> We need to applaud companies like Slack, but know that the nitty-gritty of human services—housing, health care, social support—which lots of nonprofits and public institutions are working on, the private sector has largely turned away from.”
I mean, yeah? Those things sound like they’re precisely the kind of stuff that’s the domain of non-profits and the government. Why would we expect Slack or other tech companies to be helping random people with housing or social support?
The private sector does help here, indirectly, with taxes that go to support such programs. And it’s the government that sets the tax rate and decides where revenue goes, not the private sector.
You can blame the government, or the people who voted them in, but blaming Slack and co. is silly. It’s not their job, and it shouldn’t be: you don’t want the institutions with profit motive to be the ones handling charitable works. That’s part of the whole reason we have a government.
You live in Munich. You think like a European. Left or right on the political spectrum, doesn't matter. What you said is generally accepted as "how it works" in Europe. Not so much in other places.
I'm from the states, grew up Mormon, and have lived in Alabama and Utah, in addition to other regions. I'm very aware of how the American mindset works, thanks.
Government is to govern. Government in most countries is driven by democratic mandates. Democratic mandates are set by influencers. The US’ key influencers are largely regressive and dishonest - and convince people to either not vote - or to vote against their personal best interests[1].
The US government does not currently have a democratic mandate to operate as the social welfare state. Consequently hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people are immorally (by my own standards) disadvantaged and with no means or realistic opportunity to better themselves.
So if a private company (or shareholders-forbid: a publicly traded company)’s leadership feels a moral obligation to help those left behind by the state - more power to them.
Until the US truly embraces the “for the people” part of the “by the people, of the people, for the people” part of their unofficial motto it really is up to private entities to make-up the difference.
[1] UPDATE: To clarify - I don't mean that I somehow know what's in someone else's best interests - because I don't - nor their exact reasons for voting for a particular party or candidate - but I mean that it's still possible to _objectively_ say that many people vote for ideological or sentimental reasons that appeal to them (which is part of democracy!) with - or without - having done (for example) a spreadsheet comparisons of how each candidate's manifesto politics would affect their cost of living, quality of living, economic expectations, and so on. I can respect someone voting against their interests for ideological or moral reasons - provided it's done with informed consent. I'm not convinced that most- or even a plurality - of GOP voters in recent US elections sat down and made a spreadsheet and said "yup - I'm okay with rising the cost of my individual health insurance provided it means I have the choice to refuse healthcare coverage" (and that is not a misrepresentation of the ACA and its opponents' stated positions).
So by all means - vote against your own interests - provided you do it with informed consent - otherwise you _really_ are voting against your own interests.
> convince people to either not vote - or to vote against their personal best interests.
I’ve seen this on HN several times, and it always cracks me up. The condescension isn't dripping. It’s running in torrents.
You think the reason they won’t vote the way you want is because they don’t know what’s good for themselves. You might want to consider an alternate: they don’t want someone like you deciding what’s good for them and forcing it down their throats.
The UK has just had an election where many people voted for the party which has been in power for nearly ten years and been an utter disaster.
Because they want change.
Condescension has nothing to do with it. It's empirically observable that a proportion of the electorate doesn't vote in its own best interests.
It's also empirically observable there's an entire industry of media outlets, think-tanks, journalists, bloggers, TV presenters, radio commenters, online commenters, and other influencers which is paid huge sums every year to make sure this doesn't change.
The 2019 election - just like the previous 3, subverted the popular vote by way of First Past the Post. Nationally, the pro-leave side only secured a minority of the vote.
And unfortunately a major problem with proportional representation is there's no one single best way to achieve PR - any campaign to achieve PR would be stymied by splitting the pro-PR faction between STV and IRV, for example.
> The 2019 election - just like the previous 3, subverted the popular vote by way of First Past the Post. Nationally, the pro-leave side only secured a minority of the vote.
Labour's official position is to negotiate a deal and then hold a final referendum. [1]
So there were three positions in the election (leave, remain, vote again) and leave won the largest share of the popular vote.
I think that would a feature at least as much as a bug. If the national government becomes focused on doing the most essential things and is forced to build broad-based, cross-party coalitions to accomplish that, it seems that causes the people to be better represented than if a majority party can cram through their point of view without worrying about trodding over those (temporarily) in the minority.
There was a lot of negativity around Corbyn in the newspapers that tend to flip-flop - only the definite left-leaning papers (The Guardian, etc) maintain their support for Labour and the LibDems.
My observation of the BBC's coverage was that while they at least didn't put a positive spin on the Tories, it felt like they were doubling-down on anti-Labour and anti-LibDem negativity. I still don't believe the BBC is in any way biased towards any particular political party, but I feel there's a feedback-loop somewhere in the media system. Once the meme "Corbyn is unelectable" becomes a meme and people don't stop to question it - or it becomes self-referential ("Corbyn is unelectable because the people believe he's unelectable") then we have a problem.
(Disclaimer: I would not actually vote for Corbyn myself - just saying).
Benedict Evans, though he lives in SV, would not have voted for Corbyn if he lived in the UK. Does Benedict Evans not know which political ideology is good for his own self-interest?
How do you explain away people who didn't vote for Corbyn because... they would prefer a non-anti-semitic leader? I have a hunch. You might say, "Well these people were duped. He isn't IN FACT an anti-semite." But, now the goal posts have changed and the discussion moves to whether certain claims are true, not whatever is in someone's best interest.
The thought that people you disagree with are simply fools because they don't know what is in their best self-interest, is not only arrogant, it's patently just not how the world works. Like always, it all comes down to whether your position or their position actually maps to reality. And if you think that you can't be wrong, or that it isn't likely that you get at least some things wrong, then your position is already hosed (not to mention lacks epistemological humility).
> It's empirically observable that a proportion of the electorate doesn't vote in its own best interests.
I'm not sure that's true (that it's empirically observable without bias). The trouble comes from an assumption that by giving up X (that you value only a little) to achieve Y (that you value a lot), that those other people would be better off, when they simply value X a lot more than you do (or Y a lot less). When they consistently vote to prioritize X over Y, you empirically observe some outcomes, apply your own weights to each factor, and conclude they're acting against their own best interests and cite your evidence as empirical proof, ignoring the judgment you applied when determining the weights.
I don't think people exhibiting this bias (unconscious or conscious) are intending to be condescending, but it comes across that way quite often.
Some people prefer to live in a society where the government has minimal power/influence over citizens' daily life (X) while other people prefer to live in a society where government power and influence is strong and consistently exercised to protect the most vulnerable (Y). They're different choices.
Is DaiPlusPlus is forcing things down people's throats? Is DaiPlusPlus' condescension running in torrents? Are you being condescending?
If I say that consumers are being tricked by ad companies, am I being condescending? How dare I make judgments on so many people?
And when American Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only true way and that Islam is a false path, and that all other ways are false pathways which lead to eternal hell, and is among the greatest of wrongs, is that condescending? Or mere spiritual reality? Other people aren't experiencing moral anxieties in judging you; instead they feel they have moral clarity. This is the majority stance of the land.
You are missing the point. If I say, "I support X" and you say, "I support not X," that's just a disagreement.
If I say, "I support" and you say, "I support not X, and if you weren't so blind you'd think that too," that's being condescending because you are assuming that someone (a) has fundamentally the same values than you but is (b) too stupid to see it.
The reality is that people can value something different than you (less government intervention, less restrictions on speech, lower taxes) for fundamental reasons different than yours, not because they basically agree with you and are too stupid to understand. This is different than merely arguing truth claims, because fundamentally political choice is a choice. There is no One True Way(TM) to govern and people prefer different things.
Why do you use the word "we"? I wasn't directing my comment to you.
An assumption isn't necessarily condescending. I assumed I was talking to someone on the left side of politics and was giving examples for the sake of an argument. If those examples do not in fact work then I can just as well pick other ones.
> > The reality is that people can value something different than you (less government intervention, less restrictions on speech, lower taxes)
> Why do you assume we don't value those things? Isn't that _you_ being condescending now?
If you assume people do share the values, or if you assume they do not, you are still assuming to know their values. Better to just ask the person and start the conversation from there rather than shut down debate with something along the lines of "You'd agree with me if you weren't misled by X".
>people can value something different than you (less government intervention, less restrictions on speech, lower taxes) for fundamental reasons different than yours //
You're right, but in the election run-up people living on minimum wage, who complained we needed a change because of the rich getting too rich, also were convinced that Labour's tax increases were a devastating blow to them personally; tax increases that a family of two well-paid professionals would be unlikely to even be affected by.
The reason they hate those taxes is not because they're bad for them, they would undoubtedly be benefited. Nor is it because they actually have a financial basis for a belief in lower taxes for the extraordinarily well off. It's a matter of advertising -- the private press splash an advert "Marxist Money Madness" or whatever and tell the people they're going to be hit by massive tax increases costing taxpayers 1000s.
Of course it's a carefully tailored half-truth. It does cost taxpayers _who_are_affected_ thousands but people on gross wages below £80k aren't. The message the minimum wage, or benefits only, households get is "if Labour get in we will have to pay thousands more tax" (which to them is a lot, despite the tax rises not actually applying to them). They also don't appear to realise taxes pay for running the country; things they benefit from (health, education, roads, trade relations, ...) or if they do that reducing taxes won't just make these things cheaper but mean they have to pay individually (and pay a profit to capitalists as part of that deal). If they do realise these things there's no rational reason for then to support them; really there isn't, not for the vast majority of the populous.
Many people can't do basic percentages, they genuinely just trust the headlines.
The BBC have failed in refusing to call out lies because that would be "targeted" at one particular party (apparently 80% of their Facebook posts were factually flawed) because they are the ones telling the lies.
And why? Well look at the headlines post-election many Tories made many hundreds of £millions. Everyone else is working on inputs to value creation and they're playing the system and walking away with all the value.
In short, yes, there are genuine differences in political opinion. But there is also a massive deficit of understanding too.
Even with perfect understanding, there are many people who believe along the lines of "the government which governs least governs best."
Specifically, if you promised that every year you'd take 5% of the money of everyone richer than me, that I'd get a healthy slice of it, the rest would be spent on programs I approve of, and that there is no possible future in which that new tax would apply to me, I'd still vote against it. I don't think it's because I'm too stupid or ill-informed to understand that it would be "good for me".
In your hypothetical, what if the 5% tax was presented (with significant evidence) as a way to correct for market distortions that, if left unchecked, would be exploited by those at the top, politically and financially? Would you still want the government to not interfere?
I should perhaps step back to explain my concern over the 5% tax on "everyone richer than me".
Rather than starting from "we should exercise our power to tax the rich as a reaction to their success and to promote fairness", I start from "What services must the government provide the people?" then "How much will it cost to provide those services?" then once that is determined, figure out how to raise the needed revenue.
Tax revenue should not be raised to punish or correct for market distortions, but rather because it's needed to pay for an essential government service.
I believe, with very few exceptions, that the creation of wealth, even the concentration of great wealth in a few hands, represents evidence of a market success not a market failure. Those wealth creators mostly got there by providing something that many other people wanted and wanted so much that they parted with their own hard-earned money in exchange for the goods and services the wealth creators had on offer.
Similarly, when considering the role of government (such as when weighing a new program), I think it's better for society overall if the decision is made on a basis of "this newly proposed program is so beneficial/essential that everyone would be willing to pay some part of the cost of it" rather than "I'm willing to support this program that benefits me because I know that only other people are going to be paying for it."
So, yes, I'd be opposed to a tax presented with strong supporting evidence that that tax was motivated by raising incremental revenue under the justification/cover of "improving fairness".
Right, but there is a massive difference between saying that some people can be misled and categorizing an entire political party as a bunch of fools.
(As an aside, it is entirely fair to question your future tax rates under a politician promising to deliver massive social programs, even if they don't claim they'll raise taxes for the non-rich. Money has to come from somewhere and there's no guarantee that taxing "the rich" is going to be enough.
Also, saying "They also don't appear to realise taxes pay for running the country" is a strikingly dim-view to have of people.)
As another person said, the real interests are not always monetary. Someone may be willing to pay more in healthcare if the government is less involved in their life, even if they are poorer than most people. This is just one example.
To be fair to jtbayly - I do agree I came across as
presumptuous and paternalistic to state people are voting against their personal best interests.
While I cannot, at all, claim to know what's in someone's interests, let alone their best interests - it is possible to reasonably determine when someone is voting _against_ their interests - especially when there is evidence of emotional manipulation or misrepresentation of the facts. (Though I assume we won't enter into a "debate" over specific facts here on HN).
The best example are the rural, conservative, voters in states that didn't expand Medicaid, who voted for representatives who campaigned against the ACA - and who who various reasons (unemployment, hard luck, etc) are now left without any feasible options for healthcare coverage: it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests, even the most staunch Libertarian can agree with that statement (though the Libertarian might argue it was still their free choice to make and that should be respected - which I can agree with because at least they're being honest about it).
> it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests
Actually, it's not. You're reducing the whole spectrum of things that they may care about to the single axis of healthcare costs, and not performing any analysis of the opposition position.
It may be that the representative these people voted for aligns significantly better to their values than any other choice that was available.
It may be that ... but it's not. Either you're being very naive or rather deceptive.
People aren't paying for £millions of political advertising because it doesn't work, Boris wasn't stupidly echoing a 3-word slogan because he's an idiot with nothing else to say. It's wide-scale mental manipulation, the sort Coke does with brand advertising all the time. The people running Boris aren't messing around, he doesn't tousle his hair before every public event because he's an actual moron: but so so many people think he does. It's calculated and computed to the n-th degree.
Boris's team did some incredibly inciteful things, learnt through the success of Trump's campaign in part. One of their genius moves was not having him appear in debates - everyone knew he couldn't really handle himself and would lose voters, even he can't lie so bare-facedly. But having him not appear gave the BBC/Media excuse to always talk about him but never say anything of substance. He did have to get in a fridge to avoid having the negative stories make billing that day, but the TV folks were happy to naively play along, ...
