Apart from technical concerns and the fact that the new generation has more trouble with house ownership and therefore is much less able to own vehicles regardless of preference, it is very interesting to me how people here will get extremely worked up about software-as-a-service, loss of ownership rights and corporate greed, etc... and yet when it comes to having to rent mobility instead it's all cool to essentially pay a forever subscription service for car rides?

What everyone should be aware is the extent of what's being called 'sane-washing' distorts public perception.

When Bannon did his Nazi salute at CPAC, if you searched for it online on most search engines, ALL the top results contained frame-grabs of hand-waves, half-assed gestures, and other arm positions earlier in the speech that absolutely looked liked dems were losing their shit over nothing. NONE of the headline images were of the actual salute and nod at the end. The content of these articles included plenty of 'alleged' and other ambiguous language mischaracterizing the situation as well. Perfect click-bait for all sides.

It took several hours to a day for most traditional-news-cycle outlets to start carrying the story. Serious news outlets reported the incident and the immediate international response more resposibly, of course, usually also including the full video showing the inequivocal nature of the gesture, but who watches that? No-one on that side of the political spectrum, that's for sure, so completely ineffective. Too little and too late.

I'm not sure sane-washing is the appropriate word anymore. This is pure disinformation, and, depending on the source, many would characterize it as information warfare. But also explains why a significant amount of people keep talking about spastic hand-waving and generally dismissing Nazi-talk as ridiculous. Some of these people are terminally dumb, of course, but most have simply been lied to so extensively that they lost track of reality.

It might be possible, but assuming completely unsupported possibilities is not the best way to go through life.

When I cross the street I can always look up, because planes exist and sometimes even fall down. Or, I could look towards oncoming traffic, because that's what makes sense in real life. People that do the latter instead of the former are guaranteed to do better.

You're absolutely right that the problem has been solved. But even in the context of university teaching.

The oldest European universities - still around from when standardized grades as a measure of education was not a thing and even getting a place was already an expression of favoritism - simply have pass/fail university examinations separately from class coursework. You perform them anonymously and get graded fairly by a panel of subject experts that may not even include your instructors. Schools often exchange panels to ensure their cross-grading standards are consistent. Unsurprisingly... it works, as the professors that know their stuff and can communicate their knowledge most effectively prepare their students the best, and are thus the most sought out, which works both ways and is precisely the right sort of incentive higher education participants should have.

No, they're not. We tend to think even very small things are still things, but they're not the same but tinier. Atomic nuclei are not really composed by individual particles orbiting about. That sort of 'plum-pudding' / Rutherford model was envisioned in 1905, but now we know when you go quantum-size the objects we perceive as coherent things turn out to be mostly empty space and wave interactions, whereas all the medium and big things are definite entities with definite positions and boundaries and all that - so any big/small analogy breaks apart at the fundamental level due to the very nature of things.

You're 100% on the right track regarding the collective responsibility of vaccination, but there's just a slight misstep here that I'd like to point out.

Well, I certainly don't care if some rando has bad teeth, and probably neither do you, but then... What if they get sick? What if they need public emergency care? What if they need disability checks? What if the infrastructure that people rely on for these things is actually paid by our taxes, and we'd like them to be used efficiently?

Remember that (besides the dishonest advertising and evils of second-hand smoke) the real problem with smoking was actually the significant drain of public resources of the 'individual' habit.

So there's no such thing as 'just harming themselves'. People don't get a free pass to be dumb to themselves because everyone else still has to cover their asses when it goes wrong. If we lived in some libertarian dystopia where people keel over on the sidewalk and their corpses just pile up, sure, then it's really not my problem. Apart from the corpse diseases everywhere, I guess. Anyway, if we lived in some communist dystopia and missing work was a crime against GDP that would probably be a bit much as well. So clearly there is a line somewhere.

I think it is easy to think forcing one person to take care of their teeth is over the top, but that's not how public policy works. We're hundred of millions. It's never one individual, but some statistically significant amount. As we live with the understanding that we pool and redistribute our resources for the common good, we absolutely have to respect individual freedoms, but we also absolutely have to maintain a structure of incentives that discourages collective stupidity.

TL,DR: it's not just vaccines that require collective responsibility - everything that burdens the social safety nets should be discouraged to some degrees.

Honestly, I think what really broke personal webservers, even for those technically inclined, was the era of massive insecurity created by the 'invention' of for-profit malware.

These days anything online NEEDS professionally managed security solutions against random automated DDoS, zombie networks, ransomware, all sorts of constantly evolving exploits. Even with professional stuff it can be iffy, but without it it's hopeless, and it's been like this ever since unpatched PCs got owned by Blaster worms within 10min of coming online.

Wow you're so deep in the propaganda you can't even tell anymore.

Democracies don't (can't) literally fence and board-up aparment complexes because some people in there need to be quarantined. That is bat-shit insane and indeed DPRK-level authoritarian bullshit. It is also well-documented that that happened across several regions in China, with pictures all over reliable media outlets (like the BBC) for anyone who cares to be informed.

Proxy power would create very wholesome incentives for the House indeed.

But then how to address the Senate? (i.e. how to prevent the vastly more populous states from ruling the others?)

I'm not sure you're taking government seriously if you insist on having an opinion poll on the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine.

