Hacker News Reader

Comment by meltyness | Hacker News Reader

6 hours of testimony that, at most, 2-3% of the country even glanced at is a spectacle in your eyes?

This looks like splitting, or you're deliberately failing to understand how lawmaking works and the importance of making informed decisions at the federal level, in the long term.

Congress constantly grills CEOs, the elite, and victims because it is understood that they reshape society, sometimes for the worse, not always on purpose.

Is a law needed? How do we tax it? Who is being harmed? What is the harm? Can a law be enforced?

The transparency is by default. Not a "spectacle".

View on HN

The US idea of a committee hearing is pure spectacle. There is a reason it doesn’t really exist in any other country. Everything that was achieve here could have been achieve through usual channels of communication with companies and the private sector. It just wouldn’t look as good on TV.

Communication requires two parties, through what other channel is the entire US public to formally express it's concerns to the company?

It does exist in many other countries.

The reason you don't know it is because the CEOs of the biggest corporations in the world don't live there, so it doesn't get any media attention.

Who cares about the grilling of the CEO of Royal Mail in the UK?

If you do, here you can watch it

https://youtu.be/-aFR2E_uG_I

I think that’s very well put. It’s kind of funny thinking that if the commentator made an equally tithy (false or not) saying throwing shade on China in private on WeChat they’d be censured within a day or two.

I mean, civic engagement is certainly a cultural difference, and it's pretty stark I think.

I can remember being in high school, still in the age of minority, and feeling joy when one of the louder, dumber cooks finally kicked off.

I kind of suspect Beijing and the CCP of not being so colorful at the federal level, and rather just being a giant executive bureaucracy with principle, law, and regulation intermixed freely, minimal federation, which leaves them largely ignored by society and festering until they're in your face enforcing lock downs -- like an authoritarian military state.

I unfortunately don't read a lick of Mandarin, and I'm not sure where to get a more optimistic view about what goes on over there, but I'm curious.

Did you watch those hearings? Spectacle is a very generous word.

I haven't watched the TikTok hearing, but I have watched the 4-5 preceding Big Tech-focused hearings basically since "The Encryption Tightrope."

You can't generalize the whole thing as spectacle just because a few of the congressmen choose to grandstand / push an agenda / be generally tonedeaf, I can almost guess that in 6 hours at least some of the concerns are legitimate and merit public discourse even if they are nuanced, possibly quite boring, and have more to do with how OS maintainers and parents should behave.

Everything is in the crosshairs and nothing material is sacred, and it has been that way for as long as I can remember[0]. That's why we hire these people.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhwM3ZMTCR0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com