What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:
- "Sin Eaters"
- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company
- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)
I'm definitely open to adding profile photos. So far I've mostly been developing based on what I personally want because I do enjoy using the service myself. Description has been on the backlog for a while. For location: you can currently set a flag to show up on your profile in your settings, but I agree it would make sense to expand it to a full location. Messaging will definitely be coming.
Right now the only way to see if you have common discs with someone else is to directly visit their profile and a "Discs In Common" section will show up. But that's sort of impossible to stumble upon since user discovery is non-existent at the moment. Will be improving this in the near future (others who've collected this disc, etc).
I'll come up with an actual roadmap this week, but here's a few ideas that will be on it:
- Bio, messaging, full location, profile photos
- Album reviews (only after collection)
- Improved empty state and onboarding
- Folders to organize your collection
- Readable profile links
"The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to organize a company."
Alternatively, we could have these companies turned into research organizations run by the government and funded by taxes they way most research (e.g. pharmaceuticals) should be. There's more than one way to get good research done, and having it public removes many strange incentives and conflicts of interest.
The next grail here would be the automatic use of more trustworthy systems like WA when using ChatGPT in general. If one were to ask it to write an essay on a subject, that it'd infer which pieces need fact-checking based on confidence intervals of snippets of discernable and differentiable data, then run a query against said trustworthy system.
With this improvement, it would at least never get dates or measurements wrong.
I don't think we can ever solve the problem of needing real editors and fact checkers as ultimate sources of truth for ChatGPT's output, especially when it's for something critical, but for many tasks, this would be a major improvement.
Licensing, copyright takedowns, and partnership agreements make things that appear seemingly simple in fact quite complicated. That, and supporting a myriad of devices (plus different versions of those devices with different capabilities, plus all the different store integrations and their quirks) make for a very complicated set of organizational requirements.
There's no good answer here in markets this complicated
Another in a long line of unexpected causes for system errors, the classic being the cosmic ray:
"When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe.
While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices. It's called a single-event upset or SEU.
During an SEU, particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet."
Those of us who do high-level development generally treat these underlying systems as infallible, but as we continue to scale - and more money and lives are on the line - we'll need to get used to the idea of not only not trusting the underlying hardware as the article states, but may have to get to the point where we have "ECC at the system level." We already have this in various distributed systems tech, but this tends to be application-specific.
The next step would be to incorporate it directly into datastores generally.
This also suggests that heterogeneous hardware architectures can have an advantage in situations where data integrity is critical, even with the increased administration, hardware, and ops costs. Finally, it also highlights the importance of data audits and reconciliations for even non-suspect data on a regular basis, preferably with the aforementioned heterogeneous setup.
'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.
“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'
that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy. it doesn't make society in "oligarchy". our democracy actually works really well, even with gerrymandering and some voter disenfranchisement. if all those people actually voted frequently, the policy outcomes would be a lot different.
compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.
and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.
> that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy
That does not seem correct based on the study. 100% popular support increases chances of a measure passing by 0%. If even a small percentage remains politically active, 100% population support should make some difference, and it doesn't.
Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect. At some level, people have cognizance that their efforts make no difference, so they don't bother.
Denying access to elections and legitimate election fraud seem worse. However, I feel this underestimates invisible power. It doesn't take overt violence or the threat thereof to thwart democracy. In American politics, money does the trick. We need lobbying outlawed, and to prevent the revolving door between government and big industry allowing for things like regulatory capture. Pointing to lack of overtly violent means used to thwart democracy proves nothing.
As for regular people determining policy, you might have a point. However, between regular people and ultra wealthy people making the laws for their own benefit, I'll take the flawed-from-ignorance laws of the common man over the flawed-by-greed laws of the elite. We should also perhaps try democracy before writing it off. We haven't gotten there yet.
> Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect.
People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.
People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.
Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.
