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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.

Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?

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The US legal system allows a great many delaying tactics if you can afford filing fees and base your case on statements that cannot be proven with certainty. The legal system is often set up to require either certain proof or expensive multi-year reviews to overcome such objections, and they are used with great success by coordinated groups of NIMBY folks.

Laws could be passed to sidestep all of this and support infrastructure growth, but those laws would trigger the same attacks from coordinated groups NIMBY, who happen to often be wealthy single-family homeowners, and thus more often than their competition have captive lawmakers to resist any effort they disapprove of.

Not enough people are willing to spend time at city hall community hearings and make the voice of reason heard whereas these other people will show up to make demands. Same thing happened here when the city wanted to install free wifi in public parks for students, all the nuts flooded the meetings making ridiculous claims and demands but none of the people who would benefit bothered to show up so they canned the idea.

And the council members are so incapable of critical thought that they believe that the loud nutjobs who show up are representative of their constituents?

The concern is more how many of those people will show up to vote against you in races which can have very small numbers of voters, and how much of a hassle they'll make for your office. If someone decides that you're part of the problem, you'll be getting lots of contacts, public records requests, etc. The things which circulate on neighborhood listserves, Facebook groups, etc. can be pretty absurd but they might break down into the 95% who don't care and ignore them and the 5% who care enough to put a lot of energy into obstruction.

None of that precludes doing the right thing, of course, but if it's not an issue you care strongly about you might decide not to fight it. The best countermeasure is for everyone else to tune out local politics less, which is an area people oddly ignore even though it has the most day to day impact on your life.

Turnout can be pretty low in city elections, so the cranks may not represent their constituents, but be overrepresented among voters. For folks reading this: there are probably YIMBY or other pro-housing/infrastructure groups in your area that will tell you when to show up to meetings to fight back against this nonsense.

Great question, and I personally believe it's driven by modern American communities being unable to maintain their own infrastructure at any level. 100 years ago people worked for a living, with their hands, and would often have to build, install, and repair their homes, roads, and other infrastructure themselves. They understood the process, and what it takes to get something done.

These days, most households, especially the wealthy ones like in Marin, are helmed by people who do NOT work with their hands, do not respect people who do, and who have no interest in learning more. Even worse, infrastructure work is so heavily regulated and specialized that gobs of accidental complexity prevent anyone who wanted to from learning more about it, reinforcing the ignorance.

And truly, it's easy to have sympathy. The world is a complex place, and no doubt they have their hands full dealing with the technology revolution and palace intrigues at work; who has time to understand something as boring as infrastructure? And besides, if infrastructure fails, it fails for everyone so there's no real benefit to being informed or prepared (in that sense being informed about city infrastructure would be very similar to being a "prepper", in a weaker sense, which comes with it's own stigma).

So if you say "That's ridiculous, be quiet" you will offend sensibilities to the extent YOU will be banned, banned for having dirty knowledge, for shaming those that don't, and for tacitly asserting the value of having such knowledge! Plus, your views aren't in their news-feeds, so there's no emotional juice to them. Emotionally driven opposition is the inevitable retarding force in the hyper-connected, capitalist info-sphere, and ultimately leads to civic ignorance and paralysis. Good luck overcoming that in your city council meetings! (But you have my respect if you even try.)

Because the representatives with authority will get voted out by these folks. You have to dance around them, or find technical mitigations to the silliness (substation facades, suboptimal siting, more expensive underground transmission, etc).

It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it charges primarily from your rooftop solar, which is mandatory on new CA residential construction).

It is ridiculous, and people who are ridiculous must be negotiated with (unfortunately!). I don't know what the solution is besides applying constant pressure in the appropriate direction.

Disclosure: This information comes from my own research, as well as first hand accounts from electrical linemen friends in NorCal upgrading infrastructure.

At what point is it ok to throw in the towel and say "this is just a city/state reaping what they sow". Sure there's people who want to do things right but as evidenced by a result they're a small enough minority that their voice doesn't matter. It's not like there's lobbyists from BigWildfire(TM) distorting things. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Every time I think we’re there, it turns out we’re not yet there. I don’t know.

I looked into this recently in order to gather enough facts to educate an aunt who wasn't a 5g conspiracy person, they just asked "how do you know that it's safe?", which is always a fair question. I wrote a post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103096

But the TLDR is that (in the example of 5G), the power levels were talking about amount to ~300,000x less power than what would be required to irritate your skin in a minor way.

