Stay Gold, America
blog.codinghorror.com
blog.codinghorror.com
The 2024 election had a turnout of about 59% of the voting age population. Since 1972, only one presidential election had higher turnout than that (it was 2020). If the 2024 vote didn’t represent everyone, then most every election for the last half century has been even worse at representing people. Figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
Having 70-80-90% participation with non-compulsory voting should be the goal of any self respecting democracy and politicians who reject measures to increase voter turnout should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
To play devil's advocate and to argue for compulsory voting for a moment, however: It is a potential antidote to the type of voter apathy by which a somewhat demoralized but popular party (e.g. Democrats in the last US election) put themselves out of power by not being as motivated as a smaller group.
So while knowing the width of the motivation gap is useful, a polity could also just compel everyone to vote and then ask if they would have done so if not compelled, to get that information. Which is worse: Inaccurate data about voters' excitement, or sudden and surprising political shifts because people were sure they didn't need to go out to vote because they assumed their party had the majority?
Without compulsory voting, only those with strong motivation will vote - and there is no guarantee that an outsized motivation on one extreme side of the spectrum will not drastically and surprisingly take over if most people felt safe staying home. Austria right now seems to be a good example.
Better then to vote for yourself, vote blank, vote for whoever you would rather have in charge, or vote for the least bad.
Not voting can be dissent (I disagree with the process, I don't think it's fair etc) or simply apathy. But in either case it gives less legitimacy to whoever is elected. And that's important: if you don't think it's a fair election/process then you don't want to give the legitimacy.
If you get killed on the high ground, you’re still dead.
Put simply, the effort to become a voter should be equal regardless of wealth. I like the idea of imposing the difficulty the minority poors have in getting an ID on the white better off. Can you imagine Musk having to make multiple in-person trips to the DMV and wait an hour each time he is there?
Not really: Voters can still choose to "not participate" (whether as protest or laziness) simply by casting a ballot that is functionally empty of choices.
If anything, the signal you're talking about becomes stronger, since a compulsory-voting system removes or reduces certain practical impediments which have nothing to do with deliberate protest.
The signals are different. I cast a blank vote to indicate my support for the process/election, but my lack of support for any of the candidates. I cast no vote to indicate my lack of support for the process itself.
Non-voters and blank/invalid voters are usually reported separately to give exactly these 2 signals.
The US has a long history of voter suppression, which is often supported by the remaining voters. There's a lot of court cases about it; states will fight hard to reduce the impact of the ""wrong kind"" of voters.
Why on earth would you prefer a signal of legitimacy over 70/80/90% vote participation? Get people engaged.
(It's far from the only reason states don't use compulsory voting, I should say. There are many reasons both to have compulsory voting, and many arguments against. But the fact I was trying to point to was that the vast majority of countries don't use mandatory voting - because, one must assume, they feel the cons outweigh the pros)
"There are many reasons both to have gerrymander and not have gerrymander. The USA has gerrymander, because, one must assume, the USA feels the pros outweigh the cons."
Countries don't make the laws. They delegate that job to politicians. It should come as no surprise that even for an obviously anti-democratic practice like gerrymander, politicians get away with adding laws that favour them personally over democracy.
As for the arguments on www.idea.int, they say the leading one is "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with democracy". It's a circular argument. You don't have complete freedom under democracy, and there is no definitive list of freedoms democracy does give you. It varies from country to country. In some countries you don't have the freedom to not vote. So the argument made is really: "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with definition of democracy I just made up".
The other argument they raise is "random votes". True, there are random votes - 7.3% according to them. But that 7.3% is swamped by the 40% of additional voters in the USA who vote if you had compulsory voting. Besides, I'm suspicious of that 7.3% figure. In Australia we measure these things as best we can, and the figure is 1% .. 2%. Informal votes are around 5%, which if you add them together does bring the total to 7%. A vote is counted as informal votes when it's impossible to determine the voters intentions. Some are deliberate protests, but it seems most are just mistakes. In any case, they aren't "random votes" and don't effect the outcome directly so the 7.3% figure is misleading.
I've never head an Australian (where we do have compulsory voting) make what www.idea.int says is the leading argument for compulsory voting, which is that "decisions made by democratically elected governments are more legitimate when higher". Again, since I've never seen a solid definition of "legitimately elected government", I suspect it also suffers from the "definition I just made up" problem. I fact I've never heard anyone make any of the arguments on www.idea.int's list.
