the comedy bit than has been in most media accounts of Snowden.

That irreverence was the tone is to be expected. It's comedy. But that itself implicates most media as being near worthless when something done for laughs has more weight than the 24/7 news cycle, who have constitutional protections I might add, and whose job it is to cover this in the first place.