Of course, it's always complex because sure, stick your hand in to a transformer and electromagnetism will do plenty of damage to you. Being against 5G or power stations because EMF "can do damage" is a bit like banning cars because jumping in front of a car "can do damage", except cars are _far_ more lethal and far less helpful than signal-carrying cables.

Because the people involved have political and legal power.

Please review the Epri document EMF and your health. Document number 3002016508. It's free on Epris website.

Because they can vote.

Yes, stupid people can vote. This is the main vulnerability of democracy.

Stupid people can also become a monarch or a despot, which is one of the problems of monarchism and despotism.

I think that what you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy.

I think the key value of (our version of) democracy is the peaceful transition of power. For example from Clinton -> Bush -> Obama -> Trump. They all had very different views on what the country needed to do, but they all accepted that elections were how the future was decided and handed off power to someone they did not agree with.

In a monarchy or despotism, there is no transition of power by design. It is supposed to be difficult, because it is not wanted. So if you end up with the wrong choice it is very hard to correct.

A big part to this is that the voters have confidence in the result, hence they don't go around looting and starting civil wars.

Trump is scary. I am not of the US but: I fear if Trump wins. I fear the tantrum/insurrection of Trump if he loses in respect to a peaceful handover.

> you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy

Well, yeah. BTW, I didn't say I have a better idea, I merely pointed out an issue.

[edit: retracted]

This is called sortition, and the only common use of it in the US today is for drawing juries.

To be clear, the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, and the constant use of the word democracy dilutes this fact.

This is a red herring, here is the definition of democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

The US clearly fits in here. The US is not a direct democracy, but neither is any other country in the world, including Switzerland that perhaps is the one I know of that comes closest.

Given the subtopic I commented on was bringing up NYMBYs and political process and the word democracy, I don't see this as a red herring, or an attempt to divert or smokescreen the argument; I simply stated the US is a constitutional republic, which some would argue further and label it a federal republic. It seems your quote is from lexico.com. How do you respond when someone asks you what type of government does the US have?

Here is what you said: "To be clear, the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, and the constant use of the word democracy dilutes this fact."

Here is what happens when you google democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy: 1a: government by the people especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

dictionary.com: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.

You said the US is not a democracy, all definitions I can find says it is.

Except that the proposition system in California, and other states, is direct democracy.

The end result is that many state and local issues are resolved through direct voter action.

I don't know where you picked up the meme of "the US is a republic not a democracy" but you might want to read up about the reaction against it:

https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s...

https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...

I picked up the "meme" long before the word "meme" entered the vernacular in the sense that I think you are using it. I had the good fortune of attending a Jesuit HS in NYC when grammar was prescriptive rather than descriptive, you took two years of Latin, and studied world religions, and the preciseness of language mattered. Mr. Caruso, my sophomore year History teacher, asked the first day back to school, "Is the United States a democracy?". Like most I said 'Yes'. He then lectured on early U.S., and other types of governments. It was an eye opener for me, and taught me to question my assumptions, and try to be more precise in my language and arguments (logical ones, not emotional ones). My comment about "diluting" comes from people throwing the term about to a point that it becomes meaningless out of context. For a similar commentary, this quote in the Wikipedia entry for a search on "democracy", seems in agreement: " However, the noun "democracy" has, over time, been modified by more than 3,500 adjectives which suggests that it may have types that can elude and elide this duality."

Thanks for the links. I found the first link interesting and then disappointing, since I had worked at a bookstore in NYC in the early 90s that carried a lot of philosophy books, economics books mainly from the Austrian School, and so the mises.org link caught my eye. Ryan McKaken the author of the article basically dismisses the use of "we're a republic and not a democracy" when used as an argument in two cases of what he believes people are thinking. I was pointing out that we are not simply "a democracy", but more precisely constitutional republic, no more, no less.

How do you answer the question, "What type of government does the U.S. have?"

Thank you for that context, even if it mostly relates to your personal experience and back story. I agree that we should be careful how we use words, but I don't think you can easily argue that "democracy" has become meaningless out of context, while also imposing your own idiosyncratic context to claim that the US isn't a democracy.

As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.

I feel that's nitpicking. The values of democracy are constantly advertised in all political discourse in this country.

The values of democracy are touted in Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make it a democracy. Small groups with a NYMBY position, or large PACs depend operate on our current form of government, which is why I made the precise distinction in my comment. The 2016 election outcome was via the electoral college, and not the popular vote.

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