What Australians do say is it makes detecting many types of voting fraud easier, because it becomes trivially easy to check people votes just once: count the votes. Because detecting voting fraud is easy, there are no stringent ID checks. You just turn up, no ID required, get your name crossed off the electoral roll, get your ballot paper and vote (or not). So it in compulsory effect makes it easier to cast a vote. It also makes voter disenfranchisement much harder for a pollie to pull off, because people start yelling loudly if they cop a fine because someone makes it near impossible. Surprise, surprise, disenfranchisement is common in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... It's not a thing in Australia.
Those are clear and obvious effects. A debatable one that I think is true is it pulls the vote toward the centre. The people pushing for extreme views always vote because they want things to change. Those that are happy with things as they are sometimes assume it will continue if they do nothing.
Total utter rubbish.
Australia has compulsory voting .. meaning 98% of people turn up or mail in a "vote" and have a barbeque on the day.
The "signal" you falsely claim to be missing is right there in the donkey votes and duds - anybody that objects to the candidates presented is free to draw a dick and balls on the ballot or pencil in a candidate of their choice .. and that signal is anonymous, counted and logged.
You are missing the point. It's not about objecting to candidates. It's two separate signals sent by on the one hand abstaining, and on the other hand filling out a blank votes.
Blank vote means "I think this is a legitimate election, I just don't like any of the candidates".
The distinction between these two signals is important enough that most democracies around the world preserve it by not having compulsory voting.
Australia has compulsory voting and retains this: the legal req is to show up and get your name marked off.
If you wish to communicate your dissatisfaction with the available candidates, then you then fill out your ballot with a giant penis and go on your merry way.
But the only punishment you get for not voting is at most a small fine and that you have to jump through some hoops to get on the register of voters again. But it seems to work in practice to get people to turn out.
Lot of great people of average intelligence. They should not be trying to involve themselves in governance. There should be no expectation or need that they get involved. Average people make poor decisions vs the unusually intelligent. Political discourse should elevate, not mean-regress.
The magic of voting is that most people vote for a side in a semi-random manner and cancel each other out harmlessly.
Either way, encouraging stupid people to participate is not the way. At best it is a harmless no-change manoeuvre.
If it’s not people who study policy as a hobby, then who ought to be voting?
Have you ever heard people say, when government policies transfer wealth from the young to the old, that it's because young voters have low voting rates while old voters have high voting rates?
If you believe politicians will naturally favour the interests of demographics who vote, then having equal voting rates across all demographics is required for a just society.
(Not that it's worked flawlessly for Australia, I'll admit)
The logical endgame of that approach is to have a big tug-of-war between two big coalitions struggling to steal stuff off the other (which, in fairness, is a pretty common equilibrium in democracies).
That actually goes right to the heart of the issue - you can't get a just society by doing things by the numbers. To get a just society, just policies need to be implemented. If the winning side of an election wants just policies then there will be a just society. Otherwise society will be injust. Participation doesn't change the dynamics of that at all - if anything it makes it harder because the majority is generally an unprincipled blob and certainly does not make time to reflect on matters of fairness (Australia is hardly a just society, simply that the people getting a bad deal are relatively small minorities, not actively mistreated and can be reasonably ignored). If we had a reliable process for achieving a just society we'd use that instead of democracy.
...why just two? He specifically mentioned advocating for ranked choice voting, which would make it a tug-of-war between N coalitions, and would lead to better outcomes that our current broken two-party system.
And if N coalitions playing tug-of-war, that means there is an (N-1)/N chance that your preferred one loses. It is much better if everyone agrees not to play that game and adopts smarter strategy. Which has little to do with the number of people participating in the election.
But it doesn't solve this particular issue.
The whole population is aging. Which means we're going to see higher and higher percentage of old people vs young people. Now what? We demand higher turnover rates from the young to cancel it out?
I think that Gilens 2005[1] and Gilens 2014[2] are the references that people usually cite to argue that America is an oligarchy. The 2nd paper made a splash at the time, see for example this summary[3]. There were some attempts at rebuttals that seemed silly even back then, but regardless of what you think about the argument 1 or 2 decades ago, wealth concentration has accelerated, so.. hmm.
If voting has little chance of winning you your policy preferences even when you do get your preferred candidate, there is little good that may come of it but many potential negatives such as: junk mail, jury duty, the smoldering eternal hatred of your differently aligned friends/family, drafted into the coming great space war, etc
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3521574 [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
You'd have to be a dogmatic believer of civic duty to stand in line for hour just to vote R or D in a state that will go the other way with 30% difference...
What the prior commenter meant is that in some jurisdictions it's pointless to vote against one of the parties because they win so overwhelmingly.
