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[WealthyRadish]

It's hard to think of an example where the American presidential system operated in a way preferable to a parliamentary system, while things like our current shutdown provide ready couterexamples. The intention was to create a government that would be more dysfunctional and weak, but considering the economic and geopolitical challenges that the US has had to overcome relative to almost everywhere else (read: fuck all) this is like putting training wheels on a bigwheel trike.

It is the optimal government if you're a wealthy merchant, slaveowner, or root vegetable, for what that's worth.

Given that you're a wealthy root vegetable, I'd think then that you'd be singing its praises then, no?

I vacillate. Sometimes the root to progress seems clear, other times I'd like it all tuber-n down, but the critical thing is to find from where these things stem.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, I get that... but it only addresses a limited range of problems.  It prevents individuals or minor factions from seizing complete control and instituting tyranny for their exclusive benefit.  But for minorities who have no representation or on conflicts of interest specifically between the common people and those with wealth and power, the nature of tyranny for those people or on those specific issues remains unaltered.

That is true, and most of the examples I'd list offhand are either of shifts in the separation of powers that haven't happened versus those that did, like the 17th Amendment or Maine's adoption of ranked-choice voting, or of the relative longevity of America relative to a host of dictatorships, which does require that we take a specific view of how much a state can change and remain the same state given things like what happened to most of Europe post-WWI and that's probably more historical minutae than anyone wants to delve into. It's difficult to point to good things that have been enabled by a system designed to be robust to change a priori -- and, as you correctly point out, that same robustness can backfire when it prolongs fixable suffering.

But what the equipoise of opposed tyrants and the resultant separation of powers does do for people without access to power is give them a stable framework to which it is possible to organize long-term pressures that create changes. That's both utterly necessary for bringing about changes we want (and, indeed, even surviving in such a system given enough vulnerability) without the ones we don't and really hard to achieve by either electing "good" people or putting laws in place to keep them from being bad. If you want to see parchment barriers fall, look at Trump's rampant emoluments; if you think we can only elect good leaders, the man himself is a fantastic counterexample. Even leaving aside Russian meddling in the general election, that he was nominated is, I think, enough of an indication that we're perfectly capable of electing absolutely unsuitable people.

And yet the Wall is not built, waterboarding isn't back, Obamacare isn't actually repealed, there's no full-on Muslim ban and Trump's not king despite two years of rule solely by a party he's effectively commandeered personally. It could have been a lot worse.

Separation of powers is absolutely not a panacea, and ours is fairly broken at the moment, but it is durable, and it can even be said to help marginalized blocs by letting changes happen locally before they happen nationwide.

[Folly]

We are nearing the end of our 16th day of government shutdown. Tomorrow will make this the third longest shutdown in US history.

There is some speculation that Trump is holding out to break the longest record of 21 days, so that he can say he's the best at something, and so he can tell his base that he made a real effort to get the wall. However Trump himself is saying that he could keep this going for more than a year, so who really knows what will happen.

[SalmonGod]

You're right that separation of powers serves a purpose, and I never meant to dispute that.  And while I have considered how stability relates to social progress, I never thought about how our government's durability contributes to that.  I still remain wary of how consolidation of wealth is interacting with modern forms of information control and enforcement, and how that relationship will progress into the future.  It's increasingly difficult for me to imagine how pressure can be mounted as it was in the past under these circumstances.  I see power structures in the future becoming increasingly obfuscated, intrusive, and resistant to challenge.  But I do appreciate your point.

[Trekkin]

You're right that separation of powers serves a purpose, and I never meant to dispute that.  And while I have considered how stability relates to social progress, I never thought about how our government's durability contributes to that.  I still remain wary of how consolidation of wealth is interacting with modern forms of information control and enforcement, and how that relationship will progress into the future.  It's increasingly difficult for me to imagine how pressure can be mounted as it was in the past under these circumstances.  I see power structures in the future becoming increasingly obfuscated, intrusive, and resistant to challenge.  But I do appreciate your point.

Oh, I never meant to suggest that it could be mounted as in the past; we don't give out free beer to get people to vote anymore either. Horses for courses, and all that.

You're right to remain wary, though; this is, in many ways, a new sort of existential threat to the republic. It's also breaking one of the fundamental assumptions the founders made about the isolating effect of a large republic communicating via slow methods and how that would let cooler heads prevail; not only is agitprop faster now, but it's critically become effectively faster than actual information by virtue of everyone's online experience being compartmentalized into personalized echo chambers. I never meant to imply that we have no cause for alarm, but we have seen all these component problems before. Before there was Murdoch, there was Hearst; before there was the 1%, there were the barons. The faces change, the nature of the expression of power changes, but human nature doesn't, and we can use that and have used that without breaking the system and losing all the good things people need it to keep doing.

