> The final version of the bill received rare bipartisan support, passing the state assembly 147–2 and the senate 59–4. The bill was delivered to the governor Friday, according to the New York Senate's bill tracker, though she has been considering it since late June.
With such a majority surely they can override a veto? So the problem is more that it will need to happen in a new session from scratch (for some definition of scratch)?
My understanding is the reason it hasn't passed is that each entity has dragged its feet and then bounced it onto the other one for stalling (not just in NY). Passing bills in one chamber and having it sit there in the other - or in both chambers, but pocket vetoed - is a common tactic for these things. So it might look like it's close to passing but in reality who knows how far it is.
> With such a majority surely they can override a veto?
Not necessarily. You have to look at votes a bit more cynically. There are generally no surprise votes in the house and senate. A 51-49 vote that passes may actually have a lot more people who would vote "yes" if they had to, but some can vote against to pay lip service to their constituents. They can go back to their district and say, "I tried to stop this bill" when they knew it would pass. Votes are regularly trade on this bases. Sometimes a party is ok with a bill not going through and "just enough" will defect from the party to kill it. Note how many votes in the senate are decided by a single senator -- even in years when the senate is not so closely divided by party. They know the numbers before it comes to the floors.
With such overwhelming numbers, presumably it could pass a veto if they had the political will. Or they can just throw their hands up and say, "we tried, it's not our fault it didn't pass." Or some nuance in the bill will come out that makes in "unfeasible" to pass in the veto override. Then it goes back to committee never to be seen again, and definitely not in passable form.
In short, don't view the vote on a bill as strictly a popularity vote on the bill's merits. Every actor involved has their own agenda, and to some, voting on the bill is just a way to build a favor or pay back a debt.
Term limits don't matter when the politicians are in the pockets of billionaire donors. (Pick your preferred boogeyman Thiel or Soros). In fact, they can make things worse as now a Representative needs to ensure he or she has their lobbying job lined up for when they can longer run for re-election.
That just means a bunch of newbies dependent on deep-pocketed support for their first campaigns, and it'd be one of the few scenarios in which we punish job experience.
I don’t understand why people think term limits will work. Now you just have a revolving door of people that are in the pockets of special interest groups.
I’ve never seen a convincing argument for term limits and I don’t think they should exist. If you have a good representative they should be able to stay in that job for as long as the electorate wants. Your qualms are with other parts of the election process like first past the post and inability to recall reps when they’re no longer doing their job well.
There is no veto. Ars had a writer who is an advocate for an issue write a news story about said issue, and completely screw up the key facts of the story.
Instead of pulling the story, they made a “correction” that renders the whole thing moot. Ars should really be embarrassed by the shitshow.
This is yet another example of why direct referendums are a powerful mechanism for bypassing paid-off politicians who act on behalf of a few oligarchs to block popular policy changes.
It isn't, though, and in fact often such referendums can't be funded through taxes because of referendums like the other one in the comment you responded to. So what happens is other programs suffer.
"You voted for me to represent you! Now I will not do that!" would, in any reasonable system, be grounds for dismissal. And is, in many countries. Come on New York, you can change this.
This is a bit silly. Right-to-repair (and to be clear, I'm all for it) wasn't on the NY ballot. There wasn't a referendum, it wasn't anyone's key campaign issue, etc. Dismissing representatives for a vote on any one issue would pretty quickly leave us with zero.
(As the edit to the article indicates, the bill isn't subject to a pocket veto, either.)
It's not. The kind of behaviour being discussed is corruption. It wouldn't be dismissing representatives for a vote on any one issue; it would be dismissing representatives for corruption. But the electorate prefers to re-elect corrupt politicians as long as the corruption is in their favor, so the behaviour continues.
It's not inherently corrupt for a representative to vote in a way that's not a perfect representation of their constituents' opinion polling.
There's no allegation that the Governor has been bribed, the bill becomes law soon even if she doesn't sign it, and it's only been on her desk for two business days.
> It's not inherently corrupt for a representative to vote in a way that's not a perfect representation of their constituents' opinion polling.
That's not what we're discussing. Up-thread, I responded to:
"...paid-off politicians who act on behalf of a few oligarchs to block popular policy changes".
That behavior, if it is happening, is what I'm claiming is corruption, even that kind of behaviour is the norm nowadays, and voters don't vote this kind of corruption out, or even call it out as corruption.
> There's no allegation that the Governor has been bribed...
Correct. The allegation is as I quoted above. It is not my allegation; I'm merely discussing appropriate voting behaviour if it were true.
> ...it's only been on her desk for two business days.
Not according to the article:
"A spokesperson for the governor's office told VICE's Motherboard on October 31 that "Governor Hochul is reviewing the legislation." Asked about the bill's status today by Ars Technica, a spokesperson responded that "Governor Hochul is reviewing the legislation."
What is the general sense being expressed to them currently? It's there any effort made to see how the average person in their district feels about the issue? What about those who have an opinion?
That's what representation means. It isn't intended to end when ballots are counted.
People can contact their representatives. Each representative has a paid staff to accommodate the scale of that communication.
If you can show that the average consistuent in a district has a shared opinion, and that opinion is being overruled by their representative, then you have illustrated the failure of representation.