For example, I live in Massachusetts. The legislature is 95% one party. There's no point in being in another party, you'll never get elected and your vote won't change the outcome. It sounds like a dream if it's "your" party but without inter-party tension there are a lot of shenanigans that go on.
Your municipal and state elections are, by a wide margin, the most consequential to your daily life. Congressional representatives have a moderate importance.
Who is elected president has the least impact to your daily life, and to the laws and politics of the country, of any person you ever vote for. It's actually tiny, even if some people would like you to think it's everything.
Gerrymandering is a cancer on our democracy. Unfortunately it is self perpetuating.
The problem is that it's also "what point is there in voting D in California?"
All this great shit the D's talk about never seems to manifest in the states they solidly control.
(Also, if you're hung up on the fact I'm bagging on the home team, that's just the state the parent poster mentioned, mentally invert R and D and substitute a southern state).
The fact that Jeff Atwood can make $8 million in political donations just underlines the fact that I am powerless compared to him. We may have equal say on election day, but people like Atwood have vastly disproportionatal say on legislation days. Putting money into politics is the problem, not the solution to the problem.
If the "American Dream", according to Jeff Atwood, is to become much wealthier than one's fellows, that's inherently anti-democratic.
There was a lot of Musk/Thiel billions here, Kamala spending surge there, George Clooney, Taylor Swift.
(And now this guy who will spend more millions)
Wasn't the intention that you could not buy a democratic election?
The real winners here must be Ad providers (google/facebook) and television networks.
"Programmers all over the world helped make an American Dream happen in 2008 when we built Stack Overflow"
"I was rewarded handsomely for a combination of hard work and good luck. That's what the American Dream promises us."
"I earned millions of dollars. I thought that was the final part of the American Dream." [He goes on to talk the final part as "sharing" the American Dream, but I question why earning millions of dollars is the first part, or indeed any part, of the American Dream.]
"It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans."
"I grew up poor in America, inspired by the promise of the American Dream that I could better myself and my family"
In other words, Atwood is committed in principle to a system of inequality, despite complaining about the current historic levels of inequality. One wonders, what level of inequality would be acceptable to him? Atwood started making political posts only after Trump was elected, but wealth concentration was already a huge problem before then.
Moreover, Atwood's only "solutions" to our problems seem to be charity from the ultra-wealthy and voter turnout. Implicitly, he appears to be blaming people poorer than him for our problems, for not voting "correctly", or not voting at all, as if there were anyone to vote for who would do anything about wealth inequality. Certainly not Harris, financially backed by a bunch of billionaires herself who were essentially writing her policies along with their checks to her campaign.
A system that relies essentially on charity, especially on the charity of the ultra-wealthy, is fundamentally dysfunctional, broken. Charity should not be necessary if the government does what it's supposed to do and protects its citizens. I'm not impressed by philanthropy, because the need for it is already a sign that something is very wrong. It presumes a system that disproportionately benefits a few and impoverishes many, perhaps just so that the philanthropists can feel good about themselves.
I mean... is the definition of "everyone" really up for debate? 60% is only a little more than half
You can debate why turnout is so low in this country for something so high stakes. The obvious things to reach for are the electoral college (where votes simply don't matter unless you live in a swing state) and the two party "system" (where you have to vote for an omnibus which will definitely have things you disagree with).
But it's just plain rotten. The only people this seems to work for consistently are the wealthy.
Well, that's because they know how to invest wisely in lawmakers. Fabulous ROI.
maybe it's good when you are at that level. Jeff and Elon both spent a ridiculous amount, but arguably smart money like the Koch brothers are just making nice influence campaigns with a lot less, and of course the same goes for state-level actors.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
Maybe because statistically speaking your individual vote does not in fact matter? And that's a principle that applies equally to the left/right. For every marginal non-voter in your preferred party you get to vote, there's a marginal non-voter in the opposite party that somebody else is trying to get out to vote.
Put another way, we could intentionally reduce the sample size and mandate that only 33% of adults vote in any given election, and we'd reduce the statistical confidence in the election result very little.
Any given individual's singular vote (which is likely nullified by the marginal person in the opposite party) just has so little impact compared to Atwood's $8m political contribution that it's a rounding error.
The understatement of the year. From all I read, hasn't it been dead and burried for decades? (Of course not for some founder who hit the jackpot like Jeff).
"Evidence indicates that in recent decades social mobility in the United States has declined, and income inequality has risen.[7][8] Social mobility is lower in the US than in many European countries, especially the Nordic countries.[9][10] Despite this, many Americans are likely to believe they have a better chance of social mobility than Europeans do.[11] The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index.[12]"
The only related thing remained appears to be individual scheming and grinding to make it big, by whatever means necessary, and hope you get lucky. Not some notion that the current environment is conductive to that, or that "hard work" alone will get it, and for most young people forget about the "house with the white picket fence" too.