Upthread you called me cynical, quite correctly, but there's a certain hope embedded in cynicism. An equitable government must be at least a little transactional if people with orthogonal needs are to be mutually satisfied; a politician representative of their constituents is on some level pandering to them. More than that, though, if you want a government where the will of the people can tip the scale either way on a decision, you need the metastability provided by an equipoise of tyrannical assholes. Look at how the SOPA and PIPA fights played out; if it weren't for the competing interests of technology companies opposing the ISPs, how effective would all the letters have been?

I do share your wariness, but I don't think you can pressure power structures away from calcifying into whatever's most resistant to your pressures, at least without committing to doing so indefinitely. It's like population genetics: eventually, all systems reach a self-perpetuating ensemble of states, because everything responds to pressure until it can't anymore. The metastable state produced by competing ambitions satisfies the need for self-perpetuation without centering on a single set point, though, which is what makes it incrementally shiftable by small outside forces without breaking the system down entirely. That's good if you're only capable of producing a small force and the system's hanging over your head.

[SalmonGod]

Upthread you called me cynical, quite correctly, but there's a certain hope embedded in cynicism.

I used that, because cynicism typically gets called out in this thread.  Describing positions of power as a place to put sociopaths was one of the most boldly cynical statements I've seen around here, and I don't think of you as normally one to be making those.   But don't take it as a negative from me.  I'm quite cynical myself, and my last few posts were quite cynical as well.

[Max™]

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek by taking your idiom literally, for which I apologize, but my point was larger than your remarks alone: we, both on these boards and in the country generally, keep suggesting that if we either purge the government of bad actors or legislatively restrain their worst impulses, things will get better.

I was talking about google having our info and who exactly should we trust to have this power besides google, that's it. Everything else was added in.

[McTraveller]

I was talking about google having our info and who exactly should we trust to have this power...

The answer should be "nobody."

That said, the goal I'd espouse is the ideal aim of any kind information security: true security isn't ensuring people don't have unwanted access to information.  True security is making it so that even if people have information they can't do anything unwanted with it.

Some of this is evident even in the terminology we use: consider "identity theft." What is stolen isn't really identity, it's authorization.  If we made it so that authorization wasn't something independent of person, it wouldn't matter if people knew your account information.  However, our culture has traded security for convenience.  Put concretely: when you knew your bank tellers and vault managers in person, you couldn't just have someone walk in and say "hello I'm Max, my birthday is foo and my code is bar can I please have my money."  The tellers would say "sorry, I know him, and it's not you."

This is admittedly a contrived example, but it is illustrative.

In the context of big data profiling, I think we already have some of the infrastructure in place to deal with most of the non-financial issues. After all, I think political affiliation is already a protected class isn't it (depends on if it counts as a 'creed' in the 'religion or creed' clause)? If it's not, it should be.  So you can't legally base hiring and firing, access to housing or loans or education, etc. on political statements.  The problem is then in how we enforce protected classes, not that we don't have the infrastructure for it.

If anything, what we could use is more consistent application of the rules we have, to make it more obvious to the average person what the rules are so they don't have to guess.  Heck I mean we don't even regularly enforce trivial things like speed limits*.

*pet peeve:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The thing that gets me about speeding is that people arbitrarily pick some number above the speed limit as "ok" and even get mad at people who are honoring the speed limit (not even discounting the fact that driving 70mph in a 60mph zone when total travel distance is 30 miles, say on a morning commute, saves you a maximum of 4.3 minutes at the expense of at least 36% more drag energy.  Even though there are real societal impacts on fast travel, from increased fatalities, increased fuel use, increased wear and tear on vehicles.  My contrived argument is "we have a 'stealing limit' of 0 - what if I just go $5 over that?"

[wierd]

It was my understanding that speed limits were established in the 40s and 50s, based on test data derived from handling and crash statistics of vehicles for that era.  (this has been getting updated, so I understand, but many of the old limits derived from that dataset are still in place. Again, this is my understanding anyway. It could well be wrong/out of date.)

It has since become a perverse incentive for small towns to enforce those old rules, even though vastly safer road surfaces and vehicles with vastly better economy, handling, and crash survival metrics are the norm. (ticket traps being a major source of income for many small towns that straddle highways.)

