So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise that we call the legislature. They’re all interchangeable and within 12 years, 100% of it will be changed out.
Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to learn from their mistakes. In almost all cases people's political solution is just "well we didn't try my idea hard enough" and increasing their tenure in office doesn't really help the overall situation.
The result is that you can stay as long as people keep voting you back in, but you lose the incumbency advantage and end up with a higher turnover rate without ending up with a 100% turnover rate. And you make them learn how other parts of the government work. It wouldn't hurt a bit to see long-term members of Congress do a two-year stint in an administrative agency once in a while.
I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.
The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
edit: I see the "term limits are anti-democratic" takes elsewhere in the comments, so I guess let me narrow the above ask to "someone who isn't opposed to term limits, but thinks this idea is flawed."
There, the professional legislators can't get anything right either.
Do you think there's a middle ground of increasing the term limits to, say, 18 or 20 years?
A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.
Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.
Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.
Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.
Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.
That is one aspect, but not the important one. The most important element is anti-corruption. Legal bodies can always entrench themselves and their own interests. Term limits significantly weakens entrenchment...excepting when the same legal bodies inevitably gut it.
That's in fact not at all what the research says. There's a decent amount of research that suggests that they actually increase corruption. There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
This is a classic one of those ideas that many people intuitively "feel" makes sense but is actually just terrible policy.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
There are a lot of factors beyond term limits that influence this kind of research. The most important detail is to remember that corruption spans more than external influence. Institutional ossification has benefits and drawbacks. The drawbacks have outweighed the benefits, historically in the US and England. It was literally baked into the US Constitution to ensure this would not repeat for the US head of state. Notably the Supreme Court was baked in as a lifetime appointment. Granted, the remaining political bodies have not followed suit, I think it's clear that this has had a negative consequence due to the aforementioned entrenchment of the political parties.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
It is incorrect to claim that is the only effect. I also don't believe that the conclusion is correct. I do believe it's closer to your initial statement.
> it's just a way for [legislators] to not take responsibility for their voting.
ie It shows a lack of care in executing the responsibilities of the elected position, which is why they barely do anything but campaign at the federal level.
That's at an age where wizened legislators can move into advisory roles, instead of needing to find a next career.
Plenty of shitty ideas are popular based on a hope and a prayer. That’s why you don’t give in to populism. If we’re to impose any kind of limits on Congress, it has to be more intelligent than term limits.
If the problem is representatives using insider knowledge to enrich themselves then just hire more Inspectors General. If the problem isn't insider knowledge specifically then make whatever allows them to get rich illegal.
That should not be a profession.
Decisions should be made by people who are the most informed about the subject matter. By definition you cannot have someone who is the most informed about everything.
We elect the way we do and empower the way we do because it empowers voters to choose on a regular recurring basis who is going to provide oversight that way. When you start screwing around with the basis tenets of electoral democracy, you distort and pervert the value of an actual legislative seat and undermine the value of holding people directly responsible through elections.
Another good example is the ballot proposition system. Some things must go before voters—which is another separate wrong which would be righted—but apart from those, the ballot proposition also presents legislators an opportunity to outsource decision-making risk to voters where instead of having to take a chance of being wrong on a piece of legislation with a roll call vote, they can pass the risk off to State voters. If people voted on the issue directly, they’re not as empowered to hold the people who only put it on the ballot rather than making the decision as someone whose job is to make & pass legislation.
You want legislators to be empowered to serve their role in society so that they are also taking real risks every time they take a stand on an issue that risks pissing off their constituents.
This is not true-by-definition . It may be true, but not by-definition. If there were an omniscient person, they would be the most informed about everything.
It seems all at once, everywhere that many groups that have a vested interest in forcing precedent and compliance of non-anonymous access across the computer world. It smacks of something less-than-organic.
1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires.
2. Access things the way you've always done. All that has changed is that things that care about age checks find out you claim to be old enough.
The only people it actually materially affects on your new computer are people who cannot set up their own accounts, such as children if you have set up permissions so they have to get you to make their accounts.
Then if you want you can enter a birthdate that gives an age that says non-adult, so sites that check age will block them.
From a privacy and anonymity perspective this is essentially equivalent to sites that ask "Are you 18+?" and let you in if you click "yes" and block you if you click "no". It is just doing the asking locally and caching the result.
This puts the responsibility back on parents to do the bare minimum required in moderating their child’s activities.
Possibly it could be further mandated that the OS collect relevant rating information for each account and provide APIs with which browsers and other software could implement filtering.
And possibly it could be further mandated that web browsers adopt support for this filtering standard.
And if you want a really crazy idea you could pass a law mandating that parents configure parental controls on devices of children under (say) 12 and attach civil penalties for repeated failure to do so.
There's never any need for information about the user to be sent off to third parties, nor should we adopt schemes that will inevitably provide ammo for those advocating attested digital platforms.
Sending all the "bad" data to the client and hoping the client does the right thing outs a lot of complexity on the client. A lot easier to know things are working if the bad data doesn't ever get sent to the client - it can't display what it didn't get.
When you click on a search result, you load a new page on a different website. The new page would once again come with a header indicating the content rating. This header would be attached to all pages by law. It would be sent every time you load any page.
Assuming that the actual problem here is the difficulty of implementing reliable content filtering (ala parental controls) then the minimally invasive solution is to institute an open standard that enables any piece of software to easily implement the desired functionality. You can then further pass legislation requiring (for example) that certain classes of website (ex social media) include an indication of this as part of the header.
Concretely, an example header might look like "X-Content-Filter: 13,social-media". If it were legally mandated that all websites send such it would become trivially easy to implement filtering on device since you could simply block any site that failed to send it.
> A lot easier to know things are working if ...
Which is followed by wanting an attested OS (to make sure the value is reliably reported), followed by a process for a third party to verify a government issued ID (since the user might have lied), followed by ...
It's entirely the wrong mentality. It isn't necessary for solving the actual problem, it mandates the leaking of personal data, and it opens an entire can of worms regarding verification of reported fact.
Reading the first analysis PDF:
> This bill, sponsored by the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Children Now, seeks to require device and operating systems manufacturers to develop an age assurance signal that will be sent to application developers informing them of the age-bracket of the user who is downloading their application or entering their website. Depending on the age range of the user, a parent or guardian will have to consent prior to the user being allowed access to the platform. The bill presents a potentially elegant solution to a vexing problem underpinning many efforts to protect children online. However, there are several details to be worked out on the bill to ensure technical feasibility and that it strikes the appropriate balance between parental control and the autonomy of children, particularly older teens. The bill is supported by several parents’ organizations, including Parents for School Options, Protect our Kids, and Parents Support for Online Learning. In addition, the TransLatin Coalition and The Source LGBT+ Center are in support. The bill is opposed by Oakland Privacy, TechNet, and Chamber of Progress.
I think you’ve nailed it here. How many of these people campaigned on this issue? Where were the grassroots to push this? Where did this even come from?
Somebody, somewhere - with a heck of a lot of money - wants to see this happen. And I don’t think they have good intentions with it.
TLDR: Evil people be doxxed internally not everyone.
These days the name "LLM" refers more to the architecture & usage patterns than it does to the size of model (though to be fair, even the "tiny" LLMs are huge compared to any models from 10+ years ago, so it's all relative).
You can remove the in California
Older people have already seen all the patterns, and realize you have to focus on specifics, and that helps clean up the general issue.
A realistic dynamic is the old people are comfortable with the general problems and have positioned themselves to benefit from them. Indeed, they solved the general problems that troubled them in their youth with political activism in their middle age. The young people have different political needs that require general problems to be solved.
Also young people have a terrible track record of actually identifying problems, they are pretty clueless in the main.
Or they just realize that the general problems are insoluble.
I don't know much about guns, but I assume that would be on the hammer? Couldn't you remove that "microstamping" by lightly filing down the hammer or just using it a bunch and causing some wear?
He may be our next president and this becomes an executive order.
come to think of it, maybe there is something good about this law. :D
Not to mention all the printers, routers, etc that run freertos/thread x/vxworks.
While you are correct with this statement in this context, I would say it applies to most things in government in general.
The vast majority of lawmakers have zero experience solving any real world problems and are content spending everyone else's money to play pretend at doing so.
The reality is, most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve, after which, they blame their predecessors for all the problems they caused and the cycle continues.
The "reality" is that propaganda heavily encourages you to ignore the government successes and only focus on the failures. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine who benefits from that.
Please, name for me one product or service that the US government has created, that people willingly buy, that has made your life tangibly better.
I can list a billion made by businesses.
Please, go for it. Just one.
Medicaid
The National Park System
I know that the next step is you explaining why these don’t count, or saying “wow only 3” or whatever, but
Oh, there's more: Medicare, Social Security, the highway system.