If you can show a pattern where the opinions of a minority group are being chosen over an opinionated majority, then you have illustrated the corruption of that representative.
> What is the general sense being expressed to them currently?
On right-to-repair, from their constituiencies? Likely nothing. I'm an avid consumer of news, including local, and there's been very little coverage of it.
> If you can show that the average consistuent in a district has a shared opinion, and that opinion is being overruled by their representative, then you have illustrated the failure of representation.
Nah. Politics is complicated and full of compromise; sometimes you give in on one battle to win another.
> If you can show a pattern where the opinions of a minority group are being chosen over an opinionated majority, then you have illustrated the corruption of that representative.
Or a pattern of upholding minority rights, a core component of our Constitution.
Oh I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood what an almost unanimous vote to pass by the New York legislature means? This person was not elected to ignore the state senate, no matter who you voted for. Their job is to ratify bills that passed the house, not to let them die for the lulz
> Their job is to ratify bills that passed the house, not to let them die for the lulz
Uh, no. That’s an absurd assertion. The Governor is another branch, that exists as a check and balance on the legislature. That’s why they have the veto power.
The gov was just as voted-in as the rest of them, too. The will of the voters in both branches.
Yes. However, this is after the fact when the damage is already done. Referendums allow people to directly change decisions that public disagrees with and force the representatives to obey the outcome. They are as democratic as it gets - direct will of the people.
Of course, propaganda is still a powerful enemy, but at least people have a chance to win against rich lobbies.
If we were serious about politicians actually representing the will of the residents in their district people it would be way more accurate if policy and votes were based on a public statistical analysis sanity checked only by "is what the people want actually doable."
But we're not. We don't vote for politicians to represent people faithfully, we vote for politicians to represent our interests in a much more abstract sense.
This is the governor, not a district member. They are elected, by the entire state, to represent the entire state in federal context. Whether you voted for them or not, they still represent you and one of their jobs is to sign bills passed by the house. If they don't do that, they should get fired.
People don't vote on representatives. People (en masse) vote along party lines or on name/ideology recognition.
It has been well noted that this reduces to advertising budget, which lays bare the farce that is democracy. If it weren't a direct mapping from
money to power, we wouldn't need campaign finance laws.
You can't change this because this is the way the system was designed to work. It is a system for legitimizing the authority of those with money and power using the branding of "the will of the people".
Funny how the people's will always lines up with the interests of the largest corporations, employers, and landowners, despite their being a tiny minority of "the people".
While it is accurate that most people vote on party basis, it is straightforwardly not the case that advertising budgets dictate campaign victories, especially in the larger, more visible races.
You can't blame people for voting on "party line" when there are only two parties to vote on. That's a problem we can't solve, so let's not shame folks for dealing with it.
But here's the fun part: it doesn't matter who voted for the governor: once voted, the represent everyone in the state of New York, irrespective of who they voted for. When the house votes, almost unanimously to pass a bill, the governor's job is to sign it, not to stare at the wall picking their nose while checking their bank account on their phone every few minutes.
> When the house votes, almost unanimously to pass a bill, the governor's job is to sign it
Which is why the pocket veto exists. If the governor doesn't sign it or veto it, it becomes law. 10 days is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, considering it took the legislature from Feb 2nd to Dec 16th to deliver it to the Governor - 317 days. If 10 days is that important, then we should be more concerned about the 317 days.
I don't like the NY governor (for a whole list of reasons), but not signing a bill and pocket vetoing it - if that's wants she wants to do - is not her "refusing to do her job". It's fully defined as something she can do by their constitution. If you don't like that, campaign for a NY State constitutional amendment to reduce the time period of a pocket veto.
You may want her to eagerly sign it - fine, vote against her in her primaries or the general election if it's that important to you. But her replacement will probably will also do something you don't like at some point. No one is ever 100% perfectly represented, especially by a governor or president.
This is an old topic in the political philosophy of representative democracies: is a representative supposed to just do whatever the most popular sentiment is? Or are they supposed to use their best judgement—given they, presumably, spend more time looking into and thinking about various issues, and have access to better experts and advisors than most members of the general public—even when that's sharply counter to public sentiment? Somewhere in between? Where does the line fall?
I expect the representatives to represent my interest and make a judgement. I don't expect them to do just exactly what I would have done. When a potential law is drafted and works through the process to become law, it goes through bargaining between legislators.
If the legislators shirk their duties, it is to the extent that they are avoiding unpopularity by redelegating back to me, and I always vote no on referenda unless there is a huge factor of conscience. Which happens apparently once a decade or so.
Obviously if people didn't support it then it would be repealed. That doesn't make it a good law. It is directly responsible for the housing affordability crisis in california. That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else. Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.
> That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else.
Homeowners are a big part of the state. "everyone else" must be a small minority. If you think it is a big enough part of the population, feel free to bring a prop to repeal prop 13. My bet is that any attempt to repeal it will lose in a landslide based on what happened in 2020[1] when they attempted a partial repeal.
> Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.
