An American Privacy Emergency(scottaaronson.blog) |
An American Privacy Emergency(scottaaronson.blog) |
Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.
Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.
One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.
I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.
Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.
I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.
As they say, freedom ain’t free.
Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.
Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.
The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices!
Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses!
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[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...
Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.
And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...
pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question
Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.
This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.
It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.
The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.
So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.
Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.
Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.
As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
It's too bad this has become political.
I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
You mean legislation?
We do GDPR-compliant reporting by using differential privacy to provably remove PII.
The true crisis here is in the captured political system.
In the 1990s in Australia a racist, white supremacist party arose called One Nation through a very weird confluence of events that led a racist fish and chip shop owner by the name of Pauline Hanson to become a member of parliament. It was almost 30 years ago she gave her now famous miaden speech to Parliament [2].
After some scandals, One Nation kind of disappeared for awhile, in part because the conservative coalition (of the Liberals and Nationals) basically adopted the racist platform in the early 2000s where asylum seekers were effectively scapegoated. But weirdly she's back now. Anyway, that part isn't the point.
Australia has a preferential voting system, what tends to be called ranked choice voting in the US. You generally have two options on how to vote: you can individually number candidates yourself or you can use the registered preferences for a given party. In this case you put a "1" in Australian Labor Party, Australian Greens or whatever. A lot of people do this so preferences matter. Anyway, One Nation had a strategy of voting gainst the incumbent with preferences. So if it was a Liberal seat, the preference went to Labor and vice versa. This scared the bejsus out of the political establishment such that the opposing political parties gave preferences to each other over One Nation, leading to One Nation getting no seats in Parliament despite getting 10%+ (at its original peak) of the popular vote.
My point here is that too many politicians and political parties view their seat as something that belongs to them. In the US primaries are treated largely as a formality by the parties for their anointed candidates. Re-election rates in Congress have sat at 95%+ for decades.
What's interesting is that the Demoratic Party is almost in open revolt currently and over the past few weeks, several long-term (10-30 years) incumbents have been primaried by insurgent candidates.
Here's a funf act I learned this week. It's been ~18 years since Citizens United basically got rid of campaign spending limits. A third of all the money spent since then has been spent this year on primaries. Thomas Massie has $35M+ spent against him in his primary, making it the most expensive in US history. Many others are in the millions. It's estimated that the total spending for the Senate seat in Maine will push $400M. For one Senate seat.
All of this is a long way of saying that the only thing that will work is making these legislators fear they'll lose their cushy positions. And really if somebody has sat in office for 30 years and has nothing really to show for it, it's time for them to go.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
more urgent is to repair the broken election process especially in california where it now takes 30+ days to "count" the votes.
UHC requires the removal of politicians from qualified input, and this country's politicians love nothing more than to get overly involved in things they know nothing about.
You think social democrats never heard of a balanced budget? I don't know how you "fiscal conservatives" take yourselves seriously.