Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.
Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.
Are you saying that one billionaire's loss in the primaries indicates money is not a problem in U.S. politics?
I was thinking of things like the 2015 study referenced in this article [0] that looked at 1,800 policy change polls over three decades indicating that elites got their way twice as often as the majority, and the majority never - not a single time - got something the elites didn't support.
In the other direction, the article gave examples of things the elites wanted that were passed into law, even thought he majority opposed. Like NAFTA, the Bush tax cuts, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws.
It appears that politicians pay more attention to voters with money.
btw, I agree with you that ideally voters are rational and informed. I guess that's a separate question than the influence of money.
A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving!
I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
Lots of cars now come with a WiFi hot spot as part of their offerings. There's no way to prevent the driver from also connecting to it and circumventing whatever ill conceived notion this is
Even connected to wifi a cell phone canstill use the wireless network. Even airplane more won't actually stop your phone from connecting anymore. GPS data can also be transmitted in the background over wifi back to apple/google and/or the device manufacturer.
If they really wanted to push this they could do it directly in the baseband chipset and bypass the OS entirely when deciding to lock down the device to some kind of "travel mode" with limited functionality (such as no texting or no browser)
Not that I'm advocating for that sort of thing, but it's good to keep in mind that we don't really own the cellular devices we pay for and that even in the rare case we have root we can't stop them from doing what they want to our devices as long as they control the closed hardware.
I mentioned buses and trains, and was thinking that only those mobile wifi hotspots would be permitted, whitelisted for 5g service. Hotspots in (human driven) cars would not. That might encourage some people to take the bus?
I agree with the other poster about this being more workable in a fictional society with different shared values.
I just bumped into the idea of "demographic diversity" versus "moral diversity" [1].
Demographic diversity speaks to the differences in sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. A nation of immigrants, for example.
Moral diversity speaks to the differences in culture, the rules a society follows. Erosion of those rules is what leads to a low trust society.
I thought this was a really interesting distinction to make.
It seems that the U.S. is not as high trust as it was 75+ years ago. The book I read used the example of neighbors disciplining children, which was more common in U.S. culture 75+ years ago. Today you'd worry about a parent calling the police for that. In general the idea of character has replaced with personality. Moral diversity. Live and let live.
But on the other hand 75+ years ago women and minorities were more limited. We now have more demographic diversity. Which is a good thing.
I would like to think that demographic diversity and a high trust society aren't mutually exclusive. Conflating the two doesn't help.
[1] The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, Chapter 8, The Felicity of Virtue
Haidt et al decompose moral foundations into several factors to explain how progressives and conservatives view morality differently by virtue of prioritizing different factors; cf. Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundationshttps://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/JPSP-2009-Moral-Foun...
I'm using openbsd on a several laptops at the moment, a dell x55, a thinkpad x230, and a thinkpad x270. Everything works on all of them - sleep, hibernate, wifi, touchpad, colume and brightness buttons, cpu throttling, etc.
On one of them I use a creative bt-w2 bluetooth dongle for audio output, openbsd removed software bluetooth support due to security concerns. The latest wifi standards are not supported on these models, which doesn't bother me. It's not the size of your network, it's what you do with it! I don't mind not having the latest flashy hardware - been there, done that.
I have to pay attention when I purchase hardware, and am happy to do so, because openbsd aligns much better with my priorities. For me that includes simplicity, security, documentation and especially stability through time - I don't want to have to rearrange my working configs every two years cuz of haphazard changes to things like audio, systemd, wayland, binary blobs, etc.
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public
People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.
Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
> People have the right to take in what is in public
You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree. I could imagine this could be treated differently in different cultures. As an example, Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info (including faces). Another common issue that is handled very differently in different cultures: How to control video recording in public places.
> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info
I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.
Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?
I think we're agreeing but our frequencies are mixed. I was just saying "you can't stop people from using their eyes in public".photography and recording laws are very different.
for more context, the chain started with this:
>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?
and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.
I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.
Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:
> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]
The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.
I was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon?
In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups?
Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.
People want to get entertained and informed. Very few original content is available and sharing of content from other platforms will lead to harsh reactions from self-claimed activists. I got insulted from completely random people who don’t follow because I didn’t remove an UTM key from an URL I shared.
In general the tone went super harsh and cult like. While neo nazis dominate X, the authoritarian left dominates on Mastodon. People call to dispossess „the rich“, „fight capitalism, support my gofundme“, antisemitism and open support of Hamas and other BS.
If you dare to reply and ask for rationality, you will get attacked personally. It‘s a toxic service like Twitter but just the other way around, and way too few insightful or funny content to lure new users. „Run your own server“ is also BS because discoverabilty is very poor.
I ended up on OpenBSD, having gotten frustrated with Windows, Suse, Fedora, FreeBSD and a Chromebook.
I grew to appreciate stability, over time - I don't want to have to fix things after updates, including my tweaks and customizations. I want complete control of my computers. I appreciate a cohesive and well documented system. I want simple and consistent and secure. I don't want the OS to take up more of my time than it needs to.
Perhaps you should consider the BSDs to be like different linux distributions, having their own priorities, pros and cons. Some people don't care. Some do. It's all good, having more options.
Seems to be that big companies usually push to externalize costs and take advantage as much as possible, to the detriment of everyone else. Shareholders have a right to sue them if they don't.
Fake cures, filthy mines, toxic ingredients, polluted waterways, fraud, predation, monopolies, algorithmic social outrage networks, etc. These things have been going on for a long time. Regulations have fixed a lot of problems.
It doesn't seem that reputation matters as much as regulation. It doesn't take many greedy people/companies to leave behind a big mess. Just a few breaking the rules (including the cultural rules around reputation) gain an advantage over all those who don't.
I use a bluetooth usb dongle for audio with my openbsd laptop.
It's very small and has a single button on the end for pairing, something like the creative bt-w3 [1]. You want to avoid something that won't work without windows drivers.
The os sees it as a separate audio device, doesn't care that it is bluetooth, and can be set to switch audio playback between the internal sound and the dongle automagically.
Doesn't that mean that there's always a delay in the audio since it doesn't know to buffer slightly? (I'm not sure how it works on Linux today, but it didn't used to work well a long time ago for that very reason.)
I assume you were talking about audio/video sync? I used to use mine to mostly listen to music, audio only.
But I still have a creative bt-w2 audio dongle, and was curious, so I gave it a try, using mvp to watch a yt-dlp mp4, showing someone talking on camera. The bluetooth speaker was 3 meters away from my laptop. No tweaks.
It looked good, I was pleasantly surprised. It definitely had better sync than I've seen on some badly compressed cable tv content.
I wasn't familiar with how bluetooth buffering used to be, but I can believe it's caused problems. I've noticed sometimes when people are using bluetooth on their phones.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
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