I was inclined to support DeSantis, but he ran a really bad campaign and I don't even think he wanted to run (kind of seems like his wife nagged him into it). I would sum it up as follows:
1) He had no national political platform, he couldn't or wouldn't adapt what he did in Florida to the federal government.
2) He made a big and totally unnecessary bet on a six week abortion ban. This shows such tone deafness I think it was disqualifying for a presidential bid.
I would like to add that Trump's biggest positive is that he doesn't run with theoretically conservative ideas he knows are big losers. He doesn't care about abortion, he criticized Iraq War before it was cool in 2015, and he doesn't pretend he's going to cut SS/Medicare.
3) He just doesn't seem that bright politically. Try to remember that the guy only won in 2018 by a tiny amount and needed Trumps endorsement. He makes gaffes and misplays all the time. The people of Florida correctly rewarded him for his performance during COVID, but that's not going to carry you through 2024.
I think DeSantis' big mistake was thinking he could just copy Trump's issues and get the same result, like you would a normal party platform. Which he couldn't do because he wasn't Trump.
The reason political parties have been necessary, is to coalesce support around candidates that share a common worldview. The problem is that they become institutions that end up focusing upon their own care-and-feeding more than the worldview they were built around.
We live in an information age where IMO we have the ability to get past reliance upon parties when it comes to candidate selection, if we can overcome our fear of doing so. Consider taking a cue from Buckley's statement about governance ...
"I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. "
... and selecting our candidates at random from the voter rolls. Say, ten for each office.
Each candidate gets access to the web hosting service of their choice, paid for by the government no questions asked and with no other funding allowed, with outside help limited to tech support (no political or marketing conslutants) to build a website using their own material ... so we can see how capable they are of making the case for their policies.
Conduct the vote in multiple stages. Each stage will take only the candidates with the highest vote counts, that together make up 50% or more of the votes cast, and move them to the next stage. When one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes cast, at any stage, they win the election and take office.
The first stage includes a "None of the Above" choice; if that gets over 50%, ten more candidates are randomly selected and the process starts over.
I'm skipping over a lot of details here, for brevity - this is food for thought.
Oh, and consider this, too ... why do the members of Congress have to immerse itself in the DC intellectual-inbreeding/influence-peddling environment AT ALL?
I propose operating Congress as a TeleCongress that convenes via secure, and publicly-viewable, teleconferencing. With each Representative participating from a studio/office in their district, and each Senator from a studio/office in their state capital (to at least pay lip service to the time before the 17th Amendment). That puts them closer to the people, out of the intellectual-inbreeding environment, and harder for lobbyists to schmooze.
AI is going to start rocking this country's economy in a few years in a real hard way. As an engineer, i'm building it now, i'm seeing the results because i'm driving the change in my own company. Covid made it super clear our government institutions are not even remotely prepared to deal, and I don't recall it even being brought up at the debates.
From a historical comparison perspective, the cotton gin is probably the best comparison for our situation. The broad expansion of it's use expanded the profitable capacity to process cotton, which was the bottleneck. We could plant and distribute just fine, but separating cotton from seeds was incredibly slow. The gin changed that, and as a result pushed the bottleneck towards harvesting. This had the effect of cranking up demand for labor, and actually reinforcing slavery in the South due to increased profitability. At the same time, abolitionist ideas were slowly growing, especially in the North. So you've got this new tech making slave labor more valuable than ever in the South, while questions about slavery's morality were brewing elsewhere. It basically forced the slavery issue to the top of everyone's minds, making an existing problem much worse and more urgent. The gin didn't cause slavery, but it certainly intensified the situation, deepening the divide between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.
In my project at work, i've used ai to supercharge the input process to our funnel. But we still need people to verify the output since it's not 100% reliable. We're going to hire a lot of people because it's going to be VERY profitable to do so. But these jobs will be temporary, kind of sucky jobs that few people would want, and not pay as much as what the job looks like today. And, it's likely the supercharged profits will go to large corps, and not to the individuals. That's coming in less than 6 months, we're asking for the budget today. I've been in the industry for over 20 years, AI is a HUGE technological transformation, and it's happening way faster than past technology adoptions, and since the resource it mostly directly replaces is labor, it's having profound impacts on organization structure. I think this is going to cause change that will have political ripples.
AI and big tech was never mentioned at the debates, but i'm confident it's the spur to the most important issue of the century. How do you spread the ownership of this technology. You can kind of see how the parties are consolidating around the issue. The democratic party has come out (in a soft way) against it, especially the progressive wing of the party. They want to protect the raw input (the data) but want to keep it locked up in large corporations where it's controllable. The Republicans have started to come out in favor of allowing AI to be free, but with an emphasis on open source as consolidation is a huge risk to individual freedom. There's a lot of tentacles to this octopus. It's clear to me how we deal with this is going to define my childrends lives, and it's crazy that we're debating eating cats instead of talking about it.
The social and economic conditions underlying the debate over "cat food" are right-here-right-now. AI is next week's issue for the vast majority of people.
And I think the AI discussion needs to be at a more fundamental level than the political. We live in a society that has gravitated towards near-total trust in "authorities" as superior to their own insights and common sense.
Is that society going to misunderstand AI and perceive it as an "authority" that is immune to human error, greed, and malice - and therefore even more worthy of outsourcing our individual decision-making to it as the ultimate Magic 8-Ball?
