Does the pledge of allegiance actually do anything? I can't even remember if I did it in school. I first thought "oh, my State must not have done the pledge in school", but after more reflection I think I did but just doing remember.
I went to a grand total of five schools in Florida: one grade school, two middle schools, and two high schools. The first two were in upstate conservative Florida, the last three were in Orlando (which is comparatively more progressive).
Wow, that doesn't terrify you? We're talking about a thing that, if you did it, you would have done at least ~2000 times in a typical 12 years of school. Every morning. Do you remember other school events?
Sure sure -- I can't tell you what I ate for dinner on an arbitrary Tuesday or something but a routine thing from 12 years? Knowing whether or not you did that routine at least? Seems like something you should probably remember? I donno I'm only 36 maybe it just gets lots harder from here.
It reminds kids that they live in the United States, and that the country has values, and that they will be expected to defend the country as part of the social contract. I don't know if other countries have pledges like this but on the surface it seems OK to me. I think it also inspires worthwhile conversations about what we owe to the country (or not).
As I've never said "The Pledge of Allegiance", this seems to be the original one, I'm guessing there might be some other modern variation schools use today, but anyways:
> I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
I wouldn't be surprised that most people see it as a joke today, given the "with liberty and justice for all" is far from reality today, and it's very obvious to anyone.
> I don't know if other countries have pledges like this but on the surface it seems OK to me
Generally not, AFAIK. On the surface it seems like blatant propaganda to me, and kind of extremist, something you'd see not in a modern country typically.
That one was modified some 75 years ago. Nowadays it's worse:
> I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The flag is no longer yours. The Christian god, despite supposedly being a secular nation of differing religions, is the leading principle.
There are really two values expressed in the pledge. "Liberty and justice for all" and "the nation is below God." I'm happy saying that the former is a national value, though it is rarely achieved in practice. The latter... oof.
It is definitely propagandistic. Even if we ignore the religious component, it more expresses an idea that "liberty and justice for all" is already achieved rather than being a goal to strive for.
I'd rather they pledge allegiance to the values rather than to the country. I can see defending those values as part of the social contract, but not the country. If the country and the values are aligned, then sure. But if not, then it is no longer worthy of that allegiance. Otherwise, you can wind up with something like Nazi Germany where people have to go along with it because "my country".
If you think about it, the main reason for the Bill of Rights, and especially the 2A (I vehemently disagree with guns in today's world but I understand the original purpose of the 2A), is because they understood that governments can be subverted away from the country's values and citizens need protection from the government in such cases.
I've said before that we need strong legal protections for white-hat and even grey-hat security researchers or hackers. As long as they report what they have found and follow certain rules, they need to be protected from any prosecution or legal consequences. We need to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is this is literally a matter of national security, and currently we sacrifice national security for the convenience of wealthy companies.
Also, we all have our private data leaked multiple times per month. We see millions of people having their private information leaked by these companies, and there are zero consequences. Currently, the companies say, "Well, it's our code, it's our responsibility; nobody is allowed to research or test the security of our code because it is our code and it is our responsibility." But then, when they leak the entire nation's private data, it's no longer their responsibility. They're not liable.
As security issues continue to become a bigger and bigger societal problem, remember that we are choosing to hamstring our security researchers. We can make a different choice and decide we want to utilize our security researchers instead, for the benefit of all and for better national security. It might cause some embarrassment for companies though, so I'm not holding my breath.
> we need strong legal protections for white-hat and even grey-hat security researchers or hackers.
I have a radical idea which goes even further: we should have legaly mandated bug bounties. A law which says that if someone makes a proper disclosure of an actual exploitable security problem then your company has to pay out. Ideally we could scale the payout based on the importance of the infrastructure in question. Vulnerabilities with little lasting consequence would pay little. Serious vulnerabilities with potential to society wide physical harm could pay out a few percents of the yearly revenue of the given company. For example hacking the high score in a game would pay only little, a vulnerability which can collapse the electric grid or remotely command a car would pay a king’s ransom. Enough to incentivise a cottage industry to find problems. Hopefully resulting in a situation where the companies in question find it more profitable to find and fix the problems themselves.
I’m sure there is a potential to a lot of unintended consequences. For example i’m not sure how could we handle insider threats. One one hand insider threats are real and the companies should be protecting against them as best as they could. On the other hand it would be perverse to force companies to pay developers for vulnerabilities the developers themselves intentionally created.
An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.