The American political left would gain immensely and lose exactly nothing by being less condescending. The first line of argument they should abandon is telling people they are voting against their own interests. It’s remarkably insulting, and arrogantly presupposes you know know better what another person’s interests are.
I usually see the argument "you're voting against your own interests" from the free-market, libertarianish side. You may be right that it's often viewed as condescending, but I'm not sure what the alternative would be since the proper pursuit of 'enlightened self-interest' is the whole point of that sort of politics.
The condescending part is that the left views poor people who vote for non-democrats as voting against their self-interest. No one knows what someone’s self-interest is except the person who is voting. Considering the US has only 2 major options on elections, there is a panoply of reasons why someone votes and merely saying “poor people who vote republican are brainwashed idiots” is what grates on people who believe everyone has their own agency regardless of their economic class.
>the condescending part is that the left views poor people who vote for non-democrats as voting against their self-interest.
And the right views poor people who vote for Democrats as lazy grifters just looking for a handout, naive fools in the pocket of globalist elites, or else not "real Americans" like themselves.
It isn't only the left or Democrats which have a problem in this regard. The right/Republican end of the spectrum is fueled by its naked contempt for everyone outside their camp.
You have it wrong. In many cases poor people are better served by voting for lower taxes, cheaper products, maintaining the status quo so there factory job can stay a little longer. It might mean dropping union protections because it makes there state more investable. In the auto sector jobs shifted to southern states without unions.
I didn’t say anything about the issues. What could I be wrong about? All I said is, if you believe anyone from X voting for the other guy means that they are brainwashed, you are delusional. People vote how they want for innumerable reasons. All poor people, gay people, black people, etc. cannot be easily bucketed into voting units. Everyone has their own agency as individuals.
It seems like a losing argument, from whichever direction. Who would not be ashamed to confess, that they took only their own interests into consideration when voting?
You don't have to guess what a lot of people's interests are. They will tell you. In my constituency people were annoyed with our sitting member who is Labor because the train prises increased. They want lower train fares so they voted conservative. So yes, it is actually easy in some cases to say someone voted against their interest.
No. They didn’t vote against their interest. They voted for someone who supposedly would fulfill their interests. Voting against your interests implies you know your interests are wrong.
I'm not sure that a better solution is possible in America's current political climate. As I see it there are basically three approaches that a progressive could take in a policy debate:
- Persuasion: I think that you are mistaken as to what is in your best interest, here's why my approach would benefit you more.
- Negotiation: Here's how we can work together to find a solution that meets both of our interests.
- Zero Sum: I recognize that this isn't in your best interest but I don't care because its in my interest.
Due to the power of Fox News and the Republican party's current willingness to ignore facts, I don't think persuasion is possible.
Similarly, the strategy that Fox News and the Republican party have taken of promoting polarization, demonizing the other side, using straw-man arguments, etc.[1] Makes it impossible to have the kind of nuanced debate and compromise that would be necessary for a negotiated solution.
Therefore, it seems like all that is left is a zero sum solution. If the other side won't listen or negotiate then the only option remaining is to implement our policies whether they like them or not.
I'm not saying that's an ideal situation, but it seems to me that its the reality that we find ourselves in.
[1] To be fair, I think that progressives do this to a worrying extent as well. However, I single out the Republican party due to the degree to which they have focused on this strategy and because the fact that many Republicans get all of their news from Fox makes the strategy almost unassailable.
You don’t need to convince republicans, you need to convince moderates who can be persuaded to vote one way or the other in a given election. In the context of a general election, we’re talking about thousands of people in a handful of states. I’m struggling with how the idea of “condescension isn’t persuasive” is finding so much friction here.
The condescension isn't really coming from the democratic party. Mostly it's from their allies in the press. The democratic party probably knows what the problem is, but doesn't really know how to deal with it.
Maybe the assumption that its condescending is the problem? Someone some time ago figured out that calling evidence based arguments condescending, and for some reason it stuck.
Maybe because those arguments are not perfect. After all they are messy, based on the complex reality filtered through the ugliness of statistics and bounded rational arguments.
... and The Ugly Orange's tweets and one-liners are gospel, but anything that starts with data is condescending.
The issue that I see is that due to the electoral college and gerrymandering, it can be difficult to win even if you can convince moderates.
The other issue is that many of the issues that progressives are concerned about (e.g. climate change, inequality, gun control) require action by society as a whole. Ideally we would negotiate and find policies that address the priorities of both progressives and conservatives. However, that doesn't currently seem to be possible.
I don't think the electoral college is an effective way to give everyone a voice because it creates a situation where some votes count more than others and it allows a minority of the population to hold the country hostage.
I believe that something like proportionate representation is a better solution. It would still allow minority populations (e.g. rural areas) to band together and get representatives elected that reflect their priorities. However, since the system is no longer winner takes all it promotes finding solutions via negotiation.
This reveals that it is possible to combine the Persuasion and Zero Sum methods that the poster above described: "Once I have persuaded 51% of voters to my view, I no longer need to care about your view."
The idea that moderates or "the center" would win an election just broke Labours back in UK. It's also what broke Clintons campaign in 2016. The left has a big enough voting base to win elections, what it lacks is motivating them to vote. The exact opposite of what happens when you water down your positions in search of "moderates".
Interestingly, right-wing parties understand this quite well. If they loose an election you never hear that they have to convince moderates. Instead they get even more radical.
I'm not sure I think "just cave in" is a realistic solution to polarization. That doesn't actually solve anything it just creates more resentment.
In terms of demonization, I think its fair to use words like racist, sexist, and fascist when they are accurate descriptions. Before the Trump administration I was opposed to using those terms because I didn't feel that it was clear that they were accurate. However, I do think they are accurate now.
In my opinion, Nazi is only a reasonable term when the person is actually advocating for Nazism which, other than actual Neo-Nazis, is very rare. The only example I can think of where it might be valid was when Trump said that there were good people on both sides of a Neo-Nazi rally.
Clearly you need to find a different news source. I suggest OANN if you'd like a cable news network (also available via an app) with very factual reporting.
The American political right faces constant scrutiny from left learning news in America. The simple fact is that somehow labor unions seem to be turning against the political left, which means someone messed up big time.
Media in the echo-chambers emphasize the bogeyman/straw man arguments of the other side, ensuring that right-leaning audiences only sees the video and soundbites that reinforce the effete, ivory tower, condescending, detached-from-reality stereotypes. Similarly, the left-leaning population only sees the racism, intolerance, education-bashing, and fact denial. Neither represents more than 5% of the population, but each political leaning believes the stereotype represents 50% of the other side.
I've always thought that the line about people voting against their own interests was just addressing an irrelevant point. Billionaires who support Sanders and Warren are voting against their own interest because they'd get taxed higher, does anyone think that's bad? There's nothing wrong with voting on principle, rather than for what directly benefits you personally.
What I mean is that any attempt to change policy/society/laws/government innately involves deciding that something would be good for society as a whole and then attempting to get laws put in place that force it to happen.
Therefore, your post doesn't seem to be actionable since it basically boils down to "don't do anything".
I rarely come across such a terse, yet clear, argument why socialism requires force. But it is a false dichotomy, to conclude that the alternative is not to do anything.
Also I think maybe I didn't explain what I was trying to say clearly. My point is that all political positions, not just socialism, amount to trying to force the laws to reflect how you feel society should operate.
The opposite -- a presumption that people always vote in their own best interests -- is equally condescending because it's an expression that nobody can really believe. It's like everybody applauding and saying "good job" at the kindergarten music recital.
In my view, evidence that people vote against their own interests is the massive industry that exists for the purpose of making that happen.
The respectful middle ground, if there is one, is that how people vote relative to their own interests is a worthy topic and debate, but that the debate might make a few people uncomfortable.
Your logical error is assuming that it’s so obvious what “vot[ing] against [one’s] own interests” means. Maybe a stable free market government with a strong cultural and religious framework is in everyone’s interest, and the “massive industry” exists to convince people of that fact?
This was like the archetype of a partisan argument.
You two managed to go through why the sides don't like each other's worldview or the way it's expressed, and then stopped the second it came to discussing any real world issues. And I mean both of you as well, you could've given examples and data about why your system might be in anyone's interest but you didn't and it would've been the perfect time for him to reply with examples and data in favour of his, and neither of you even tried, it just stopped.
I’m not trying to convince anybody of that world view. My point is more modest: people can reasonably disagree about what is in the “best interest” of various groups, and therefore there is a difference between “convincing people to vote against their best interest” and “convincing people that a particular world view is in their best interest.”
The opposite is true. It is ahistorical to look at the Constitution as protecting only an individualistic form of religious liberty, merely individual freedom of conscience. At the time of the founding, America was comprised of communities practicing different religions (mainly different forms of Christianity). But within each community, there was a strong, very public religious framework. Indeed, several states had established churches into the 1800s. The First Amendment was designed to protect that status quo. Not to eliminate public religion, but to keep the federal government from erasing those diverse communities by establishing a national church.
The “freedom from religion” reading of the first amendment is, besides being atextual, utterly non-sensical. It reads the Framers to have banned, sub silentio, practices with respect to public religion that were utterly routine at the time the amendment was adopted.
As a wise man once said, good ideas do not need a lot of lies told about them to be convincing.
Also, who is "everyone"? Whose culture is "cultural"? Which religion is the "religious framework"? The problem with the 1950s white patriachal evangelical Christian version of America is the huge bunch of people it didn't work for, who got counted out of "everyone".
The other way to frame it is that people need convincing to forgo what feels good in the short term to pursue what works best in the long term.
As to whose culture and whose religion: it’s not clear to me the specifics matter so much as the existence of strong, broadly-shared social norms. My Bangladeshi immigrant family doesn’t share a culture or religion with Pat Buchanan, but there was frankly not a lot of daylight between their views on how people should live in society.
And you’re right in one respect: a society that emphasizes social norms will leave some people out. The social norms can be evolved, of course. Bangladesh, for example, is making progress in evolving the social norms surrounding participation of women in the economy. (In terms of labor force participation rate, Bangladesh today is where the USA was in 1950. On the other hand, we’ve had not one but two women as heads of state.) But a society that emphasizes individual self determination will be more inclusive and more responsive to social change. But these are trade offs in the structure of a society and people can reasonably disagree about what serves the best interests of the vast majority of the people.
As to whose culture and whose religion: it’s not clear to me the specifics matter so much as the existence of strong, broadly-shared social norms.
It definitely is nice when it is the case, but I don't think it's necessary for America's future to be successful. Certainly, for the first 150 years of its existence, the United States had very widely varying cultures and ways of life throughout. The Puritans in the north lived differently than the Scotch-Irish, who lived differently than Germans in the midwest, who lived differently than the pioneers in the west.
The difference between now and then though was that back then all those people were free to live as they felt like, and if they didn't like it, they could pick up and leave to form new communities, like for example the Mormons did when faced with hostility of people from their origins. Now, however, the mass media and powerful federal government is dictating the one and proper set of moral and social norms, and the correct way to live. People aren't free anymore to do what they want if the feds don't like it, even if their state doesn't have an issue with. Even the states expanded their reach into determining how people should live. This wouldn't have been a problem if, like you suggest, the enforced way of life was broadly shared, but it clearly isn't.
Actually, this is obvious. Voter votes for person who says they will do X. Voter doesn't understand the implications of X. Person gets elected, does X, fallout ensues. Voter now complaining about the consequences. This is a very obvious factual observation of voters voting against their own interests. It's not something up for debate.
But is that what actually happens? Witness the abysmal approval ratings of Congress as a whole while every district continues to approve of and reelect their own representative.
Because people love it when their representative brings home the pork but they hate it when the other guy does it.
It's not possible for people in one district to elect a representative who could individually eliminate all wasteful government programs, but it is possible for them to send in somebody who will at least bring them back a proportionate share of the loot from the heist. Is that not rational behavior absent some coordination mechanism to get all the other districts to stop electing kleptocrats at the same time?
Maybe better would be to vote for someone willing to do that while also pushing for structural change to remove those incentives, but that's assuming there is any candidate running with that position.
> The opposite -- a presumption that people always vote in their own best interests -- is equally condescending because it's an expression that nobody can really believe.
It's hard to believe that every position of a candidate you vote for is in your interests because that's basically never the case.
Suppose I support the elimination of most federal programs and taxation (let the states do it) but I think that a federal carbon tax which is paid out as a dividend to the citizens is a great idea, because it's a national/global issue and pricing externalities is the legitimate purview of government. Who shall I vote for? I have never seen a single candidate proposing to do both of those things.
In a sense the only way for me not to vote against my interests is to stay home. At the same time, there are two candidates on the ballot that are very much not the same as one another. So it's not so much a matter of "voting against your own interests" as choosing which of your interests outweigh the others.
But assuming that anybody who makes a different choice than you is a fool is very condescending.
If you look at the 1997 Labour manifesto, which led to the UK doubling GDP from 97 to and 2007 and the 2019 Labour manifesto they’re very similar.
If you ask people if Labour was good for the economy and would be good for the economy, you’ll largely get a negative response.
Unfortunately it’s easy for people’s opinions to be shaped with zero basis in fact and when this happens it’s easy for them to vote against their own interest.
This has little to do with a condescending left and much more to do with how well the Conservstives play and are supported by the media.
Side point. Just because a government is in power doesn't mean they are responsible for the economy doing well. Often the previous policies take time to take hold more so global trends are driving this. What happened after 2007 the housing crisis.. in part made by government policy spanning decades in part because of foreign influence through global markets.
That’s true but widespread economic opinion is that the austerity policies have resulted in lower growth. Cuts started before 2010 and the effects are visible now. The IMF was critical of the policy as early as 2013 but the conservative government pushed on for idealogical reasons. There’s little reason to continue self harm.
The financial crisis manifested itself in the UK wholly due to Gordon Brown’s mismanagement of the economy yes. A housing bubble and promising the end of boom and bust. Having sold off the gold reserves at a rock bottom price already.
Labour would like their voters to forget it was them who bailed out the banks too.
> What happened in 2008 that might call into doubt Labour’s management of the economy?