Notice that prop 15 lost by 4%... It is not good for the state as a whole, but it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home. So now 48% of the state and everyone that wants to move to california is fucked because 9 million people want their home value to keep increasing. They've effectively voted in a law that requires non homeowners to pay homeowners $500 a year and burn another $500 due to lost economic efficiency. Is that good for homeowners? I guess, but it's certainly bad for the state.
If 52% of people in alabama wanted to bring back slavery does that make it the right thing to do?
And it targeted only commercial and industrial properties, with proceeds going to education and local govt funding. That is, as sympathetic setup as it could be. It didn't touch any residential homes, neither primary nor secondary nor rentals. And it still lost.
> it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home
It seems you didn't read what prop 15 was about. If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.
Prop 15 failed because people were worried that if it passed prop 13 would be repealed next election. It had nothing to do with people wanting commercial properties to have tax breaks and everything to do with signaling how devoted the voters are to prop 13.
> If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.
Source?
No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13 it's still the wrong policy in the exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is. Laws that exist solely to siphon money from poor people to rich people are bad. Doubly so when they destroy economic value to the extent prop 13 does.
> No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13
Moving goalposts now? Upthread, you were talking about 51% shafting 49% and that was a pure hyperbole which I called out. Prop 13 support is much more massive (more like 63-27 per my citation above).
> exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is
Nope. Enslaving someone is forbidden under the US constitution and personal freedom is recognized as a basic right, backed by the full force of the state. Prop 13 merely affects prices in some small areas of a giant state and there is no constitutional right to "own a home in the most expensive area of the country".
Again, comparing that to slavery is another hyperbole meant to evoke emotions?
> comparing that to slavery is another hyperbole meant to evoke emotions?
I really don't think it is. Prop 13 turns non homeowners into wage slaves. It makes housing prohibitively expensive. It is a deeply unjust law. I'm not trying to make some case about the legality of forcing non homeowners to pay exorbitant amounts for housing, I'm saying it's morally and in many ways economically comparable to slavery, or at least serfdom.
I don't really think I ever moved the goalposts. My take was always that direct democracy leads to the majority shafting the minority and that's exactly what prop 13 does. It doesn't matter that the majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority, it's a bad law for the state because it destroys economic value and is obviously unjust.
> I really don't think it is. Prop 13 turns non homeowners into wage slaves...It makes housing prohibitively expensive.
Barring a few pockets, housing is cheap even in California. Now, if your claim is that everyone who wants to should be able to afford a home in SF or Palo Alto, then that is something else.
> majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority
How is majority taking money from minority in this case?
The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter. It was a vote of contempt not on the matter. If more referenda were held, the contempt for the lack of democracy would fade away as it's in Switzerland.
>The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter.
To be fair, the EU is partially responsible for that. Even if the UK had a form of direct democracy, EU rules would still dictate on many issues. Switzerland can only do what it does because it isn't part of the EU.
(Now, if the EU itself had a direct democracy (setting aside the practical issues with that) it would perhaps be different.)
I agree that the EU has contributed to outlawing democracy on several issues and has replaced it with bureaucracy. Like a silly thing where the city can't directly manage parking fees and needs to instantiate an independent profit-seeking business for that.
However, now after Brexit UK now opened itself to profit-seeking international relations which can be worse than EU-dictated bureaucracy.
You can't judge the outcome of elections by standards under which they were not held. Popular-vote-wins would result in very different campaign efforts, and different voting patterns.
It's like holding a baseball game and then, after the fact, declaring that the winner isn't the team with the most runs, but the one that got the most hits. Sure there's some correlation there, but both teams would have played differently if they'd known that's how they'd be judged, so you can't be sure who would have won if they'd known that's how they were supposed to be playing.
I think Brexit can also be seen as an argument for more direct democracy: if there had been a referendum in the UK on one or more of the major changes in the EU treaties in the previous 25 years, I think it's likely that Brexit wouldn't have happened, or else that it would have happened much earlier with less damage as a result.
Brexit wasn't based on actual harm caused by EU treaties. It was caused by bigotry, fear over economic issues being very deliberately misdirected due to propaganda, and a host of outright lies on the part of the Leave campaign.
I see you're getting downvoted, but as an American who followed the whole mess remotely, that sounds about right to me. The only thing I'd add was that I think it started as intra-party infighting and political dramatics that got wildly out of control.
Speaking as a Californian, where our ballot is always filled with propositions [1] [2], I can confidently say this is a bad idea. I think it works tolerably well for issues that are something an average citizen can understand with a little research, but otherwise just ends up as dueling propaganda campaigns.
For example, this year San Francisco voted to decide whether one of the major streets through Golden Gate Park should remain mostly car free after we tried that for the pandemic. That seems like a fine use. But there was a state prop titled "REQUIRES ON-SITE LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL AT KIDNEY DIALYSIS CLINICS AND ESTABLISHES OTHER STATE REQUIREMENTS. INITIATIVE STATUTE." This was some sort of high-dollar fight among vested interests fought via sketchy ballot proposition and it absolutely should not have been on the ballot.
(You also can quickly run into tyranny-of-the-majority issues. E.g., famously liberal and tolerant California in 2008 voted to strip an already-existing civil right from a minority. [3])
For complex issues, I think it's better to have the decision-making concentrated in the hands of highly supervised professionals with staffs who have the time to understand the issues enough so that they have a chance of understanding the impacts. Rather than more direct democracy, what I'd like to see is more transparency and accountability for those professionals.
