It used to be that when the US did something bad, people would point to the constitution and the American ideals and say "this isn't living up to our promise".
Now instead when people point to the constitution and American ideals people say "those were written by dead white men" as if to justify cynically discarding them in favor of something heinous.
The thing that results in enshittification is market consolidation. Notice that Comcast sucks whereas there aren't a lot of complaints about Big Shampoo because that's a fairly competitive market.
If the government needs trucks then they should just buy trucks, not build a factory to make trucks and then another factory to make lead acid batteries for the trucks and then start mining lead to make the batteries etc.
At some point they have to interface with the market and you still have to solve the problem of keeping the market competitive and keeping the bidding process from being captured. If you're not doing those things then you're screwed either way; if you are doing them then it's better to just buy finished goods than to have civil servants manufacturing doorknobs and operating rubber tree plantations to make weather stripping.
I think that's true for widgets but it becomes much more opaque when it comes to digital services, particularly those that handle sensitive information. Sure there's govcloud and fedramp these days but if the US federal government had chosen to build that hardware out in house I think that would have been a reasonable decision. It's similar to private versus in house security personnel where there are arguments in favor of both.
There's a big difference between physical products, which, once the government has them, it can just use them, and digital infrastructure, which has a number of issues.
The two big ones I see off the top of my head are:
1) Once the government has paid for digital services from some private company, they are then providing those digital services to their country's public.
2) Because of that, they are then also storing their people's data in those systems.
If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.
If Microsoft decides they don't like the government of Belgium, even if they don't decide to do anything nefarious with the data (which is absolutely a real concern, both from malice and incompetence), they can shut off their services overnight and then the people of Belgium have no governmental websites or digital services. (And if they have a contract that says they can't...well, what's Belgium going to do about it? Ask Trump real real nice to make Microsoft keep the lights on?) Or, even if they're perfectly polite and commit to an orderly transition, Belgium still has to put in absolutely massive amounts of time, effort, and money to select a new vendor and migrate all their data and retrain all their people on the completely different interfaces and such.
Whereas when they start buying new vans from Mercedes...the drivers might have to remember that the radio's volume knob is 5cm away from where it was in the Fords...?
If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
This is in no way a solution to the population-scale problem of a belligerant nation having root on the citizenry's mobile phones/cameras/GPS units/network scanners
Something with ~0% market share outside of China and which trades the US having root for China having root is not a viable alternative.
In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point.
Which means the thing it calls for is something open source, since that both allows contributions from multiple countries and solves the trust issue by leaving no single entity in control of it.
One of the ironies of the TikTok-China discussion was that as an individual in the US, I would much prefer the Chinese govt have access to all my data over the U.S. government, just like I suspect individuals in China would be much better off if the U.S. government had all their data over the Chinese government.
So giving your data to the Chinese government, while not a great solution, may still be preferable over giving it to the U.S. for someone in the EU given the closer relationship between EU governments and the U.S. than EU governments and the Chinese government.
Of course, this may be the opposite of what you want from a national perspective.
Viability is debatable. There are tens of millions of smartphone users in the US who are vastly more exposed to US law-enforcement abuses and intrusiveness than anything China would care to try. Chinese emigres excepted.
In other words China doesn't have to be trustworthy as long as the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.
If the USA were to ever weaken into irrelevance then yes messing with foreign HarmonyOS users might have some possibility that can’t be easily dismissed.
As long as the USA doesn’t become completely toothless then the incentives would point in the opposite… as long as Huawei behave scrupulously they are nearly guaranteed to win and dethrone the incumbents for most of the world.
The entire premise of "other countries can trust your companies to protect their privacy" is that you can't. "US reads Dutch emails" is the thing you have to not do.
You can be strict about who you do business with while still respecting their privacy once they are set up.
The respectable, politically popular country setting this up would simply say yes to the International Criminal Court, but no to Putin.
This doesn't work well as a blacklist of "everyone's allowed unless they turn out to be sanctioned", because some shell company or reseller could register and actually be a front for Russia or whatever other bogeyman. But just serving enormous respectable organisations is a big niche in itself.
But now you're proposing something that doesn't solve the problem for the vast majority of people, since nearly everyone is neither the International Criminal Court nor Vladimir Putin.
It might solve it for the majority of people by compute use, though. Charge $100,000 one time auditing fee to get approved for it. For a Fortune 500 company or EU government agency or a big NGO that's nothing.
> I can't prove it with math or logic yet, but I have a feeling that it’ll never happen.
It's not really that hard to actually prove it with math.
It's a computer, so to produce the boolean result (safe or unsafe) there has to be a mathematical formula. This formula will inherently be extremely complex, but even a very simple formula has a huge problem. Suppose "unsafe" is true if X - Y > 0. Make X and Y themselves as simple or complicated as you like but even in the simplest version it's already impossible to calculate unless the model has perfect information.