And the charity work mentioned, good as it might be, is more like a drop in the bucket, that won't change much either way.
has been a classic dismissal throughout history - it was the excuse in Dickensian England also.
What has more leverage and potential for positive change is an analytic approach looking at multiple countries, quintile various income|asset bands, look at food and housing security in these bands, look at the movement from band to band and quantify what it is to be poor and how many are poor - look to the factors that cause or are tightly bound to being poor.
...and those poor people in the US could always look up to much better social mobility trends than the current ones.
Even for whites, south had very stable social hierarchy - you had a place where you was meant to stay at. It was resembling aristocratic setup rather then actual free for all capitalism. Civil war changed that by a lot and opened mobility options that were not there before.
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - George Carlin, like 30 years ago. Just after he observed that "hard-working people of modest means continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them."
Source: I am a non-American who does business in America.
You can start and business and get downwards social mobility (lose your personal investment in a bussiness which fails).
And inversely, you can get upwards mobility without starting a business (like with a promotion or getting a better job). Or rather, in the last decades, increasingly you can't. But traditionally, that was the way most people saw it. The "company man" going through the ranks, the immigrant who studies and gets a good job, etc. Building a business was always a thing for a minority.
And since most new businesses fail anyway (and in most fields require capital, not to mention connections and lack, plus a specific set of skills like salesmanship and market savvy), "start a business" as a solution to social mobility at large, is a really bad idea.
Starting a succesful business doesn't even necessarily translate to social mobility for others. In fact, it can happen even in a social mobility wise regressing economy. E.g. many people lose better paying jobs, and end up working on the cheap for some uber (pun intended) successful new business.
Successful business people start multiple businesses.
Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera.
Which is irrelevant to the points discussed, no?
Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses.
>Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera
Social mobility in the context of this discussion is about getting better jobs and making more money. It's not about becoming an aristocrat or going to the Opera...
Yes they did. Statistics were cited about business failure rates, which were one-shot rates.
> Social mobility in the context of this discussion…
Then you are talking about economic mobility, and the data cited in support of arguments about social mobility is a category error.
Maybe because of naive concepts like "enlarging the cake for everyone" or - more likely - the top won't allow the protections they raised to be lowered.
Yeah, that has been working a treat (pun intended)...
The 27th best, if that new thing is supposed to lift your social/economic status upwards: "The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index".
But it might well be the best for people to build new businesses of scale (especially already well off people).
My grandpa worked in agriculture, my dad in a factory, and I'm a software engineer. The only reason I became the first in my family to go to university is that in my country as long as I passed all my classes I was pretty much guaranteed to not pay a euro for attending university. I even went to one of the top 5 universities for CS in Spain, which might be crap compared to US ones, but economically I'm much better off than my parents.
Affordable university education can provide upwards mobility to a lot more people.
Where the US differs from a lot of European countries is a) a lot of people chase after their "dream" university, which may be private/more selective/out of state/etc and b) almost anyone can go to A university in the US, no matter how poor their grades. It just won't be free.
We're not talking about someone moving up the ranks in a caste system.
Per your citation, fewer welders go to the ballet, but they are richer, across generations.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) for intergenerational social mobility.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=t...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
etc.
1%'ers don't have to worry about the price of groceries nor affordable housing; they can just brute-force whatever they desire through excessive wealth.
At least, that's the impression I get from the millionaires I know. Perhaps not all are like this (they gathered their wealth primarily via private equity) but I have no reason to think politicians would be any different.
There are jerks everywhere. Most very wealthy people I know fund science and hospitals.
I accept your surrender. Better luck next time.
I'm the first to admit my ignorance of such topics to be completely honest.
However, what I've noticed about myself as I've become more wealthy is that I'm less corruptible.
I've always had a strong moral backbone, sure, but I've noticed that I am less likely to do things that compromise what I want to do, as I've become more rich.
So, maybe you need your politicians to be somewhat rich and numerous, in order to prevent external pressure from people who have an incentive to bribe *ahem*... sorry.. "lobby".
And how's that been working out?
What are we comparing to?
It's funny because I grew up in a very corrupt country (Brazil), nowadays when I compare the corruption I saw there with developed countries I've lived at the main difference is how brazen and shameless it is in Brazil while in developed places it has more layers to be stuffed into, and veneers attached to it to hide it away.
I know tons of people who work at NVidia for whom this isn’t true. They love working on hardware and suddenly we’re worth 8 figures because of the rise of the stock.
I don't believe this kind of nitpicking helped to further any discussion around the main point I made.
I think the difference is, what was your goal? If your goal was something other than getting rich, then it can go the way it did for you. But if your goal was to get rich, if you went into politics because you thought that you could make a lot of money around the edges there, then the more you rise in power, the more opportunities there will be for corruption.
Character matters. It matters for everyone, and it matters in particular for politicians.
This is nihilist cynicism, and is worth rejecting out-of-hand.
In any case it's a moot point, to an argument nobody made.
Trying or not trying, and understanding that the (documented) cases of social mobility are worsening are orthogonal.
In fact, with that understanding, a society can do something to improve that, which will also make it easier for people trying.
I'm also tired of people saying the American dream is about becoming a billionaire. It's not. It never has been. It's always been about having the opportunity to improve your wealth and living standards. Sometimes that means just leaving something better for your children, much like the Italian and Irish immigrants did That American dream is very much still alive.
On a related note, I'm tired of hearing people say they can't afford to buy a home. Buying a house is a very expensive and slow way to build wealth. These people would do better to put some money into a low cost index fund, or max out their 401k if they have one.
Obviously, the very poor do not have money to invest with, but they can give their children a better life. it's certainly not easy, but it's possible. The working class, however (not the most poor), routinely chooses to put their money into flat screen tvs, Iphones, expensive vehicles and clothing, and other depreciable assets. We've failed to teach people how to take advantage of the abundant opportunities in America, and we have a culture of frivolous spending.
Doesn't make it less true.
>I'm also tired of people saying the American dream is about becoming a billionaire. It's not. It never has been. It's always been about having the opportunity to improve your wealth and living standards.
True, but that's what is argued that has regressed (and the numbers back this up).
>On a related note, I'm tired of hearing people say they can't afford to buy a home. Buying a house is a very expensive and slow way to build wealth.
Which is irrelevant. People want to buy a home to have a shelter and not be subject to raising rent, evictions, and insecurity. Not necessarily to "build wealth". And, in past decades, they used to be able to buy a house, without huge mortgage costs, and pay it off quite early too.
Buying a second house may be questionable, but the first house has so many tax and leverage advantages as well as "hedging" against the volatile rental market. Especially when Americans can get 30 year fixed mortgages!
> but they can give their children a better life. it's certainly not easy, but it's possible. The working class, however (not the most poor), routinely chooses to put their money into flat screen tvs
What if they want to give themselves a better life, rather than just their children?
> flat screen tvs
All TVs are flatscreen now. This is a "tell" that somebody is mentally copy-pasting a rant from the early 2000s.
I hear this so the time from people who have never owned a home. It's partly true, but not as good if a deal as you think. True that you don't have to pay capital gains taxes when you sell, but that's true of 401ks when taking distributions.
As for HELOC loans, well that's more debit in to of your mortgage. You could get that from an SBLOC from your brokerage account, and under some circumstances, from a 401k. Again this is all more debit, and you don't want that unless you are desperate.
Finally, owning a home does not protect you from increasing housing costs. Increasing property values will increase your taxes and insurance every year, just like a rent increase. Maintenance costs will hit you like a hammer. In the end you pa thousands to maintain your home every year. The only reason to buy a house is to capture a small percentage of the over all cost in equity. But it takes about a decade before that saves money over renting.
All these people complaining about not being able to afford a home don't even have savings. First, get a few months of savings, then max out your 401k or open a brokerage account, then consider buying a house if you think you'll live there for a year.
>What is they want to give themselves a better life
That's not always possible. If you immigrate at the age of 50 and you're very poor, it might be too late. Still, many people will simply benefit from living in a more stable nation.
>All tvs are flat screen now
It was true in 2000 and it's true now. maybe I should have said 4k tvs? it makes no difference.
> Our family made eight $1 million donations to nonprofit groups working to support those most currently in need
Color me cynical but he's quite literally part of the problem, writing about the problem in abstracts.
URL should be (current one only works until a new post): https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
“ a phrase referring to a purported national ethos of the United States: that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life.[2] … different meanings over time. Originally, the emphasis was on democracy, liberty and equality, but more recently has been on achieving material wealth and upward mobility.[4]”
It seems like the article—and many of popular complaints (including mine)—are primarily grappling with the lack of upward mobility. Versus the older meaning, “democracy, liberty and equality”, which IMO would be a much more severe loss.
An argument could be made that loss of material equality threatens access to democracy and liberty, but imo the article—and charity recommendations-are focused on bandaids, where the [Citizens United](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) decision is the known mechanism by which inequality threatens democracy and liberty.