I wish I could have this level of optimism. If US voters actually wanted all of these things, there is absolutely no way that the margins in congress would be as razor thin as they are, gerrymandering or not.
Literally the effect of gerrymandering is that a set of people who share both ideology and party get more voting power.
It's pretty clear that the average Republican in the US has been galvanized into partnership, so the members of that party will very likely vote cohesively with each other.
It's also pretty clear that the same is not happening in the Democratic party. Most Democratic voters I hear from disagree with one another ideologically, and do not feel effectively represented by their party. It is not likely that voters in the Democratic party will vote cohesively with one another.
The effect of that applied to gerrymandering is that districts over-representing republicans take advantage of the average Republican voter cohesion, while districts that over-represent the Democratic party do not.
Voter cohesion is the strongest vector for outcomes I can think of in our first-past-the-post representative voting system.
It's my contention that changing the structure of our voting system or factoring out gerrymandering would have a drastic effect on legislative outcomes.
That would be great, but it assumes that there wouldn't (continue to) be massive voter suppression by the right wing, guaranteeing that their pet issues win in most of the south and midwest.
America is an imperfect democracy, in other words — but it's hardly an oligarchy. When the rich and middle class disagree, each wins about half the time.
The people that wrote that article don't address claims of the original study. They cite academic work that divides the country into four groups: the middle class, the rich, business interests and non-business interests. (This is not a covering set, which is already a red flag.)
They show the rich and middle class agree on bill outcomes the vast majority of the time, with a 10% spread when they don't (e.g., 45% - 55%, from the article).
As an example, they point out the rich are more supportive of public campaign financing than the middle class. This is a second red flag: It is unlikely that people that use their money to influence legislative outcomes are more supportive of banning the practice than the general population.
The original study claimed that (1) lobbyists and oligarchs are basically writing legislation and deciding who gets elected, and (2) there is no correlation between popular opinion and actions of congress. You can't rebut that by claiming that the 90-99% usually agree with the 50-90%, and congress doesn't really seem to favor one of those groups' opinions over the other.
It is as though I said that, once confounding factors are accounted for, there's no correlation between listening to rock music and catching cancer, and the rebuttal comes back as "Well, Eagles fans and Jay-Z fans both get lots of cancer, but half the outlier cancers are more common amongst Hotel California fans, so electric guitars must be carcinogens!"
To rebut the original claim, the academic study would need to either reproduce the original study (showing statistical irreproducibility) or dive into causality. They could look into the actions / opinions of lobbyists and people like the Koch brothers, Soros and the ULine family. The could trace how many line items those groups are sneaking into bills, and whether the popularity of the line item matters at all to its success. (Hint: Most voters don't form an opinion on section 1.35.2.456.63356-b that was introduced at 2am the night before the 10,000 page military appropriations was passed by voice vote.)
Anyway, the damage control piece was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.
They address several things, like the low R-squared value (0.074) or the fact that interest groups win against both the rich and the middle class at roughly the same rate if you use their own data sets.
>They cite academic work that divides the country into four groups: the middle class, the rich, business interests and non-business interests. (This is not a covering set, which is already a red flag.)
These groups are literally from the Gilens study, not the rebuttal. If you view this as discrediting the rebuttals then you should view it as discrediting the original paper as well.
>they point out the rich are more supportive of public campaign financing than the middle class. This is a second red flag: It is unlikely that people that use their money to influence legislative outcomes are more supportive of banning the practice than the general population.
This policy preference comes from the surveys used by the original Gilens survey, so if you view this as discrediting the rebuttals then you should view it as discrediting the original paper as well.
>The original study claimed that (1) lobbyists and oligarchs are basically writing legislation and deciding who gets elected, and (2) there is no correlation between popular opinion and actions of congress. You can't rebut that by claiming that the 90-99% usually agree with the 50-90%, and congress doesn't really seem to favor one of those groups' opinions over the other.
The original paper explicitly claimed that
>ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots
So it makes plenty of sense to exclude those instances where the two groups agreed if you're trying to determine how influential their policy preferences actually are.
> (Update, 10:50 a.m., 12/20/2022: Given that the NY legislature is technically never out of session in modern times, inaction by the governor on the bill after 10 days would make a passed but not signed bill a law. The original post originally suggested an out-of-session process. Ars regrets the error regarding New York's otherwise completely straightforward legislative system.)
> The governor has 10 days to act on the bill after Friday's delivery, or until midnight on Dec. 28. Failing to act with either a signature or a veto will make the bill become law. The bill was originally introduced in 2021, so it cannot be easily re-introduced during the next session and would have to be re-drafted and submitted.
So she has until the 28th to veto it or it becomes law.
I'm more interested in the details... from the scant info in the OP, it sounds like not much. Meaning, drivers in linux (and other foss os's) such as video, ethernet, wi-fi, etc. aren't gonna see any change. Be happy to hear otherwise though.