What data do you want? Look at the way people change their answers to whether or not they support Medicare For All based on how the question is phrased, or support for the Affordable Care Act [1]. What you are asking for is asinine. The data is the results of elections. You are the one who has provided no evidence for your claim.
If you think what someone answers to an opinion poll matters here, you're just wrong. Show me people voting based on these issues as a primary factor and not seeing results because politicians magically change their minds after winning.
"economic elite" is literally defined as anyone in the top 10% of income by that study. Guess what income group always votes? Those same people. And they're going to be the ones pressing for action the most. [2] And they are more educated, so it's stupid to compare public opinion like this. You need to compare expert consensus to policy and public opinion.
It's not because people aren't voting - it's because our votes are not equal. We don't have "one person, one vote" here - we have "one dollar, one vote", and those with more dollars get more votes. Citizen's United infamously set that in stone. Meanwhile, rampant gerrymandering, court packing, and other anti-democratic tactics have been heavily abused over the past few decades of Republican control to further erode and cement that. Though Republicans are not the only ones accountable - Democrats are just as responsible for accepting PAC money, for instance - and the two party system is mathematically guaranteed to be intractible as a consequence of our voting system. Even if every eligible voter voted in every election, the two party system is an inevitable conseqeunce of any election outcome, and both parties are dogs of the rich.
That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.
> That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.
People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).
Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.
Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.
Ranked choice was rejected in MA because it was poorly explained to voters and they voted against it because they didn't understand it. A vote against ranked choice is a vote against your best interests, and that's an objective fact.
It’s not really debatable that money has an influence in US politics and elections. It’s also pretty clear that for presidential elections, votes are not equal for people living in different states. But to say “We don’t have ‘one person, one vote’” in this context is pretty blatantly false.
The primary reason that dollars have such an impact on elections is because dollars get spent on advertising and on canvassing and on outreach, and the impact of those things is that it gets your candidate more votes from more people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to vote. The way that dollars buy elections is via people voting.
There’s plenty of rational debate to be had about gerrymandering and campaign finance and a whole host of topics, but to throw our hands in the air and say that votes don’t matter is nonsense.
I don’t completely disagree with you: people do have agency at the end of the day in the US. That said, let’s be careful not to fall into Scotsman fallacies where we don’t accept more subtle forms of oligarchy because they don’t fit our “1984”-esque imagination. Southern states have long histories of subtle voter disenfranchisement (requiring licenses or certificates that Black Americans have in lower percentages, placing polling stations in strategic locations, requiring money to discourage the poor from voting (who lean left), etc.) and it’s short-sighted to “No true Scotsman” that and say “well, it’s not an actual oligarchy because technically people still can vote.” One, in the vein of Niemoller’s “First they came...”, it ignores warning signs or red flags difficult to reverse until it’s too late. Second, it puts the focus on the individual. Sure, people can still vote. They can take off their $#!@ job for a few hours even though their boss is an @$$#@!€ and they need every dollar they can get, take the bus to the voting station 30 minutes away, wait in the line for potentially hours (I waited in just the primary line for 8 hours and I lived in West LA (Democrat, richer, etc.) at the time), only to be told they need a driver’s license which they’ve never had because they’ve never been able to afford a car. Or they actually do have, but this is just one person and most of their friends aren’t voting. Sure, this is possible. But then I ask you to reflect on the purpose of a democratic government if not to enable fair, free, and accessible elections? Especially now that the incumbent president is sueing and refusing to accept the results in a - I don’t way to say decisive, but clear perhaps - election, I guess I would like to know what it takes to consider that “legitimate election fraud”? Is it simply missing the f@$cist aesthetic of red, black, echo-y microphones over a rabid crowd, tanks and semi-automatics down the streets? Once again, once things progress to that level, it might be too late, but that doesn’t mean our current circumstances are any “less” of an “actual oligarchy” just because theyre not as obvious. IMO
- "Sin Eaters"
- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company
- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)
- Certain religious martyrs