The blowup of Lehman Brothers (US investment bank), ABN Ambro (Dutch bank recently acquired by RBS), Northern Rock (overextended British building society), Kaupthing (Iceland), and Anglo-Irish (despite the name, entirely Irish)? Yes, I'm sure that's all the fault of the Labour government.
they don’t want someone like you deciding what’s good for them and forcing it down their throats
But they're happy with other people deciding what's good for them; people who've decided that what's good for them is to be poorer and sicker?
If they could be tricked into becoming richer and healthier, without realising they're doing it by voting for commie socialism or whatever scare label is in vogue, is that wrong? Is there some morality there, like life is an art project.
Seriously; is that wrong? Is it more wrong to tell people what will make them richer and healthier, or to let them be poorer and sicker?
I would make the same quoted statement, but mainly because of misinformation.
I do NOT think people understand what their parties are telling them because both sides lie dramatically.
Democrats do not present realistic plans with costs on their social programs, and Republican media and politicians typically say the exact opposite of what the real plan is. I used to love their smaller government push until they touted cutting public services to save 40 million as a huge victory for the budget while giving Lockheed et. al. A billion dollar contracts... So smaller government, sure, but NOT balancing a budget as it was claiming to try for.
So if you subscribe to partizan political sources, both parties only feed you information that support their party line, and the facts are elsewhere, if they are even available. Presidents keep breaking all promises they make on the trail.
Judgement of one's long term personal interests is dictated by whose projection of the future you believe. To many, the future trend seems obvious and it seems inconceivable that people would vote against your estimation of what the future will be. A little humility and open-mindedness would go a long way towards bridging the gap.
There's another reason people appear to vote against their best interests: the opportunity to hurt those they dislike or resent.
That motivation can be especially strong when the party that you thought represented your economic interests turned out not to do that as much as you'd have liked.
I feel like you're referring to the seam of high individualism in American culture. imho, that's the lie. And if we don't come to see that, it might be our collective undoing.
There's a reason our highest form of punishment is to isolate. It's not our functional unit of existing. To truly isolate us from others is to punish us perhaps worse than death. So what makes people think the individual should be our highest functional unit of decision-making after millions of years evolving otherwise?
This is something I wonder if western thought deserves to lose its crown over, if it can't course correct.
Disclosure: civic technologist, community organizer, biochemist
The reason we rest decision-making power in the individual is that it's democratizing. A community is not inherently a hierarchy. People can work together and achieve common goals without vesting ultimate power a Supreme Leader. It just means that you have to convince people that what you want the group to do is good, instead of ordering it by fiat.
And if some people want to split off and do something different, diversity is a good thing too.
> The reason we rest decision-making power in the individual is that it's democratizing.
I've studied in democratic reform, and work in civic tech space. There's a book called _Democracy for Realists_ which I highly recommend. It's a wonderful book, but it eviscerates most of what we understand colloquially about democracy. (Or at least did for me)
You are walking around a piece of democracy that is entrenched in "folk democratic theory" -- things people talk about as being the basis of effective democracy. But in democratic theory, folk democracy appears to have much evidence against it, and very few serious academics advocate for it as an explanatory theory. It's telling is part of the glue perhaps, because systems must appear simple and understandable to its participants, or else it can be destabilized too easily :) the works for electoral systems too -- people need to feel like they understand it in order to trust it's outcomes, nevermind if first-past-the-post is truly best.
The individual is very flawed, and democracy might work despite it's individual nature, not because of it. Political parties and identity groups outside the original structure of democracy perhaps stabilize a system that puts decision-making power into a very ineffective unit. (The individual)
Anyhow, it's been awhile since I worked deeply on this stuff (and not as an academic myself), and I might be misspeaking some parts that an academic could correct me on, but I'm sure the general thrust of the above is true :)
If they'd like to, sure; but they don't have to, and we shouldn't be relying on them to.
> Democratic mandates are set by influencers.
This is a cop out: the electorate is still responsible for the politicians it puts in power. Don't let people off the hook for supporting terrible policies.
> This is a cop out: the electorate is still responsible for the politicians it puts in power.
I disagree. After reading about famous propagandists from the past century I'm just depressed that it's so easy to manipulate enough of the public to vote a particular way.
Yes, it's the people's fault - but the people are fallable and _predictable_ enough to be played like a puppet.
If someone is an idiot and is convinced into doing something criminal even when they know it's wrong, that still doesn't get the person who tricked them into doing it off-the-hook - in serious crimes that's called aiding-and-abetting.
Both can be true (and probably are). Yes, modern propaganda is odious, but also yes, don’t let us off the hook. At least while we feel responsible for our elections, we have some modicum of interest in them. I’ve seen countries where they’ve lost hope, who are democratic in name only. It’s not pretty.
The electorate doesn't vote on policy: it votes for people. People who are free to enact any policy they want while they are in office. The only consequence is not being elected a second time.
When people vote in their personal best interests, that is a signal for a dying society. Imagine if you had a vote at halftime of a sports game and let people vote on what the rules should be. Ideally, they would vote out things like corrupt refs, and make adjustments to rules that have proven to greatly advantage people in a game-breaking way. But if they start voting in such a manner that they are reallocating points in order to personally benefit their team, the democracy is over, that's no longer a society with social cohesion voting on principle for the sake of the game.
Direct democracy populism where people are maximizing personal return should not be considered the standard that we aspire to. I'm not making a case for right or left wing politics, I'm just making a case against the idea that if people vote in such a manner that they will not personally benefit, particularly in the short run, that they are necessarily idiots that have been tricked into voting against their best interests.
Voters don't need your respect. They don't have to justify their votes to you. Many people who you might think are 'voting against their best interest' have a different view of the trade offs than you and actually are voting in their best interests. Or they are voting in their long term best interests in spite of it being against their short term best interests. Or they are voting their principles regardless of the impact on their bottom line.
Most voters are uninformed about most issues. It's effectively impossible to be informed about every issue. There are simply too many issues. Calling out GOP voters on ACA specifically just shows your partisanship.
> and that is not a misrepresentation of the ACA and its opponents' stated positions
If I was feeling generous, which I am not, I would say this is accurate but incredibly imprecise. In the context of this thread, it's simply flame bait.
>it's still possible to _objectively_ say that many people vote for ideological or sentimental reasons that appeal to them (which is part of democracy!) with - or without - having done (for example) a spreadsheet comparisons of how each candidate's manifesto politics would affect their cost of living, quality of living, economic expectations, and so on.
I disagree. I'd wager most voters do perform such an analysis, albeit in their heads.
People generally vote for Republicans because they want lower taxes. People generally vote for Democrats because they want better-funded government services. Most voting is really that simple -- people want their lives to cost less, and they vote for the party they think is more likely to deliver that. The ideological trappings are largely post-hoc justifications for why this self-interest is virtuous.
>Why would we expect Slack or other tech companies to be helping random people with housing or social support?
Yet they expect congratulations. Slack's selfish commercial interest is entirely aligned with hiring cheap developers, but, they put out a press release and the atlantic magazine took it up.
I worked with a another charity that did a similar thing (not prisoners, but the underprivileged) and one of the companies we got some of them jobs at did the same thing.
The company got some cheap developers, avoided commission on a recruitment agency and then proceeded to issue a press release patting themselves on the back.
In this particular case, I think it's worth it even it is self serving. The advent of cheap online background checks has added to the already difficult task of getting a job if you're a felon. Any publicity around hiring them helps normalize it as expected.
They're playing the PR game and winning. I find it hard to blame them for that. Especially since they're not lying or doing anything explicitly harmful.
I dont blame government, as it is not and should not be the governments role to do this.
>Those things sound like they’re precisely the kind of stuff that’s the domain of non-profits and the government.
Non-Profits yes, government no
Government sole and only job should be to preserve and protect the rights of citizens. Expanding government beyond this role has always lead to disaster and human suffering
> you don’t want the institutions with profit motive to be the ones handling charitable works
While true in some sense, HN's continual hostility to profit is absurd. Profit motive is what leads innovation, what makes things cheaper, and what allows charity to feed 100 people with a $100-200 donation...
Profit Motive is what has brought the massive reduction in poverty world wide...
It was not government, it was Free markets that did this
I don't find the hostility to profit absurd. Profit motive also filled the world with crap we don't need. It also accelerated climate change. Through our fossil fuel companies' profit motive. I actually find HN lacking in hostility towards profit, but it seems it's because we selectively choose what to pick up on and remember.
Throughout the vast majority of human history the role of government has not been just to preserve and protect rights, but also to promote the public good. This is true both of national government and more informal governments such as those in churches and clubs. I think that humanity is a species that operates and survives as a society; therefore, I think its likely that there is a place for society promoting the common good.
I agree with you that completely abandoning profit motive would be a very bad idea. However, any process can become harmful if it is allowed to run without limits or safeguards. During the time that poverty has been reduced worldwide we have had both profit motive and the government operating; therefore, I don't think it is reasonable to conclude that profit motive would bring prosperity without also having government to constrain it.
Churches and Clubs are generally voluntary organizations on chooses to join, and can leave. Thus can not be classified as a government
I have no choice but to interact with the government and should I choose not to said government will put me in a cage and/or use violence against me to compel my activity,
I am sure you next comment will be "well you vote so you consented..." which is equally absurd of a notion for voluntary interactivity
>>>Throughout the vast majority of human history the role of government has not been just to preserve and protect rights
I am aware of this history, and almost universally it has lead to suffering, tyranny, and oppression
>>>However, any process can become harmful if it is allowed to run without limits or safeguards.
It is often governments and the legal system to provide the avenue of these abuses. Limiting liability, and shielding corporations via layers of liability shields, caps and other regulations
>>> During the time that poverty has been reduced worldwide we have had both profit motive and the government operating;
yes, and poverty would be ALOT lower if government was not "helping"
I agree that if someone wants to live outside of society then they should be allowed to do so.
However, for those who are part of society, I feel that the purpose of society is to provide for the needs of its members.
I think that your analysis of history may be too simplistic. Certainly governments have caused suffering, tyranny, and oppression, but so has profit motive. By the same token, both profit motive and government has done a lot of good for people.
My overall objection is that you seem to be taking a very black and white approach. I agree that we shouldn't adopt a communist approach that rejects profit motive or an extreme collectivist approach that rejects individual rights. However, that doesn't mean that there is no role for society to provide for people's needs.
> I mean, yeah? Those things sound like they’re precisely the kind of stuff that’s the domain of non-profits and the government. Why would we expect Slack or other tech companies to be helping random people with housing or social support?
The economy is becoming more competitive in the upper 20%. This translates into heightened signaling around social issues for those in that bracket [1]. It's not a bad thing, and people do have their hearts in the right place, but the underlying status anxiety is real and it is an economic effect.
You're effectively describing trickle-down economics. "Help out rich people so they pay more taxes which will trickle down to poor people" That's not a real thing. The economy is trickle-up. Income inequality is widening. San francisco has the worst income inequality of any city in a developed country: top 1% earn 44x more than bottom 99%. The number of home owners has actually decreased in the last ten years. Cost of living have increased in line with what the top 1% are making. The recession hurt low income far more than the top and yet we subsidized the shit out of the top by giving tax breaks to tech and wallstreet. We basically created a drag race between a ferrari and a civic, gave the ferrari a head start, and then sat around waiting for the civic to catch up.
I don't think that is the OP's point at all. They aren't saying the tax rate should be low, they're saying that the social safety net should be handled by the government and charities rather than for-profit businesses.
I'm a social democrat. My point is that we shouldn't be dependent on the whims of private companies feeling charitable or not. If society needs money from them, then that's what taxes are for.
> blaming Slack and co. is silly. It’s not their job, and it shouldn’t be: you don’t want the institutions with profit motive to be the ones handling charitable works.
I’d agree with what you said because the reason you gave seems strong & compelling to me; the idea that profit motive might corrupt charity if in charge.
On the other hand, I dislike the idea that only government should “handle” social responsibility. (I think what we’re talking about is responsibility, not charity.) And in fact, today there are laws requiring social responsibility of the private sector, so in a very real sense it actually is their job.
The kind of thinking that separates the people & companies making money from helping our social outcasts, or just giving back to society in general, is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to having more social outcasts and growing income inequality. When rich people argue they should have no responsibility to pay taxes into social programs, what we end up with is more people who need social programs. Why shouldn’t it be everyone’s job to handle social improvement, including all the companies profiting from the environment that makes their profits possible?
> it’s the government that sets the tax rate and decides where revenue goes, not the private sector.
While that might be technically accurate, it seems misleading to frame it this way. The private sector has such massive influence on tax policy, it doesn’t even make sense to suggest the government does it and the private sector doesn’t. Lots of laws are effectively written by and for private companies, enough so that we have a serious problem with it and a name for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
CSR is fine and good when you're talking about behaving in an ethical manner in the course of their business. But there isn't really any reason to want Slack and co in charge of solving housing or health care. It's not their responsibility, it's not their expertise. Expecting every single company to be randomly contributing to a dozen different societal problems outside the scope of their business is a recipe for scatterbrained failure.
Like, what even would Slack be expected to do here for housing or health care? Slack can't change zoning regulations. They can't force hospitals to provide price transparency. Why expect them to do something, rather than just take their money and have the government do something with it, when the government has vastly more authority to act?
Maybe I don’t know what your argument is responding to specifically. I’m not suggesting that Slack should be by itself “in charge” of solving all social problems, and I don’t think the article suggested that either. I’m suggesting that their participation should be non-zero.
Is this really a black and white issue, do or don’t? I don’t feel that way at all.
Do you think private companies can “contribute” to the solutions alongside the government and the public, by being open to hiring non traditional workers, by having support programs that help people keep their jobs? Can companies encourage and support the government’s support programs, by enrolling the government’s help and joining together to pay for them, by writing corporate policy to foster non-traditional workers, by making work allowances for people who need more help?
