Manso

We have a government that says it’s okay to eat Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew, but it’s illegal to drink raw milk and eat compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda’s pickles.

James Fallows and me on the U.S. Constitution, NBD

James Fallows, responding to my question on his Reddit AMA yesterday:

[…]our political system is uniquely resistant to change. Our Constitution is harder to change than most other countries’ – and is getting quite old now. If “the Founders” were around today, they would never come up with something like today’s Senate. They were practical-minded people, and they would have seen it as unworkable that (a) a state with over 30 million people had the same representation as one with half a million people, (b) the modern abuse-in-practice of the filibuster makes it possible for an entrenched minority to block majority will. I don’t have the cite here, but a very valuable piece in the NYT a few days ago pointed out that no other countries are copying our Constitution. It no longer makes sense.

I cleaned it up a bit.

And here’s the NYT piece he references: ‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World. One highlight:

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

Thanks to James for pointing my mind in new directions, and thanks to everyone who voted for my question.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

kateoplis:

“Still, there’s a reason for optimism about America’s workforce, and a good lesson to be learned from Apple’s surge. What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms. As Marc Andreessen argued in the Wall Street Journal this summer, “software is eating the world.” Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways and a central kitchen that roasts three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice a day.

So perhaps there’s a different insight from Apple for Obama. Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.

That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop “an economy that’s built to last.”

— Nicholas Thompson

Yes.

The techno-libertarian utopianism that pervades Silicon Valley means that both corporations and individuals buy into the idea that they don’t need to bend anyone’s ear in Washington D.C.

The problem is, D.C. is still going to talk other people. (Notably, the entertainment industry, which has a long, effective track record of getting its legislation passed.) Together they’re going to talk about us, and we can be a part of that conversation, or not. But no matter how much we may wish that Congress wouldn’t listen to lobbyists, it’s an unrealistic expectation borne of idealism that ignores how our broken, dysfunctional government actually works. In the America of 2012, laws are written by lobbyists.

The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair.