It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?
Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.
But also, I think we are well past affecting change through voting and so forth. Not that you shouldn’t vote. But if we want to see actual change in the United States, we need to start taking some cues from the French and other countries where they go on strike aggressively until they get what they want.
As long as we keep getting fucked and showing up for work anyway the powers that be are just going to keep fucking us.
What did the senate do this week? Interview the TikTok CEO. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles, inflation is out of control, housing and rent is unaffordable, the middle class is dying.
Why are they over there arguing about wokeness, screaming about communists and facists being on the precipice of taking over the country, and interviewing the tiktok CEO? Because that doesn't require any action. It distracts the public from real problems. The partisan inflammatory and meaningless screeching is enough to get them re-elected, so why do any hard work fixing problems?
And so people who do try to get involved in order to fix real issues like the economy or housing, end up getting blocked by pointless debates. It's system-wide filibustering.
(My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )
Politics is the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals.
Throwing technology at these human affairs isn’t an answer.
Something like liquid democracy.
Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.
So in the end your individual vote does little, because real power is at the hands of much better resourced interests.
It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves.
Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless.
Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.
What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation.
That's something of an outlier but $25-50K is common.
So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.
I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round.
Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.
This usually isn’t allowed. At least in my precinct (in an open primary state), both primaries are on the same day, in the same location, and you select which party’s ballot you want when you arrive. Anybody can vote, you don’t have to be a party member.
Some states have closed primaries, where only party members can vote. Usually you declare party membership in advance. Not sure how these states prevent people from joining both - I suspect there is a state register of party affiliation.
As the parent post alluded to, the US is at a bit of a crossroads. The protections built into the political system that were added to protect minority political groups from the tyranny of the majority has been turned on it’s ear over the last several decades and we’re now stuck with an ever-decreasing population of angry christo-fascists making decisions against the will of the vast majority of the nation.
That's not permitted in any state which I know.
I am a registered voter in "NO PARTY", which gives me the option to request a ballot from any party in a primary and vote within that party.
Any registered voter can vote any candidate or issue in general elections. I think what would improve our abysmal two-party system would be runner-up benefits, and coalitions, rather than winner-takes-all.
If I were king, I’d do away with party primaries completely. Run a jungle primary with all candidates on a single ballot. Ranked choice to pick the top 4-5 for the general. Then ranked choice in the general to select the winner. Something like that.
I’d also ditch the EC for direct election of the president. And legislate the size of a House district be derived from the smallest state population. This adds hundreds of members to the House, and brings voting parity back to CA and TX (who currently have districts substantially larger than Wyoming’s single seat.
Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem.
> or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time
...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.
The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near.
>Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate,
This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion.
Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.
Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right?
> The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.
And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now).
Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design.
If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.
Why can't it be both? All this does is keep us busy looking where the 'root cause' is and never actually solve anything because the mechanisms to fix those things don't exist... all the while others reap its benefits.
That's not the right characterization of the argument. Judges are there to tell legislators that they can't make certain laws. The abortion dispute is not about judges making abortion legal, it's about judges telling politicians that they cannot make abortion illegal. Without that, politicians would literally have the ability to do anything they want.
It should concern everyone that these types of top down authoritarian mentalities are more prevalent as people without a tradition or culture based in western philosophy that has led to what used to be a clear separation of powers, become more prominent even all over the western/European based world.
It will not end well for most of humanity, even in this community, regardless if how much we believe ourselves to be doing good here, or at least not even considering the destabilizing consequences of what we do here.
Do tell, what people specifically are you referring to?
I think you are wrong here. We, the people with “lived experience” in authoritarian countries, look with astonishment at how the American people dismantle the basics of their own political system “based in western philosophy”.
You know, Stalin’s constitution of 1936 was one of the most liberal and progressive at the time. Then 1937 came. So the suggestion that judges should stop looking at the code of law and just eagerly follow the Party line - produce cries of “danger” from my very own carbon-based neural network.
So my estimate is quite opposite - the “native” Americans took the benefits of the political system based on western philosophy so much for granted, that they’ve stopped thinking where these benefits were coming from.
Look at how the 2nd Amendment basically does not exist for some of the most populous states because SCOTUS refuses to reign in the more egregious examples of judicial/legislative reacharound like Wickett v. Filburn, or the vast majority of firearms legislation in places like NY and California.
Roe v. Wade is a shining example of how legalism can get turned on it's head just by changing out the authoritative judge who has the last word, or a new case coming up and being heard that threatens a change in viewpoint of SCOTUS.
The Writ of Certiorari is in my opinion the most overpowered political lever in the entire U.S. in the negative sense in that it's not being granted robs millions of an opportunity for redress of real harms, and in a positive sense in that when it is granted it can completely alter the judicial landscape for decades without legislative action.
These right declarations aren’t super clear so the political leanings of the court weight heavily.
9th Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does not define rights, rather it defines the limits of the government's power to abridge those rights.
It's frightening that so few seem to really get this.
The judicial is there to decide if a given law should be enforced (and if a given enforcement method is valid)
This is why I’m not a big fan of originalism: that is almost always a subjective decision.
Otherwise we would just have a legislative and an executive.
The Executive is there to implement an enforcement mechanism, even if the decision os to implement a null mechanism.
The executive cannot (or normatively should not ex nihilo) just materialize enforcement infrastructure without Congressional approval. The existence of Administrative law, however, rather shopts down the original intent of the Founders in terms of Governmental architecture.
I don't think there was ever any serious doubt that the Internet Archive would lose their case as they are clearly in violation of copyright law. The issue in the case is that the copyright laws are bad laws that have become contrary to their purpose of "promoting the useful arts and sciences" due to the copyright terms being absurdly long (and the lack of any serious deterrent to fraudulent DMCA claims which has allowed for the proliferation of such claims as a censorship and/or doxxing technique) and need to be reformed. It was unwise for the Internet Archive to violate copyright law just as it was unwise for Bowser the ROM site owner[0] to violate copyright law because flagrantly violating copyright law is an effective way to get yourself bankrupted via lawsuits and an ineffective way to get bad intellectual property laws changed.
[0]: https://venturebeat.com/games/gary-bowser-has-to-pay-nintend...
It's a library. A library does that.
One much needed copyright law adjustment would be to limit copyright protection to a period where the work is actually commercially viable meaning the owner is making an effort to sell it. It doesn't benefit anybody to have old works locked up for years and years with no way for the public to acquire them legally.
It’s unfortunate that you would demonstrate such logically compromise in such a blatant manner, ironically, in a post about “bad law”. Ironically, overturning Roe specifically was good law, in that it followed the law the ruling was a blatant violation of.
The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that.
You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
> If anything has proven this [that 'we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society'] lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws [...]
No. The reason Roe v Wade was overturned is because conservative middle-aged/old white-guys with money are not happy about people, and by people I mean women, having reproductive choice.
It's one of the areas that fundamental islam and conservative "Christians" have significant overlap, and that's not a good thing.
It's political. It's always been political. It always will be. The judges that want abortions illegal will find legal arguments to make that happen and vice versa.
The way people are supposed to support better laws is by electing better legislators. Easier said than done I admit, but I think that's better than giving judges power beyond their role.
I think many agree that copyright needs to be shortened, but what does “broken” mean, exactly?
I have good feelings for the Internet Archive, but in this case it’s about a handful of books that are being copied and distributed a mere 5 years after initial publication, which I think a lot of people who want copyright shortened would still agree is quite a bit too short. Books frequently get popular long after initial publication, they’re not anything like blockbuster movies that make most of their income in a few weeks (which used to be true before streaming but might not even be true anymore).
Keep in mind that this isn’t about the Internet Archive specifically. If the court ruled it’s okay for them to copy and rent books, then anyone can copy and rent books, it undermines the entire market for books (and also web sites and images and other media, because this is the Internet Archive). Think about what it means for the company you work for, or the creative works you or your artist friends create, if people can copy their things legally and take away their revenue streams after only 5 years.
I wonder why the Internet Archive doesn’t keep things unpublished on their site until it’s not generally available online, this would keep them clear of the most obvious copyright violations.