Usually when publications make gross errors like this, they don't care or silently fix their articles. Ars noticed they were wrong and added a notice explaining how they were wrong. I've always considered Ars to be one of the better news sites out there but this increases my respect for them
The headline and subheadline should be updated, though. Plenty of folks won't even read the first paragraph, and they'll show up on all the social media share widgets when people share the link.
I've also seen NYT and CNN make updates to articles that materially change the original reporting without noting the change[1], or adding an blink-and-you'll-miss it note at the very end of the article. Ars consistently updates the title and has the explanation for the changes before the original article body, which is beyond other news organizations since it's impossible to miss.
1. See the NYT or CNN tabs at http://newsdiffs.org to see how often this happens
I've been an Ars fan for years, but they are an outlier, in how they handle this (which is a good reason to like them).
Most news outlets have their changelist buried at the end. I don't think that it necessarily means they are bad. There's plenty of other stuff they pull, that does that.
They added a correction, they didn't fix the article. It still reads "But lobbying by the nation's largest technology interests seems to have kept the bill parked on her desk for months, where it could remain until it dies on Dec. 28." in the lede, which is flatly incorrect per the correction[1].
Inaction by the governor will pass the law, not veto it. Ars only makes that clear (and barely so) in the correction blurb at the bottom.
[1] At least as phrased. I'm certainly no expert on New York State legislative process.
A personal favorite of my father was a NY Times correction of years' past. It went something along the lines of "Previously when reviewing $restaurant we discussed the half cooked chicken. The actual menu item is called the cooked half chicken. We regret the error."
> Given that the NY legislature is technically never out of session in modern times, inaction by the governor on the bill after 10 days would make a passed but not signed bill a law. The original post originally suggested an out-of-session process. Ars regrets the error regarding New York's otherwise completely straightforward legislative system
Waiting is the same as signing it seems? So whats the plan here? Veto at the last second over the holidays and hope nobody notices?
Messaging and managing perceptions is important for politicians (it's almost the entire job -- legislators should have aids that research and draft bills, and some of America's best presidents were known for delegating well, then practicing their golf swing for 4 years).
By not signing, if this bill ends up being a shit-show, then during her next campaign, she can say she didn't support it, but didn't want to block popular opinion.
If she does a last second veto, then her popularity will take a hit, but whoever forces the veto will continue to support her next election.
I have no idea which of the two paths will be taken, or what back room negotiations are at play. On the veto path, she might be tightening the proverbial thumb screws in exchange for campaign donations, or she might be executing according to the schedule of some high-paid corporate PR firm. It's even possible she thinks right-to-repair will be a shit-show for the state, and will veto it for that reason.
If she wants to continue to be governor, then it's crucial that we never know which of the above is true. See also: The dictator's handbook.
Preventing waste and unnecessary spending is a good thing. Repairing your own stuff, and keeping it as an heirloom to pass on to your children, was the norm. Making things literally as hard to fix as possible is only a very recent concept. And a universally harmful one, too.
But... consumption! growth! You have to throw away things and buy new ones (preferably twice as many things as you threw away), otherwise the economy will take a nosedive!
Growth that is based on artificial consumption isn't real growth and isn't real economic output. It might make your stock numbers go up but it is bad in the long run if we delude ourselves into thinking that cannibalizing our own wealth in the form of trash is growth.
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Obvious Rage bait troll.
Or a debt collector saying there is no recession because he is able to collect record levels in collections.
Or
If none of the above, self-repair is not populism, its prevention of e-waste and purposeful disposal of stuff that works and unnecessary production of stuff.
Nature doesn't care about your market trends, it will head towards collapse if we keep producing.
Or
If you dont care because you are too old and won't live to see the climate change, too bad, we dont care if u make money either.
side-note: while investigating the E * Waste world news a while ago, an important California announcement was made, co-sponsored by Goodwill (established charity). SF Mayor Gavin "perfect hairgel" Newsom spoke. As a nerd and quite well read on the topic, I expected vapid or hand-waving sorts of statements at the media event. not so ..
GNewsom spoke clearly and with detail, showed contextual understanding and also on important details. I was surprised. This E*Waste and consumer-rights topic is far from settled.
109 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadWith such a majority surely they can override a veto? So the problem is more that it will need to happen in a new session from scratch (for some definition of scratch)?
Not necessarily. You have to look at votes a bit more cynically. There are generally no surprise votes in the house and senate. A 51-49 vote that passes may actually have a lot more people who would vote "yes" if they had to, but some can vote against to pay lip service to their constituents. They can go back to their district and say, "I tried to stop this bill" when they knew it would pass. Votes are regularly trade on this bases. Sometimes a party is ok with a bill not going through and "just enough" will defect from the party to kill it. Note how many votes in the senate are decided by a single senator -- even in years when the senate is not so closely divided by party. They know the numbers before it comes to the floors.
With such overwhelming numbers, presumably it could pass a veto if they had the political will. Or they can just throw their hands up and say, "we tried, it's not our fault it didn't pass." Or some nuance in the bill will come out that makes in "unfeasible" to pass in the veto override. Then it goes back to committee never to be seen again, and definitely not in passable form.
In short, don't view the vote on a bill as strictly a popularity vote on the bill's merits. Every actor involved has their own agenda, and to some, voting on the bill is just a way to build a favor or pay back a debt.