The whole food/medicine regulatory system is also a big one, and it's the reason a lot of US (and European) products like baby formula are imported into China, because they can be more trusted.
My bet is the GP's going to weasel out using his "that people willingly buy" language. The flawed assumption there is the government should be conceptualized as just another company selling in the market, when the government's actual role is very different.
Airlines are a great example of this. They have changed very little in the last 30 years (again, thanks to all the government regulation and red tape).
Smartphones, TVs, (and literally anything else not in the hands of the government) has also seen rapid improvements.
Anything the government handles is always rife with overspending, inefficiency, and corruption.
A company must maintain profitability to stay alive.
The government on the other hand, is $38 TRILLION dollars in the red.
Yes, the things that "people willingly buy" are the literal engine that makes all of this possible. It is not the reverse.
> Airlines are a great example of this. They have changed very little in the last 30 years (again, thanks to all the government regulation and red tape).
And thanks to regulations, we have less airline accidents than ever. Private companies are more than willing to "externalise" any accidents from cutting costs otherwise.
> Smartphones, TVs, (and literally anything else not in the hands of the government) has also seen rapid improvements.
So does government funded medical research, which improves the quality of life of people corporations deem "unprofitable".
> Anything the government handles is always rife with overspending, inefficiency, and corruption.
Because large corporations and rich donors lobby them to do so.
> A company must maintain profitability to stay alive.
So does a government, debt only lasts as long as the lender believes in your ability to pay it back.
> The government on the other hand, is $38 TRILLION dollars in the red.
And which of the Mag7 are not in debt? I remind you that if you wish to compare the USA to companies, they are literally an entity of over 300,000 people. No company employs that many people.
> Yes, the things that "people willingly buy" are the literal engine that makes all of this possible. It is not the reverse.
No, government enforced order is what allowed the engine to exist to begin with. No one would innovate if their IP could not be protected, and we would regress back into cartels if the government could not enforce private property.
The prosperity of the modern world is build upon a foundation of solid governance.
> Anything the government handles is always rife with overspending, inefficiency, and corruption.
Boy will you be surprised when you get a job.
> A company must maintain profitability to stay alive.
Yeah. And once it becomes a monopoly (like Comcast), it can just keep raising prices.
Where I live now, I paid $50k to get a private fiber optics line just not to deal with Comcast anymore. There were no other options. We _might_ get AT&T fiber, eventually.
I "owe" Comcast $200. They say I didn't cancel at an old apartment. I say I did. I have the email. They insist. They've sent me a letter once a year for a decade. About 2yr in it went to collections. They're still trying.
Imagine the consequences if I did that with government.
Say nothing of the fact that if I tried to pay it, Comcast would be able to take my money no problem. The government would take a check, ACH or charge me $5 to use a buggy 3rd party CC processing service.
I've had the irs write me a letter saying I owed them money. They were correct and I paid them in a couple of months. It wasn't very hard.
I don't enjoy paying taxes but I do very much enjoy the things they buy.
And their websites are well-designed and functional. There are customer support emails and phone numbers.
> Say nothing of the fact that if I tried to pay it, Comcast would be able to take my money no problem.
About that... A couple of years ago I got locked out of AT&T because I forgot to update my credit card. And I couldn't log in because it required a (you guessed it) one-time SMS password. Their "pay your bill" needed a bill number, for which I needed to log into their website.
Their fix? Visit the store.
> Imagine the consequences if I did that with government.
A couple of years ago I accidentally overpaid the IRS (I paid the capital gains tax twice, as it was already deducted during the sale by the broker) to the tune of $10k. A year later, they sent a letter asking me for clarifications. I called them, and they sent me a refund check.
> The government would take a check, ACH or charge me $5 to use a buggy 3rd party CC processing service.
And what's wrong with a check or ACH?
Well, they aren't willingly buying it. They are funded with taxes.
Medicaid - funded by the government, meaning people are not willingly paying for it
The National Park System - funded by the government, meaning people are not willingly paying for it
Human genome - J. Venter was the first to sequence the human genome, privately funded.
the entire space industry - Liquid fuel rockets were pioneered by Goddard, through private funding.
Radar - originated from late 19th-century experiments on radio wave reflection, pioneered by Heinrich Hertz in 1886. While Christian Hülsmeyer patented a "telemobiloscope" for ship detection in 1904
The proto-Internet - Pioneered by Samuel Morse, see "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage. Privately funded.
Optical data storage - Invented by D Gregg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Paul_Gregg, at a private company.
