[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

While I  appreciate your narrative, it's not clear to me how that story hardens the digital voting app against the successful exploitation we're seeing in our representation. While the therapist comment seems to be cheeky, there's a good argument to be made that universal healthcare or a basic income or even establishing election day as a national holiday would instantaneously make all American's *better* consumers. Poverty is exhausting. Freeing people up to think a little harder about *who* they're voting for would help a lot. It's fairly easy for us wealthy people to look down on the sick and tired for their ignorance and stupidity. It takes significant effort to restructure the world so that they're less sick and less tired.

Re: Roger's lament of why we can't all work on higher order pursuits, I take Sturgeon's Law seriously, it's easier to foster the 10% of everything that isn't crap if all 100% of us have our basic needs met. Sure, there's some truth to Republican fears that if you give lazy people an inch, they'll take a mile. But by *not* giving the ~30% of the US population near-poverty enough time and energy to *think*, we miss out on whatever it might be any crypto-Musks would think about or work on.

If a digital voting app can help solve such problems, I'd like to know how. If it can't, much like the neuralink, it will simply be another tool by which the rich exploit the poor, by which those of us *with* free time/energy exploit those of us without free time/energy.


On August 30, 2020 1:14:35 PM PDT, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>Fixing things,
>as far as I can tell, will require investment in the capability of the
>American people and the disruption of a program to produce good
>consumers.
>Short of that, I don't know what the next steps will need to be, but I
>suspect those steps will involve a good therapist.