>People fighting each other over things instead of fighting nature.
It's easy to criticize the endless debates (and it's often over subject matter that looks silly), but this sort of debate is a big part of the success of a country like the US. It prevents leaders from moving too quickly in a direction which may have negative consequences. The trade-off is that everything takes forever to get done.
>but never something being invested in and grown to produce value.
The US and its underlying political system has possibly created more value than any society in the history of the world. It's hard to argue that the system doesn't work.
> his sort of debate is a big part of the success of a country like the US
The problem with your statements is that the US has a Constitution, which explicitly restricts the actions that the federal government may take. The endless debate witnessed today in the United States is only evidence towards the fact that our government no longer leverages a respect for its own legal documents. This ends up making the battle unwinnable by either side, because while the one side argues with totally true technological facts, the other side argues in the domain of senseless rhetoric. Meanwhile, neither side is making the concrete legal argument that the Constitution forbids the FBI's desires outright - except for Apple themselves. Many of Apple's own defenders have verged into the territory of "but this is math and you have to accept it!" which only distracts from the much more horrifying disregard for common sense these politicians are displaying today.
This is not a battle of mathematics - politicians should not need to leverage any knowledge of encryption to know that coercing a corporation into destroying its product's security apparatus is both unethical and illegal.
> The US and its underlying political system has possibly created more value than any society in the history of the world.
Apple, today, has done a lot more to bring value to the world than any of the politicians in DC have, today. Perhaps you could make such a fallacious argument about some of our better times of politics - but not today. Today's government has bumbling fools like Lindsay Graham and Joe Biden in leadership positions.
It's a good point that solid debate at the federal level prevents them from moving too quickly. But I would counter by saying that if their debate is consuming a large portion of our GDP, the infighting alone holds us back and I'd prefer they just went home and did something else: 3.8T fed budget / 16.8T US GDP ~= 22% being consumed by them. If 10% of that is waste (~2% of GDP) and we're growing at 2% GDP/year, the difference is doubling in 30 years (which might not even show in GDP/person due to population growth) vs a 3.7X increase in 30 years, which is a strong and innovative nation. In short, even just a 10% waste on their part might be holding back the whole nation. I bet the overhead waste of the feds is 10%. I don't even want to think about how much the military waste is holding us back.
Yeah, we should have some kind of central authority figure to just make the right decisions instead of wasting all this time and effort on debate. What could go wrong?
If the central authority figure is an algorithm, I could be persuaded to support that.
It's probably too soon, but I think one day having near real-time information on the state of the economy could enable a central controller that is more efficient than the markets.
In any system, every decision is about trade-offs. I could see elections being created where individuals vote for algorithmic priorities (ie rank education, law enforcement, r&d spending, etc...).
Vitally important programs like Medicare have an acknowledged ~10% fraudulent payment rate. And that isn't counting inefficiencies, just outright fraud.
So programs with less oversight, and less importance, are likely to have just as much if not more fraud. A lot of it perfectly legal and baked into the system like military contracts.
Not embracing a culture of harsh punishment and strong public shaming of even the hint of corruption has cost this country trillions over the years. Trillions which would have compounded results (like maybe smaller classrooms with better educated teachers).
It's easy to criticize the endless debates (and it's often over subject matter that looks silly), but this sort of debate is a big part of the success of a country like the US. It prevents leaders from moving too quickly in a direction which may have negative consequences. The trade-off is that everything takes forever to get done.
>but never something being invested in and grown to produce value.
The US and its underlying political system has possibly created more value than any society in the history of the world. It's hard to argue that the system doesn't work.