It's like a water plant engineer that spent his life doing water-plant-engineer-things tells his boss 'hey we need a new water plant because population growth and whatnot', and then his boss does all the bureaucracy to appropriate some money, get a new water plant, and do their jobs. We picked Congress, Congress picked the rules, and as long as the water people follow the rules they can do whatever. What they don't do is ask the public opinion on highly technical questions that essentially boil down to 'do you wanna die of thirst or cholera or what?', because that'd be dumb. Similarly, there are no pro-water and anti-water candidates around. That'd be even dumber.

Now, I'm sure geopolitics and military science are not as simple as sanitation engineering, but still. The problems still have right and wrong answers, and it's still all regulated by a mixture of legislative and executive rules. Israel and Ukraine are serious conflicts with serious implications, and the people who work to disentangle that crap all their lives push their expert advice up until someone elected does something. Something that, for those in the know, and with access to all the relevant information, is usually pretty obvious. To pretend everyone's opinion on this issue is similarly valid and worthy of direct representation is very ignorant. It's not a direct democracy. That ship sailed after cities grew beyond a few thousand citizens, enfranchised the working masses, and society became hopelessly hyper-specialized. We pick some that is hopefully halfway moral, give them a ton of executive power, and that's it.

No matter how big the issue is. Hashing out these disagreements is not a popular process. For global conflicts like these, civil society actually probably contributes a lot of the analysis beforehand - in academia, think thanks, and other expert circles - and because it's on the media a lot some sanitized slogans may even make it to a popular debate, but that's not really popular consultation or representation, it's just pushing an electoral brand.

I guess all politics stories in a tech site are going to be misinformed flame wars one way or another, but the amount of people here shitting on the media for manufacturing close-races and going on about how polls have nothing to do with democracy is shocking.

Let me introduce you to the Median Voter Theorem. Which formalizes how the candidate aligned closest to the middle, policy-wise, always gets the most votes (because he is closest to more voters than other candidates). Though MVT is a proof in one dimension, and of course real-life politics deals with many issues and dimensions, it is also obvious that, on the aggregate, the candidate closest to this central policy-median will attract the most votes.

All of this is simple stuff that anyone that TALKS about politics - certainly FiveThirtyEight and cohorts - take as a given. This is also simple stuff for people who DO politics, and for people who INVEST millions of dollars in candidates. So why, do you imagine, in any working democracy - where public opinion can be accurate/legitimate - would anyone simply DECIDE TO LOSE ON PURPOSE by taking a stupid, verifiably unpopular position?

Anwer: NO ONE DOES THAT. People run also-ran campaigns on fringe platforms to influence their party, get attention and a cabinet position, grift campaign donations, whatever. But in the general election, the actual election, everyone does their very best to sit at the very middle of their constituency, the spot that appeases most people, because they WANT TO WIN. Note that 'their constituency' may ignore rejection-voters. Like, I don't think the family of that dead Capitol cop is going to vote for Trump, whatever his new position, so moving towards them is a net-loss. Anyway, nation-wide, these disjoint fixed-constituencies offset positions a little, party-wise, and the final platform bids end up not-identical. But VERY SIMILAR.

Not because it is a media conspiracy. Because that is the whole point of REPRESENTATIVE democracy. You try to represent as many people as possible. And the way to do that is by asking people what they think.: i.e. polling. And the result of that is EXTREMELY CLOSE RACES. Obviously.

Are you trolling? Or does the word taxes scramble your thought process?

Citizenship comes with both duties and privileges since... forever? Idk, Sparta for sure.

Yes, US-babies have no choice but to contribute to the IRS. On the other hand, if they get in trouble anywhere else in the world a resident US official will be tasked to deal with it one way or another. When the number of US-babies involved is large enough, the least that will happen is a C-17 rescue flight. When the trouble involved is serious enough, sometimes a carrier group has to parade about. The privileges for citizens on home soil are obvious. Lots of people straight up receive cash from the government.

These privileges are owed solely according to what side of an imaginary line your baby-bottom was born in, regardless of how deserving the individuals affected may or may not be, but in any of those contexts a $2350 check is laughable.

It's not that they would be unlicensed or magically more competent (though I'm sure required training helps...), it's that someone would lose their license over a failure this large - just like someone would if a bridge fell through negligence (but worse, actually, since its worldwide bridge collapses) and thus at least a little more cautious.

It introduces accountability.

Yes. When debt is forgiven it is essentially bought back into non-circulation at present value. In a normal economy, which is slightly inflationary, present value is always less than the original issue value. Not to mention the lost opportunity cost of a bunch of money that should have created value elsewhere but didn't. Anyway, value is lost. And when the equivalent value needs to be re-issued back into circulation, we all pay for that loss as inflation.

There is nothing fair about a flat tax. People that understand economics understand that flat taxes (like sales tax) are extremely regressive - a fancy word for "unfair".

Think about it. A person who has $100 in total needs to spend every dollar wisely (or run out). Every dollar matters. Each dollar is more valuable.

A person who has $100000000 can spend their dollars recklessly. The small stuff does not matter. Each dollar is less valuable.

Flat taxes pretend that the $1 from the $100 person and the $1 from the $100000000 person have the same value. This is not true, and so the flat tax is actually making the poorer person pay more than a fair share.

Since the whole point of taxes is the redistribution of wealth for the public interest, flat taxes are always counter-productive - they skew (even more) the concentration of wealth away from those who already have less, and benefit those who have no need of redistribution schemes.