<story><title>A science committee that doesn’t get science </title><url>http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/10/editorial-meet-a-science-committee-that-doesnt-get-science/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>prawks</author><text>Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are &lt;i&gt;clear&lt;/i&gt; problems with the US&apos;s legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I&apos;ll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d love to help change these kinds of things, but I don&apos;t feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I&apos;m just an a-typical slacktivist.&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I&apos;m upvoting this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards.&lt;p&gt;We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being&apos;s lifetime, versus a line of code. We&apos;re an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We&apos;re the world&apos;s largest economy. We&apos;re the world&apos;s reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status.&lt;p&gt;We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy.&lt;p&gt;I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system.&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America&apos;s. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it&apos;s place among the world&apos;s great societies.&lt;p&gt;So if you&apos;re frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn&apos;t get any better than it is now. As I&apos;ve gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable.&lt;p&gt;*) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it&apos;s ridiculous to ask &quot;what does the Constitution mean?&quot; The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!</text></comment>
<story><title>A science committee that doesn’t get science </title><url>http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/10/editorial-meet-a-science-committee-that-doesnt-get-science/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>prawks</author><text>Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are &lt;i&gt;clear&lt;/i&gt; problems with the US&apos;s legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I&apos;ll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d love to help change these kinds of things, but I don&apos;t feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I&apos;m just an a-typical slacktivist.&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I&apos;m upvoting this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goostavos</author><text>I&apos;m right with you on your slactivism. I like the &lt;i&gt;idea&lt;/i&gt; of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics.&lt;p&gt;I just don&apos;t have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I&apos;ll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I&apos;ve tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people&apos;s points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? &quot;Yeah, but.. still..&quot; and then they go back to making their talking point.&lt;p&gt;&quot;But still..&quot; is not a rebuttal, people.&lt;p&gt;I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that &quot;I&apos;m missing the important issue.&quot;&lt;p&gt;So... fuck it. I&apos;ll just go back to studying.</text></comment>