And basically all the schemes to make copyright more expensive, difficult, requiring jumping through hoops and paying increasing amounts of money to renew? That just basically screws individual creators (who already don't make much money for the most part) to the benefit of the major content rights holders who are not going to forget or be unable to pay for copyright renewal. Which is probably not the objective of most of the people dreaming these up.
The US actually took a pretty big step towards benefitting more small-time creatives when it aligned with the Berne Convention and did away with explicit notices being required.
I only recently learned that the US has a bit of a Berne convention loophole in the sense that you are required to registers works with the copyright office before you can seek damages for copyright infringement. That fine print seems like it undermines the spirit of the Berne convention just a bit, and most other countries that adhere do not have this extra hoop.
Having no-effort century-long copyright might narrowly benefit a tiny number of small-time creators, but it robs the public of our collective culture.
“Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Part of the intent behind the law is to promote the sciences and the arts through these exclusive rights. The idea is that creators will have an economic incentive to create, because they’ll have some protection from copiers. The idea was not primarily to promote culture by releasing works into the public domain. This framework acknowledges both means of promotion, the short term protection of profits, combined with the long term acknowledgement that society will benefit from works becoming public after some time. So it is trying to be fair to both authors and to the greater social good, and it requires deciding & balancing what the term length should be.
The original (US) copyright term was 14 years with registration + another 14 years with renewal. That seems to me, in broad strokes, like a good balance between promoting new works vs. giving public access to previous works.
The century-long term only benefits a vanishingly small proportion of creators (which is to say, a vanishingly small proportion of creators' inheritors). The primary beneficiary is a small number of very large monopolistic media/publishing firms, who have e.g. bought up the rights (for peanuts) to the past century of back issues of thousands of scientific journals, and now keep them behind a paywall.
But the harm to the public is incalculably large.
I certainly might have misunderstood your comment about being “fair” to authors. I guess you were saying that the US copyright law isn’t doing anything to distinguish between independent authors, small businesses, or large corporations? It certainly does allow for big business to have an easier time of things, and is not at all fair to individuals and small businesses, that’s true.
In my opinion the Berne convention (which is instead premised on authors’ supposed natural rights, without much concern for the public) is a incredibly harmful and anti-social system which should not have been ratified by the USA. It has become even more harmful in the digital age.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on copyright history, law, or philosophy.
* edit, since I didn’t see your edits about the Berne Convention. That’s an interesting take. I thought most copyright progressives viewed Berne as a marked improvement over US copyright pre-Berne. The most important aspect of Berne is that it’s globally adopted, so the discussion about terms really needs to be about Berne more than US copyright law, I think?
Unlike working on something physical (say, a bushel of grain, a shirt, a bookshelf, or a house), when the work is an idea (like a better mousetrap or a catchy song) if someone copies it they can profit from your labor at your expense because they pay none of costs of creation, so can undercut and outcompete you.
Therefore, the thinking goes, creators won’t bother making new intangible creations like textbooks or paintings or inventions if they can’t have some kind of exclusive right over publication or use. (I’m not quite sure what empirical evidence there is for this claim. That seems like an interesting question, but it’s probably pretty tricky to investigate.)
The goal of the copyright and patent system is to encourage creators by granting them limited-time exclusive rights, whereby they can benefit from their hard work. Those creators then do useful work they otherwise would not bother with, and the public benefits.
But the premise is not an abstract ideal of fairness or a guarantee of moral rights for authors and creators. The premise is promotion of science and useful arts. At the point where the copyright term is interfering with (rather than promoting) science and useful arts, it is too long. That is, the fundamental question should be “does this system most benefit the public?” not “is this system the fairest to authors?”
I’ve never met a creator who decided what or whether to create based on their descendants' earning money from exclusive rights to their work 50+ years into the future. Maybe such creators exist, but I would guess those to be vanishingly few.
Is that relevant?
To me copyright is there to encourage the creation of new works. I doubt any publisher takes into account book sales more than 5 years out when deciding whether to publish a new book.
I have artist friends. Current copyright acts as more of an inhibitor than enabler of their creativity.