Which is one of the many reasons why we need term limits for each and every politician.
For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny...
I’ve never seen a convincing argument for term limits and I don’t think they should exist. If you have a good representative they should be able to stay in that job for as long as the electorate wants. Your qualms are with other parts of the election process like first past the post and inability to recall reps when they’re no longer doing their job well.
Instead of pulling the story, they made a “correction” that renders the whole thing moot. Ars should really be embarrassed by the shitshow.
Referendum 1: the State shall not raise taxes in any way without a vote of the people.
Referendum 2: the State shall fully fund the education of children living in the State
(As the edit to the article indicates, the bill isn't subject to a pocket veto, either.)
It's not. The kind of behaviour being discussed is corruption. It wouldn't be dismissing representatives for a vote on any one issue; it would be dismissing representatives for corruption. But the electorate prefers to re-elect corrupt politicians as long as the corruption is in their favor, so the behaviour continues.
There's no allegation that the Governor has been bribed, the bill becomes law soon even if she doesn't sign it, and it's only been on her desk for two business days.
That's not what we're discussing. Up-thread, I responded to:
"...paid-off politicians who act on behalf of a few oligarchs to block popular policy changes".
That behavior, if it is happening, is what I'm claiming is corruption, even that kind of behaviour is the norm nowadays, and voters don't vote this kind of corruption out, or even call it out as corruption.
> There's no allegation that the Governor has been bribed...
Correct. The allegation is as I quoted above. It is not my allegation; I'm merely discussing appropriate voting behaviour if it were true.
Not according to the article:
"A spokesperson for the governor's office told VICE's Motherboard on October 31 that "Governor Hochul is reviewing the legislation." Asked about the bill's status today by Ars Technica, a spokesperson responded that "Governor Hochul is reviewing the legislation."
> The bill was delivered to the governor Friday, according to the New York Senate's bill tracker, though she has been considering it since late June.
That's what representation means. It isn't intended to end when ballots are counted.
People can contact their representatives. Each representative has a paid staff to accommodate the scale of that communication.
If you can show that the average consistuent in a district has a shared opinion, and that opinion is being overruled by their representative, then you have illustrated the failure of representation.
If you can show a pattern where the opinions of a minority group are being chosen over an opinionated majority, then you have illustrated the corruption of that representative.
On right-to-repair, from their constituiencies? Likely nothing. I'm an avid consumer of news, including local, and there's been very little coverage of it.
> If you can show that the average consistuent in a district has a shared opinion, and that opinion is being overruled by their representative, then you have illustrated the failure of representation.
Nah. Politics is complicated and full of compromise; sometimes you give in on one battle to win another.
> If you can show a pattern where the opinions of a minority group are being chosen over an opinionated majority, then you have illustrated the corruption of that representative.
Or a pattern of upholding minority rights, a core component of our Constitution.
Good.
There tend to be downsides of political systems that don't have elected representatives.
Uh, no. That’s an absurd assertion. The Governor is another branch, that exists as a check and balance on the legislature. That’s why they have the veto power.
The gov was just as voted-in as the rest of them, too. The will of the voters in both branches.
Of course, propaganda is still a powerful enemy, but at least people have a chance to win against rich lobbies.
But we're not. We don't vote for politicians to represent people faithfully, we vote for politicians to represent our interests in a much more abstract sense.
It has been well noted that this reduces to advertising budget, which lays bare the farce that is democracy. If it weren't a direct mapping from money to power, we wouldn't need campaign finance laws.
You can't change this because this is the way the system was designed to work. It is a system for legitimizing the authority of those with money and power using the branding of "the will of the people".
Funny how the people's will always lines up with the interests of the largest corporations, employers, and landowners, despite their being a tiny minority of "the people".
But here's the fun part: it doesn't matter who voted for the governor: once voted, the represent everyone in the state of New York, irrespective of who they voted for. When the house votes, almost unanimously to pass a bill, the governor's job is to sign it, not to stare at the wall picking their nose while checking their bank account on their phone every few minutes.
Which is why the pocket veto exists. If the governor doesn't sign it or veto it, it becomes law. 10 days is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, considering it took the legislature from Feb 2nd to Dec 16th to deliver it to the Governor - 317 days. If 10 days is that important, then we should be more concerned about the 317 days.
You may want her to eagerly sign it - fine, vote against her in her primaries or the general election if it's that important to you. But her replacement will probably will also do something you don't like at some point. No one is ever 100% perfectly represented, especially by a governor or president.
If the legislators shirk their duties, it is to the extent that they are avoiding unpopularity by redelegating back to me, and I always vote no on referenda unless there is a huge factor of conscience. Which happens apparently once a decade or so.
you will be surprised what would happen if USA switches to direct democracy
Heck, a county voted to split from California. That won't happen though.
https://projects.scpr.org/prop-13/history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+popular+is+prop+13+in+ca...
Homeowners are a big part of the state. "everyone else" must be a small minority. If you think it is a big enough part of the population, feel free to bring a prop to repeal prop 13. My bet is that any attempt to repeal it will lose in a landslide based on what happened in 2020[1] when they attempted a partial repeal.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_15,_Tax_on_Co...