Nuclear energy - a very long list of contributors. See "The Making of the Atomic Bomb".
And so on.
Quite a stretch to say the Atomic Bomb was privately funded!!!
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/articles/does-early-investment-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_the_United_States https://clearpath.org/tech-101/hydraulic-fracturing-a-public...
Things work here and nobody seems to be passing the "oops my unintended side effects and clueless regulations messed things up horribly." Or, if they do, it is at something like 1/10th the level.
We didn't start warning label spam everywhere. We don't have weird propositions that are causing run-away housing prices. There aren't bar codes on our 3d printers, or cookie banner requirements on every website. Well, ok we do, but that nonsense all came in from other places.
We did pass laws to lower PFAS/PFOAS. That seems reasonable. Government can work.
Most of those are a reaction rather than the cause. People want to move to california, it creates a different set of problems for california vs Massachusetts
The sheer size, economic volume and cultural diversity of CA presents a pretty unique set of issues.
I wish I was joking. They get audited yet? Pretty sure that was a ballot measure that passed by a huge margin years back and last I checked they were stalling...
Zero basis in fact. We’re in the wealthiest nation on the planet. Most of us live better than any previous generation. To claim all that success is completely in spite of government is ridiculous.
What's even more curious is that the California voters seem not care at all. As long as the government can collect more taxes with more altruistic slogans, the voters will stay happy.
Some people think all problems should be fixed with regulation.
Some people think all problems should be fixed with free market / responsibility.
California and liberals tend to lean to the former. A place like Texas and conservatives tend to lean to the latter.
I think both camps are crazy because it’s a case-by-case basis where you need to consider second and third order effects. But man talk to a die hard regulation supporter or die hard free market supporter and you just want to say “the world isn’t just simple rules like that.”
Anyone buying or selling a microwave with an app store deserves this mess.
Eh, sounds kinda reasonable. Ammo already has unique serial numbers embedded in the butt of every cartridge (in some countries, not sure about the US), and guns do leave somewhat unique marks on the bullets upon firing so... sure, why not. Surprised it took that long TBF, the necessary technology has been commercially available since the early 90s, I think?
> 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems
Yeah, this one's seems unnecessary. Is weapon manufacturing without a license a crime? If yes, then whoever 3D-prints a gun can be prosecuted normally.
> Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave?
Or on your gas stove. A travesty, really: I was taught how to operate a stove when I was in the second grade and never burned any houses down, thank you very much.
Even people who didn’t want to break the law might find themselves on the receiving end of law-enforcement if the firing pin wears such that the micro stamping is no longer identifiable.
The micro stamping law does nothing to prevent the flow of guns to people who should not have them, and does everything to prevent the use or purchase of guns by people who can lawfully own them - which is the whole point of a law like this. The people who make these laws are well aware of this.
The age verification law, coupled with the proposed hardware attestation that our good friend Lennart poettering is working on will ensure that anonymity on the Internet is gone. This is precisely what lawmakers are aiming for. And just like the micro stamping law, the intent of the law is not the literal word of the law.
I'm curious, so if (when?) California ends up successfully hunting down some criminals with this, what is your new position going to be? They were going to get caught anyway, or something like that?
What it takes to become a “successful” politician is typically not what it takes to define good policy.
All this does is require the user to select a non-verified age bracket on first boot. You can lie, just like porn sites today. I thought HNers wanted parents to govern their children's use of technology with these kinds of mechanisms.
> There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place."
There's an obvious theme with HN posters about politics—they make cheap drive-by comments about regulations they have zero clue about, based on articles they haven't actually read, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've shown why I'm smarter than all these politics people."
This is the age verification requirement which you rudely and incorrectly said doesn't exist. Nothing is done with the data (for now) but age is in fact verified on the assumption that the user doesn't lie.
Instead of lengthy condescending missives about the behavior of other users, you should instead write "I'm sorry for being negative and bringing down the quality of discussion."
The original post was low effort flame baiting. There's an argument to be made that it should be ignored, but it's hard to say.
When the law and it's execution are undermined and weak, it becomes the cudgel of fickle changing power, i.e. it is applied selectively and it means nothing to people except when they are being beat in the head with it, at which point they only regret having been caught, successfully undermining the social and political fabric of a nation.
Having a bad law with a weak enforcement mechanism isn't quite the thing to be boasting about you seem to think it is.
If California starts knocking on the door of random distros and hobby OSes designed for power users or servers with 2000 average monthly downloads then I'll go to bat defending them.
