A person who willingly worked for doge or whatever has a lot of explaining to do. All you know about them on paper is that they are either a clueless dupe, or a closet nazi. Either way why would you want them in your repo?
Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.
>This is saying that people in congressional leadership positions do 47% better than other members of Congress.
It's even more damning than that I think.
>we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension.
The same person makes more after being put in a leadership position than before. That essentially removes any possibility of 'well maybe they're just more knowledgable and that's why they're in leadership.'
A person typically picks stocks based on some view of the future: what’s going to be valuable, how the world is going to change, etc. Presumably, a congressperson does the same when drafting legislation - try to move the world in the direction they think it should go. The underlying worldview and outlook is the shared variable, and congresspeople in leadership positions are more capable of moving the world the way they think it should go than anyone else. The increased stock performance is because someone in congressional leadership’s predictions for the future are more self-fulfilling than most.
(Again, that’s the best steel man I can offer, and if you made it this far without laughing, I commend you)
I think the point is that this study suggests a causal relationship (having leadership power enables one to make more money), which is stronger than just correlation (being in leadership positions correlated with making more money).
I can at least understand being aware of what your kid is doing, but the number of people who say they just ban X outright in there house I'm afraid are gonna be shocked by their kid's actions when they leave the house. Better to teach them when they're young then to all of a sudden have them exposed to everything when they're an older teenager/18.
And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
I've already used some "adult" exams where someone fucked up and forgot to set minimum ages and got my kids through them perfectly fine. The kids are not the problem, or at least, having them pass the normal exams at the normal age for those exams is possible. The schools simply aren't doing it.
The issue with that approach is that it's a lot of work, and I would love an alternative. But I don't have an alternative.
Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally. And there's not a lot of companies that can handle a 90% drop in revenue.
The real solution would be to make users pay for the content, but charging for something that users used to get for "free" is also essentially impossible.
It doesn't have to be untargeted. You know the type of content the website hosts, therefore, you know a lot about the type of visitors. You can then charge appropriately for advertising that is targeted at those visitors. Don't show diaper ads on a site called Jalopnik. Instead show ads for Armorall, jack stands, tools, etc. When you visit a media site specializing in content like real houswives or kardashians, don't show the previously suggested ads. Instead, show ads on inane fast fashion, beauty products, luxury items, etc.
Targeted ads are always dumb as they tend to push an item that you've looked into before purchasing, but never realize that item has been purchased and you are no longer interested. They never get that the person researched item but has not looked for some time for item. Let's now advertise accessories for that item. If it was a fridge, show stainless cleaning items, for dishwasher, show ads for different detergents or other kitchen related items. It's not hard. For whatever reasons, they can't do targeted well. Targeted doesn't work as advertised.
We’ve been talking about federated micropayment technologies for some two decades. I’d happily pay for content but I refuse to sign up for 30+ publisher websites. If I could opt to pay $.25 for some article without giving the site all my personal data or incurring a subscription I’d be all for it. As it is I either “steal” the content through an archiving site or simply leave the site. More and more it’s the latter. I’d also happily pay some monthly fee for unlimited content from a consortium of publishers rather than disable my ad blocker, and let them sort out how much each one gets based on my browsing habits. None of these seem like hard technical problems, it’s certainly not impossible. I think the days of believing content comes without any cost are long behind us.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
If targeted advertising, as a whole, is banned, you can be pretty damn sure the payout for untargeted will come up—not necessarily to match what targeted is now, but way more than that 10% figure.
Ad spend, in aggregate, doesn't change that much based on new "innovations" in advertising annoyance. If you've still got roughly the same amount of money being spent on untargeted ads, continent-wide, as you do now on targeted, they're going to pay out much closer to parity.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.
Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.
As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.
People love getting their content for free and that's what Google does.
Even 25 years ago people wouldn't even believe Youtube exists. Anyone can upload whatever they want, however often they want, Youtube will be responsible for promoting it, they'll provide to however many billions users want to view it, and they'll pay you 55% of the revenue it makes?