> when the government has vastly more authority to act
I don’t agree with this framing. Large and small companies get local zoning laws changed all the time. If Slack was lobbying for zoning regulations near it’s business, it’s entirely likely they can, in fact, get them changed. Companies can, and do routinely, suggest regulation changes, participate in policy making, and the government listens and routinely acts on those requests, and involves private companies in the legislation process. When companies band together to get zoning changed, it happens even faster.
The government does not really have that much more “authority” than the rest of us when it comes to the basics of taking care of each other. This isn’t really an authority issue, it’s an issue of whether we care and take action, it’s an issue of what our goals are as a society, it’s an issue of whether we view it as our collective responsibility, or someone else’s responsibility. If we all think it’s someone else’s responsibility, and we do nothing and think of the government as the only solution, then we not only end up with a crappy solution, we are ceding our own authority as well.
> I’m suggesting that their participation should be non-zero.
If you look at this in a vacuum, I can see how that'd be attractive. But consider that this will obviously cost them -- and whatever other companies do the same -- money. Now, would you rather all those companies independently pursuing different ways of helping on a particular issue piecemeal, or that the government extract the money that would've been spent pursuing a more cohesive and coherent effort?
> Do you think private companies can “contribute” to the solutions alongside the government and the public, by being open to hiring non traditional workers, by having support programs that help people keep their jobs?
That's not the part I was responding to. When Slack accepts felons or Google uses renewable energy for data centers, that's being a good corporate citizen in the act of conducting their regular business. I think that's fine and good.
But what I quoted, was someone suggesting that Slack assist with things completely outside the scope of their business, like housing. Slack has nothing to do with housing, so the principle underlying that comment must be, "Slack should help these people (and maybe the community at large) in general, even in ways that have nothing to do with their business".
> Large and small companies get local zoning laws changed all the time.
Just look at the bay area as an example. Basically every company would LOVE to massively upzone everywhere for both office space and housing (because this benefits them), these companies are rich as hell, and yet they're woefully impotent at getting these things changed. The broader culture, especially for the politically connected, is against them, and they can do very little about that. Trying to swing their weight around would just result in a huge backlash, as many are already skeptical of how powerful they are.
> If Slack was lobbying for zoning regulations near it’s business, it’s entirely likely they can, in fact, get them changed.
I'm sorry, but this betrays ignorance of bay area politics. Even Google struggles to get changes, and they're ridiculously massive. Slack might be able to get changes if they were moving to a less popular city for tech that's more desperate for jobs, but if they stay in SF, they have very little influence. SF is lousy with high paying tech jobs, most people there don't really fear any particular company moving away, and thus the companies have little leverage relative to how rich they are.
It's in companies' interests to have a healthy economy with employed workers, with families bringing up the next generation, etc. But that's a very long term perspective relative to the stock market, which would much rather see lower taxes and higher work force participation for the next few quarters.
People voting for public policies are only a little bit better; old people vote for their benefits, middle age people vote against taxes, and young people vote for redistribution when they're aware enough to turn up.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Those blow up into generic ideological flamewars, which are always the same and always less interesting than the specific discussion that they destroy by burning as kindling.
With your comment, you provoked a flamewar that degenerated straight to bon mots like "Government is to govern.", "I’ve seen this on HN several times, and it always cracks me up. The condescension isn't dripping. It’s running in torrents." and "American Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only true way and that Islam is a false path". It swelled to over a hundred comments, completely dominating the page. Worse, it was sitting at the top when I saw it, crowding out all the discussion that curious readers and commenters are here for. That's not cool; that's the way a community like this destroys itself.
Tire fires like this are why the site guidelines explicitly ask: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
With respect, it was directly related to a quote in the article. It wasn't my intent to provoke a flame war; I was addressing what I felt was faulty reasoning used by someone in the article.
I understand where you're coming from, but I'm honestly not sure how much of the article -- or articles in general -- I could bring up without it potentially counting as an 'ideological tangent', as that seems like an awfully broad and ambiguous label. Just about everything is ideological to somebody.
I also don't see what about my comment exactly counts as flamebait. I wasn't overly abrasive, I didn't say anything particularly outrageous or extreme. It was a political sort of point, yes, but "how do we, as a society, help former criminals integrate back into society" is kind of inherently political, I think.
I totally accept that it wasn't your intent. But effects matter more than intent in cases like this, and these effects were predictable.
Your comment wasn't first-order flamebait, but it was a classic generic ideological tangent. Those two things are related, since generic ideological tangents mostly lead to flamewars. That's why they're included in that guideline.
In this case you picked a particularly weak point from the article, on a generic ideological issue, that was entirely tangential to the main topic (which is where all the specific information that could support non-generic discussion was), and posted a comment dismissing it, leading with a swipe ("I mean, yeah?"). That pretty much guarantees what we ended up with.
There's another guideline that's relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There are two ways in which your comment arguably broke that rule. First, picking a weak and tangential point from the article to criticize is more marginal nitpicking than solid discussion. The "strongest plausible" rule applies at the article level as well.
But also: if I read the entire quote that you were objecting to, it's clear that that person's main point was that the private sector can't solve all the problems that come up for reintegrating former prisoners. In other words, the quote's point is exactly the same as yours. If you had adopted the strongest plausible interpretation, the "blaming Slack and co" provocation would have dropped out and there would have been nothing to complain about.
I hope it doesn't feel like I'm picking on you personally. These issues are common, which is why I post about them at length. The hope is to get the community to understand the patterns, so we can have more curious conversation and less bilious repetition.
> the main moderation point here is that the effects were predictable.
Well, maybe it was from your perspective, as someone who obviously reads HN comments all the time. I was expecting maybe a handful of comments at most, and I sure as hell wasn't expecting people to suddenly start arguing about Brexit.
> The issue with your comment wasn't exactly that it was flamebait, but because it was a classic generic ideological tangent.
I take issue with this. It's true that what I was doing was going up a level of abstraction. But, like, that's an extremely common rhetorical thing to do, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Often there's a good point to be made there; obviously in this case I thought it was true of what I wrote, maybe you disagree, but I've seen your own comments do the same thing all the time to help explain a point, like about contrarianism.
It sounds like "generic ideological tangent" is just "going up a level of abstraction" in the case where it's more likely to start a flame war. But that's not always easily predictable, and even when it is, it essentially means you're shutting down points, not because the points themselves are bad, but because other commenters can't be trusted to restrain themselves from much more awful replies to that comment.
> you picked a particularly weak point from the article
Oh c'mon. Of course people are going to pick on the weak points, because within our minds the weak points are the bad points that we disagree with and want to say so. That people leap to speak when they think a point is dumb or wrong, more than when they think a point is good or okay, is entirely expected and normal and fine. When people hear something that sounds wrong to them, they feel a compulsion to speak out, to correct it, from their perspective. That's not a bad thing.
> that was entirely tangential to the main topic
Well, it didn't feel tangential to me. To me, the article is about how to help felons re-integrate into society, the quoted person was talking about how we need to support felons in other ways as well (which I agree with), and then, to borrow your language, took a swipe at the private sector for apparently not doing their part in those areas, blaming them essentially, which I felt was unfair and unrealistic. I really don't think "should the private sector do more here in other areas to support felons?" is tangential to the topic. To me it felt like one point among many.
> that person's main point was that the private sector can't solve all the problems
I disagree, I don't think that was her point at all. "the private sector has largely turned away from [these areas]" does not read like she's saying they can't, but that they don't, they won't, they've refused to.
edit: I'll try to be more careful in the future, but honestly, even earnestly trying, I'm not exactly sure what would make sense to change about my posting mindset. Try not to comment on points if they're too minor? Don't go up a level of abstraction to make points about more generic principles? These don't sound like good things to me.
edit2: I kind of see what you mean about the swipe. I can try to avoid that in the future, though I feel like it may be difficult without switching to a very dry/stiff posting style. "I mean, yeah?" is not a very abrasive or aggressive sort of comment. It's the written equivalent of a shrug. I'm aware that HN has high standards for civility, but I honestly did not expect such a sentence to breach that.
Programming generally provides people with a lot of power. Either in access to data or obviously code. In that, there is a lot of trust requested and given. I know lots of enterprises add a lot of "scans" and "checks" and limit things to much complaints to remove the "we trust you" from the equation, but still you can't scan for everything.
The open question is how much trust do you want to give?
Of course, 2nd, 3rd, 4th chances are awesome and all - but in reality; as a company with lots to lose.
1. reputationally
2. financially
I feel like if any one person can seriously subvert something, you've already lost. Maybe that's just my perspective from working at international enormous tech corp X, but we've already basically got that problem in the form of employees hailing from repressive states (yeah, Australia, that's you now too) where everything needs cross-signing anyway.
All in all, I'd probably be more concerned about foreign nationals open to various forms of coercion than I would felons - in the general case, anyway. Of course, there are certain environments where more assurance is needed and not employing from either category is reasonable, and the type of criminal background also matters. For instance, someone from a bad neighborhood who got swept up in gang activity like the guy in the article is probably a lot less likely to try to fuck you over than a serious convicted blackhat/fraudster.
It's also possible to, as in the article, explicitly limit their roles to those that don't touch customer data or sensitive product code, where it'd be significantly more sufficient to parlay access into a quick payout. One ironic thing is that's frequently the exact opposite of how it works in practice: think of all the crooked telco CS reps who've been doing SIM swaps recently. Those roles aren't exactly exclusive positions, and I'd argue they're a good example of why paying people crap combined with poor vetting and lots of access is a bad idea.
I definitely agree with you in spirit, but I feel like in most organizations, there's still lots of easy potential for one person to seriously subvert things.
I think a baseline level of trust is an absolute requirement, regardless of how well implemented your organizational access security is.
I would say that any company source code, by definition, is a company secret, and there will always exist an easy means for an employee to leak or compromise that secret.
Interesting point about foreign nationals! Indeed, this seems like a major point often overlooked, despite the recent growing evidence of state-sponsored and state-directed hacking
Intelligence organizations and other institutions handling very sensitive data likely have way better information discipline than almost any org, but even there singular individuals leak and cause outsized embarrassment.
>I feel like if any one person can seriously subvert something, you've already lost.
This is technically correct, but most companies (at least in the US) take the easy way out, just like they do for hiring. No college degree means no job offer.
A well functioning IT organization will not be vulnerable to a single malicious person, but having been in the industry for almost 30 years at this point, the number of corporations functioning to that level in IT is small.
The fact that most organizations are more concerned about lowering costs and increasing profits instead of quality means that managers take the easy way out... it's cheaper to just not hire anyone they deem a risk and not worry about improving IT's functioning because they don't see any downside to that in the time frame that concerns them.
But this is precisely why Tech is the perfect place for people like this: we already don't trust anyone!
Consider Netflix's ChaosMonkey (or whatever their new simian name they have now). It messes with your IT infrastructure automatically to ensure that your software/system can handle these regular problems. Developers have to consider that hey, these things are going to happen all the time (rather than relying on luck that it doesn't happen) and they build super resilient systems. You ever even heard of a Netflix outage?
Now ask yourself this: How would you build your security infrastructure/system given the knowledge that literal convicted criminals would have access to some parts of the system? You'd become very inventive, creative, and build the world's best system. AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) security? You'd find some new A's to add just to be sure.
If your system can't handle convicted criminals access it, how will it handle the ones who didn't get caught but now work for you?
In what way is Slack not elite? Slack is within the top 10% of companies in the Bay Area by pretty much any metric you choose to rank companies by. By almost any measure, that's elite.
Is Berkeley not an elite school, because it's less prestigious than Stanford?
Whatever dude, I'm not going to argue with you here. The beginning of this article starts out by explaining what a stand up is. It's not written for tech workers it's a general piece. And just working at any large technology company puts you in a very small fraction of the population and the truth is a lot of people vy for these positions. If you work at Slack coming out of undergraduate, you'll be a top 1% earner for your age bracket. That is pretty "elite" by a normal person's standard.
My original point still stands. Realize you're living in a bubble if you think a normal person would not consider working at any "average" tech company like Atlassian, or Dropbox, elite. Let me guess, you work at a company that's
"""elite"""?
Ah no. It's an article about a software engineer in a software company which they call elite. It's shared on a site with tech people and commented on by tech people.
Elite has a meaning. It's not just a 'nice place to work'.
If you aren't able or willing to articulate your rebuttal to my comment then you shouldn't have hit reply on the original comment and then proceed to dodge/re-frame the world so you can be right.
> My original point still stands
No, it really doesn't, at all.
> Let me guess, you work at a company that's """elite"""?
No.
edit: also, could you please stop pulling made up stats out of your behind? " top 10% of companies in the Bay Area". "top 1% earner for your age bracket".
percentages & stats are real things - not flippant things which have no meaning.
I tend to avoid valleythink, but Slack's brand value is definitely elite, it pays extremely well and is widely used, even if it is just a glorified Bay Area chat app.
Please don't take HN on nitpicky tangents, especially bilious ones. Every article contains some minor provocation. We all need to learn to handle those, not start threads about them.
A company in the UK that also has an ex-offender (edit: apparently prisoners still serving their sentences are given an opportunity to learn the trade) hiring/apprenticeship program is Timpson, a locksmiths
How would, "What happens after prisoners become accountants / lawyers / bankers..." sound? To me, it says that trust in our profession is interchangeable with that of trained felons.
I'd rather not have technically proficient felons near passwords, credit card #s, and other personal information.
Edit:
I hate to sound like a Calvinist here, but you have to ask yourself how much a change in behavior is due to "rehabilitation", and how much of it is purely situational.
From what I've seen, they're model employees, until the setback--be it divorce, drugs, financial hardship, stress, etc. Then there is the backslide.
And you don't have to take my word for it. Recidivism rates are very very high.
The specific felony matters a lot to me. Someone busted with a gram of marijuana or a bong in Arizona can pick up a felony conviction for it. Someone with a previous embezzlement charge is a different story (even if the embezzlement conviction was only a misdemeanor).
This Aguirre guy in the article was at least an accessory to a shooting--even though they charged him with much more than that... not the kind of person I want near confidential information.
I did different/lesser dumb stuff when I was 17. If my friends were into "street life" instead of cars, computer games, and D&D, I can see a scenario where I'd be along for the ride in one of their/our exploits.
