15 ms·

> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise,

by rayiner 3mo ago

> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 3mo ago
You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but universal adult franchise was a much later development.
jmye 3mo ago
[dead]
rainsford 3mo ago
Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate like intelligent adults. If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones who suffer the most from dysfunctional government. Every unit of inefficiency or dysfunction in public services—every late bus or bad teacher—is a tax on the people who can least afford it.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
    You seem to imply that allowing poor people to vote leads to a dysfunctional government, whereas it seems clear to me that allowing corporations to influence politics is far, far worse.
    - rayiner 3mo ago
      You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive. Say you cut out the third of the electorate that’s most susceptible to advertising. That would increase everyone else’s voting power by 50%. But it would greatly reduce the actual power of rich people, because the remaining electorate would be much harder to influence by buying advertising. The other thing is that narrowing the electorate by a third would be less elitist than the systems the Wilsonians came up with in response to the Jacksonians. Today, everyone votes, but votes don’t matter very much because the government is actually run by a small elite of credentialed experts and civil servants, and lawyers. APA litigation has a far outsized impact compared to voting.
wolvesechoes 3mo ago
> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. God, tech people should have stayed in basements.
- hollerith 3mo ago
  The person you're quoting is a lawyer.
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”
  - Jtsummers 3mo ago
    A lawyer who has, in the past, said only property owners and people with at least two grandparents born in the US should be allowed to vote (which excludes him by the second criteria). He's been an advocate for disenfranchisement for a while now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305
    - TimorousBestie 3mo ago
      I do believe the “we have to strip voting rights from the poor in order to save the poor” framing expressed in this thread is new, however.
      - Jtsummers 3mo ago
        It is new, but it's not that surprising given his stated positions in the past.
      - rayiner 3mo ago
        If you think poor people know what’s best for them, how do you think we should decide vaccine schedules for kids? We should have online voting on it with universal franchise, right? We have the technology now. If you don’t agree we should do that, explain why you think we should gatekeep such an important decision instead of letting people decide what’s best for them?
ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate. However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that they used to give to black people to validate whether they would be allowed to vote (spoiler: the tests were ambiguous enough to invalidate everyone subjected to them). Imagine if this was implemented and then some bright spark announces that Starbucks workers no longer have to pay income tax. Then, following the election, an immediate decree is made that Starbucks workers are now the property of Starbucks and are not considered to have individual rights.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
    > It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate I agree, but that's not really the argument here. My argument is that it is very easy to abuse certain distinctions and so we should not seriously entertain those distinctions. Proof of worth or intelligence can be easily gamed to prevent certain classes of people from voting,

by rayiner 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

maxerickson 3mo ago

You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.

rayiner 3mo ago
Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but universal adult franchise was a much later development.

jmye 3mo ago

[dead]

rainsford 3mo ago

Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate like intelligent adults. If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.

rayiner 3mo ago
The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones who suffer the most from dysfunctional government. Every unit of inefficiency or dysfunction in public services—every late bus or bad teacher—is a tax on the people who can least afford it.
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
  You seem to imply that allowing poor people to vote leads to a dysfunctional government, whereas it seems clear to me that allowing corporations to influence politics is far, far worse.
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive. Say you cut out the third of the electorate that’s most susceptible to advertising. That would increase everyone else’s voting power by 50%. But it would greatly reduce the actual power of rich people, because the remaining electorate would be much harder to influence by buying advertising. The other thing is that narrowing the electorate by a third would be less elitist than the systems the Wilsonians came up with in response to the Jacksonians. Today, everyone votes, but votes don’t matter very much because the government is actually run by a small elite of credentialed experts and civil servants, and lawyers. APA litigation has a far outsized impact compared to voting.

wolvesechoes 3mo ago

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

hollerith 3mo ago
The person you're quoting is a lawyer.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”
- Jtsummers 3mo ago
  A lawyer who has, in the past, said only property owners and people with at least two grandparents born in the US should be allowed to vote (which excludes him by the second criteria). He's been an advocate for disenfranchisement for a while now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305
  - TimorousBestie 3mo ago
    I do believe the “we have to strip voting rights from the poor in order to save the poor” framing expressed in this thread is new, however.
    - Jtsummers 3mo ago
      It is new, but it's not that surprising given his stated positions in the past.
    - rayiner 3mo ago
      If you think poor people know what’s best for them, how do you think we should decide vaccine schedules for kids? We should have online voting on it with universal franchise, right? We have the technology now. If you don’t agree we should do that, explain why you think we should gatekeep such an important decision instead of letting people decide what’s best for them?

ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago

I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate. However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that they used to give to black people to validate whether they would be allowed to vote (spoiler: the tests were ambiguous enough to invalidate everyone subjected to them). Imagine if this was implemented and then some bright spark announces that Starbucks workers no longer have to pay income tax. Then, following the election, an immediate decree is made that Starbucks workers are now the property of Starbucks and are not considered to have individual rights.

rayiner 3mo ago
It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
  > It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate I agree, but that's not really the argument here. My argument is that it is very easy to abuse certain distinctions and so we should not seriously entertain those distinctions. Proof of worth or intelligence can be easily gamed to prevent certain classes of people from voting,