You can't calculate "X - Y" if you don't know the value of X. And it's indisputable that there is information it doesn't have. Case in point, telling you about a vulnerability in some piece of code is safe (and indeed not telling you is unsafe) if you're the developer and you want to patch it or an administrator and want to mitigate it, but the opposite if you're the attacker and want to exploit it. The model does not know which one you are, therefore it cannot make the correct determination any more than it can solve one equation with two unknowns.
It's also the sort of thing that has to have been thought up by someone with nothing better to do, given how ridiculous the premise is. You would have to assume the adversary is someone with the technology to build rockets, literally rocket science, but not the technology to build their own GPS receiver, which is simple 1970s radio technology?
Worse than that, it's 20th century radio technology in the 21st century when everyone has access to FPGAs and SDR.
The number of innocent people with model rockets or similar being negatively impacted by that rule is infinitely larger than the number of adversaries because the number of adversaries being impaired by it is zero.
The only precision part about a GPS receiver is to assign precise timestamps when you receive a radio transmission from a satellite. The rest of it is just doing math.
> If Congress is incapable of making new laws, we still need them somehow.
Do we though? When there is a lack of consensus on what federal law should be, those are exactly the times the federal apparatus should be silent and leave it to the states.
So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
This is just dodging the question of why can’t Congress do its job.
> So states can regulate interstate commerce, congressional stock trading, foreign policy, military spending guidelines, federal lands and financial exchanges now?
Which of these are the things where gridlock is happening? In which administration did Lockheed go poor because no defense budget was passed in the entire term?
And Congressional stock trading is exactly the sort of thing that should be regulated by the states, since the federal members of Congress have an obvious conflict of interest. Meanwhile if California says it's illegal to trade stocks on insider information then US Senators from California who do insider trading should be in an orange jumpsuit.
The US is a large country with a large economy and a very diverse economy. It is probably not feasible for Congress to deal with the low level details of managing all that.
> how much worse off would it be if we still "representatives per person" numbers from 1776 and had a Congress of many thousands?
Isn't that actually a major cause of the trouble? You expect Congress to deal with more and more complexities but limit the number of people (i.e. experts) who are members of it, causing them all to be generalists and moreover to have to spend more of their time campaigning rather than debating because the value of each seat is higher and correspondingly so is the effort someone will put in to take it from you and the proportion of your time you have to spend merely defending it.
Meanwhile people feel that their vote doesn't matter because a member of Congress now represents almost a million people and then ordinary people can neither affect the campaign nor get the ear of their own representative.
Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people. The members who are doctors would understand both medicine and medical bureaucracy. The members who are engineers would understand technology. Instead of them being lawyers whose first job is campaigning.
It doesn't matter if Congress has 5% of them who are actually engineers when 95% of the vote must inevitably come from non-engineers. Not that "engineer" is even enough. Just because I'm an "engineer" doesn't mean I can opine meaningfully on a civil engineering project any more than a civil engineer knows any more about AI than a current Congress-person.
No matter what solution you try to apply to that problem, it's not going to be solved. Try to split the legislative branch into interests so that we don't need the full branch to vote? Massive problems. Try to create a culture where Congress defers to the interest groups who know? Massive problems. A pretty solid case could be made that we've simply scaled past what a legislative approach can reasonably address.
One of the reasons I tried to write my post neutrally is that the whole situation is pretty complicated. Less neutrally, I'm fairly aware of the issues of the technocratic state and its "experts" who really aren't but get given what is basically stolen valor. On the other hand, pointing out problems is easy, trying to propose solutions is much harder. To be honest I just keep coming back to, cultures get the government they deserve. If a culture views governance as primarily about duty and obligation and honor, the structure probably doesn't matter much. If a culture doesn't view it that way, you're going to get corruption and abuse. And unfortunately, while this is a continuum it isn't balanced; to get good government requires a very positive and widespread commitment to those ideals. It doesn't take much deviation at all before you get pretty widespread corruption. It doesn't need a culture that actively values power and what it can bring you, it just takes less than massive, widespread agreement that power is more duty than privilege. If the US ever had that culture, which is debatable but possible, it really doesn't anymore.
> Suppose it actually had ten thousand members. Then they would be ordinary people.
I thought that's how it originally was supposed to be. You were supposed to be represented by a peer, not by a career politician.
And then of course, we have fun gerrymandering, where unelected officials will draw random lines to see how they can eke out more votes for their guy. Redistricting is important to do but I'm not convinced any redistricting committee in the US does it with the people's best interest at heart.
>What advantage is there in giving the unelected bureaucrats the authority to change the rules without approval, except to Congress in dodging accountability for what happens?
Why must congress do more? Most of this stuff would be state issues if not for the absurdity that is current commerce clause interpretation.
It used to be that when the US did something bad, people would point to the constitution and the American ideals and say "this isn't living up to our promise".
Now instead when people point to the constitution and American ideals people say "those were written by dead white men" as if to justify cynically discarding them in favor of something heinous.
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