When/if I think of a corporation as a legitimate group of citizens, (much less dissonance when I think of a labor union this way), I wonder if the democracy and liberty are better protected by allowing inequality to be weaponized against the government. The “fact” that weaponizing inequality against the government is the effect of Citizen’s United remains unchanged?
So I found it very funny that right now there are more and louder voices on reducing trade deficits and bringing manufacturing backs. Well, are most folks ready to have the blacklines also becomes red? I have a huge doubt on that.
Let's look in more detail at the medical field for instance:
There was a 3,200 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators between 1975 and 2010, compared to a 150% increase in physicians, due to an increasing number of regulations:
https://www.athenahealth.com/resources/blog/expert-forum-ris...
>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009.) [3]
In contrast, the fields of medicine in the US less affected by this surge in government intervention; cosmetic and laser eye surgery, have seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation. [4]
[1] https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/prospective-payment-sys...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...
[4] https://healthblog.ncpathinktank.org/why-cant-the-market-for...
Q: Why should anyone be a nurse when they could be a frontend developer instead and make way more money?
A: You're going to have to pay your nurses a hell of a lot more.
Why do we worry so much about voter turnout? A 58% voter turnout is a statistically significant sampling of the population; aren't we getting a pretty accurate measurement of the actual vote with that high of voter turnout?
Now if voter turnout is skewed, then that's a problem worth talking about. But with how much time and effort it takes to vote, it seems like such a waste of time with how we do it today.
We could get the same results with much less effort if we made it work like jury duty; at each election we select 10% of the population at random and it's their job to actually do the research and go to the work of voting (research candidates, wait 3 hours at the ballot box, etc), and the remaining 90% of us get to go watch a movie or something that day.
Voters are not randomly sampled so this is impossible to state due to selection bias. If a plurality of potential voters are saying "none of the above" when asked to vote, that itself is a noteworthy signal.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184266/educational-attai...
There are some downside like wealth inequality but the dream is about individual attainment not comparisons with the Joneses.
A man builds a home to grow old in and sells it before the roof is on is the American Dream.
Not to downplay the other contributions which are fucking awesome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371627
Is this post wildly off on his net worth calculation?
Either way, I applaud him for his donations!
I hadn’t heard about the Warren Buffett complete 180 degree change on where his money is going after he dies and that’s really disappointing to read.
(Context: SC2 is a competitive game where players are distributed in "leagues" according to their skill in the game. "Gold" is one of the lower leagues. "Stay gold" is a mean thing you would say to someone who is wrong and shows unwillingness grow by learning from their mistakes).
If the last election was any indication then more than half the country explicitly rejected many of them.
the other issues are:
* child hunger
* veteran support
* censorship
* financial literacy
so I guess the unpopular ones in your eyes are...
* civil rights
* lgbtq rights
* immigration
hard to give a blanket "democrat wishlist" when more than half are generally favorable across party lines
* child hunger - Global rather than US-focussed.
* veteran support - OK
* censorship - Ish. The campus free speech stuff looks OK, but there is the usual culture war "book banning" by preventing sexually explicit material been shown to young children.
* financial literacy - OK
* civil rights - a lot of it looks like the Soros-funded lenient DA stuff
* lgbtq rights - I think the main flashpoint is the "t" in that acronym
* immigration - obviously contentious, even within right wing circles
He also compares the current environment to Nazi Germany. Now a lot of commenters on YouTube think this is inappropriate. Nazi's were bad. End of discussion. If you think that too, I would like to defend Niall a bit here. You can disagree with Nazi's and still listen to Nazi's. How else can you learn from their mistakes? How else can we figure out what went wrong and avoid it happening again?
How about the rich/government following the rules and not allowing a former president that violated the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause run for election? Taking millions as bribes/gifts from foreign governments? Are you kidding me.
And I'm stumped as to why more people haven't heard the new Epst.. tapes where he reveals his 15 year friendship with this "president".
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/trump-jeffre...
Are you serious? This is the leader of a free country?
Ohhhhhhh because this country is so darn proud of free speech.
I wonder if the whistleblowers that revealed all of the NSA spying programs feel that way.
The come up to this election had nothing but propaganda spread on "X". Literally no possible way to block the content created by the shi* poster Elon.
Only after everyone started to move to blusky did his posts magically stop showing up daily in timelines.
Braindead country. I truly wish I was born in South Korea where the citizens hold corrupt politicians accountable.
Maybe there is a case that can be made where more central planning can fix these issues, but it is unserious to leave it unaddressed.
