Wow, the contrast in sentiment between SpaceX vs ULA and Jabil vs Makerbot's Brooklyn factory (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11574215) is striking. With SpaceX undercutting the incumbent, people are cheering free market competition but with Jabil undercutting the incumbents, people are complaining about work being done in buildings attached to the wrong pieces of Earth (China) even though in both cases, they cut costs by using genuinely more efficient processes.
You wouldn't just be running away from the president. You'd be running away from a whole country full of hysterical people afraid of an imminent communist invasion and blaming it on you.
You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.
It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.
The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.
I bought an early Amiga in order to port the compiler to it. It irritated me that they used standard connectors, but changed one pin in order to force people to buy peripherals from them. I thought that strategy would doom Amiga, and decided not to expend my dev time on it.
DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring special floppy disks), with the same results.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that their cold wallet was untouched and all they lost was on the order of a hour's worth of turnover. That's more than can be said for a lot of the other bitcoin hacks.
This surprises me about America. Other countries have national criminal record databases. Is it that America hasn't spent the money to build one, or that counties/states/police stations don't want to share information, or that they're not allowed to share information?
But access to those databases is not necessarily available to all. In the UK we have the 'Disclosure and Barring Service' (which used to be the 'Criminal Records Bureau', but there are now a bunch of non crime (or non conviction) reasons you might be on the barred list) which will perform a background check which discloses any convictions and any allegations of sexual abuse. All this for the bargain price of £59.
As that last suggests, however, only certain roles are eligible for the checks, those being primarily roles that involve working with children or vulnerable adults, though the full list [0] is quite interesting.
I'd say it's fair for candidates to break promises. If voters keep voting for them and their party despite seeing that happen, then it means voters don't mind broken promises. This is what's nice about democracy - you don't have to argue about too many rules, the rules evolve naturally. For some reason it turned out that keeping promises wasn't a natural rule that voters wanted. The same goes for resigning. If they don't resign and are still re-elected or their party is still re-elected then that reflects what their constituents want, not some artificial rules that some unelected rule-maker (who would that be?) decided on.
The US system seems to be doing quite well. The majority of the population doesn't care at all, and their votes don't count. Those are people who either always vote for the same party or don't vote at all. The important decision then comes down to the minority of people who are most interested in the policies - the swing voters. Isn't that quite an efficient division of labor?
This absurdly reductionist view of participatory politics comes up again and again. What are you trying to add to the conversation? Do you think that this notion is new? Or that the rest of us haven't considered it?
Instead of a pithy but pointless HN comment, let me suggest a book for you that might expand your thinking on this topic:
It would be more helpful if you expanded on why it's a bad argument. Off the top of my head:
> They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it
Was there a vote on it? When exactly?
Here's a book about how election results can change people's opinions on topics. It applies here because X. I used to think Y, but it changed my thinking to Z. I'd highly recommend it.
Not that GP is any better, but hey... And to be fair, the guy is practically trolling, whether intentional or not.
You're right of course disagreement should be explained better.
But he is responding to a one-line meme whose only purpose is to establish learned helplessness and end discussion that massively oversimplifies a very complex issue and is essentially copy pasted in any article here that even touches on politics. It gets quite exhausting engaging, having long in depth discussion about how this view is overly simplistic on every single thread only to have it appear again tomorrow, exactly the same as before.
I think downvotes and silence is the correct move here.
You're right. I got a bit impatient there. This argument seems to come up again and again and no amount of reason and explanation seems to be able to overcome it, even to the point of convincing its adherents to read what others have said about it.
This notion ("the people get exactly what they vote for") goes back to Ancient Greece; it's not like its a novel topic.
I don't think it's that straightforward. It's hard to vote for something that doesn't come up for a vote. And it doesn't come up for a vote if the right people don't want it to come up for a vote.
"The people" aren't given the opportunity to vote on many things, yet the people they elect do vote. The people they elect often side with their supporters (especially financial ones) on issues that are important to said supporters. A candidate can use their NRA/pro gun status as part of their platform and it will have a meaningful impact on the turnout.
Logically if the US electorate cared even half as much about [topic x] as they do about guns - candidates would care too and "democracy" would follow... no?
(I'm not bashing the US, just taking gun control as an example where a passionate popular view is reflected democratically)
If it wasn't the US, it would be classified as a human rights violation. This is worse than imprisoning or torturing political prisoners because of the scale of it. At least political prisoners knew they were breaking the law. They're also usually fewer in number except during revolutions/etc.
Nor do eyewitness stories. Nor does recognizing someone from a single photo instead of a proper lineup. These are cases where there's already no reliable evidence in the first place. Really, they should go to court and it would be clear they're not guilty but the polygraph just helps shortcut it. Even better would be no polygraph and just release people when they find they don't have any reliable evidence.
The point is that polygraphs are utter nonsense, at about the same level as reading tea leaves. Had she failed the polygraph, she'd still be prosecuted. No judicial process should have a decision point that is stochastic by design.
> Had she failed the polygraph, she'd still be prosecuted.
The article does not support that claim. It might be. But they also specifically acknoledge that polygraphs are unreliable and seem to use it mainly as a filter to deter people who are worried they might fail it, and in parallel they carry out a case review.
> No judicial process should have a decision point that is stochastic by design.
In an ideal world, no. But adding an extra decision point where the worst that can happen is that the prosecution that was going forward keeps going forward, and the best that can happen is that the case gets dropped without the ordeal of a trial sounds like a substantial improvement even if it doesn't always work.
" But adding an extra decision point where the worst that can happen is that the prosecution that was going forward keeps going forward, and the best that can happen is that the case gets dropped without the ordeal of a trial sounds like a substantial improvement even if it doesn't always work."
Uh, that's not the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen is that those who actually committed crimes are let off because they learned how to 'beat' a polygraph, or who just got plain lucky. And if you know already that your suspect is innocent, then why the polygraph?
Look I understand how adding some voodoo scapegoat to a complicated social construct can be used to change institutional mores that are impenetrable otherwise. So in that sense, I have no rational reason to discourage the use of a polygraph here; just like one can say 'if homeopathy helps people, why shouldn't they use it? And why shouldn't we finance it from the same means we finance regular health care?'. From a utilitarian point of view, there is no denying this. I maintain that it's still bad (maybe not a net negative, but a negative still) to use acknowledge superstition this way.
> The worst that can happen is that those who actually committed crimes are let off because they learned how to 'beat' a polygraph
They would also need to "beat" the case review of the available evidence. If there is no evidence, they shouldn't be convicted anyway - even if they are guilty.
The _threat_ of a polygraph test might filter out some guilty people who are afraid of it. They don't use the result of the test for anything, according to the article.
I think that ethically that's problematic. I consider that to be coercion based on pseudoscience. There are people out there who are afraid of it for a variety of reasons - I can think of a few off the top of my head:
They are concerned they might ask a question unrelated to the case that incriminates them
They are concerned that they ask a question that causes them personal problems, even if they are innocent (like past infidelity from 20 years ago, etc)
They are concerned that the polygraph might be wrong and incriminate them for something they haven't done
If they don't use the results of the test for anything, then it's a deceptive interrogation technique and one that should be stopped.
But you see the polygraph test doesn't have to be accurate. It's not there to actually tell whether the person is guilty. It's there so that the police can save face. Instead of "we made a mistake, we charged the wrong person", they can say "we charged this person, all the evidence suggested they were guilty, but, look at this polygraph test! It proves they are actually innocent". The police must not be questioned, if you believe the police are corrupt as I do then you become very unhappy/restless. Such an attitude does not lend itself to a cohesive society...
