squaresinger @ squaresinger @lemmy.world

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622

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4 mo. ago

Fair.

It does make sense though. The main motivator for politicians is power. That means, naturally political systems flow towards maximizing power for those in power, that's just the natural progression.

To change this, major political upheavals are necessary, so basically events where the whole old leadership is tossed out and the new leadership can try to setup something to stop the same thing from happening again.

WW2 was perfect for that. All those countries were in need of a completely new political system and thus they could be built better from the ground up.

The US never had any event like that (apart maybe from the civil war).

To change the system without such an event, two thirds of all relevant politicians would have to vote for changing the system that brought them to power. Not likely to happen.

Now I'm hungry.

Have you looked at the amendments? So far there have only been 27 of them over 236 years. Ten of them were created within a year of the constitution being created. They were basically Zero-Day-Patches, not actual amendments, and two amendments only exist to nullify each other (18 and 21) which leaves 15 amendments over 235 years (one of which was actually also created within the first year and only ratified 200 years later).

The last time an amendment was proposed was 54 years ago and the last one ratified was 33 years ago.

Not counting the Zero-Day-Patches, not a lot of these amendments actually change anything fundamental. Notable ones are 12 (governs the election of VP), 13-15 and 19 (civil rights), 17 (election of senators), 22 (president's term limit) and 25 (succession of the president).

Notably absent from the amendments is anything that changes the core political system or electoral system.

Compare that to other countries. In the time that the US constitution hat 15 minor amendments, France had a total of 15 complete constitution re-writes, not even counting amendments. 15 full new constitutions.

Germany had 69 constitutional amendments since 1949 (76 years, so almost one amendment per year, compared to the 1/16 amendments per year in the USA).

But by far the biggest issue is that a constitutional amendment cannot actually fix fundamental systemic issues. The people who have the power to change the constitution came to power within the current system, so if they fundamentally change how the system works (e.g. by repairing the electoral system in a way that more than two parties can be relevant), they are directly cutting into their own power, so of course they won't do that.

That's what you need major constitutional crises for (like e.g. Europe after WW2), so that the constitution can be re-written from scratch, fixing the issues that lead to the crisis.

But the US has been too big to fail for too long and thus there never was anything big enough to take down the US so that it needed to be restarted from scratch. The closest they came to was the civil war, but they didn't take the opportunity to actually overhaul the system. Probably because it was still too early and there wasn't much of a precedent of how to build a better democratic system.

But who knows, at the current rate it might be likely that the US is quite close to another chance to re-write the constitution.

You are not supposed to do champignons.

Our independence was supposed to free the people of kings and tyrants. It’s been 249 years since 1776, we have undone what the Constitution authors fought for.

That's what happens if you stick with a quarter-millennium old prototype of a semi-democratic system.

The constitution was revolutionary and ground-breaking, a quarter millennium ago. But still running that old piece of toilet paper as the basis of a democratic system in 2025 is like driving a Ford Model T today and claiming that it still is the latest and greatest automobile ever created.

After thinking about this myself, I’m starting to feel the same way. Instead of being proud of the country, I’m feeling like I’m just another wallet that companies and the government are trying to suck all the money out of.

Always have been, always will be.

The cost of living is going up, the housing market is a nightmare

Don't worry, once they deported or killed all the Jews illegals the prices will surely come down.

pi == 3

That's what happens if you only have access to a handful of brain cells.

That was actually never the case. The default USB mouse driver comes with the OS. And also today any modern mouse will work just fine with the default USB mouse driver in the OS.

What this abomination is is a kind of extended driver that allows the user to e.g. remap buttons on the mouse or control RGB lights. You know, anything but the actual basic functionality of the mouse.

It does take practice, but once you know how to do it it becomes easy. That was like 5 minutes of work.

I'm a bit younger, though not a lot.

I all but stopped buying games because Epic and Amazon give so many away for free.

I've got like 500 free games that I haven't even installed once.

The only time I'd actually pay for a game is if it's a special one I want, and they've gotten few and far between.

Yeah, it's an economics student running something on python. I can guarantee that it's horribly unoptimized.

That's at least what I got from the comment with the SSH port.

First, define what you are asking for.

Do you want someone to send you a cardboard box full of RAM? Then forget it. Nobody would be stupid enough to lend that much expensive hardware to someone on the internet.

Or are you asking for someone to let you run random code on their PC for a few hours? Then forget it. Nobody would be stupid enough to open "a single SSH port" to someone on the internet to run potential malware on their PC.

That's exactly what cloud platforms are there for, and if you don't like google, get any other cloud provider.

I don't think OP wants you to lend them physical RAM modules but asks about letting his friend run random code on your high-RAM machine.

That guy is so far up his own rear, he can't even fathom that someone would be using a device in a different way than he is.

To be fair, his statement "I never see people copy-pasting by mouse" might be correct, but he probably could have left out the second half of the statement and it would still be correct.

That's a very different kind of thing. The apple ecosystem is tiny. They themselves make every single device supported by the OS. They make the only variant of the OS. They have the power to change whatever they want and everyone who wants any access to apps (or users) needs to follow apple's guidelines. They also have something close to a monopoly in certain professional use cases. So they can push whatever they want and everyone has to suck it up.

Compare that to Fedora. Fedora is just one distro in a sea of different Linux distros. They aren't even the biggest one, not by a longshot. So if they drop 32bit, that won't force Valve to move Steam to 64bit and it certainly won't push game developers to update old, unsupported games that were never meant to run on Linux at all to change anything.

Most likely, people would just move to a different distro.

The title is from the article.

The problem is deeper than the title of some random article though. The basic currency of any reporting is attention, and that's the case not only for media intended for the non-scientific public, but also for scientific papers.

At the same time, a lot of science, especially basic research, is really boring. Because basic research is per definition without a real application (yet), and pretty much any research is years if not decades away from being commercially available.

To get around this dilemma, every level of science reporting needs to be sensationalist. Every little thing needs to be a "break-through" that "will change the world", otherwise it won't get attention, and stuff that doesn't get attention won't get funding.

But sensationalism is inherently counter-scientific, because it requires the authors to make claims that the science doesn't support.

So right within the core systems of modern science is a mechanic that rewards being non-scientific while punishing researchers that stick to dry science.

And that's a real problem because it means that a large portion (estimates are at ~30%) of scientific papers are just bogus, and an even larger portion (my cynical estimate is ~90%) of what makes it into non-scientific media is pure sensationalist garbage.

Overextend the cap and turn it so it goes sideways. It doesn't have to point at your nose at all.