Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, absolutely! We solved the problem!

No really, seriously, this idea is so flawed.

* You don't like the government? Move or start your own government!

* You don't like your house? Rebuild it or buy another house!

* You don't like the way Earth is being run? Move or RIP!

* You don't like the way the school is being run? Move to another town or build your own school!

* You don't like the fact oil is so expensive? Drill your own oil!

* You don't like this comment? Flag it or deal with it or build your own HN.

* You don't like the way anything is done or served? DIY all the way.

* You don't like your local Starbucks? Run one or go to Dunkin' Donut.

* You don't like the way hospital runs? Run one or don't go.

Something more extreme?

* You don't like your parents? Disown your relationship with your parents or make new parents!

* You don't like your child? Disown your child and make one again.

Why don't we dedicate our own life building things every time we don't like? Because we have better things to do. We deserve to complain and we have every right to dislike a service and we don't need to discredit our expectations.

Users want real time PvP and exchange/trade in PokemonGo, but after a year they are still not available. So why don't we build a new PokemonGo? Because we need to rent servers, build the code, maintain the code, make deal with Pokemon rights owners (which is impossible for a small company). So we bend and yield to Google, because we have no better alternative.

This incident teaches us a few things;

1. Please do not think AI/algorithm is smart enough to replace an actual human. Even though human carries biases and are sloppy too, but algorithms are just as bias, if not, more bias and more sloppy (dealing with "abnormality" and edge cases) than a human being will ever be. The hype "AI" will take over... we are nowhere near that.

2. YT is too popular to listen. Losing a few thousand users means nothing to YT. We will soon forget about this in 5 hours and go back to do our own things.

Appealing to government authority every time some business does something you don't like should make your list of "so flawed" solutions.

1. No one said it was, but it's their business. We live in a society that allows you to start up your own business in days if you don't like the offering of another private business. Giving up immediately and suggesting that the wielder of force in the society (government) jump in as a parent is usually a fail.

2. That still doesn't give you the right to dictate how they run their business?

There's definitely something going on in our society these days where everyone wants authority to solve all their problems without acknowledging all of the potential problems that strengthening authority leads to. The article below talks about victimhood, but it mainly tries to help illuminate where this appeal to authority strain is coming from.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/11/victimhood-culture-in-amer...

It's a common response even here on HN when companies behave contrary to the social good - "it's their job to make their investors profit while working within the law. Don't like it? Change the law." Well, don't be surprised when they do. Why complain now?

Proposing a legal change isn't appealing to government authority. It's asserting that we should formalize a social attitude into a rule. Complaining about government as paternalistic intervenor ignores the right of people to shape government to work on their behalf, which is the reason they are instituted to begin with.

So what that society 'allows' you to start up your own business? The economic and logistical barriers to doing so in competition with a monopolistic are significant, and overcoming anticompetitive tactics of incumbents is horrifically wasteful. People have every right to set general standards for how they want business to be conducted and promulgate those standards by law.

Rather than warding off government as some remote and malign force, we should be seeking to make the process of governance more responsive to the public interest. The stability and consistency that allows markets to operate is government's primary product.

The fact that this is being down voted is such a shame. It's a good addition to the discussion and it shouldn't be down voted just because one does not agree with it politically.

"People have every right to set general standards for how they want business to be conducted and promulgate those standards by law."

I think that this in particular is a very important insight with regards to the accountability of multinational corporations. In this case government acts as a way of stipulating conditions of common decency.

Complaining about government as paternalistic intervenor ignores the right of people to shape government to work on their behalf, which is the reason they are instituted to begin with.

Anigbrowl, I'm sure you and I are just going to have to disagree on that one.

The purpose of the federal government in the USA is to execute its duties in the Constitution within its enumerated powers agreed to by the States that ratified it, along with the amendments that have been agreed upon since. Ultimately, the Constitution was constructed in such a way as to protect individual liberty while minimizing the chance that the government would become too powerful. Mechanisms such as the checks and balances and enumerated government powers were put in there explicitly to constrain those in government and prevent them from thinking that they could shape the government however they wanted without fundamentally altering the Constitution through new amendments.

Treating the government like it's a parent there to fix all problems for the children has led to failed state after failed state as leaders assume more and more power over their people. Venezuela is the latest in a long line of where the paternalistic intervenor view of government leads. It's a shame that societies never seem to learn that lesson. My FB feed is full of my more left-leaning friends' laments of how Trump is in control of the American government. But the left still doesn't seem to grasp the fact that Trump isn't as bad as it can get - assuming he doesn't do something that makes things even worse. Keep increasing the power of government and a future incarnation of Trump will really terrify you.

Well, I certainly disagree with your rhetorical bait-and-switch here.

checks and balances and enumerated government powers were put in there explicitly to constrain those in government and prevent them from thinking that they could shape the government however they wanted without fundamentally altering the Constitution through new amendments.

I was talking about people, as in the electoral, shaping government to suit the public interest, whether by the passage of laws or by constitutional amendment.

For some reason you switched that out with 'those in government' - whether you mean professional politicians or bureaucrats, this is a completely different thing to what I was talking about.

Treating the government like it's a parent there to fix all problems for the children has led to failed state after failed state as leaders assume more and more power over their people.

You're the one asserting that government is being used that way. I say that the regulatory role of government is entirely valid and constitutional and reject your claim of paternalism. Your argument is tantamount to saying that any kind of legislation is questionable because it undermines the constitutional role of government, which is absurd.

But the left still doesn't seem to grasp the fact that Trump isn't as bad as it can get - assuming he doesn't do something that makes things even worse. Keep increasing the power of government and a future incarnation of Trump will really terrify you.

You don't seem to get that the left understands this perfectly well, and indeed better than you. You seem to imagine that dictatorships result from an excessively powerful government whose levers are suddenly seized by a bad actor and switches to becoming evil overnight. In reality institutions (both formal and informal) are corroded over time, from within. Hitler had been in power almost a decade before the nazi government began to implement the 'final solution.' You may wish to reflect that the Nazis never abrogated the Weimar Constitution but maintained it as a legal figleaf for their totalitarian policies. The US Constitution is similarly capable of exploitation, eg via a3s2.

Your thesis seems to be 'we must keep government weak so that it can never be used to oppress us' but this is absurd on its face. What keeps governments in line is the granting or withholding of the consent of the governed.

The problem is that YouTube is a monopoly in online video. We wouldn't even be having this discussion if there were other viable providers for online video hosting. However, there aren't. So we're down to either complaining about YouTube blocking videos where it shouldn't or defending YouTube on the grounds that they're a private corporation and they have the right to host or not host whatever they please.

Moreover, I've noticed a certain ideological favoritism on Hacker News towards Google, Facebook, etc. I strongly suspect that if it weren't YouTube, but rather Comcast that was filtering these videos, the community's reaction would be different.

Vimeo

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