Peer pressure and "going along without thinking through the consequences" in a group of your friends at that age is a real thing and I don't think is strongly predictive of adult trustworthiness. (I generally tend towards the "law and order" side of things.)
The article says the felon coders who were hired are in the test engineering department, due to restrictions clients have when it comes to data access by people with criminal records.
That sounds nice and dramatic, but I don't see how a terrible choice someone made 10 years ago says anything about how trustworthy they are with regard to financial or personal information. It seems you're leaving out the assumption: once a criminal, always a criminal.
This possibly speaks more about how our current incarceration methods are failing society, than it does about any particular person who’s been incarcerated.
The prisoners hired ostensibly showed commitment to good behavior, rehabilitation, and self-education, over a period of many years, in an environment extremely non-conducive to such aspirations. That amounts to more than “zero”.
Why do you assume they're not earning trust? The article says: All three apprentices were placed on the test-automation team, which writes tests to ensure the quality of other engineers’ code, precisely because it’s insulated from customer data. The people doing the hiring are aware of the issue, as anyone in their position would be. It is obvious.
Would you mind re-reading the site guidelines and noting this one?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
This implies that a felon has a criminal mindset and is just looking to commit more crime.
I personally feel the world is safer with felons having access to code and PII (or working in financial roles) and a good salary than it is when they are released and are back in the cycle of desperation -> crime -> incarceration -> release.
Yes, recidivism rates are very high indeed. And I am proof of it, having done time in two countries (US and Mexico) and two states (Arizona and California) for a total of 19 years of my life. But just as I am a statistical number of those that return to prison, I am a statistical number for those that get out and stay out. I have been working as a software developer for the last 20 years and make a comfortable living from the career I chose. But my story would have been very different if I had never been given a chance to work and prove my worth. Thankfully, someone was willing to take a chance by hiring me. I’ve been free for the last 22 years, married for the last 20, father of a beautiful daughter, and grandfather to an adorable girl.
Most crime is situational. You would be a criminal too in the right situation.
Your thought process is a huge contributor of recidivism. When someone cannot escape their situation, they continue doing what they need to to survive.
The "but our jobs! but our pay!" refrain is a common one, but our industry has WAY too many job openings for this to be a legit worry (the very presence of the h1b visa proves this). As for salary, as those jobs get filled, whether by bootcamp grads, or journeymen, or trained individuals with a criminal record - it will push income down for some. Some incomes are a product of scarcity, and you only need to look at a supply/demand curve to know what will happen to prices. In the late 90s, you'd spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a basic website. Now you can get one for a few hundred.
I'm an ex-con developer. To be fair, my dev roots go back to childhood. I make around a quarter million a year in a mid-range cost of living city in the mid-west US.
> * Drew McGahey, the engineering manager at Slack for all three apprentices, was initially struck by their ability to solve what he called “blank-canvas problems”—those that don’t have prescribed solutions. “Thinking back to their experience, it makes a lot of sense,” he said. “They all learned how to code in an environment where they didn’t have access to the internet. They’ve got drive.”*
Anyone familiar with contemporary interviews have insight/examples on what “blank-canvas” problems are?
For backend, a classic one is how do you design a basic twitter clone that can handle a tweet by a popular person going to their millions of followers.
I love how inmates get a better education and more support from tech companies than the adults who live in the bay area. The bay area has the worst income inequality of anywhere in any developed country. Bootcamps are a scam and cost tens of thousands of dollars and yet inmates, people convicted of severe crimes, are treated to free education. From a business standpoint this makes more sense because inmates have no bargaining power and can flood the coding labor pool, thus lowering wages for businesses. How is a boot camp graduate supposed to compete with modern-day slaves?
By the way the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a eugenics group. What are they doing here? This program is so fishy.
I'm a bit unclear on your perspective here. Are you saying teaching inmates is wrong because they've apparently lost their chance at success in life because of their "severe crimes"?
Regardless of that perspective, here's a truth: most inmates will be released at some point. As a matter of fact, alot of the inequality you reference is a result of those with criminal backgrounds and the socioeconomic conditions that got them those backgrounds. We have a rich set of statistics about what happens to people in that situation: desperation -> crime -> prison -> repeat. Personally I don't like that world. I want to feel safe in my world, and anything we can do to short-circuit that recidivism cycle makes us all safer.
The "but our jobs! but our pay!" refrain is a common one, but our industry has WAY too many job openings for this to be a legit worry (the very presence of the h1b visa proves this). As for salary, as those jobs get filled, whether by bootcamp grads, or journeymen, or trained individuals with a criminal record - it will push income down for some. Some incomes are a product of scarcity, and you only need to look at a supply/demand curve to know what will happen to prices. In the late 90s, you'd spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a basic website. Now you can get one for a few hundred.
The point of prisons is to remove them from society until they can be sociable again. But I see your point, we should be putting more spending towards those who have never been convicted than we are now.
> The entire point of prison is to remove them from society.
That is the immediate effect, for sure. But that isn't the issue.
Unless someone is convicted for life without parole, or a death penalty, then they likely will be released into the general population at some point.
Do you want them to have skills that might allow them to support themselves, or do you think a near term investment in education might be cheaper for society and more humane than releasing them with a situation where they have fewer opportunities to make a living?
But we're not even concerned with regular people having skills. Why are we concerned with convicts having skills? I don't understand your argument. Prison isn't a rehab center. It's a colony for removing people from society.
Like it or not, most inmates will be released. Patterns of recidivism are well established. If they reoffend, we will spend more resources on those prisoners. (To say nothing of the costs on society when they do reoffend) It seem reasonable to not want to spend money on someone who has already messed up, but the practical reality is there's a real cost to not making those investments.
Put a different way, this is about those who haven't committed crimes: those affected by future crime, and those who haven't yet committed crime but statistically are likely to (think children of the chronically incarcerated)
I'm unclear whether you're OK with spending other people's money but not your own. The fund supporting this initiative accepts donations. Have you donated? Have you volunteered? No, you haven't and you won't.
Why do you say that? I have supported educational efforts in prison, but not this specific one. I have personally hired at least 3 people who have been in prison.
Hi. I was a cofounder at Hack Reactor, an SF-based coding bootcamp that also provided the first set of curriculum and instructors for The Last Mile. I personally taught many bootcamp students in SF as well as inmates in San Quentin. Everything you're saying about bootcamps and the motives of people running programs like The Last Mile is total malarkey FYI.
I have been teaching a Python course at my local jail M-F for over a year now, and something we have struggled with is finding potential internships or general employment for our students when they are released. We typically recommend our students to enter the local community college system, but we also have some students that are utterly brilliant and could succeed without a formal education.
Does anyone have any insight for how we should approach companies on their behalf? Is it more beneficial to teach web development (it seems like this is an easier way to break into the industry)?
I am also interested in hearing any opinions on how we should approach teaching in the setting where there is no internet access and the typical mathematics level is algebra.
I've never been incarcerated, but the open source path worked for me. But on the other hand, my family is well off enough that I could afford a year writing code for free. I'd imagine that most people getting out of prison need to earn a living right away.
Ok, so a company which facilitates open source contributions by prisoners, possibly giving them greater leverage in their parole hearings as well as post-incarceration career prospects? Does that sound like something worth doing to anyone here?
> [...] how we should approach teaching in the setting where there is no internet access
Here is a link to a learning platform that is specially designed for the offline setting: https://learningequality.org/kolibri/
It can work both as a general purpose library (for self-directed learning) or as a LMS in a setting where there is someone who can "coach" the learners by monitoring their progress, organizing them into groups, and assigning specific lessons. In order for the content to work offline, it needs to be "packaged" as a Kolibri Channel (local copy of the content), then you can import it from a USB drive.
I spent 19 years of my life incarcerated. My life of crime started when my family moved to East Los Angeles and I decided to become a gang member at the age of 15. My last stint in prison was fourteen years straight; having been sentenced to 21 years but was granted parole on my first parole hearing. During my prison time, I enrolled in educational activities and got my GED, an Associate of Arts degree with honors, and later a degree in Computer Information Systems. Needless to say, that it took me time to adjust to a completely different type of life on the outside than the one I had been accustomed to. More than once I had the experience of being rejected, and of job offers being withdrawn, because of my criminal history. For the last 20 years, I have been working as a software developer and make a good living thanks to the career I chose while in prison. I hope more companies have the courage to take a chance on others such as myself that have paid their debt to society and are trying to live a normal life. Kudos to Slack and all the companies that believe in giving people a second chance.
Thanks for sharing your story. It really makes me angry to hear about the countless obstacles the formerly incarcerated face when it comes to reintegrating into society. As you put it, the debt to society has been paid. Someone who makes a mistake when they're young and stupid -- I know I made my share -- shouldn't be prevented from ever being able to have a good, normal life.
It is unfortunate that, although sentenced with finite punishments, ex-cons continue to be punished (i.e. judged, discriminated against) well after their sentence is over.
That said, I can also understand why companies avoid ex-cons. Companies make decisions based on statistics. A company will, ceterus paribus, always choose the candidate who has no criminal history because that candidate is less likely to commit a crime and hurt the company.
Allow companies to pay felons less for the same job, at least for some finite period of time, to compensate for that risk. Otherwise, as you say, it makes sense for them to hire people without a criminal record, other things being equal.
The truth of the matter is that us felons do work for less – at least I did – mostly because we have no choice. We are also less likely to be promoted. Three times I had job offers withdrawn because of my criminal past. Having much more to lose than someone without a criminal record I never considered doing anything illegal, or anything that would cast a shadow of doubt to my integrity. “Once a criminal always a criminal” is just not true. Unfortunately, too many people subscribe to the false cliché.
Most of the software companies I've worked for don't care about the relative salary cost because the all in cost and opportunity cost of a bad hire is way higher than the salary. For example, given the choice between a proven senior dev making 200k or a risky untrained dev making 70k they'd still just hire the senior dev. It's more about headcount with the big companies. They don't care about saving 40-60k in practice, from what I've seen.
"As you put it, the debt to society has been paid."
It's not so simple. A murderer or rapist may have served his term in prison but still not have made restitution to the victim or his or her family. However, it's good for felons to find work after incarceration so that they can support themselves and ideally make amends to victims.
Good point. I also find it to be an odd turn of phrase considering we spent those decades paying 70k a year or whatever to take care of them in prison. I'm going to have to start saying that my debt to society has been paid whenever I've just cost the taxpayers a great deal of money.
To that end, when we shift the problem from 1 reformed ex-con applying to 1 company to a distribution of reformed and non-reformed ex-cons applying to many companies, and consider in general how inefficient hiring practices tend to be in this field, what are some things that could be done to give these companies confidence that the person they hired won't steal from the company?
Perhaps some kind of standardized post-incarceration psychological/behavioral evaluation and certification system?
I understand that some organizations have pretty strict requirements, some government mandated, regarding a criminal background. But most do not. And it gets on my nerves that the tech industry, one who has many heroes that were themselves close to or outright criminals, has been so slow getting on this train. I think that’s sort of a symptom of the broification of the industry and I’m not proud of it.
243 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI mean, yeah? Those things sound like they’re precisely the kind of stuff that’s the domain of non-profits and the government. Why would we expect Slack or other tech companies to be helping random people with housing or social support?
The private sector does help here, indirectly, with taxes that go to support such programs. And it’s the government that sets the tax rate and decides where revenue goes, not the private sector.
You can blame the government, or the people who voted them in, but blaming Slack and co. is silly. It’s not their job, and it shouldn’t be: you don’t want the institutions with profit motive to be the ones handling charitable works. That’s part of the whole reason we have a government.
The US government does not currently have a democratic mandate to operate as the social welfare state. Consequently hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people are immorally (by my own standards) disadvantaged and with no means or realistic opportunity to better themselves.
So if a private company (or shareholders-forbid: a publicly traded company)’s leadership feels a moral obligation to help those left behind by the state - more power to them.
Until the US truly embraces the “for the people” part of the “by the people, of the people, for the people” part of their unofficial motto it really is up to private entities to make-up the difference.
[1] UPDATE: To clarify - I don't mean that I somehow know what's in someone else's best interests - because I don't - nor their exact reasons for voting for a particular party or candidate - but I mean that it's still possible to _objectively_ say that many people vote for ideological or sentimental reasons that appeal to them (which is part of democracy!) with - or without - having done (for example) a spreadsheet comparisons of how each candidate's manifesto politics would affect their cost of living, quality of living, economic expectations, and so on. I can respect someone voting against their interests for ideological or moral reasons - provided it's done with informed consent. I'm not convinced that most- or even a plurality - of GOP voters in recent US elections sat down and made a spreadsheet and said "yup - I'm okay with rising the cost of my individual health insurance provided it means I have the choice to refuse healthcare coverage" (and that is not a misrepresentation of the ACA and its opponents' stated positions).
So by all means - vote against your own interests - provided you do it with informed consent - otherwise you _really_ are voting against your own interests.
I’ve seen this on HN several times, and it always cracks me up. The condescension isn't dripping. It’s running in torrents.
You think the reason they won’t vote the way you want is because they don’t know what’s good for themselves. You might want to consider an alternate: they don’t want someone like you deciding what’s good for them and forcing it down their throats.
Because they want change.
Condescension has nothing to do with it. It's empirically observable that a proportion of the electorate doesn't vote in its own best interests.
It's also empirically observable there's an entire industry of media outlets, think-tanks, journalists, bloggers, TV presenters, radio commenters, online commenters, and other influencers which is paid huge sums every year to make sure this doesn't change.
And unfortunately a major problem with proportional representation is there's no one single best way to achieve PR - any campaign to achieve PR would be stymied by splitting the pro-PR faction between STV and IRV, for example.
Labour's official position is to negotiate a deal and then hold a final referendum. [1]
So there were three positions in the election (leave, remain, vote again) and leave won the largest share of the popular vote.
1:https://labour.org.uk/page/labour-brexit-plan/
The majority of the country doesn’t want the Tories to negotiate the withdrawal. But that’s what is going to happen.