Yep, it's hard to believe it exists for free and with not a lot of ads when you have a good ad blocker... though the content creator's ads are inescapable, which I think is ok since they're making a little money in exchange for what, your little inconvenience for 1 minute or so - if you're not skipping the ad, which you aren't, right??) - after which you can watch some really good content.
The history channels on YT are amazing, maybe world changing - they get people to learn history and actually enjoy it. Same with some match channels like 3brown1blue which are just outstanding, and many more.
Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently? I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the House at the moment.
At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again eventually) to make that argument.
I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to speed up major change the next time a party has a super majority, by planting the seeds early...
> Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently?
if you think it's recent, you haven't been paying particularly close attention
2021: The Senate Cannot Be Reformed — It Can Only Be Abolished [0]
2018: The Case for Abolishing the Senate [1]
2004: What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate [2]
and that's just from the first page of Kagi results for "abolish the senate". I have no doubt it goes back farther than that if I actually went digging for historical sources.
the imbalance of power is only going to get worse as time goes on, as well [3]
> By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate
> “David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states,” Seib wrote. “They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”
The Senate has been nothing but a non-population-proportional version of the House since the 17th amendment. The House was supposed to give voice to the people while the Senate saw to the needs of the nation. The requirement for the house and senate to work together would balance these often competing needs. Direct election of senators is a worst of both worlds situation - democracy where some people's votes count for more than others. Since the 17th amendment was ratified, the legislature has ceded tremendous power to the executive and judiciary as it has become steadily more ineffectual, and public perception of the institution has plummeted. This has only accelerated in recent decades. Abolishing the senate is only one potential form that reform could take, but I don't know how anyone could look at the current situation and not see the need for some type of reform to get the legislative branch back on track.
I don't know what you're talking about, since abolishing the Senate (or at least making it the lesser of the two bodies) is anything but nonsense.
edit: Since I cannot respond due to throttling, I agree with the below idea of statewide house races, but by doing Proportional representation and a ranked/approval voting system.
If anything I think we need to make the House more like the Senate by making them run state wide. That would do a lot to get rid of the hyper partisan nutjobs since there's usually more ideological diversity across a state than in a given district. As a bonus it would also get rid of gerrymandering.
Yeah -- keeping population-based apportionment of representatives per state, while making representatives elected state-wide would be a huge shift of power, for the better, especially in the South (speaking as a southerner).
I've been harping on this for years. My support for democratic, rational governance is non-partisan - if a majority of voters support the republican, that's their prerogative
It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.
There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good.
It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.
Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation?
Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.
We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.
> We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken
You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative body and you'd still have the same problem.
You could abolish the Senate and have a unicameral House. But then we'd never have survived 250 years as a democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)
> I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought
The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].
The fact that the Senate can't pass things without a 60% majority, despite that not being a thing in the constitution, is just another facet of its undemocratic nature. The body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says.
And this is definitely not a necessary aspect of the system. Even if you want to argue that the Senate itself is essential, the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades.
I'd be fine with a bicameral legislature as long as both houses were actually representative. Maybe you'd have one with short terms and one with long terms. But having a body where California and Wyoming both get two representatives is just ridiculous.
I'm curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate. It looks to me like they're doing pretty much whatever they want aside from passing the recent spending bill, and to the extent that they aren't, it's because of a handful of Republican holdouts in the House, not because the Senate stands in their way. And if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either.
> body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says
All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
(Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
> the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades
Sure. Agreed. I'd honestly argue the concept of shutting down the government is dumber and setting a debt ceiling for already-appropriated and spent funds is unconstitutional.
> curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate
All the crap Trump is doing by fiat would have been passed into law. That, in turn, would strongly reduce the ability for the courts to call foul.
