I'd rather see Google make donations to the education system. We've seen that there are limits to money in politics. Once you get past a certain point, what we really need is a strong educational system so people can make rational decisions.
I see plenty of people that graduate from ivy league schools that continue to make irrational decisions, publish irrational research, and work on irrational things.
Being offered an education doesn't guarantee you get educated.
I went to school and they didn't teach me anything about critical thinking. Our grades mainly reflected how well we followed orders.
So maybe we should make everyone take a course on critical thinking. OK, what course is that? Everyone I've ever seen is garbage. Which shouldn't be surprising coming from a population that discourages critical thinking.
Check out Methods of Inquiry [0]. I took it my freshman year of college and it’s proved to be one of the most useful classes ever. I still keep the book and reference it from time to time.
>Google donate money to education or other social services, rather than use their money to influence politics.
they will use those donations to influence politics differently, is all. We will get a spinoff company whose job is education or social services, and that company will try to capture regulators and pay off the low end administrators they find in the education system.
I understand your hope but people don't have time/desire to want to be educated on a subject. Even those of us on HN, how many subjects are we really well informed on? or do we just believe the headlines from our favorite site? The spending bill that was recently presented to Congress was 800 pages and our representatives had four hours to read it before the vote. The world is too complicated and moving too fast.
I'm not sure what you are saying. Ted Cruz has a Harvard law degree but thinks, well who really knows. Being educated didn't stop millions of college graduates from believing that Dominion voting machines "flipped" votes to Biden or that tractor trailers full of "Biden" votes were dropped off but only in the states that Trump had more in person votes initially because the US Mail bad or fraud. I saw people reposting stuff on FB that X state had more votes than registered voters or even citizens but if you did a single Google, you would see that it was for the population of state X in 1980 or some shit. How does this happen in a world with Coursea?
You would think so, but I fear that google is a corruptive influence wherever it goes. What changes would google require education made to get its donations? How much vendor lock in will their 'donations' get them?
A strong education system is important, an education system bought and paid for by corporate interests directly is another step towards giving google power it will wield to everyone else's detriment.
There are lots of well-educated people siding against the election. Those elected representatives are not uneducated. We can believe they only pander, that they do not actually believe this stuff, but then we are the ones being naïve. Many educated people really do have faith in this issue. That faith is shaken but is far from gone.
I feel like our era of technology is being monopolized or it's preventing equal access. Software can no longer be developed with a couple of people and make a large impact. VC money is designated to a certain group of people. This isn't what technologist wanted to create. We hoped that technology would create tens of thousands of small impactful teams, not a handful of oligopolies.
I really enjoyed the section about working with the search engine and how we typically use search. Naturally, when we come across a problem we search to find solutions. When your problems are generic, it's easy to find an article that gives you an exact answer, but the deeper problems that you work on or the more specific they are, the less likely you'll find an article you can follow to fit your needs. That's where it's important to form models and sharpen tools for inference. It's more likely that you'll have to read a handful of articles and take segments from each article to formulate an answer.
You have to think of it in a deeper context than it being binary. It has very similar properties to oil. It's also fixed, but technology has done some phenomenal things to extract more of it with greater efficiency. The same is true for land and housing. UBI, self driving cars, and a greater shift away from working in offices are all going to change how we live and the type of land we will want to live on.
1. People in the comments below have addressed this. Not really sure how this creates a greater power divide than the current system. Having money allows individuals choices.
2. Again, providing people with money will allow them to have more choices. If housing becomes too expensive in my county, I now have a greater degree of freedom to move and this creates more competition for rental rates.
3. This is one that I feel like most people miss the forest for the tree. You're right, it's going to happen. I just don't think that a portion of bad actors in the system should prevent that massive benefits it can create for the people in society that will spend it in more productive ways. I've heard arguments of how it will create disincentives in society. That people will choose to no longer work. But when I ask the exact same people that pose that question if they would stop working if they had $14,400 provided to them every year, the answer is unequivocally, no. If you're looking for policies that solve all problems, you're not going to find any.
I think this is a situation where employees need to leave the company. We vote with our choices. If we don't deem this to be appropriate, we must respond in kind. It's not simple and not everyone has the choice, but for those that can, should.
Or regulate. Consider that your same argument was applies to e.g. the 40-hour workweek, and workplace safety standards in the US. We quite rightly decided not to leave such things to the market because in practice the labor market is FAR from perfect.
And it's also not true in particular, you might happen to be in a group which benefits from given regulation. Hopefully, in a democratic society, the group that is negatively affected (if any) is as small as possible.
.. and I downvoted you, because it absolutely true by definition.
Regulation, by definition, decreases freedom.
That's the whole point of regulation - to threaten with violence, acts that people have agreed are not a good idea.