Why don't more people vote or engage with state institutions? Perhaps it is because we regard these systems to be immoral and politics to be a fruitless endeavor. The US was founded by individualists who claimed they wanted to limit government's role in our lives. Today the US government accounts for 27% of the US's GDP. Those who aspire to cut this spending are labeled as "un-american" by the author.
Even after the author's journey of upward mobility, he engages in classism. We rightly condemn those who condemn those who use pejoratives for racial classes, ethnic classes or genders, but somehow it is socially acceptable to blame social issues on "The Rich". Even on this site, I regularly see articles which use, "World's Richest Man" as a pejorative.
I listen. I get it. I understand people are unsatisfied. Those who do not seem to understand the latest electoral outcome seem to be asking, "Why can we not double down with even more gov. central planning?"
https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2017-11-03-regulatory-over...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I feel sad reading this because it is filled with the millennial optimism that DID improve the world in the early 10s in the wake of the financial crisis. We are in a different time, I think.
The core issues are that voting, donating, and protesting, do not "work" in effecting meaningful change for the average American on a timescale that is useful.
No amount of donating, voting, or protesting, or xyz will change this political vibe until there are real consequences for bad actors. Without this, this creates the dichotomy of "winners" and "suckers". When you are a sucker enough times, you don't want to play anymore. Noblesse obligee is for suckers. Voting is for suckers. Policy making? Suckers. Donating is for suckers. Working is for suckers.
When faced with extractionists, there is no building.
My savings is a megacorp's uncaptured/unallocated value. That is my only defense against the dark arts of our system, and it is at risk every day I am alive.
For my peers, they feel advancing their life goals (school, house, kids) has a non-zero possibility of blowing them up. This persistent insecurity is the result of decades of the American System. We can all look back at the last decades and see what outcomes look like for the average.
You see it and feel it at all levels, from local politics, to national politics.
You see it in tech, lord of the flies style corporatism is in vogue. It is expressed in people chasing promos, doing small scale company politics against their rivals, and doing absolutely unethical things while getting away with it. I have seen people who I thought were good people suddenly say and do ethically radioactive things to get ahead in their career. The trick is never getting caught, and always getting ahead.
If you raise your voice, everything you have worked for is at risk, if you're lucky, you're fired, if you're not, you're exiled from the industry.
I have optimism for America on the long term, but currently we have too many exploiters, a system that reacts too slowly / not effectively to those inputs, and seemingly no recourse due to the legal system not cleaning up. Note, normal is the guy at your coffee shop making you coffee, the person stocking shelves at your grocery, and the guy who fixes your car, not the "I sold my startup for 1B and I can't figure out my own life." guy.
As for me, early on my small surplus was blasted by one hospital bill due to flu (20k), and getting millstoned by college debt while working in academia. I recovered by going full megacorper, much to the chagrin of my old lab. No PhD meant always a pet and never a peer.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
I mean, we're watching what happens to them due to them being corporations in real time. I find it difficult to interpret that statement in the way the post intends for it to be read.
Welcome to oligarchy, America. Private citizen Musk now owns the government, being the largest donor of the republican party. The democrats are bought too and now only show a principled opposition.
What remains of public services will get privatized on bullsh*t excuses (through DOGE, for example) so that Musk and his friends can put their hands on the latest markets.
And, sadly, we are getting dumber and easier to manipulate.
Grassroot movements with legitimate concerns are infiltrated and destroyed. Elite made "grassroot" movements are allowed to do things while it fits the dual narratives.
There is active suppression of talking about safety, housing, jobs, food quality, economic prosperity (of the people not corporations or state!). This is replaced with endless arguments about race, abortion, guns, immigration, religion, scare tactics, and war.
The recent H1-B drama was telling. The elites tripped and exposed their lies. There was a collective "wait a minute" that united antisemites and Jews, right wingers and Bernie Sanders, cats and dogs. And the system got scared like with the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.
Stay safe. It looks like it's going to get rough either way.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/trump-mail-in-vo...
If you want to put elections beyond doubt and make everyone accept the result you should have voter ID and paper ballots. The public holiday idea is probably not a bad one.
I have doubts. First, as someone else pointed out, there already has been lots of investigation in Republican-run states, and they turned up very little. Second, Trump seems to have the ego-driven need to deny that he lost. He seems to have the tendency to hire people who tell him what he wants to hear, and to fire those that don't. That's not likely to drive an impartial investigation.
Why not apply a little bit of technology to the problem so we can verify our vote was counted, and that only legitimate votes were counted?
If your tech friend says everything sucks in tech, then why should their judgement even be taken at face value? They’re part of the problem!
"There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired."
Agreed on your second paragraph.
It is also my understanding that most voter fraud challenges in 2016 were dismissed due to lack of standing, before the facts were considered.
Some were dismissed for failure to state a legally tryable claim, or for lack of evidence. ("I think there's something going on there" is not a legally valid ground for a lawsuit. You have to have something that at least looks like evidence in order to get in the door.)
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks
analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
Also, could you please explain, in detail, how voting by mail is “the most open to abuse”?
Having to show an ID to a poll worker to get a ballot is a higher bar than signing something.
I mean, look, I get the arguments about mobility. My mother was not going to drive to a polling place. But it is also true that mail-in voting is more open to abuse and fraud by those who are inclined to do so.
I agree, but it's also true that 1) strict ID requirements inconvenience poor and other disadvantaged people the most, and 2) there have been multiple studies on the effectiveness of voter ID laws which have found them to have little impact on voter fraud.
Additionally, if my data is correct, only 11 US states have strict voter ID requirements. This means that for a majority of Americans, an apples to apples comparison would be "signing a ballot" vs. "giving a poll worker your name/address." Of those two options, I would argue that signing something is actually a higher bar than giving your name to a poll worker, because it could later be more reliably verified to be fraud, if necessary.
So, I don't accept that mail-in ballots are "the most open to abuse."
Everyone should use telnet and there is no evidence that anyone is looking at your packets.
As a divided country, we keep squabbling over the metaphorical telnet when we could be making ssh more accessible. Or building the next generation with key rotation.
> First Generation Investors – Introduces high school students in low-income areas to the fundamentals of investing, providing them real money to invest, encouraging long-term wealth accumulation and financial literacy among underserved youth.
I don't know how to process these two together. Giving $1m to a charity teaching people to invest while lamenting that the top 1% own 32% of the wealth.
The concentration of wealth is a result of the insane inflation created by the spending and endless money printing of the state, not because people are savvy investors bent on seizing all the poor people's wealth.
It's not investors / the top 1% who created the $36 trillion in government debt (except for the corrupt politicians like Nancy Pelosi who are part of the 1%).
This kind of thing triggers me. Not because of the humble-bragging but because this is precisely the attitude which makes everything worse. Systemic problems cannot be fixed by bailing out a select few... It's making things worse for everyone else, adding cost pressure for those who aren't getting any money or special help.
It's dystopian that some people have millions of dollars of passive income; easy money falling on their lap each year, mostly coming straight out of a money printer, then they give back a fraction of that to a fraction of the people who were victimized by that same system.
The system systematically steals a little bit of money from maybe a few million victims via inflation, taxes and loss of opportunities, the system then essentially gives some of that money to 1 person (e.g. gov contracts, cheap loans, etc... which props up their stocks, without them even being aware), then the person donates a portion of that money to maybe 10 to 100 hand-picked victims. Net result; it just serves to concentrate wealth from a majority of victims to a minority of victims and makes things even harder for the majority of people who aren't recipient of any donations or investments.
It creates a system where nobody can succeed without receiving help. Either the government helps you with their money printer, or some rich person (who is themselves helped by the government or banking system) helps you. It becomes increasingly difficult to succeed without help when everyone else is getting help.
Imagine playing a game of monopoly when half of the players are getting 10x the money than the other half every time they pass go. What happens to the people who are receiving less money? They're essentially guaranteed to lose the game. A miserable experience because it FEELS hopeless and it literally IS hopeless... Yet they're being gaslit that everyone else is on the same playing field. It's not, just look at how the system is designed, new money is being created constantly, clearly it's not being distributed evenly.
The system would be much better if rich people just retired and spent their time and unlimited printed money on their yachts and mansions instead of distorting the markets and monopolizing opportunities by funding all sorts of startups which only steal opportunities from more worthy competitors (who don't have priority access to a money printer).
If you factor out ignorance, it's as evil as it gets.
And yes, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you are competing in the market against homeless people for limited goods. That's the modern reality. Most people are precariously close to being homeless.
If the rich started donating a lot of money to all the homeless people, I'd probably become homeless myself because rents for low-cost accommodation would go up because of all the free money flooding that market...
Then surprise, surprise, when it'd be my turn to get my free money, rich people wouldn't have any money left to spare for me because the problem would have become too large by then due to perverse incentives they would have created.
The whole system is in a controlled demolition; concentrating more and more and creating increasingly perverse incentives. Why bother creating value, when there is an easier way to get money by convincing rich people to 'select' you?