You’re right that copyright is there to encourage creation of new works, and the stated mechanism for doing this is by granting the creator a limited-time monopoly, so they have a chance to make money.
Why do you doubt that publishers aren’t considering more than 5 years, and to turn your question back on you - why exactly is that relevant? There certainly can be a difference between why they decide to publish a book, and whether they should have the exclusive right to make money from a book after 5 years, can there not? Since you’re making a broad generalization, think about all book types, text books, reference books, novels, literature, non-fiction, etc. Aren’t some of those slower to publish and slower to go out of date? Think about walking through Barnes & Noble and tell me you believe that everything in the store in less than 5 years old.
And how does copyright inhibit your artist friends? Copyright doesn’t enable creativity, it just protects it, right? Are you sure your artist friends would even get paid for their work without copyright laws in place? If you are sure, then why?
No, you don't have a right to kill someone because it's inconvenient for you and because you made bad decisions.
Everyone at the time recognized that Roe v. Wade was shitty law, but they put their objections on the back burner and kicked the can down the road so they wouldn't have to have the Mother of all Debates.
Well the chickens finally came home to roost...
This is yet another classic example of why you must hash out a problem the moment it becomes a problem instead of trying to put it off because it's unpleasant.
Well, no. It codified roughly what the public thought was appropriate at the time - the stable achievable policy equilibrium. And in the past 50 years, public sentiment has remained mostly unchanged; it's just trended a tiny bit towards more permissiveness around abortion.
See the graph displaying Gallup's public polling results here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-has-public-opinion-a....
> Two years after the court’s decision, 54 percent of U.S. adults said they supported abortion under certain circumstances and another 21 percent said abortion always should be legal, according to Gallup polling from 1975, while 22 percent of Americans said it should be illegal.
> By 2018, Gallup pollsters found little change [...]
LFP
Ah, there's the rub: How to define "anyone."
(In my 1960s Catholic family, my parents encouraged us four kids to discuss issues of the day at the dinner table. One night the discussion was about abortion, and specifically, when does a fetus become human. My dad joked that he often wondered whether fetuses didn't become human until they could cut their own meat ....)
We're going to see a wave of hilariously (in the worst possible way) maladapted babies, because I'm almost certain we'll find that the constant "noise" of the mother's body, plus hormonal changes, are critically important for proper development.
Sure, maybe researchers and scientists will factor all of this into the development of such a technology, but so far Humanity doesn't have a good track record with getting everything right on the first go-round.
The point, which ought to be obvious to HN readers - and would have been 10 years ago - is that we as a nation never sat down and decided, "What constitutes a person?"
Personally I'm on board for telling you what you can do with your uterus in the same way European nations are - you have 12 weeks to decide. After that, you keep the baby and it's illegal to abort it. I believe every single one of the vaunted Scandinavian nations has a 12 week limit on abortion. Many tech people want to model society after them, so there you go. Start there.
Do you need a specific law protecting the right to throw a barbecue, own a dog, or read books on dangerous topics? No, because the Constitution is a framework which broadly allows actions by people, and carves out specific things that the government has control over.
They'll sure warp the bounds of Federal Government jurisdiction through the interstate commerce clause though.
That being said, regardless of anyone's political stance, you saying 'because you made bad decisions' is inflammatory, and clearly based on the assumption that the pregnancy was a result of fully consensual sex.
Don't be that guy.
You're going to be hard-pressed to find a reasonable, thinking individual who would not allow for abortion exemptions for rape / incest / endangerment of the mother.
We're on Hacker News. A place where - supposedly - thinking people comment.
You "Don't be that guy."
It shouldn't even be necessary for me to have had to type this.
If you’re argument hinges on “reasonable, thinking” individuals, and you’re claiming that Alabama law didn’t meet that standard, then I would argue your “thinking” standard is completely irrelevant. The only relevant criteria is what makes it into law and affects people.
The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't grasp broken laws as a threat until it is challenged (and we as a society usually lose), and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable
This circuit should be shortened, we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society like with DMCA and PATRIOT act
If anything has proven this lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws, be more involved in the legislation process and actively propose and push for fixes