Notice that prop 15 lost by 4%... It is not good for the state as a whole, but it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home. So now 48% of the state and everyone that wants to move to california is fucked because 9 million people want their home value to keep increasing. They've effectively voted in a law that requires non homeowners to pay homeowners $500 a year and burn another $500 due to lost economic efficiency. Is that good for homeowners? I guess, but it's certainly bad for the state.
If 52% of people in alabama wanted to bring back slavery does that make it the right thing to do?
And it targeted only commercial and industrial properties, with proceeds going to education and local govt funding. That is, as sympathetic setup as it could be. It didn't touch any residential homes, neither primary nor secondary nor rentals. And it still lost.
> it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home
It seems you didn't read what prop 15 was about. If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.
> If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.
Source?
No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13 it's still the wrong policy in the exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is. Laws that exist solely to siphon money from poor people to rich people are bad. Doubly so when they destroy economic value to the extent prop 13 does.
https://www.ppic.org/blog/who-likes-proposition-13/ (at least until 2014, ~65% Californians think prop 13 is a good thing, similar to original support levels in 1978).
> No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13
Moving goalposts now? Upthread, you were talking about 51% shafting 49% and that was a pure hyperbole which I called out. Prop 13 support is much more massive (more like 63-27 per my citation above).
> exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is
Nope. Enslaving someone is forbidden under the US constitution and personal freedom is recognized as a basic right, backed by the full force of the state. Prop 13 merely affects prices in some small areas of a giant state and there is no constitutional right to "own a home in the most expensive area of the country".
Again, comparing that to slavery is another hyperbole meant to evoke emotions?
I really don't think it is. Prop 13 turns non homeowners into wage slaves. It makes housing prohibitively expensive. It is a deeply unjust law. I'm not trying to make some case about the legality of forcing non homeowners to pay exorbitant amounts for housing, I'm saying it's morally and in many ways economically comparable to slavery, or at least serfdom.
I don't really think I ever moved the goalposts. My take was always that direct democracy leads to the majority shafting the minority and that's exactly what prop 13 does. It doesn't matter that the majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority, it's a bad law for the state because it destroys economic value and is obviously unjust.
Barring a few pockets, housing is cheap even in California. Now, if your claim is that everyone who wants to should be able to afford a home in SF or Palo Alto, then that is something else.
> majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority
How is majority taking money from minority in this case?
To be fair, the EU is partially responsible for that. Even if the UK had a form of direct democracy, EU rules would still dictate on many issues. Switzerland can only do what it does because it isn't part of the EU.
(Now, if the EU itself had a direct democracy (setting aside the practical issues with that) it would perhaps be different.)
However, now after Brexit UK now opened itself to profit-seeking international relations which can be worse than EU-dictated bureaucracy.
It's like holding a baseball game and then, after the fact, declaring that the winner isn't the team with the most runs, but the one that got the most hits. Sure there's some correlation there, but both teams would have played differently if they'd known that's how they'd be judged, so you can't be sure who would have won if they'd known that's how they were supposed to be playing.
For example, this year San Francisco voted to decide whether one of the major streets through Golden Gate Park should remain mostly car free after we tried that for the pandemic. That seems like a fine use. But there was a state prop titled "REQUIRES ON-SITE LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL AT KIDNEY DIALYSIS CLINICS AND ESTABLISHES OTHER STATE REQUIREMENTS. INITIATIVE STATUTE." This was some sort of high-dollar fight among vested interests fought via sketchy ballot proposition and it absolutely should not have been on the ballot.
(You also can quickly run into tyranny-of-the-majority issues. E.g., famously liberal and tolerant California in 2008 voted to strip an already-existing civil right from a minority. [3])
For complex issues, I think it's better to have the decision-making concentrated in the hands of highly supervised professionals with staffs who have the time to understand the issues enough so that they have a chance of understanding the impacts. Rather than more direct democracy, what I'd like to see is more transparency and accountability for those professionals.
[1] In our most recent election we had 7 state propositions: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-measures/qualified-b...
[2] And 15 local ones: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/local-ballot-measure-a...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
- rapid action on climate change
- legalized abortion
- universal health care
- right to privacy
- improved internet access
- cleaner water + food
- bank reform
- DACA
- Social Security funding (returning funds stolen by previous congresses)
Heck, we might even go completely nuts and actually finish banning slavery.
Not sure what would happen in year two.
It's pretty clear that the average Republican in the US has been galvanized into partnership, so the members of that party will very likely vote cohesively with each other.
It's also pretty clear that the same is not happening in the Democratic party. Most Democratic voters I hear from disagree with one another ideologically, and do not feel effectively represented by their party. It is not likely that voters in the Democratic party will vote cohesively with one another.
The effect of that applied to gerrymandering is that districts over-representing republicans take advantage of the average Republican voter cohesion, while districts that over-represent the Democratic party do not.
Voter cohesion is the strongest vector for outcomes I can think of in our first-past-the-post representative voting system.
It's my contention that changing the structure of our voting system or factoring out gerrymandering would have a drastic effect on legislative outcomes.