Though to re-iterate, I'm pretty sure the requirements here are for asking a user to set an age, not to do age verification, so if you did want to comply it would mean adding a Date field to your setup flow and then wiring that up to applications that ask for it.
I'm no democrat, although I'm sure as hell no republican, and as a resident of the state, I'm also a routine critic of the California state government.
I agree that a lot of their activities are indeed, performance art in nature.
However I do agree with the identification requirements on guns and ammo.
You can't shoot someone with a computer, no matter what OS you run.
The idea that lethal weaponry is the same as any other consumer product is just not accurate.
No, you can just target-lock them. The computer database (and now, LLM) is probably the biggest threat to freedom in existence. You can keep your popgun. They'll know where it is, and come with bigger ones.
China be doing some pretty heavy-duty damage with computers, but age-gates won't stop them.
You can't put the genie of firearms back in the bottle any more than Hollywood can put the genie of p2p file sharing back in the bottle. Trying to do so is like trying to unscramble eggs. It doesn't matter how valid your desires or justifications for attempting to so are, it's an act of banging your own head against the cold, hard wall of reality.
I don't have a stance here on what "the right" policies around gun control are but it is clearly a much wider field than just a preplanned assassination with diy parts.
A non-exhaustive list of a few very different scenarios that are all involved with anything touching or rejecting gun control:
- highly motivated, DIY-in-the-basement assassination plots like you mentioned - hunting for food - hunting for fun - wilderness safety - organized crime and gang related violence - mass shootings at things like concerts, sporting events, colleges. Sub point of mass shootings at schools where the law requires children to be. - gun violence involved with suddenly escalating impromptu violence like road rage and street/bar fights - systematic intimidation / domestic terrorism of particular groups or areas - gun related suicides
All of these are very very different. None of them have perfect answers but that doesn't make thinking about it "an act of banging your own head against the cold, hard wall of reality" nor does it make anyone interested in working on some of these problems naive or stupid like you imply.
If you're being earnest or maybe jaded, I'd say dont give up hope and don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
If you're just being a dick then so be it, maybe someone else gets something out of this comment.
That kind of mistake is common here, but I don't think it is due to a failure of logic. I think it is something deeper.
I've noticed that people who have worked deeply and/or a long time as developers tend to lose the ability to see things as a continuum. They see them as quantized, often as binary.
That's also why there are so many slippery slope arguments made around here that go from even the most mild initial step almost immediately to a dystopian hellscape.
This is prevalent enough that it arguably should be considered an occupational hazard for developers and the resultant damage to non-binary thinking ability considered to be a work related mental disability with treatment for it covered by workers compensation.
A way to protect against developing this condition is to early in your career seriously study something where you have to do a lot of non-binary thinking and there are often aren't any fully right answers.
A good start would be make part of the degree requirement for a bachelor's degree in computer science (and maybe any hard science or engineering) in common law countries a semester of contract law and a semester of torts. Teach these exactly like those same courses are taught in first year law school. Both contracts and torts are full of things that require flexible, non-binary, thinking.
> 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems
Color scanners and printers have long had algorithms to recognize currency and prevent its reproduction, implemented with the technology of decades ago. It seems relatively simple to implement gun part recognition today, especially with the recent leap in image recognition capability.
(Rants and takedowns, IME, may entertain fellow believers, but signal a comment that's going to go well beyond any facts.)
With 3d shapes of non-governmental origin this is at best difficult and at worst intractable. Consider the fact that many parts of a gun can be split into multiple printable pieces to be later assembled, making it very nontrivial to decipher the role of the shape.
With currency, the government has the controls for the supply of the target shape (it can encode hidden signals onto banknotes) and effectively controls the relroduction side (through the pressure on printer manufacturers). But it cannot control the supply of gun-part-shapes (it is not the only source for it), and since the problem is likely intractable - neither can it enforce the control on the 3d printing side.
Paper money being almost non-fungible is a great achievement, but is it as easy to make any mesh nonfungible as well?
> Paper money being almost non-fungible is a great achievement
Going off on a tangent: Many people in technology and in the public look at cash as backward, boring, even socially embarassing technology. I think few it's amazing technology, an incredible hack: tech we struggle to implement in computers is implemented highly successfully and reliably in a piece of paper.
Not doing anything and preserving maximum agency is an entirely valid choice.
And it's sits fine with you because you are the one who wouldn't pay the price for this "simple image recognition capability". Except you would pay of course, indirectly but at least you wouldn't know for sure so your conscience would feel at ease.