PR would probably lead to even more parties with each having fewer votes and none ever having a majority.
My observation of the BBC's coverage was that while they at least didn't put a positive spin on the Tories, it felt like they were doubling-down on anti-Labour and anti-LibDem negativity. I still don't believe the BBC is in any way biased towards any particular political party, but I feel there's a feedback-loop somewhere in the media system. Once the meme "Corbyn is unelectable" becomes a meme and people don't stop to question it - or it becomes self-referential ("Corbyn is unelectable because the people believe he's unelectable") then we have a problem.
(Disclaimer: I would not actually vote for Corbyn myself - just saying).
How do you explain away people who didn't vote for Corbyn because... they would prefer a non-anti-semitic leader? I have a hunch. You might say, "Well these people were duped. He isn't IN FACT an anti-semite." But, now the goal posts have changed and the discussion moves to whether certain claims are true, not whatever is in someone's best interest.
The thought that people you disagree with are simply fools because they don't know what is in their best self-interest, is not only arrogant, it's patently just not how the world works. Like always, it all comes down to whether your position or their position actually maps to reality. And if you think that you can't be wrong, or that it isn't likely that you get at least some things wrong, then your position is already hosed (not to mention lacks epistemological humility).
I'm not sure that's true (that it's empirically observable without bias). The trouble comes from an assumption that by giving up X (that you value only a little) to achieve Y (that you value a lot), that those other people would be better off, when they simply value X a lot more than you do (or Y a lot less). When they consistently vote to prioritize X over Y, you empirically observe some outcomes, apply your own weights to each factor, and conclude they're acting against their own best interests and cite your evidence as empirical proof, ignoring the judgment you applied when determining the weights.
I don't think people exhibiting this bias (unconscious or conscious) are intending to be condescending, but it comes across that way quite often.
Some people prefer to live in a society where the government has minimal power/influence over citizens' daily life (X) while other people prefer to live in a society where government power and influence is strong and consistently exercised to protect the most vulnerable (Y). They're different choices.
If I say that consumers are being tricked by ad companies, am I being condescending? How dare I make judgments on so many people?
And when American Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only true way and that Islam is a false path, and that all other ways are false pathways which lead to eternal hell, and is among the greatest of wrongs, is that condescending? Or mere spiritual reality? Other people aren't experiencing moral anxieties in judging you; instead they feel they have moral clarity. This is the majority stance of the land.
If I say, "I support" and you say, "I support not X, and if you weren't so blind you'd think that too," that's being condescending because you are assuming that someone (a) has fundamentally the same values than you but is (b) too stupid to see it.
The reality is that people can value something different than you (less government intervention, less restrictions on speech, lower taxes) for fundamental reasons different than yours, not because they basically agree with you and are too stupid to understand. This is different than merely arguing truth claims, because fundamentally political choice is a choice. There is no One True Way(TM) to govern and people prefer different things.
Why do you assume we don't value those things? Isn't that _you_ being condescending now?
An assumption isn't necessarily condescending. I assumed I was talking to someone on the left side of politics and was giving examples for the sake of an argument. If those examples do not in fact work then I can just as well pick other ones.
> Why do you use the word "we"? I wasn't directing my comment to you.
Indeed this is a communication mystery.
> Why do you assume we don't value those things? Isn't that _you_ being condescending now?
If you assume people do share the values, or if you assume they do not, you are still assuming to know their values. Better to just ask the person and start the conversation from there rather than shut down debate with something along the lines of "You'd agree with me if you weren't misled by X".
You're right, but in the election run-up people living on minimum wage, who complained we needed a change because of the rich getting too rich, also were convinced that Labour's tax increases were a devastating blow to them personally; tax increases that a family of two well-paid professionals would be unlikely to even be affected by.
The reason they hate those taxes is not because they're bad for them, they would undoubtedly be benefited. Nor is it because they actually have a financial basis for a belief in lower taxes for the extraordinarily well off. It's a matter of advertising -- the private press splash an advert "Marxist Money Madness" or whatever and tell the people they're going to be hit by massive tax increases costing taxpayers 1000s.
Of course it's a carefully tailored half-truth. It does cost taxpayers _who_are_affected_ thousands but people on gross wages below £80k aren't. The message the minimum wage, or benefits only, households get is "if Labour get in we will have to pay thousands more tax" (which to them is a lot, despite the tax rises not actually applying to them). They also don't appear to realise taxes pay for running the country; things they benefit from (health, education, roads, trade relations, ...) or if they do that reducing taxes won't just make these things cheaper but mean they have to pay individually (and pay a profit to capitalists as part of that deal). If they do realise these things there's no rational reason for then to support them; really there isn't, not for the vast majority of the populous.
Many people can't do basic percentages, they genuinely just trust the headlines.
The BBC have failed in refusing to call out lies because that would be "targeted" at one particular party (apparently 80% of their Facebook posts were factually flawed) because they are the ones telling the lies.
And why? Well look at the headlines post-election many Tories made many hundreds of £millions. Everyone else is working on inputs to value creation and they're playing the system and walking away with all the value.
In short, yes, there are genuine differences in political opinion. But there is also a massive deficit of understanding too.
Specifically, if you promised that every year you'd take 5% of the money of everyone richer than me, that I'd get a healthy slice of it, the rest would be spent on programs I approve of, and that there is no possible future in which that new tax would apply to me, I'd still vote against it. I don't think it's because I'm too stupid or ill-informed to understand that it would be "good for me".
Rather than starting from "we should exercise our power to tax the rich as a reaction to their success and to promote fairness", I start from "What services must the government provide the people?" then "How much will it cost to provide those services?" then once that is determined, figure out how to raise the needed revenue.
Tax revenue should not be raised to punish or correct for market distortions, but rather because it's needed to pay for an essential government service.
I believe, with very few exceptions, that the creation of wealth, even the concentration of great wealth in a few hands, represents evidence of a market success not a market failure. Those wealth creators mostly got there by providing something that many other people wanted and wanted so much that they parted with their own hard-earned money in exchange for the goods and services the wealth creators had on offer.
Similarly, when considering the role of government (such as when weighing a new program), I think it's better for society overall if the decision is made on a basis of "this newly proposed program is so beneficial/essential that everyone would be willing to pay some part of the cost of it" rather than "I'm willing to support this program that benefits me because I know that only other people are going to be paying for it."
So, yes, I'd be opposed to a tax presented with strong supporting evidence that that tax was motivated by raising incremental revenue under the justification/cover of "improving fairness".
(As an aside, it is entirely fair to question your future tax rates under a politician promising to deliver massive social programs, even if they don't claim they'll raise taxes for the non-rich. Money has to come from somewhere and there's no guarantee that taxing "the rich" is going to be enough.
Also, saying "They also don't appear to realise taxes pay for running the country" is a strikingly dim-view to have of people.)
As another person said, the real interests are not always monetary. Someone may be willing to pay more in healthcare if the government is less involved in their life, even if they are poorer than most people. This is just one example.
While I cannot, at all, claim to know what's in someone's interests, let alone their best interests - it is possible to reasonably determine when someone is voting _against_ their interests - especially when there is evidence of emotional manipulation or misrepresentation of the facts. (Though I assume we won't enter into a "debate" over specific facts here on HN).
The best example are the rural, conservative, voters in states that didn't expand Medicaid, who voted for representatives who campaigned against the ACA - and who who various reasons (unemployment, hard luck, etc) are now left without any feasible options for healthcare coverage: it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests, even the most staunch Libertarian can agree with that statement (though the Libertarian might argue it was still their free choice to make and that should be respected - which I can agree with because at least they're being honest about it).
Actually, it's not. You're reducing the whole spectrum of things that they may care about to the single axis of healthcare costs, and not performing any analysis of the opposition position.
It may be that the representative these people voted for aligns significantly better to their values than any other choice that was available.
People aren't paying for £millions of political advertising because it doesn't work, Boris wasn't stupidly echoing a 3-word slogan because he's an idiot with nothing else to say. It's wide-scale mental manipulation, the sort Coke does with brand advertising all the time. The people running Boris aren't messing around, he doesn't tousle his hair before every public event because he's an actual moron: but so so many people think he does. It's calculated and computed to the n-th degree.
Boris's team did some incredibly inciteful things, learnt through the success of Trump's campaign in part. One of their genius moves was not having him appear in debates - everyone knew he couldn't really handle himself and would lose voters, even he can't lie so bare-facedly. But having him not appear gave the BBC/Media excuse to always talk about him but never say anything of substance. He did have to get in a fridge to avoid having the negative stories make billing that day, but the TV folks were happy to naively play along, ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is it condescending if it's true, though?
And the right views poor people who vote for Democrats as lazy grifters just looking for a handout, naive fools in the pocket of globalist elites, or else not "real Americans" like themselves.
It isn't only the left or Democrats which have a problem in this regard. The right/Republican end of the spectrum is fueled by its naked contempt for everyone outside their camp.
It's nice that we have a choice.
Unfortunately, my state went for Kang.
- Persuasion: I think that you are mistaken as to what is in your best interest, here's why my approach would benefit you more.
- Negotiation: Here's how we can work together to find a solution that meets both of our interests.
- Zero Sum: I recognize that this isn't in your best interest but I don't care because its in my interest.
Due to the power of Fox News and the Republican party's current willingness to ignore facts, I don't think persuasion is possible.
Similarly, the strategy that Fox News and the Republican party have taken of promoting polarization, demonizing the other side, using straw-man arguments, etc.[1] Makes it impossible to have the kind of nuanced debate and compromise that would be necessary for a negotiated solution.
Therefore, it seems like all that is left is a zero sum solution. If the other side won't listen or negotiate then the only option remaining is to implement our policies whether they like them or not.
I'm not saying that's an ideal situation, but it seems to me that its the reality that we find ourselves in.
[1] To be fair, I think that progressives do this to a worrying extent as well. However, I single out the Republican party due to the degree to which they have focused on this strategy and because the fact that many Republicans get all of their news from Fox makes the strategy almost unassailable.
Maybe because those arguments are not perfect. After all they are messy, based on the complex reality filtered through the ugliness of statistics and bounded rational arguments.
... and The Ugly Orange's tweets and one-liners are gospel, but anything that starts with data is condescending.
The other issue is that many of the issues that progressives are concerned about (e.g. climate change, inequality, gun control) require action by society as a whole. Ideally we would negotiate and find policies that address the priorities of both progressives and conservatives. However, that doesn't currently seem to be possible.
Please read the federalist papers.
I do not want the equivalent of a yellow vests movement happening here.
Gerrymandering is a huge issue, and it makes it so that moderates don’t have to exist because of safe districts.
The fundamental disagreement about priorities between the parties somehow turned into disagreement about facts in the past decade.
I believe that something like proportionate representation is a better solution. It would still allow minority populations (e.g. rural areas) to band together and get representatives elected that reflect their priorities. However, since the system is no longer winner takes all it promotes finding solutions via negotiation.
Interestingly, right-wing parties understand this quite well. If they loose an election you never hear that they have to convince moderates. Instead they get even more radical.
Demonizing the other size is impressively the other way. It's happening whenever you see people flinging words like racist, sexist, fascist, and nazi.
Moreover, there is a difference in calling spade a spade, and hate speech.
In terms of demonization, I think its fair to use words like racist, sexist, and fascist when they are accurate descriptions. Before the Trump administration I was opposed to using those terms because I didn't feel that it was clear that they were accurate. However, I do think they are accurate now.
In my opinion, Nazi is only a reasonable term when the person is actually advocating for Nazism which, other than actual Neo-Nazis, is very rare. The only example I can think of where it might be valid was when Trump said that there were good people on both sides of a Neo-Nazi rally.
Trump actually condemned the neo-Nazis and white nationalists. See his "fine people on both sides" comment with more context:
https://i.imgur.com/xKKdnkP.jpg
Clearly you need to find a different news source. I suggest OANN if you'd like a cable news network (also available via an app) with very factual reporting.
What I mean is that any attempt to change policy/society/laws/government innately involves deciding that something would be good for society as a whole and then attempting to get laws put in place that force it to happen.
Therefore, your post doesn't seem to be actionable since it basically boils down to "don't do anything".
Also I think maybe I didn't explain what I was trying to say clearly. My point is that all political positions, not just socialism, amount to trying to force the laws to reflect how you feel society should operate.
In my view, evidence that people vote against their own interests is the massive industry that exists for the purpose of making that happen.
The respectful middle ground, if there is one, is that how people vote relative to their own interests is a worthy topic and debate, but that the debate might make a few people uncomfortable.
It's fucking amazing.
Who two? Every next comment was written by a different person.
Partisan arguments tend to go poorly on nice civil web forums, and I'd expect to attract the attention of the moderators if I were to start one.
The founders who wrote the First Amendment clearly disagreed with that.
The “freedom from religion” reading of the first amendment is, besides being atextual, utterly non-sensical. It reads the Framers to have banned, sub silentio, practices with respect to public religion that were utterly routine at the time the amendment was adopted.
Also, who is "everyone"? Whose culture is "cultural"? Which religion is the "religious framework"? The problem with the 1950s white patriachal evangelical Christian version of America is the huge bunch of people it didn't work for, who got counted out of "everyone".
As to whose culture and whose religion: it’s not clear to me the specifics matter so much as the existence of strong, broadly-shared social norms. My Bangladeshi immigrant family doesn’t share a culture or religion with Pat Buchanan, but there was frankly not a lot of daylight between their views on how people should live in society.
And you’re right in one respect: a society that emphasizes social norms will leave some people out. The social norms can be evolved, of course. Bangladesh, for example, is making progress in evolving the social norms surrounding participation of women in the economy. (In terms of labor force participation rate, Bangladesh today is where the USA was in 1950. On the other hand, we’ve had not one but two women as heads of state.) But a society that emphasizes individual self determination will be more inclusive and more responsive to social change. But these are trade offs in the structure of a society and people can reasonably disagree about what serves the best interests of the vast majority of the people.
