Laws are just a consequence of an actual cultural change, and can only succeed (and not precede) the conversion of hearts and minds. Voting and democracy should not become a device to placate the dissatisfied masses into silence, make them lineup for ballot, to choose a lesser evil who, in most likelihood, will turn out to be a egotistical power-seeker. We shouldn't conflate voting with "will of the people."
There is this "damping" factor like a mechanical system, that takes the energy out of the people's hands and dampens it with lobbying, dishonesty, unaccountability and complete neglect for public interest. The response of the system is now steady state with little change. We need a public roster of each politician and their promises written in notarized documents, that can be used to strip them of relection and penalize them in some way so that future politicians cannot weasel their way out of promises.
I would also vote for public presentations with slides + data by each politician instead of these stupid debates and speeches. They should be documented and scrutinized for accuracy of data and their claims. We have startup decks, but yet politicians don't have to make presentations. Instead they trade blows on a debate stage with polished repertoire which has now become an entertainment show, at least at the presidential level.
I’m not sure what penalty would be appropriate that would be better than standing for re-election and having the people weigh in. Voters who were strict-Y or any-Z might choose to not vote to re-elect. Voters who care about and got more X than par and a little bit of Y would be inclined to re-elect.
If I owned a company and the people I hired to manage it were playing games like this, and if I asked them for insight into what, specifically, is happening behind the scenes, and they told me "it is literally not possible for us to provide you with that information" (and wouldn't say why it is not possible), I would be immediately launching a side project with the intent to replace the whole lot of them.
Yes, I realize "it's complex", but complexity is a continuum, not a binary.
With respect to the article, is it not true that the President has some substantial ability to float ideas into the public consciousness, that would put the heat on the state and municipal politicians to come up with some better systems to manage law enforcement and officer interactions with the public? And if the federal level truly has no power whatsoever in instituting reform or enforcing federal laws (what's the FBI do again?), I don't see why a comprehensive framework with recommendations for operational reform and greater transparency couldn't come from the top down. If there's nothing to be held accountable to, and no one to do the holding, I don't see why people are surprised when law enforcement restraint is largely left up to the goodwill of individual officers.
This whole situation and the way it is discussed seems rather absurd to me, but maybe there's something I'm not seeing.
Imagine that you get to hire 5 people to run the company on your behalf, and four other directors each also hire 5 people to further their interests. Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them, and precious little to change their minds. Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
> Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
Well in the short term, you're screwed. But how plausible is this imaginary scenario? There is literally no one better available, in a country of 300 million people? Are the politicians we have now the best of the best?
Take the choices we have in the next presidential election for example: Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. Are these the best "available and willing" candidates out there? Not one single person in the country more qualified than either of these fellows?
"I am the owner of this computer, yet I can't know whether it will run a certain problem in finite time?"
"We are the dominant species on this planet, yet we can't change its course towards Alpha Centauri?"
Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
"Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
I notice that rather than answering my question, you seem to have chosen to instead reply with two other questions, both of which are rather absurd examples of things that are literally not possible, and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
May I ask why you chose to respond in this way? My (speculative) intuition is that it is a form of rhetoric, that is often used in conversation to persuade third party observers of a certain thing. But to be explicit, this is only my intuition, I am not making a formal accusation of any kind...I am simply curious about what is going on in this conversation.
So, having said all that: is my intuition incorrect? And if so, I would very much appreciate if you could explain what is going on here, as it seems to have become a very common writing technique here and elsewhere, but I am personally unable to understand it at all - to me, it only makes already complex conversations even more confusing.
> Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
> A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
> "Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence. Is this what you are actually saying, or is my interpretation flawed? If it is flawed, would you be able to restate your beliefs in clear, unambiguous, non-rhetorical terms? And if it is not flawed, could you possibly post at least one example where omnipotence is clearly required to accomplish the task (or something reasonably close to demonstrating that)?
And I suppose I should also point out that the underlying issue of my analogy is whether the current political process in the Unites States of America could be improved, at all.
Do you think it is not possible to make any improvements at all, however small? If it isn't too much trouble, I think an initial discrete "Yes" or "No" answer would help in maximizing communication effectiveness, and after that you can include any rhetorical narrative that you believe adds to that initial answer.
Yes, I think it is possible to make improvements.*
>and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
So no, this was not a display for third parties (not completely, anyway---who doesn't like upvotes?), but an honest attempt to communicate that yes, it is really hard, probably actually impossible, and certainly not easy or simple if approached naively, which the "company owner" analogy seems to do.
>This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence.
No! A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual.
That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate:
- a company owner, as an individual, is less likely to make contradictory, impossible demands. For electorates impossible and contradictory demands are the rule rather than the exception.
- a company owner is concerned with a more responsive machine (the company) than an electorate (a country), and so is more likely to have a working feedback loop---which means if they do make impossible demands, they are more likely to connect the (bad) consequences to the demands.
- a company owner is able (at least in theory) to believably make commitments. If a company owner said, "What specifically is the problem stopping you from XYZ, I will fire you if you don't tell me, I will promote you if you do," there is a set of circumstances in which subordinates could believe and rely on that. Electorates, in contrast, are completely unreliable and cannot make believable promises. Individuals might---you might write your congressman and promise you'll vote for him if he does XYZ---but what does he care, you're one vote, he gets letters every week saying the equivalent, but for different things.
So I am perhaps not answering the question as written---is it possible for a company owner to expel bad management. Yes, it absolutely is. However, analogizing that to nation-state governance is a model with some very important flaws, the bulk of them relating to coordination/communication problems that electorates face. Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million, and there are lots of people with brains that function perfectly well. The shortage is not one of political philosophy! I tend to think the place where I can actually have impact is by building community with my neighbors, raising my family, and (I unironically believe this) writing good software.
* Though even the definition of "improvements" is up for grabs. Is a commit that improves runtime by 50% but also increases memory usage by the same amount an improvement? Governance is full of similar tradeoffs, and reasonable people can and do disagree on them.