He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
Politicians want power over people in the country, but also internet technology is one of the only things the US is best at, and so we don't want the entire world dividing into separate internet silos.
(The other things we're best at is having a huge military and having legally protected free speech, which is ironically being weakened, as you say.)
California has lots of restrictions on firearms. When I lived in the state, I had to get a firearm safety certificate (which involved paying some money and taking a multiple choice test), present my ID for a background check, get my thumb print taken, submit two forms of proof of my address (such as utility bills), demonstrate safe handling of a firearm, and wait 10 days. A cell phone bill didn't count as proof of address, only fixed utilities like water & electricity. I'm sure this denied many renters the ability to purchase firearms. Also I could only purchase firearms on California's roster (a whitelist of firearm makes and models). Popular firearms such as 4th generation Glocks were not on the roster, though cops were allowed to buy them. Also firearms couldn't have threaded barrels (it's a felony to put one on your gun) and magazines were limited to a capacity of 10 rounds.
Carrying a handgun for self-defense was impossible, as the local authorities only gave out permits to those with political connections. This caused a scandal in 2020 when the Santa Clara County Sheriff was caught issuing concealed carry permits to bodyguards at Apple in exchange for iPads.[1] Thanks to Bruen[2] it is now possible for any law-abiding citizen to get a permit if they jump through all the hoops (which includes fingerprinting, a psych eval, and examination of your social media posts), though it can take over a year to process the application and costs can exceed $1,000.
At some point the law changed to require a background check to buy ammunition, which always failed for me. I never figured out why, but my guess is that my name didn't fit in the state's database. This sort of thing happened to around 10% of legal gun owners in the state. I never got it sorted out before I moved away.
You have described the lawmaking process of basically any country. We can't actually write laws to solve real problems because real problems are hard and you can actually tell whether they've been solved or not, but we can write laws to solve imaginary problems and then when nothing changes declare victory.
You can pretty much tell when any given administration has run out of ideas once they start making a huge amount of noise about laws that affect to first and second order literally nobody. 3-D printed guns is basically California's version of illegal immigrants voting in elections. Both things happen to a vanishingly small degree that it's not worth taking any action on either, but you can make them sound like they're the greatest threat to America if you have a megaphone loud enough.
> We can't actually write laws to solve real problems because real problems are hard.
Not making excuses for politicians, but nearly all big bureaucracies start exhibiting this same behavior. It is the lamp post fallacies of problem solving.
> Both things happen to a vanishingly small degree that it's not worth taking any action on either
Eh, small thing there. Ever notice how when discussion about voter ID laws in the US come up that commenters from other countries are absolutely blown away by the idea of not having to show an ID when you vote? Because it’s such an obvious thing to not just leave up to the honor system, like we do? Point being, everyone else seems to think this “thing that could never happen” is worth safeguarding against.
You're right it's a very obvious thing that you should have to show your government issued ID to verify who you are to a civic function, and that relying on the honor system is something that seems like it could never work because elections are serious and people have vested interest in particular outcomes and so would obviously look to cheat.
But this is what I'm talking about it being a theoretical problem. It's so obvious that this could be an issue but it's not an actual issue and the USA stands as an example that, counterintuitively, you actually can rely on the honor system. And so because the system currently works as it is and there's no real problem to point to I think it is reasonable to be inherently suspicious of the motives of a government that wants to make a thing harder without being able to point to a concrete problem.
A less controversial example on hacker news would be having to show your government ID to access porn. We are all rightfully suspicious of the motives of a government that wants that when to most Americans it is plainly obvious that there is not a real problem being solved. It's so obvious that you should have to show proof that you're 18 in order to access 18 and up material but we have more than two decades of proof that just asking them if they're 18 and up works well enough.
I think you’re making the mistake of assuming that this thing that we can’t really verify (because we can’t make sure <person voting> = <person registered> at the polls) isn’t happening, precisely because we can’t accurately verify it. It’s not a theoretical concern that voter rolls can be stale (because of not removing dead people or people who have moved in a timely manner) or otherwise inaccurate. And attempts to actually purge voter rolls always meet stiff resistance as some nefarious ploy to disenfranchise voters. There is at any time a non-zero chance that you could vote using the name of someone who’s either dead or not around any more. So why so much resistance to safeguarding against that? Nevermind the added benefit that a national ID card could be used as a real replacement for Social Security numbers. But again, so much resistance to something that every other country thinks is a good idea. Which is even more assuming since we point to “well everyone else does it that way” for so many issues. But voter ID? Oh, well that’s complicated, couldn’t possibly work here.