The "arbitrary" allowance you speak of (IIRC) derives from a margin of error afforded for improperly calibrated odometers, and or, the impact that incorrect tire size/inflation has on reported MPH.  EG, your gauge could say you are doing the limit, but you are really +5mph or so over.  To prevent needless citations (as if the civil govts of the nation actually held such a notion!) police routinely overlook such small infractions. It is when you go 10mph and over the limit that they pounce.  However, idiots with testosterone poisoning their brains are a thing, and they think "Well, that just means the REAL limit is +5mph!!" and of course, it hurts their egos TERRIBLY when people dont drive that fast to suit their hormonally induced dumbassedness.  (So, they tailgate, honk, and make a general menace of themselves when people DARE to actually honor the POSTED speed limit.)  Naturally, this means that when the problem this leniency was afforded for rises its filthy head, those tools are now going 10mph over the limit, and BOOM-- Ticket motha-fucka.  Naturally, they get all pissy about it too.

And yeah, those canoes disturb me as well.  Half the time, they are in such a rush to get stopped at the same red light I do.  I just use much less fuel, wear my brakes significantly less, and often arrive SOONER than they do (by actually timing lights correctly) by going at or just under the speed limit.

[Hanslanda]

By the same token, driving 15 under the speed limit often seems to be people deciding "I get to legally be a giant fucking inconsiderate asshole and there's nothing you can do about it." In adverse weather or very steep/curvy roads, caution is necessary obviously, but I genuinely despise people that go 15 under on straight stretches. They're just exploiting legality to be dicks.

[McTraveller]

So my point about speed limits wasn't the issue about how some municipalities abuse them (because they can abuse any law), but about how the government itself selectively enforces them with "arbitrary" rules, and how the  public itself selectively ignores them.

Those are both problems in any kind of society.  Don't get caught up in the detail of the fact that it's a speed limit.

[MorleyDev]

The challenge with law making has always been to balance the requirements of enforcing them without excessive 'creative interpretations' with the need to allow enough wiggle-room that they aren't overly strict about things to allow no leeway.

Police often don't know the exact crime someone is committing when they arrest them, that's worked out after. And that's not malice, it's just that they don't have the entire law memorised but have a pretty good idea they're doing something worthy of being arrested and the details of what to charge them with formally can get worked out after they're removed from the scene.

This is why I think police should be held to a higher standard than the general public, and ideally have the numbers to let them patrol regularly, visit local schools and community events, that kind of thing. Because the police force can only really work when there's a level of trust between officer and the general public, on both sides. When that trust breaks down, such as if police regularly cross the line', then that social contract breaks down. People trust the police less to actually be a force for good, so police have more room for an us-vs-them mentality to grow, so they trust people less and abuse them more, so people trust them less...

However, our culture has traded security for convenience.

To be fair, Security and Convenience isn't a new trade-off. There's a reason we don't all have triple-locked retina scan magnetic latch front doors and backup generators to keep them running in the event of an outage, and impact-resistant glass windows with iron bars, after all. That'd be way more secure, but not very convenient.

The ratio has always been convenience-vs-security, and it's always had holes in it but the balancing act is to maintain how much security is enough security to cover most scenarios without creating too much inconvenience or cost that people just say "fuck it" and find a way to bypass that security.

If given the chance, a  majority of people have always done the convenient thing over the secure thing, and often without realising. Password reuse isn't a problem because of a lack of awareness, it's a problem because having and remembering multiple passwords when you lack the technical knowledge to select use a safe password manager is difficult. And we haven't come up with a reliable and accessible way to replace passwords yet.

The tricky thing with modern computer systems isn't accessibility, sensitive information is often harder to get at individually than it was when everything was printed and physical, but scale: A single breach can leak a lot more information in one go.

I wonder if governments should mandate (and subsidise) regular pen tests for private businesses, maybe with requirements for businesses to close any holes found in a certain time period or face fines. I've not thought it through in full.

Large responsible businesses do regular pen tests anyway, and it doesn't catch everything, but there may be something to the idea in terms of closing off the lower hanging fruit businesses.

Laws like GDPR already try and mandate that certain types of data must be stored in certain secure ways, but the law is still catching up with the technology and at the same time can't outstrip it too much unless businesses just 'forget to implement' it because of the cost to do so. And enforcement is tricky without mandating 3rd party validation, hence why the laws are mostly there for after-the-event fines.

[Hanslanda]

I wish more sites would let me use excessively long sentence passwords.

"Mypasswordisthisentiresentenceplusthewordrasputinian"
Is far more secure and easy to remember than
"P@ssword1!"

[da_nang]

I wish more sites would let me use excessively long sentence passwords.

"Mypasswordisthisentiresentenceplusthewordrasputinian"
Is far more secure and easy to remember than
"P@ssword1!"

I think the limit is around 40-60 characters (obviously character set dependent) before you start getting pigeonholed in a 256-bit password hash, salt not included. It can't get any safer after that without more bits.

[wierd]

Less, if multi-byte unicode characters are used.