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> "this proposal would also put an agency with no engineering or other relevant expertise in charge of how digital products are designed." That's how they roll
by RajT88 5y ago
> "this proposal would also put an agency with no engineering or other relevant expertise in charge of how digital products are designed."
That's how they roll. See: Ted Stevens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
> The metaphor has been widely ridiculed, particularly because Stevens displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, even though he was in charge of the Senate committee with the responsibility for regulating it.
- xioren00 5y agoYeah it's a depressing reality that a lot of government is uninformed people making uninformed decisions that affect the entire country.
- candiddevmike 5y agoLet's just cut the bullshit and use sortition for governance.
- imtringued 5y agoIt works pretty well in practice, so well, that citizens assemblies are often better informed than the politicians in government. Yet politicians routinely ignore their non-binding decisions/conclusions, as if there is a group of people that deserves more attention.
- azinman2 5y agoI encourage folks from the HN community to run! We have no (?) technologists in the senate and probably not the house either? Yet plenty from medicine and other professions…
- usrn 5y ago
- Ferrotin 5y agoThe house has Thomas Massie, Darrell Issa, and Bill Foster, at least.
- the_common_man 5y agoDoes the job pay high six figures? If not, will pass
- graywh 5y agothe official salary is $174k, but everyone knows the real money is in the kickbacks from your position of power
- azinman2 5y agoPretty ironic comment from a username that is the_common_man
- the_common_man 5y agoThat thinking is pretty common here :-)
- aksss 5y agoThey all come out millionaires if they survive a few terms.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoThe problem with positions of power is that the most qualified are least likely to want the job.
- throwaway14356 5y agoThat indeed is the ultimate puzzle. Maybe the solution is to pay what they cost and gigify the jobs.
- azinman2 5y agoLargely because we’ve lost social cohesion and pride, so that few are motivated towards civic good. The solution is purely cultural and doesn’t cost any money. But it requires shifting belief structures, which requires leadership and shared experiences… and that’s hard and rare to achieve.
- asdff 5y agoNot really, its because you will be outspent and stomped in an election by the establishment that profits from the status quo. Being good at winning elections and being a good politician do not always go hand in hand.
- pessimizer 5y agoTed Stevens had a more accurate view of how the internet works than 95% of the people I talk to. What's the correction? It's not a "series of tubes" it's acshully a "series of pipes"? It's a bunch of mailboxes and parcels being delivered to them? The attacks on Stephens for this were entirely political and unfair. He certainly was awful, but the ante-twitter mob that converged on him led by late night comedians were computer illiterates parroting what they heard. The reason he said it that way is because he was an old corrupt coot who had net neutrality explained to him in very simple terms by lobbyists and PR flacks trying (successfully) to stop it. The reason he was taunted over it was because of a strategy come up with by the opposing PR flacks, probably gathered around the same brand of whiteboard.
- euroderf 5y agoAren't TCP and IP a series of tubes ? Asking for a friend.
- dane-pgp 5y ago> The attacks on Stephens for this were entirely political and unfair. ... [He] had net neutrality explained to him in very simple terms by lobbyists Were the "attacks" really unfair? He wasn't doing his job properly if he was just accepting the position of one group of lobbyists without understanding the technology he was regulating or the consequences of that legislation. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "entirely political", since surely criticism of politicians should be political (as opposed to personal), but assuming you mean "entirely partisan" (i.e. based solely on his party, rather than the policy itself) I disagree. Perhaps you can find some example of a Democrat using an embarrassingly bad analogy to explain something technical, but I suspect it would be met with ridicule too, especially if the analogy were being put forward to justify a bad policy.
- staircasebug 5y agoLikely, one would need to follow the "donations" to see who's really in charge.
- kodah 5y agoNot to blow the "our government is broken" trumpet too hard, but this is exactly the way the FCC works as well. They instead bring on consultants; the FTEs are lawyers and policy makers.