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Politicians should take a mandatory one-week training in: - very basic macro economics - very basic game theory - very basic statistics Come to think of it,
by FredPret 2y ago
Politicians should take a mandatory one-week training in:
- very basic macro economics
- very basic game theory
- very basic statistics
Come to think of it, kids should learn this in high school
- varispeed 2y agoYou are assuming they work for the good of the country, but in reality they work for big corporations. These regulations are designed to weed out small players that are a nuisance for the rich.
- atemerev 2y agoThis is why we have direct democracy here in Switzerland. Just skip the middlemen.
- AdrianB1 2y agoSo you are assuming politicians graduate high school? Not in my country.
- wat10000 2y agoI think you’re being overly charitable in thinking this happens because they don’t understand these things. The main thing is that they don’t care. The purpose of passing legislation to protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected. If we can get the voters to understand the things you mention, then maybe we’d have a chance.
- mortarion 2y agoLawmakers also make and pass laws because it's their job, not because a new law is needed. They feel it's literally their job to come up with new bills to pass, for no reason other than "it's my job". Imagine a society so stable it doesn't need new laws or rules. All the elected representatives would just sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs. A bad look in their eyes. This is how it should be of course.
- pasc1878 2y agoHowever we are not in a stable society like that. Things change - e.g. 50 years ago no online chats, no drones, very little terrorism, travel was more costly and slower, medical drugs were less efficient, live span was shorter.
- michaelt 2y agoI agree with your broader point - but this article is about the UK and I can assure you, 50 years ago the UK did not have "very little terrorism"
- the_other 2y ago> it’s to get reelected. I doubt this. Legislation is written by committee and passed by democracy. Most of the voting public don't look up the voting records which are available to them. Most of the voting public can't name a third of the members of parliament. If there is a conspiratorial take, the one about regulatory capture is more believable.
- HL33tibCe7 2y agoIt’s more than just politicians not caring: Big Tech firms hite people on millions of dollars per year to lobby and co-operate with governments, in order to ensure that processes like this result in favourable outcomes to them. See e.g. Nick Clegg.
- ebiester 2y agoI think you're being underly charitable. The vast majority of congress critters are pretty smart people, and by Jeff Jackson's account, even the ones who yell the loudest are generally reasonable behind closed doors due to incentives. The problem is that the real problems are very hard, and their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs, which may or may not line up with doing the right thing. This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is a real problem, and those who engage in its distribution are experts in subverting the system. So is freedom of expression. So is the onerous imposition of regulations. And any such issue (whether it be transnational migration, or infrastructure, or EPA regulations in America, or whatever issue you want to bring up) is going to have some very complex tradeoffs and even if you have a set of Ph.Ds in the room with no political pressure, you are going to have uncomfortable tradeoffs. What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
- bsder 2y ago> This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is NOT a hard problem. You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved. You don't solve CSAM with scanners. You don't solve CSAM with legislation. You don't solve CSAM by banning encryption. You solve CSAM by giving money to law enforcement to go after CSAM. But, see, the entities pushing these laws don't actually care about CSAM.
- blackqueeriroh 2y ago> You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved. My dude, I’m sorry to tell you, but the problem usually is law enforcement. For so many things. You try barely training people who already like beating people up and then give them a monopoly on legal violence. Btw, the reason the cops were invented in Britain was to put down riots by the populace bc they were so poor[1], and in America it was to divide poor whites and poor blacks and turn the poor whites into slave catchers.[2] [1] https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/20/why-does-the-police-exist/ https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/20/why-does-the-police-exist... [2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876628302/the-history-of-policing-and-race-in-the-u-s-are-deeply-intertwined https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876628302/the-history-of-poli...
- threeseed 2y ago> protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected The next UK general election is ~5 years away so this makes no sense. The more likely reason is that it's simply good policy. We have enough research now that shows that (a) social media use is harmful for children and (b) social media companies like Meta, TikTok etc have done a wilfully poor job at protecting them. It is bizarre to me how many people here seem willing to defend them.
- wat10000 2y agoDoes British campaigning not look very far into the past? In the US, an opposing candidate would absolutely say “the incumbent voted against the protect-children-from-online-predators act five years ago, don’t reelect them, vote for me” and it would be effective.
- gbuk2013 2y agoLOL what campaigning? A couple of weeks before the election I get a few leaflets through my door with a few paragraphs about some person I never heard of and maybe some bullet points. People just pick political party and then vote for whoever has their logo next to the name.
- narrator 2y agoThey want to protect their political control, so they break any way for the opposition to effectively organize. Things like unlimited immigration, Net Zero 2050, and dekulakization of the agricultural sector are widely unpopular, so they just have to get everyone who has anything to say against these programs to be politically powerless.
- sethherr 2y agoNet zero is widely popular. Everything else you listed are right wing conspiracy theories.
- narrator 2y agoNet Zero 2050 involves so much economic depravation that is neither good for business interests, or good for the public's economic well being, such that the only way it could ever happen would be in some sort of authoritarianism. The adherents are nevertheless undeterred, thus I think Ecological Totalitarianism has a good chance of becoming the Bolshevism of the 21st century.
- wat10000 2y agoLet’s just require polluters to secure permission from each person whose air they’re going to pollute. That seems fair enough.
- burningChrome 2y ago>> Everything else you listed are right wing conspiracy theories. Apparently this isn't: "Just seven electric-vehicle charging stations have begun operating with funding from a $5-billion US government program created in 2021, marking “pathetic” progress, a Democratic senator said on Wednesday." https://nypost.com/2024/06/05/business/democratic-senator-blasts-5b-program-as-failure-after-only-7-ev-charging-stations-open-in-3-years/ https://nypost.com/2024/06/05/business/democratic-senator-bl...
- wat10000 2y ago
- CamperBob2 2y agoWhat good would that do? Look who elects them!
- Terr_ 2y agoIt is difficult to get a man to understand something when his re-election depends on him not understanding it.
- philjohn 2y agoExcept the gas guzzling large trucks seems to be a uniquely north american problem - because of the "work vehicle" loophole.
- Ichthypresbyter 2y agoPlenty of European countries have a work vehicle loophole, though it's not as big as the US one. Generally it's something along the lines of "a truck or van registered to a business is assumed to be a work vehicle, so pays less tax than a passenger car". Of course you need to have a business to take advantage of that loophole, but it doesn't need to be a business that actually has any use for the truck- it could be a one-person IT consultancy.
- phs318u 2y agoAnd Australian.
- thanksgiving 2y agoYou can solve it by adding congestion tax depending on vehicle size and making public transit readily available so people are less likely to take their huge trucks everywhere.
- sgarland 2y agoYou grossly underestimate the average American’s desire to thumb their nose at government regulations, even if it means spending far more money than they should to do so. Look at the prices of new trucks, then at the median salary. People should not have car payments that rival a small mortgage, yet they do.
- redleader55 2y agoPoliticians forced to learn statistics -> Politicians better prepared to understand consequences of their actions -> Politicians exploit economy better -> Everyone worse off -> Law to educate politicians is abolished -> Politicians exploit economy nevertheless Seriously, the problem is not politicians being clueless about all the above, but having too much power which makes them think they need to solve everything.
- 20after4 2y agoThis is the accurate scenario unfortunately. I'd give you 100 upvotes if I could.
- dartos 2y agoYou have it backwards. Politicians can be very very good at those things, when they have a reason to be.