You're late. It was proven by science/statistics a long time ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
Important quote:
America is an imperfect democracy, in other words — but it's hardly an oligarchy. When the rich and middle class disagree, each wins about half the time.
They show the rich and middle class agree on bill outcomes the vast majority of the time, with a 10% spread when they don't (e.g., 45% - 55%, from the article).
As an example, they point out the rich are more supportive of public campaign financing than the middle class. This is a second red flag: It is unlikely that people that use their money to influence legislative outcomes are more supportive of banning the practice than the general population.
The original study claimed that (1) lobbyists and oligarchs are basically writing legislation and deciding who gets elected, and (2) there is no correlation between popular opinion and actions of congress. You can't rebut that by claiming that the 90-99% usually agree with the 50-90%, and congress doesn't really seem to favor one of those groups' opinions over the other.
It is as though I said that, once confounding factors are accounted for, there's no correlation between listening to rock music and catching cancer, and the rebuttal comes back as "Well, Eagles fans and Jay-Z fans both get lots of cancer, but half the outlier cancers are more common amongst Hotel California fans, so electric guitars must be carcinogens!"
To rebut the original claim, the academic study would need to either reproduce the original study (showing statistical irreproducibility) or dive into causality. They could look into the actions / opinions of lobbyists and people like the Koch brothers, Soros and the ULine family. The could trace how many line items those groups are sneaking into bills, and whether the popularity of the line item matters at all to its success. (Hint: Most voters don't form an opinion on section 1.35.2.456.63356-b that was introduced at 2am the night before the 10,000 page military appropriations was passed by voice vote.)
Anyway, the damage control piece was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.
They address several things, like the low R-squared value (0.074) or the fact that interest groups win against both the rich and the middle class at roughly the same rate if you use their own data sets.
>They cite academic work that divides the country into four groups: the middle class, the rich, business interests and non-business interests. (This is not a covering set, which is already a red flag.)
These groups are literally from the Gilens study, not the rebuttal. If you view this as discrediting the rebuttals then you should view it as discrediting the original paper as well.
>they point out the rich are more supportive of public campaign financing than the middle class. This is a second red flag: It is unlikely that people that use their money to influence legislative outcomes are more supportive of banning the practice than the general population.
This policy preference comes from the surveys used by the original Gilens survey, so if you view this as discrediting the rebuttals then you should view it as discrediting the original paper as well.
>The original study claimed that (1) lobbyists and oligarchs are basically writing legislation and deciding who gets elected, and (2) there is no correlation between popular opinion and actions of congress. You can't rebut that by claiming that the 90-99% usually agree with the 50-90%, and congress doesn't really seem to favor one of those groups' opinions over the other.
The original paper explicitly claimed that
>ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots
So it makes plenty of sense to exclude those instances where the two groups agreed if you're trying to determine how influential their policy preferences actually are.
> (Update, 10:50 a.m., 12/20/2022: Given that the NY legislature is technically never out of session in modern times, inaction by the governor on the bill after 10 days would make a passed but not signed bill a law. The original post originally suggested an out-of-session process. Ars regrets the error regarding New York's otherwise completely straightforward legislative system.)
> The governor has 10 days to act on the bill after Friday's delivery, or until midnight on Dec. 28. Failing to act with either a signature or a veto will make the bill become law. The bill was originally introduced in 2021, so it cannot be easily re-introduced during the next session and would have to be re-drafted and submitted.
I'm more interested in the details... from the scant info in the OP, it sounds like not much. Meaning, drivers in linux (and other foss os's) such as video, ethernet, wi-fi, etc. aren't gonna see any change. Be happy to hear otherwise though.
I'm pretty sure that it's standard "journalistic integrity" stuff.
1. See the NYT or CNN tabs at http://newsdiffs.org to see how often this happens
I've been an Ars fan for years, but they are an outlier, in how they handle this (which is a good reason to like them).
Most news outlets have their changelist buried at the end. I don't think that it necessarily means they are bad. There's plenty of other stuff they pull, that does that.
Inaction by the governor will pass the law, not veto it. Ars only makes that clear (and barely so) in the correction blurb at the bottom.
[1] At least as phrased. I'm certainly no expert on New York State legislative process.
[citation needed]
I don't know if it's intentional but this reads to me as dripping with sarcasm. "straightforward legislative system" feels like an oxymoron.
Waiting is the same as signing it seems? So whats the plan here? Veto at the last second over the holidays and hope nobody notices?
By not signing, if this bill ends up being a shit-show, then during her next campaign, she can say she didn't support it, but didn't want to block popular opinion.
If she does a last second veto, then her popularity will take a hit, but whoever forces the veto will continue to support her next election.
I have no idea which of the two paths will be taken, or what back room negotiations are at play. On the veto path, she might be tightening the proverbial thumb screws in exchange for campaign donations, or she might be executing according to the schedule of some high-paid corporate PR firm. It's even possible she thinks right-to-repair will be a shit-show for the state, and will veto it for that reason.
If she wants to continue to be governor, then it's crucial that we never know which of the above is true. See also: The dictator's handbook.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
GNewsom spoke clearly and with detail, showed contextual understanding and also on important details. I was surprised. This E*Waste and consumer-rights topic is far from settled.