It definitely is nice when it is the case, but I don't think it's necessary for America's future to be successful. Certainly, for the first 150 years of its existence, the United States had very widely varying cultures and ways of life throughout. The Puritans in the north lived differently than the Scotch-Irish, who lived differently than Germans in the midwest, who lived differently than the pioneers in the west.
The difference between now and then though was that back then all those people were free to live as they felt like, and if they didn't like it, they could pick up and leave to form new communities, like for example the Mormons did when faced with hostility of people from their origins. Now, however, the mass media and powerful federal government is dictating the one and proper set of moral and social norms, and the correct way to live. People aren't free anymore to do what they want if the feds don't like it, even if their state doesn't have an issue with. Even the states expanded their reach into determining how people should live. This wouldn't have been a problem if, like you suggest, the enforced way of life was broadly shared, but it clearly isn't.
Because people love it when their representative brings home the pork but they hate it when the other guy does it.
It's not possible for people in one district to elect a representative who could individually eliminate all wasteful government programs, but it is possible for them to send in somebody who will at least bring them back a proportionate share of the loot from the heist. Is that not rational behavior absent some coordination mechanism to get all the other districts to stop electing kleptocrats at the same time?
Maybe better would be to vote for someone willing to do that while also pushing for structural change to remove those incentives, but that's assuming there is any candidate running with that position.
It's hard to believe that every position of a candidate you vote for is in your interests because that's basically never the case.
Suppose I support the elimination of most federal programs and taxation (let the states do it) but I think that a federal carbon tax which is paid out as a dividend to the citizens is a great idea, because it's a national/global issue and pricing externalities is the legitimate purview of government. Who shall I vote for? I have never seen a single candidate proposing to do both of those things.
In a sense the only way for me not to vote against my interests is to stay home. At the same time, there are two candidates on the ballot that are very much not the same as one another. So it's not so much a matter of "voting against your own interests" as choosing which of your interests outweigh the others.
But assuming that anybody who makes a different choice than you is a fool is very condescending.
If you ask people if Labour was good for the economy and would be good for the economy, you’ll largely get a negative response.
Unfortunately it’s easy for people’s opinions to be shaped with zero basis in fact and when this happens it’s easy for them to vote against their own interest.
This has little to do with a condescending left and much more to do with how well the Conservstives play and are supported by the media.
The bits about nationalising everything were certainly very different so I don’t think this claim holds up to scrutiny.
I also find it interesting that you stop at 2007. What happened in 2008 that might call into doubt Labour’s management of the economy?
Labour would like their voters to forget it was them who bailed out the banks too.
The blowup of Lehman Brothers (US investment bank), ABN Ambro (Dutch bank recently acquired by RBS), Northern Rock (overextended British building society), Kaupthing (Iceland), and Anglo-Irish (despite the name, entirely Irish)? Yes, I'm sure that's all the fault of the Labour government.
But they're happy with other people deciding what's good for them; people who've decided that what's good for them is to be poorer and sicker?
If they could be tricked into becoming richer and healthier, without realising they're doing it by voting for commie socialism or whatever scare label is in vogue, is that wrong? Is there some morality there, like life is an art project.
Seriously; is that wrong? Is it more wrong to tell people what will make them richer and healthier, or to let them be poorer and sicker?
I do NOT think people understand what their parties are telling them because both sides lie dramatically.
Democrats do not present realistic plans with costs on their social programs, and Republican media and politicians typically say the exact opposite of what the real plan is. I used to love their smaller government push until they touted cutting public services to save 40 million as a huge victory for the budget while giving Lockheed et. al. A billion dollar contracts... So smaller government, sure, but NOT balancing a budget as it was claiming to try for.
So if you subscribe to partizan political sources, both parties only feed you information that support their party line, and the facts are elsewhere, if they are even available. Presidents keep breaking all promises they make on the trail.
That motivation can be especially strong when the party that you thought represented your economic interests turned out not to do that as much as you'd have liked.
There's a reason our highest form of punishment is to isolate. It's not our functional unit of existing. To truly isolate us from others is to punish us perhaps worse than death. So what makes people think the individual should be our highest functional unit of decision-making after millions of years evolving otherwise?
This is something I wonder if western thought deserves to lose its crown over, if it can't course correct.
Disclosure: civic technologist, community organizer, biochemist
And if some people want to split off and do something different, diversity is a good thing too.
I've studied in democratic reform, and work in civic tech space. There's a book called _Democracy for Realists_ which I highly recommend. It's a wonderful book, but it eviscerates most of what we understand colloquially about democracy. (Or at least did for me)
You are walking around a piece of democracy that is entrenched in "folk democratic theory" -- things people talk about as being the basis of effective democracy. But in democratic theory, folk democracy appears to have much evidence against it, and very few serious academics advocate for it as an explanatory theory. It's telling is part of the glue perhaps, because systems must appear simple and understandable to its participants, or else it can be destabilized too easily :) the works for electoral systems too -- people need to feel like they understand it in order to trust it's outcomes, nevermind if first-past-the-post is truly best.
The individual is very flawed, and democracy might work despite it's individual nature, not because of it. Political parties and identity groups outside the original structure of democracy perhaps stabilize a system that puts decision-making power into a very ineffective unit. (The individual)
Anyhow, it's been awhile since I worked deeply on this stuff (and not as an academic myself), and I might be misspeaking some parts that an academic could correct me on, but I'm sure the general thrust of the above is true :)
> Democratic mandates are set by influencers.
This is a cop out: the electorate is still responsible for the politicians it puts in power. Don't let people off the hook for supporting terrible policies.
I disagree. After reading about famous propagandists from the past century I'm just depressed that it's so easy to manipulate enough of the public to vote a particular way.
Yes, it's the people's fault - but the people are fallable and _predictable_ enough to be played like a puppet.
If someone is an idiot and is convinced into doing something criminal even when they know it's wrong, that still doesn't get the person who tricked them into doing it off-the-hook - in serious crimes that's called aiding-and-abetting.
I'm curious about the list of countries that are democratic in name only (and also wondering about the time frames involved), would you elaborate?
Direct democracy populism where people are maximizing personal return should not be considered the standard that we aspire to. I'm not making a case for right or left wing politics, I'm just making a case against the idea that if people vote in such a manner that they will not personally benefit, particularly in the short run, that they are necessarily idiots that have been tricked into voting against their best interests.
Most voters are uninformed about most issues. It's effectively impossible to be informed about every issue. There are simply too many issues. Calling out GOP voters on ACA specifically just shows your partisanship.
> and that is not a misrepresentation of the ACA and its opponents' stated positions
If I was feeling generous, which I am not, I would say this is accurate but incredibly imprecise. In the context of this thread, it's simply flame bait.
I disagree. I'd wager most voters do perform such an analysis, albeit in their heads.
People generally vote for Republicans because they want lower taxes. People generally vote for Democrats because they want better-funded government services. Most voting is really that simple -- people want their lives to cost less, and they vote for the party they think is more likely to deliver that. The ideological trappings are largely post-hoc justifications for why this self-interest is virtuous.
Yet they expect congratulations. Slack's selfish commercial interest is entirely aligned with hiring cheap developers, but, they put out a press release and the atlantic magazine took it up.
I worked with a another charity that did a similar thing (not prisoners, but the underprivileged) and one of the companies we got some of them jobs at did the same thing.
The company got some cheap developers, avoided commission on a recruitment agency and then proceeded to issue a press release patting themselves on the back.
I dont blame government, as it is not and should not be the governments role to do this.
>Those things sound like they’re precisely the kind of stuff that’s the domain of non-profits and the government.
Non-Profits yes, government no
Government sole and only job should be to preserve and protect the rights of citizens. Expanding government beyond this role has always lead to disaster and human suffering
> you don’t want the institutions with profit motive to be the ones handling charitable works
While true in some sense, HN's continual hostility to profit is absurd. Profit motive is what leads innovation, what makes things cheaper, and what allows charity to feed 100 people with a $100-200 donation...
Profit Motive is what has brought the massive reduction in poverty world wide...
It was not government, it was Free markets that did this
I agree with you that completely abandoning profit motive would be a very bad idea. However, any process can become harmful if it is allowed to run without limits or safeguards. During the time that poverty has been reduced worldwide we have had both profit motive and the government operating; therefore, I don't think it is reasonable to conclude that profit motive would bring prosperity without also having government to constrain it.
Churches and Clubs are generally voluntary organizations on chooses to join, and can leave. Thus can not be classified as a government
I have no choice but to interact with the government and should I choose not to said government will put me in a cage and/or use violence against me to compel my activity,
I am sure you next comment will be "well you vote so you consented..." which is equally absurd of a notion for voluntary interactivity
>>>Throughout the vast majority of human history the role of government has not been just to preserve and protect rights
I am aware of this history, and almost universally it has lead to suffering, tyranny, and oppression
>>>However, any process can become harmful if it is allowed to run without limits or safeguards.
It is often governments and the legal system to provide the avenue of these abuses. Limiting liability, and shielding corporations via layers of liability shields, caps and other regulations
>>> During the time that poverty has been reduced worldwide we have had both profit motive and the government operating;
yes, and poverty would be ALOT lower if government was not "helping"
However, for those who are part of society, I feel that the purpose of society is to provide for the needs of its members.
I think that your analysis of history may be too simplistic. Certainly governments have caused suffering, tyranny, and oppression, but so has profit motive. By the same token, both profit motive and government has done a lot of good for people.
My overall objection is that you seem to be taking a very black and white approach. I agree that we shouldn't adopt a communist approach that rejects profit motive or an extreme collectivist approach that rejects individual rights. However, that doesn't mean that there is no role for society to provide for people's needs.
The economy is becoming more competitive in the upper 20%. This translates into heightened signaling around social issues for those in that bracket [1]. It's not a bad thing, and people do have their hearts in the right place, but the underlying status anxiety is real and it is an economic effect.
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
I’d agree with what you said because the reason you gave seems strong & compelling to me; the idea that profit motive might corrupt charity if in charge.
On the other hand, I dislike the idea that only government should “handle” social responsibility. (I think what we’re talking about is responsibility, not charity.) And in fact, today there are laws requiring social responsibility of the private sector, so in a very real sense it actually is their job.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibil...
The kind of thinking that separates the people & companies making money from helping our social outcasts, or just giving back to society in general, is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to having more social outcasts and growing income inequality. When rich people argue they should have no responsibility to pay taxes into social programs, what we end up with is more people who need social programs. Why shouldn’t it be everyone’s job to handle social improvement, including all the companies profiting from the environment that makes their profits possible?
> it’s the government that sets the tax rate and decides where revenue goes, not the private sector.
While that might be technically accurate, it seems misleading to frame it this way. The private sector has such massive influence on tax policy, it doesn’t even make sense to suggest the government does it and the private sector doesn’t. Lots of laws are effectively written by and for private companies, enough so that we have a serious problem with it and a name for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Like, what even would Slack be expected to do here for housing or health care? Slack can't change zoning regulations. They can't force hospitals to provide price transparency. Why expect them to do something, rather than just take their money and have the government do something with it, when the government has vastly more authority to act?
Is this really a black and white issue, do or don’t? I don’t feel that way at all.
Do you think private companies can “contribute” to the solutions alongside the government and the public, by being open to hiring non traditional workers, by having support programs that help people keep their jobs? Can companies encourage and support the government’s support programs, by enrolling the government’s help and joining together to pay for them, by writing corporate policy to foster non-traditional workers, by making work allowances for people who need more help?
> when the government has vastly more authority to act
I don’t agree with this framing. Large and small companies get local zoning laws changed all the time. If Slack was lobbying for zoning regulations near it’s business, it’s entirely likely they can, in fact, get them changed. Companies can, and do routinely, suggest regulation changes, participate in policy making, and the government listens and routinely acts on those requests, and involves private companies in the legislation process. When companies band together to get zoning changed, it happens even faster.
The government does not really have that much more “authority” than the rest of us when it comes to the basics of taking care of each other. This isn’t really an authority issue, it’s an issue of whether we care and take action, it’s an issue of what our goals are as a society, it’s an issue of whether we view it as our collective responsibility, or someone else’s responsibility. If we all think it’s someone else’s responsibility, and we do nothing and think of the government as the only solution, then we not only end up with a crappy solution, we are ceding our own authority as well.
If you look at this in a vacuum, I can see how that'd be attractive. But consider that this will obviously cost them -- and whatever other companies do the same -- money. Now, would you rather all those companies independently pursuing different ways of helping on a particular issue piecemeal, or that the government extract the money that would've been spent pursuing a more cohesive and coherent effort?
> Do you think private companies can “contribute” to the solutions alongside the government and the public, by being open to hiring non traditional workers, by having support programs that help people keep their jobs?
That's not the part I was responding to. When Slack accepts felons or Google uses renewable energy for data centers, that's being a good corporate citizen in the act of conducting their regular business. I think that's fine and good.
But what I quoted, was someone suggesting that Slack assist with things completely outside the scope of their business, like housing. Slack has nothing to do with housing, so the principle underlying that comment must be, "Slack should help these people (and maybe the community at large) in general, even in ways that have nothing to do with their business".
> Large and small companies get local zoning laws changed all the time.
Just look at the bay area as an example. Basically every company would LOVE to massively upzone everywhere for both office space and housing (because this benefits them), these companies are rich as hell, and yet they're woefully impotent at getting these things changed. The broader culture, especially for the politically connected, is against them, and they can do very little about that. Trying to swing their weight around would just result in a huge backlash, as many are already skeptical of how powerful they are.
> If Slack was lobbying for zoning regulations near it’s business, it’s entirely likely they can, in fact, get them changed.
I'm sorry, but this betrays ignorance of bay area politics. Even Google struggles to get changes, and they're ridiculously massive. Slack might be able to get changes if they were moving to a less popular city for tech that's more desperate for jobs, but if they stay in SF, they have very little influence. SF is lousy with high paying tech jobs, most people there don't really fear any particular company moving away, and thus the companies have little leverage relative to how rich they are.
Hah. That would be the idea yes, but we all know how much corporations like paying their tax.