> if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either
The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
A fundamental aspects that makes the Senate different is each Senator is elected by more people, and thus must cater to more-diverse interests, than a Congressman, and they have longer terms. That means more people in the Senate must think about how what they're doing today will look after 2028.
> All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
You're missing the point. Of course they have rules. But to effectively make it so that you need 60% to pass anything is very different from ordinary parliamentary rules.
> (Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
Until recently, the Senate filibuster was completely different from what we have now. It used to be something that sometimes allowed Senators to make a show of delaying legislation. This thing where nearly nothing can be passed without 60 votes is new.
> The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
This means nothing. The rule isn't a secret. Things that couldn't achieve 60 votes will generally not be brought up in the first place, since it would be a waste of time.
If having a body where each representative represents more people and has longer terms is important, we can have that while still having it be reasonably proportional. The fundamental thing that sets the Senate apart is that it's meant to represent the states themselves, not the people. Thus each state is equally represented, and until the early 20th century they were not elected by the people. That no longer serves a purpose and that's what I'd like to see changed.
> Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.
Do you earnestly think this is a function of the rural-urban skew? In my view it is almost certainly due to the differences in number of people being represented by a senator and possibly term limit differences.
Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.
(Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)
The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population of the US would end up and how the system would act to give the minority far too much power rather than protect them from having too little.
Ah ok, I hadn't noticed there was also recent discussion on the Senate itself, wrt not being numerically representative.
People often say stuff like "the founders would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population would end up [wrt representation]", but they don't propose anything specific or constructive (short of federal-state litigation, secession or another civil war). How about a (neutral) commission to reapportion State boundaries every 10 years based on Census results (with some population formula between not-quite-linear and wildly disproportionate)? Or else, to periodically reapportion state counts of Senators to total 100. (Obviously these couldn't get ratified these days, but they just might have in the 1790s). If not, what's your specific suggestion?
Another thing people aren't currently discussing much is how badly break down if/when the Supreme Court gets captured by a dominant group that is both ideological and not independent. Look at how high the stakes will be for nominating the eventual replacement to Justice Clarence Thomas/Sotomayor/etc.
And of course the terrible Citizens Utd ruling muddies every consideration of representation.
And then there's also the parallel discussion of the Senate filbuster rule, remember though that if there was no filibuster, Citizens Utd would allow unlimited dark money to influence every vote, specifically all the action would focus on the Senators in the middle, think Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Manchin, Sinema. Seems near-impossible to reconstruct democracy under these constraints. (Look at the recent Senate stealth attack in the shutdown bill by lobbyists for newly-legalized CBD to try to ban Hemp).
Do you believe there's a distinction between giving the minority too much power versus protecting them from having too little? It seems like the same thing said two different ways.
Giving the minority (Christian extremists in flyover states) too much power has caused them to start revoking the rights of everyone not them. Forget about protecting minority groups from having too little power, the main concern now is wresting control of our government in line with the principle of "one person, one vote" instead of "hectares of corn and churches take precedence over people".
Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along with because it means more power for themselves and less restrictions on how they use it.
Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states into more smaller states, but big states don't like that because it means they have less power as individual smaller states. And we have already have congressman holding far more power than they were originally meant to because they froze congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives we are suppose to have.
The US political and legislative system has been corrupted beyond reason and this is just the next step to further consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
> people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt.
Or they want to live in a democracy where every single person is represented equally to every single other person. And not a system where some people are "more equal" to others.
That's not even getting into how this weirdly, strangely seems to align up with a history of slavery and racism in the US. Total coincidence that some people think it's fair those "urban people" get 3/5 of a vote compared to them, the enlightened farmers who need to save others from themselves.
And before you say "well the house and electoral college are proportional" - no, they absolutely are not since 1929. Try that talking point when the apportionment act is repealed.
Nor are districts even conceivably "local" anymore for those arguing about "personal governance".
I don't love seeing that you're far from the only person to mention it here. It's just shouting "I'm biased and I'm proud" from the top of your lungs.
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