If software engineers were regulated under IEEE, the freedoms of software engineers would decrease not increase.
I quote from the article you linked:
"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
Regulation, by definition, is intolerance.
For example - the minimum wage regulation. You have now removed the freedom of an untrained, unemployed person to sell their labor at a lower floor which was their only way to gain employment when there's a trained but unemployed person willing to also work for minimum wage!
You've got a pretty simplistic view of freedom there, bud. Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others. Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
Employers have immense power over their workers, and regulation is one of the tools societies can use to make sure that power isn't abused.
The word regulate, in regulation literally means "decrease freedom".
In physics, a regulator is used to decrease freedom. That's why regulators are used in the first place.
> Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others
Again, regulations can only decrease freedom.
It does not make sense to "increase" something that already exists.
The freedom to live does not make you more alive than what you already are.
> Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
The concept of free speech is innate and available everywhere, including countries that does not recognize free speech.
Free speech is an inalienable right that every person is born with. It does not require someone else to grant or validate it.
All that the first amendment to the Constitution does is _recognize_ (not increase) your freedom to speak against the "government".
That is it.
The "government" still can jail you or even kill you.
All that a country that recognizes free speech promises is that after the deed is done, it will bring that misdeed to justice and hopefully right that wrong.
If that was not the case, the courts would be way less crowded than it already is.
Also, first amendment to the Constitution does not apply to private citizens.
If you suddenly started to yell at your neighbor's lawn, not matter how well placed and logical your arguments are, you will still get booted with no legal recourse.
The only thing that is left is if this was the government that booted you out, you can take them to court and expect to win if you have a valid case.
There can be no such expectation in a country that does not recognize free speech.
One person's rights/freedoms are another person's responsibility. There can be no freedom without responsibility. Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
> One person's rights/freedoms are another person's responsibility
yes
> There can be no freedom without responsibility.
yes so as I like to say it - freedom is anything but free
> Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
Yes!
The issue I have with regulation is it requires enforcement to be truly useful and part of that requires the person seeking enforcement to yield their freedom to the enforcing authority to kick in.
Yet people seem to believe that regulation is this magic pixe dust that grants everyone special powers.
Because you're applying a definition of freedom so absolutely and narrowly that it ceases to be useful.
Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
And theoretically at an absolute minimum any time you see a prisoners dilemma regulation is how you prevent it and make sure that everyone gets their preferred outcome.
If your definition of freedom can't explain why voluntary enslavement makes people less free then it's useless.
We were having a conversation about how passing regulations against surveillance at work is meaningless because just like all regulations, majority of companies will find ways to work around it while complying with regulations.
When it became illegal to directly discriminate against race, employers found out ways to indirectly discriminate against race by putting in requirements for schooling and degrees that are just not in the reach of certain races and ethnic groups.
... but let's indulge you for a moment.
I can pass all the kinds of laws against assault I want all day and you can come along and pay enough money to redefine what assault really means.
Every regulation I pass is a restraint against my own freedom.
I can chop my foot off as much as I want in an attempt to save my head but if someone really wanted my head, they will have it no matter how hard I try to stop it.
Regulation does not help the common man at all and the rich already have help to get what they want. Regulation or no regulation.
So in your view regulation doesn’t stop anyone from doing what they want to do or we’re doing anyway. Doesn’t that imply that they can’t limit your freedom then?
If regulations are totally ineffective why give them any mind at all?
> If regulations are totally ineffective why give them any mind at all?
Because each regulation is a fly constantly nagging at you. There's nothing stopping you from continuing to do what you were doing and if you concentrate enough, you don't even feel the flies but they are still there buzzing around and nagging at you.
It's annoying as hell mate.
What's one regulation that really changed your life?
Hold on, we are not done yet - now think of one regulation, without which you really could have, really, changed your life.
While there's some power in voting with your choices, it's not really voting because a true vote with your choice must occur without being under duress or leveraged.
When it comes to employment, unless you're swimming in money and are basically just working for the sole purpose that you enjoy it, you're leveraged into adjusting your vote accordingly to your best option.
When true competition exists and your labor easily transfers, then by all means, select employers with reasonable practices. Relatively few people get to completely pick where they want to work and for what position they work. Most of us who aren't the top say 5% in our field pick a few handfuls and take a shotgun approach to see which opportunity lands. If none of those options land, we move to options we don't like because not working isn't a viable option.
Right now with unemployment rates skyrocketing, you have even less flexibility because labor is even more leveraged and have to cave into more and more policies like this.
The only way to protect labor in these situations, aside from organized labor unions, is creating enforceable regulatory protections for labor.
While this is certainly one method, it is not the only one. Change from within is possible and requires organizing with your colleagues. Otherwise we become like locusts, forever driven from place to place in search of ever-shrinking fertile land.
