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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

It feels like in the US we need collective, civic organizations independent of the Federal government. I would like to see the Democratic party and other left-leaning / governance institutions / activists on specific issues work to make priorities resilient of the government. Especially since working on many of these issues is popular and not particularly partisan. And many people in upper-middle class would rather donate/work on these causes rather than a private company squeezing 1% more profit.

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Great idea. Who pays for it?

California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.

Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.

This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.

It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.

Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.

Because they’re rich.

In the US, the rich always win anyway. Full stop.

If you believe otherwise, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve probably not been paying attention.

Under the current administration, as under all administrations, it’s the poor and middle class states that have the problem.

Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.

This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.

The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.

You have it backwards. It was mostly the smaller, Northern states like Delaware that were opposed to proportional representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.

And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.

i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.

Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.

Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.

The differences in population weren’t that massive in the early years, though.

The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.

Still not that massive in relative terms

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_and_pre-Fed...

Virginia would had still been the most populous or at least second most populous state if only white people were counted.

Also there were plenty of small states in the Northeast with very small populations.

Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).

* Free states: 1,390,067

* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302

> Still not that massive in relative terms

I don't know why you persist in saying this.

[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm

Persist in what? My original was that population sizes between states were relatively more even back then than now.

1780 is probably not the best year, though. e.g. New York was still a slave state. Of course the gap only grew bigger over time

With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.

The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.

tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.

The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.

However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

How robust would the reapportioned seats be against extreme political gerrymanders? It seems like packing and cracking would still work.

Not all of us! I favor secession.

The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.

We could all band together and have another dedicated group collect money for it. It wouldn't be optional, either, because we mostly all agree it's valuable. Of course, there would have to be yet another group that sets how much money to collect, and how to spend it.

Oooh I love this idea. We could have some sort of process where everyone gets a say in deciding how the money is spent. Except maybe rather than everyone doing that you could have instead people whose job it is to do it, and everyone gets a say in deciding who those people are.

I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.

It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.

He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.

To be fair Ceasar was replaced by a few even more oppressive wannabe tyrants. He never posted lists of his political enemies to be murdered and was generally pretty lenient.

Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.

For sure. Julius ultimately just paved the way for the future tyrants. He consolidated the power into himself which made it a lot easier for his predecessors to take things further.

I understood what you meant, but the word you were looking for is "successors", not "predecessors". His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the rest of the governing bodies of the republic.

> His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the

Also Sulla and his opponents in the preceding civil war. Who paved the way for Cesar.

Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.

Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.

I wonder what the Pinkerton’s schedule is like…

> have another dedicated group collect money for it

Sounds like S E C E S S I O N

lol...

> Who pays for it?

Mexico

I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.

Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.

As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.

Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.

It doesn't and yet it does. Primarily because big oil dumped a bunch of money into conservative media to demonize the EPA.

The EPA was originally put into place by richard nixon as was championed in a bipartisan fashion.

Because the right is trying to dismantle all those things

I suspect it's a minority of people on the right, and frankly, I've known people on the left (in Canada, at least) who antagonize science and various institutions for no other reason than gut feelings. People on extreme ends of political spectrums are problematic, period. They've always been present, but the Internet amplifies their mania to all of us like never before

Yes, extremes are problematic - marxism as left-left or fascism as right-right. At the moment though USA surely has a problem with the latter.

Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence. Humanity has many examples of this happening through millennia, it is widely documented...

> Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence.

You can replace the label "Conservative" there with just about any ideology or political leaning.

Kind of, but also, I've been watching my mainstream liberal friends update their beliefs about stuff, while conservatives still seem stuck. Certainly the point of being "progressive" is about being open to new ideas, and they don't entirely fail at their title. At least in America at the moment, I think the conservatives have it worse.

I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.

I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.

The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though

Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.

> Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess

I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.

I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.

It's subtle at best in "vocal views". I'm getting this mostly from casual conversations.

Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.

They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.

A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.

Likewise, I think a lot of the problematic stuff came from legitimately good ideas. They were just co-opted by bad actors, so to speak.

right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists. Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.

Conservatism as an ideology is intrisincally resistant to change. That's what makes it conservatism.

It surely seem like it's way more frequently the issue with right, rather than left. For example there are few if any examples of interfering with scientific work during the Baden administration, while there are many during the Trump one.

> protect their believes

Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..

In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.

This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.

Because the current right-leaning US administration (ok, some would call it far right - or rather, if you would go by the standards of pretty much any other country, you'd have to classify it as far right) is so fond of conspiracy theories and rejects science? But yes, in principle I agree that accepting scientific consensus shouldn't be a partisan issue...

we had a group like that called ACORN, and they worked to make sure as many people as possible were registered to vote. Being able to vote is popular and not particularly partisan. Somehow that group doesn't exist anymore! so strange

Isn't this one of the goals of their Project 2025?

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