It's in companies' interests to have a healthy economy with employed workers, with families bringing up the next generation, etc. But that's a very long term perspective relative to the stock market, which would much rather see lower taxes and higher work force participation for the next few quarters.
People voting for public policies are only a little bit better; old people vote for their benefits, middle age people vote against taxes, and young people vote for redistribution when they're aware enough to turn up.
With your comment, you provoked a flamewar that degenerated straight to bon mots like "Government is to govern.", "I’ve seen this on HN several times, and it always cracks me up. The condescension isn't dripping. It’s running in torrents." and "American Christians say that Jesus Christ is the only true way and that Islam is a false path". It swelled to over a hundred comments, completely dominating the page. Worse, it was sitting at the top when I saw it, crowding out all the discussion that curious readers and commenters are here for. That's not cool; that's the way a community like this destroys itself.
Tire fires like this are why the site guidelines explicitly ask: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I understand where you're coming from, but I'm honestly not sure how much of the article -- or articles in general -- I could bring up without it potentially counting as an 'ideological tangent', as that seems like an awfully broad and ambiguous label. Just about everything is ideological to somebody.
I also don't see what about my comment exactly counts as flamebait. I wasn't overly abrasive, I didn't say anything particularly outrageous or extreme. It was a political sort of point, yes, but "how do we, as a society, help former criminals integrate back into society" is kind of inherently political, I think.
Your comment wasn't first-order flamebait, but it was a classic generic ideological tangent. Those two things are related, since generic ideological tangents mostly lead to flamewars. That's why they're included in that guideline.
In this case you picked a particularly weak point from the article, on a generic ideological issue, that was entirely tangential to the main topic (which is where all the specific information that could support non-generic discussion was), and posted a comment dismissing it, leading with a swipe ("I mean, yeah?"). That pretty much guarantees what we ended up with.
There's another guideline that's relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There are two ways in which your comment arguably broke that rule. First, picking a weak and tangential point from the article to criticize is more marginal nitpicking than solid discussion. The "strongest plausible" rule applies at the article level as well.
But also: if I read the entire quote that you were objecting to, it's clear that that person's main point was that the private sector can't solve all the problems that come up for reintegrating former prisoners. In other words, the quote's point is exactly the same as yours. If you had adopted the strongest plausible interpretation, the "blaming Slack and co" provocation would have dropped out and there would have been nothing to complain about.
I hope it doesn't feel like I'm picking on you personally. These issues are common, which is why I post about them at length. The hope is to get the community to understand the patterns, so we can have more curious conversation and less bilious repetition.
Well, maybe it was from your perspective, as someone who obviously reads HN comments all the time. I was expecting maybe a handful of comments at most, and I sure as hell wasn't expecting people to suddenly start arguing about Brexit.
> The issue with your comment wasn't exactly that it was flamebait, but because it was a classic generic ideological tangent.
I take issue with this. It's true that what I was doing was going up a level of abstraction. But, like, that's an extremely common rhetorical thing to do, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Often there's a good point to be made there; obviously in this case I thought it was true of what I wrote, maybe you disagree, but I've seen your own comments do the same thing all the time to help explain a point, like about contrarianism.
It sounds like "generic ideological tangent" is just "going up a level of abstraction" in the case where it's more likely to start a flame war. But that's not always easily predictable, and even when it is, it essentially means you're shutting down points, not because the points themselves are bad, but because other commenters can't be trusted to restrain themselves from much more awful replies to that comment.
> you picked a particularly weak point from the article
Oh c'mon. Of course people are going to pick on the weak points, because within our minds the weak points are the bad points that we disagree with and want to say so. That people leap to speak when they think a point is dumb or wrong, more than when they think a point is good or okay, is entirely expected and normal and fine. When people hear something that sounds wrong to them, they feel a compulsion to speak out, to correct it, from their perspective. That's not a bad thing.
> that was entirely tangential to the main topic
Well, it didn't feel tangential to me. To me, the article is about how to help felons re-integrate into society, the quoted person was talking about how we need to support felons in other ways as well (which I agree with), and then, to borrow your language, took a swipe at the private sector for apparently not doing their part in those areas, blaming them essentially, which I felt was unfair and unrealistic. I really don't think "should the private sector do more here in other areas to support felons?" is tangential to the topic. To me it felt like one point among many.
> that person's main point was that the private sector can't solve all the problems
I disagree, I don't think that was her point at all. "the private sector has largely turned away from [these areas]" does not read like she's saying they can't, but that they don't, they won't, they've refused to.
edit: I'll try to be more careful in the future, but honestly, even earnestly trying, I'm not exactly sure what would make sense to change about my posting mindset. Try not to comment on points if they're too minor? Don't go up a level of abstraction to make points about more generic principles? These don't sound like good things to me.
edit2: I kind of see what you mean about the swipe. I can try to avoid that in the future, though I feel like it may be difficult without switching to a very dry/stiff posting style. "I mean, yeah?" is not a very abrasive or aggressive sort of comment. It's the written equivalent of a shrug. I'm aware that HN has high standards for civility, but I honestly did not expect such a sentence to breach that.
The open question is how much trust do you want to give? Of course, 2nd, 3rd, 4th chances are awesome and all - but in reality; as a company with lots to lose. 1. reputationally 2. financially
All in all, I'd probably be more concerned about foreign nationals open to various forms of coercion than I would felons - in the general case, anyway. Of course, there are certain environments where more assurance is needed and not employing from either category is reasonable, and the type of criminal background also matters. For instance, someone from a bad neighborhood who got swept up in gang activity like the guy in the article is probably a lot less likely to try to fuck you over than a serious convicted blackhat/fraudster.
It's also possible to, as in the article, explicitly limit their roles to those that don't touch customer data or sensitive product code, where it'd be significantly more sufficient to parlay access into a quick payout. One ironic thing is that's frequently the exact opposite of how it works in practice: think of all the crooked telco CS reps who've been doing SIM swaps recently. Those roles aren't exactly exclusive positions, and I'd argue they're a good example of why paying people crap combined with poor vetting and lots of access is a bad idea.
I think a baseline level of trust is an absolute requirement, regardless of how well implemented your organizational access security is.
I would say that any company source code, by definition, is a company secret, and there will always exist an easy means for an employee to leak or compromise that secret.
Trust is bigger than big.
This is technically correct, but most companies (at least in the US) take the easy way out, just like they do for hiring. No college degree means no job offer.
A well functioning IT organization will not be vulnerable to a single malicious person, but having been in the industry for almost 30 years at this point, the number of corporations functioning to that level in IT is small.
The fact that most organizations are more concerned about lowering costs and increasing profits instead of quality means that managers take the easy way out... it's cheaper to just not hire anyone they deem a risk and not worry about improving IT's functioning because they don't see any downside to that in the time frame that concerns them.
Consider Netflix's ChaosMonkey (or whatever their new simian name they have now). It messes with your IT infrastructure automatically to ensure that your software/system can handle these regular problems. Developers have to consider that hey, these things are going to happen all the time (rather than relying on luck that it doesn't happen) and they build super resilient systems. You ever even heard of a Netflix outage?
Now ask yourself this: How would you build your security infrastructure/system given the knowledge that literal convicted criminals would have access to some parts of the system? You'd become very inventive, creative, and build the world's best system. AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) security? You'd find some new A's to add just to be sure.
If your system can't handle convicted criminals access it, how will it handle the ones who didn't get caught but now work for you?
> Access to an elite organization
In what way is Slack elite?
These writers need to tone done their hyperbole.
Slack's a big name in the tech industry and there's certainly competition for jobs they have on offer.
As _elite_ as, say, Apple, Google or Facebook? Probably not - but they're not Accenture or Capita either.
Is Berkeley not an elite school, because it's less prestigious than Stanford?
What about profitability?
> Slack is within the top 10% of companies in the Bay Area by pretty much any metric you choose to rank companies by
What are you basing that on?
I'd say a bloated chat app in no way portrays elite. What has come out of Slack that screams elite?
There's more to elite than just 'oh look it shiny'
My original point still stands. Realize you're living in a bubble if you think a normal person would not consider working at any "average" tech company like Atlassian, or Dropbox, elite. Let me guess, you work at a company that's """elite"""?
Elite has a meaning. It's not just a 'nice place to work'.
If you aren't able or willing to articulate your rebuttal to my comment then you shouldn't have hit reply on the original comment and then proceed to dodge/re-frame the world so you can be right.
> My original point still stands
No, it really doesn't, at all.
> Let me guess, you work at a company that's """elite"""?
No.
edit: also, could you please stop pulling made up stats out of your behind? " top 10% of companies in the Bay Area". "top 1% earner for your age bracket".
percentages & stats are real things - not flippant things which have no meaning.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/06/the-support...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd rather not have technically proficient felons near passwords, credit card #s, and other personal information.
Edit:
I hate to sound like a Calvinist here, but you have to ask yourself how much a change in behavior is due to "rehabilitation", and how much of it is purely situational.
From what I've seen, they're model employees, until the setback--be it divorce, drugs, financial hardship, stress, etc. Then there is the backslide.
And you don't have to take my word for it. Recidivism rates are very very high.
This Aguirre guy in the article was at least an accessory to a shooting--even though they charged him with much more than that... not the kind of person I want near confidential information.
Peer pressure and "going along without thinking through the consequences" in a group of your friends at that age is a real thing and I don't think is strongly predictive of adult trustworthiness. (I generally tend towards the "law and order" side of things.)
And those with criminal records are allowed to practice law. Quite a few inspirational stories of this actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shon_Hopwood
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/business/are-felons-fit-t...
Isn't a felon's debt to society meant to be repaid after their sentence ends?
I'd much rather that people leave prison ready to be useful and/or productive members of society.
How many tech firms hire at zero--other than in situations like this limited-time virtue signaling / PR fodder opportunity?
Yet we hire kids straight out of college or a bootcamp and give them access to production data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#/media/File:Recidiv...
For white collar crime, which seems most relevant to the topic at hand, the recidivism rate is slightly less at about 48%.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=1451...
This possibly speaks more about how our current incarceration methods are failing society, than it does about any particular person who’s been incarcerated.
Would you mind re-reading the site guidelines and noting this one?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If my reading comprehension were on-point, I would have clearly understood that this is against site guidelines.
Please delete my account, posts, and comments so that they no longer taint this fine establishment.
I personally feel the world is safer with felons having access to code and PII (or working in financial roles) and a good salary than it is when they are released and are back in the cycle of desperation -> crime -> incarceration -> release.
Or Senators, congresscritters or Presidents? Seen the TV news lately?
Your thought process is a huge contributor of recidivism. When someone cannot escape their situation, they continue doing what they need to to survive.
Did you see how many organizations are behind the effort? It probably took millions of dollars to go from zero to hiring ex-con coders.
I'm an ex-con developer. To be fair, my dev roots go back to childhood. I make around a quarter million a year in a mid-range cost of living city in the mid-west US.
Anyone familiar with contemporary interviews have insight/examples on what “blank-canvas” problems are?
For backend, a classic one is how do you design a basic twitter clone that can handle a tweet by a popular person going to their millions of followers.
By the way the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a eugenics group. What are they doing here? This program is so fishy.
Regardless of that perspective, here's a truth: most inmates will be released at some point. As a matter of fact, alot of the inequality you reference is a result of those with criminal backgrounds and the socioeconomic conditions that got them those backgrounds. We have a rich set of statistics about what happens to people in that situation: desperation -> crime -> prison -> repeat. Personally I don't like that world. I want to feel safe in my world, and anything we can do to short-circuit that recidivism cycle makes us all safer.
The "but our jobs! but our pay!" refrain is a common one, but our industry has WAY too many job openings for this to be a legit worry (the very presence of the h1b visa proves this). As for salary, as those jobs get filled, whether by bootcamp grads, or journeymen, or trained individuals with a criminal record - it will push income down for some. Some incomes are a product of scarcity, and you only need to look at a supply/demand curve to know what will happen to prices. In the late 90s, you'd spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a basic website. Now you can get one for a few hundred.
That is the immediate effect, for sure. But that isn't the issue.
Unless someone is convicted for life without parole, or a death penalty, then they likely will be released into the general population at some point.
Do you want them to have skills that might allow them to support themselves, or do you think a near term investment in education might be cheaper for society and more humane than releasing them with a situation where they have fewer opportunities to make a living?
Put a different way, this is about those who haven't committed crimes: those affected by future crime, and those who haven't yet committed crime but statistically are likely to (think children of the chronically incarcerated)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you please avoid taking cheap potshots like this? They make it sound like you have an axe to grind, and undermine any point you're trying to make.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My 30 years in the industry gives me a gut hunch anyone can be a successful coder. I hope these folks prove it.
Does anyone have any insight for how we should approach companies on their behalf? Is it more beneficial to teach web development (it seems like this is an easier way to break into the industry)?
I am also interested in hearing any opinions on how we should approach teaching in the setting where there is no internet access and the typical mathematics level is algebra.
Here is a link to a learning platform that is specially designed for the offline setting: https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ It can work both as a general purpose library (for self-directed learning) or as a LMS in a setting where there is someone who can "coach" the learners by monitoring their progress, organizing them into groups, and assigning specific lessons. In order for the content to work offline, it needs to be "packaged" as a Kolibri Channel (local copy of the content), then you can import it from a USB drive.
Another project in the localhost space is Kiwix-Serve: https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix-serve/ Kiwix content comes in .zim files (~= zip with html+assets in it). You can download lots of .zim files available here: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages In particular, the stackoverflow.com zim file (140GB) might be useful to have offline when learning to code.
That said, I can also understand why companies avoid ex-cons. Companies make decisions based on statistics. A company will, ceterus paribus, always choose the candidate who has no criminal history because that candidate is less likely to commit a crime and hurt the company.
It's not so simple. A murderer or rapist may have served his term in prison but still not have made restitution to the victim or his or her family. However, it's good for felons to find work after incarceration so that they can support themselves and ideally make amends to victims.
Perhaps some kind of standardized post-incarceration psychological/behavioral evaluation and certification system?
edit: someone mentioned this: https://thelastmile.org/