They meet stiff resistance because they're always done at election time and only selectively.
Voter ID laws are a non-starter because historically they've been used, along with literacy tests and civics tests, to disenfranchise people who can't get an ID. For example, in Idaho you must have "proof of your identity and age" like a birth certificate or citizenship certificate, plus proof of residency like a utility bill or rental agreement or employment record.
These things are easy for most people to provide, but people who are in unstable living situations may find these things impossible to provide. Requiring those people to provide ID at the polls would effectively disenfranchise them.
Who is verifying the documents? If the names have to match, what about people who change their names? What documents should they present to prove that that's their real name? How will the election worker actually verify that the documents are correct?
Women who have changed their names after getting married have a higher burden of proof than people that have not changed their name. The folks who wrote this act are aware of this.
The SAVE Act, in particular, puts in place criminal and civil penalties for election workers that fail to properly identify someone. But a random election worker is not equipped to make that judgment perfectly and is going to end up making mistakes, since document verification for things like birth certificates is completely manual.
Young voters are more likely to have the documents like a birth certificate back at their parents' house and they're not likely to yet have a passport. Likewise, poorer voters do not have the resources to easily obtain these documents. Passport costs over $100 in the United States and for someone that doesn't travel often is not a very good investment. Just because you can't afford an expensive government document does not mean you're not entitled to your vote.
If Silicon Valley has taught me anything, it's every time you add friction to a process, fewer people have the resources and/or are willing to go through it as they drop off the funnel. In this case, it's targeted at the young, the poor, and the women. We used to be a nation that would say: get out and vote! Participate in our democracy! Now we're looking for excuses to not let citizens vote if they can't prove on the spot that they're a citizen. Papers, please.
And all that for what? Multiple institutions, including the Cato Institute and the U.S. Department of Justice, have found no evidence of meaningful voter fraud. This is because identification is required during voter registration, which is effective in preventing illegal immigrants from voting. This is why we tie voter registration to things like getting a driver's license at the DMV. You already have all your documents prepared that you gathered for that visit, and so that's the right time to be checking all of them.
It would be easier to buy the "I just like the stock" argument for voter id despite the absence of a concrete problem if…
1. Voter turnout wasn't already shit and we're about add friction for very little practical gain.
2. The people pushing for voter id laws also pushed for things that reduced the disparity like a national id, a program to get it in the hands of every American, automatic registration when interacting with the government, literally anything.
It's unfortunate that we can't work up mechanisms to encourage and reward voter registration and participation as well as make the process a bit more dynamic, say have a 100 day window for primaries and caucuses, states/districts get to pick a day in order (with no two picking the same day, not picking adjacent days if possible to not) based on voter registration and turnout for the previous election.
> Regulating actual guns that are frequently used in crime? Unlikely.
Well, two things. First, your phrasing implies there’s no regulations around firearm ownership at all, which is not true.
Second, much to the chagrin of California and similar states, that pesky second amendment exists. Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky. But presumably regulations around what you can do with a 3D printer are much easier to handle from a constitutional perspective.
> Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky.
Not really. They do whatever regulations they want all the time. It's just sometimes federal government steps in and forces certain local laws to not be enforced.
I was able to get CCW permit in LA only due to such intervention.
There also exists a pesky fourth amendment that should protect people from laws like this but unfortunately it doesn't have the industry and lobbing that the second amendment has.
You can use an LLM to generate first drafts of flashcards that you import into, and later revise in, a true spaced-repetition system — such as Mochi or Anki.
For learning new material, make your LLM assume a Socratic position. Kagi Assistant has a custom Study model that does this. The key is causing the model to increase your friction (causing learning and memory) instead of decreasing it.
I feel like you'd be better off generating (or manually compiling) the dataset you'd like to memorize and then using existing spaced repetition tools to learn that data.
I suspect it would be less effective to learn similar-yet-slightly-different LLM-generated content generated every time you want to study.
When the LLM enters the "card" into the API it would define the required information, and then every time it would ensure you cover the required information. You could tell the LLM, "make sure I remember the date of this historical event", and then the LLM would ensure you mention the date when answering the card. If you get the date wrong, then it does the API equivalent of pressing "wrong / again" in Anki.
You write "wherever possible", but: Have you ever seen the beancounting itself having been under scrutiny?
I'd wager a big part of it is also the same politics based asymmetry that's visible everywhere; like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or people only get credit for managing a crisis, not preventing it in the first place.
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