I was inclined to support DeSantis, but he ran a really bad campaign and I don't even think he wanted to run (kind of seems like his wife nagged him into it). I would sum it up as follows:
1) He had no national political platform, he couldn't or wouldn't adapt what he did in Florida to the federal government.
2) He made a big and totally unnecessary bet on a six week abortion ban. This shows such tone deafness I think it was disqualifying for a presidential bid.
I would like to add that Trump's biggest positive is that he doesn't run with theoretically conservative ideas he knows are big losers. He doesn't care about abortion, he criticized Iraq War before it was cool in 2015, and he doesn't pretend he's going to cut SS/Medicare.
3) He just doesn't seem that bright politically. Try to remember that the guy only won in 2018 by a tiny amount and needed Trumps endorsement. He makes gaffes and misplays all the time. The people of Florida correctly rewarded him for his performance during COVID, but that's not going to carry you through 2024.
I think DeSantis' big mistake was thinking he could just copy Trump's issues and get the same result, like you would a normal party platform. Which he couldn't do because he wasn't Trump.
The reason political parties have been necessary, is to coalesce support around candidates that share a common worldview. The problem is that they become institutions that end up focusing upon their own care-and-feeding more than the worldview they were built around.
We live in an information age where IMO we have the ability to get past reliance upon parties when it comes to candidate selection, if we can overcome our fear of doing so. Consider taking a cue from Buckley's statement about governance ...
"I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. "
... and selecting our candidates at random from the voter rolls. Say, ten for each office.
Each candidate gets access to the web hosting service of their choice, paid for by the government no questions asked and with no other funding allowed, with outside help limited to tech support (no political or marketing conslutants) to build a website using their own material ... so we can see how capable they are of making the case for their policies.
Conduct the vote in multiple stages. Each stage will take only the candidates with the highest vote counts, that together make up 50% or more of the votes cast, and move them to the next stage. When one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes cast, at any stage, they win the election and take office.
The first stage includes a "None of the Above" choice; if that gets over 50%, ten more candidates are randomly selected and the process starts over.
I'm skipping over a lot of details here, for brevity - this is food for thought.
Oh, and consider this, too ... why do the members of Congress have to immerse itself in the DC intellectual-inbreeding/influence-peddling environment AT ALL?
I propose operating Congress as a TeleCongress that convenes via secure, and publicly-viewable, teleconferencing. With each Representative participating from a studio/office in their district, and each Senator from a studio/office in their state capital (to at least pay lip service to the time before the 17th Amendment). That puts them closer to the people, out of the intellectual-inbreeding environment, and harder for lobbyists to schmooze.
AI is going to start rocking this country's economy in a few years in a real hard way. As an engineer, i'm building it now, i'm seeing the results because i'm driving the change in my own company. Covid made it super clear our government institutions are not even remotely prepared to deal, and I don't recall it even being brought up at the debates.
From a historical comparison perspective, the cotton gin is probably the best comparison for our situation. The broad expansion of it's use expanded the profitable capacity to process cotton, which was the bottleneck. We could plant and distribute just fine, but separating cotton from seeds was incredibly slow. The gin changed that, and as a result pushed the bottleneck towards harvesting. This had the effect of cranking up demand for labor, and actually reinforcing slavery in the South due to increased profitability. At the same time, abolitionist ideas were slowly growing, especially in the North. So you've got this new tech making slave labor more valuable than ever in the South, while questions about slavery's morality were brewing elsewhere. It basically forced the slavery issue to the top of everyone's minds, making an existing problem much worse and more urgent. The gin didn't cause slavery, but it certainly intensified the situation, deepening the divide between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.
In my project at work, i've used ai to supercharge the input process to our funnel. But we still need people to verify the output since it's not 100% reliable. We're going to hire a lot of people because it's going to be VERY profitable to do so. But these jobs will be temporary, kind of sucky jobs that few people would want, and not pay as much as what the job looks like today. And, it's likely the supercharged profits will go to large corps, and not to the individuals. That's coming in less than 6 months, we're asking for the budget today. I've been in the industry for over 20 years, AI is a HUGE technological transformation, and it's happening way faster than past technology adoptions, and since the resource it mostly directly replaces is labor, it's having profound impacts on organization structure. I think this is going to cause change that will have political ripples.
AI and big tech was never mentioned at the debates, but i'm confident it's the spur to the most important issue of the century. How do you spread the ownership of this technology. You can kind of see how the parties are consolidating around the issue. The democratic party has come out (in a soft way) against it, especially the progressive wing of the party. They want to protect the raw input (the data) but want to keep it locked up in large corporations where it's controllable. The Republicans have started to come out in favor of allowing AI to be free, but with an emphasis on open source as consolidation is a huge risk to individual freedom. There's a lot of tentacles to this octopus. It's clear to me how we deal with this is going to define my childrends lives, and it's crazy that we're debating eating cats instead of talking about it.
The social and economic conditions underlying the debate over "cat food" are right-here-right-now. AI is next week's issue for the vast majority of people.
And I think the AI discussion needs to be at a more fundamental level than the political. We live in a society that has gravitated towards near-total trust in "authorities" as superior to their own insights and common sense.
https://thenayborhood.substack.com/p/cutting-to-the-chase
Is that society going to misunderstand AI and perceive it as an "authority" that is immune to human error, greed, and malice - and therefore even more worthy of outsourcing our individual decision-making to it as the ultimate Magic 8-Ball?