If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
> If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He was elected by popular vote but that meant he went against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any comparison directly between Lincoln and any other politician today.
> Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are in addition to democracy, not part of it directly. You can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the election was still democratically held.
> My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.
If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
Ignoring whether we should choose to defend democracy in that scenario (I would), what do you see as the mechanism built into democracy that stops it?
> If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:
> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.
Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.
Sure, I was a bit loose in my use of the term "majority" earlier though we hadn't come to this level of detail.
My point remains, though. There is a point at which democracy has no guardrails to prevent a democratic overthrow of the system. Call it a majority, super majority, 60% vote, or whatever the system in place decides. With enough support a democratic system can be thrown out in an entirely democratic election.
I've been happily driving a BYD Atto 3 for ~6 months now. Very happy with it, its got a lot of nice software and hardware features, carplay/android auto works well, driving is nice and very smooth (especially on sport mode), and my daughter loves playing with the "strings" on the doors. The most glaring issue is the battery which is really its weakest part.
Is it better than a Tesla? Probably not - there are clearly places in the software where I know that Teslas are more polished (e.g. the "360" parking view which IMO could be a bit better, although I feel like I'm parking in gta 2), and the acceleration won't blow your socks off. However, they're much cheaper and it's a good family car (for us) - definitely for the price.
If OP is comparing their experience in your BYD to Tesla's marketing material, that's not a correct comparison. Tesla battery ranges should generally be derated quite a bit to align them with how the rest of the industry measures range.
And that goes only for rather flat terrain and non-cold environments. Otherwise the discrepancies end up just like consumption of ICE engines in ads vs reality.
Battery is fine by itself, but I'd say that the range is somewhere between 315-350km depending on terrain etc. Definitely not the 420km that's advertised. I knew this beforehand from reviews so it wasn't unexpected, but I'd be pretty angry if I didn't read about it from reviews before I got the car.
For me it's fine as I still only charge once a week and I still have around 70%-80% usually, unless I visit remote relatives. I could probably stretch and recharge every other week if I really wanted to, but I prefer to have it ready as we sometimes do have longer drives.
If only Teams was developed by the largest stakeholder in the Windows native app ecosystem. It would be a perfect chance to show off native UI tooling that would make other companies want to develop for that platform. Oh well...
While somewhat true, to its credit Teams is using basically the same UI stack for its web-based product (teams.microsoft.com) and its "native" desktop app, so there's a win there.
Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.
1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2
2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).
The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.
I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
I think v8 and the multi-process model were the big differentiators of Chrome when it first launched, and how it originally got marketshare! Regardless, I think "ground-up" building isn't a great way to measure product building; after all, macOS is "just" a BSD fork, as others have pointed out Webkit was originally a KHTML fork, etc. And just about any web product runs on Linux and is effectively a wrapper around libc, which wasn't ground-up built by any modern tech co.
MacOS is not a fork of BSD but uses some of its use land. I think it’s considered a BSD because of that, but the kernel and graphics libraries are all Apple.
The kernel isn't all Apple, it's a fork of the open-source Mach kernel developed at CMU (which was a replacement BSD kernel). "Ground up" just isn't real!
The graphics libraries are definitely more custom... Although in total fairness they're not entirely ground-up Apple either; Quartz was based on Display PostScript, which was acquired from NeXT, and which NeXT built in collaboration with Adobe based on Adobe's earlier work on PostScript. It's obviously true Apple's done a lot of work since then (e.g. Metal), but in that case, so has Google since forking Webkit.
Quartz isn't based on DPS - CoreGraphics drawing commands are similar to PDF but the window management was always all pixel based - and IIRC DPS was almost all Adobe and NeXT didn't even have source for it.
> Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).
I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.
I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit.
I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.
Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.
Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome.
Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
That's like saying that people should feel thankful for paying their taxes because that's what paves their roads and builds their schools. Yes, ads bring in money, and maybe they do enable Search - but it's at most a necessary evil, not something to celebrate.
This sentiment seems out of place on a site dedicated to startups. Targeted advertising is often an important part of growing a startup and acquiring new customers. You can't just ignore advertising if you want to create a billion dollar company!
Personally I appreciate progressive tax system for its... progressivity. Much much better than head tax. It's a necessary evil yes, but so is giving money for any other thing. If it can be fairer and even win-win it ought to be appreciated.
I'm on board with paying taxes in an abstract conceptual sense. It's generally how it's spent and how it's collected (who pays how much) that are problematic.
Also worth noting that Google originally aimed to create less intrusive ads. Relevant, text-only ads with no Javascript, clearly distinguished from the search results by being on the side instead of above the search results. Those days have long since passed.
Nah taxes solve a variety of collective action and common goods problems that we are apparently unable to solve otherwise. They are to be celebrated, not simply as a necessary evil.
Even as a staunch capitalist and borderline libertarian, I am thankful for taxes, why shouldn’t I be? I am not going to celebrate it, but I don’t see it as immoral in any way.
The system already acknowledges that two judges are not guaranteed to reach the same conclusion. First of all, because there's a system of appeals. However, an even stronger example is that you need a majority of judges in certain cases - e.g. in the US Supreme Court and other courts.
Yeah, and that's needed even in cases where there's supposed to be an objective standard! In cases where it's explicitly subjective going in, "we might flip on appeal" can be pretty terrifying.
That's just not true. A lot of judicial systems give leeway for judges to rule using the spirit of the law and not just the letter of the law. Especially for obviously fake arguments, or when laws need updating to newer norms or unforeseen technologies.
Judicial interpretation is essential. Half the artifice of western civilization is built on the word 'reasonable' and its interpretations in caselaw. However judgement cannot be the primary definition of a policy. 'I know it when I see it' couldn't even be the definition of obscenity - the court repaired it 10 years later with a more clearly delineated test in Miller.
The definition of 'platform' or 'monopoly' or w/e in the context of TFA is necessarily going to be technical and detailed, and encourage the entities it regulates to drive right up to the lines it draws. The job of the policymaker is to draw lines that accomplish her intentions.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.