[slt2021]

I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency.

For example in USA we would have budget ceiling crisis, and both parties try to ram through a law to bump up the debt ceiling "to prevent government shutdown". It is being sold as a measure to keep government afloat and running, and is usually ran through pre-holiday like Christmas.

But what actually happens, is thousands and thousands of pages of various pork is rammed through with various cutouts and carveouts for special interest groups due to lobbying.

Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.

[arlort]

> and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time

This is a horrible idea in practice because everything that is public and open turns into a purity test.

You need people to be able to negotiate with each other in order for consensus to be established, and negotiations only work if the negotiators give up on something that they want to get something else. The moment you make this public all that you get is people turning negotiations into a way to generate soundbites and scared of doing any actual work because they'll just give ammunition to their opponents.

This is doubly bad in the US with the primary systems which makes legislators even more vulnerable to attacks from their flanks.

Legislators are not elected to be proxies for the voters, that's not how it's supposed to work. They're elected to use their judgement, that's why there usually aren't recall elections or restrictions on how they can vote etc.

As a matter of fact I'm of the opinion politics everywhere would be a lot better if plenaries, committees and hearings were not recorded or televised in the first place. I'm ok with minutes being made available but I'm convinced without being able to clip soundbites or tiktoks out of every meeting legislatures would be a lot more productive. Definitely more so than if we attached a camera crew to everyone in politics for "transparency"

[Shacklz]

> As a matter of fact I'm of the opinion politics everywhere would be a lot better if plenaries, committees and hearings were not recorded or televised in the first place.

At that point we might as well get rid of the press, as otherwise someone might be able to hold someone actually accountable to their actions and decisions. Taking the argument ad absurdum, might even go back to monarchy so we don't have to deal with informed (or quasi-informed) voters to begin with.

I get where you come from, that the public perception of politics is mostly soundbite-driven is indeed a huge issue, in my opinion probably one of the biggest issues of our century, as it allows absolute incompetence a democratic pathway to power by playing to human basic instincts and emotions.

But as long as we want to cling to democracy, the voters _must_ have a way of knowing who is doing what, who is involved in which decision, and what favors are being traded. How else is a voter supposed to make an informed choice?

EDIT: To address the soundbite-problem, I think systems that are more oriented towards consensus democracy (proportional elections, chance for referendums etc.) rather than competitive democracies (first past the post, majority takes all) are more stable against it. Election systems should favor choice of opinion rather than choice of persons, if that makes sense. I think especially the US (for context, I'm Swiss) would benefit a lot from such changes; right now it seems all outrage-driven.

[arlort]

> At that point we might as well get rid of the press, as otherwise someone might be able to hold someone actually accountable to their actions and decisions

Minutes are a thing, you know? And I'm not saying all sessions need to be held behind close doors, I'm perfectly fine with journalists or the public being present

> _must_ have a way of knowing who is doing what, who is involved in which decision

They do, that's what elections, roll calls and minutes are for

> and what favors are being traded

You're implying this is actually possible, it's not. Favours will always be traded in secret and deals made. All that the radical transparency proposals do is making sure that compromises can't be done effectively in official settings

[daedrdev]

This is because the budget is the only bill of significance that passes in the US in many terms

[ekianjo]

> can be tracked online for transparency

Government and officials will fight to the teeth to avoid accountability and transparency because that's where the money and power is.

[yard2010]

Some people are motivated by ideology rather than greed, which makes stuff a lot more interesting.

[aredox]

Then who voted into law the current accountability and transparency laws?

[ekianjo]

Do you see much accountability anywhere right now?

[eru]

> I would love to see more governments operate on a Git-first basis, so that each and every decision/contribution can be tracked online for transparency.

Alas, that sounds like a great idea in principle, but is probably a bad idea in practice.

Speeches in parliament (or on the senate floor, in the US) are already public. And that's a big reason those speeches are useless: they are just used as grandstanding to the general public.

The real work in finding compromises happens behind closed doors. That way you avoid producing sound bytes that can be used against you next election season. Especially from challengers in your own party, who could otherwise accuse you of being insufficiently pure.

[scroblart]

yeah transparency is bad news, the real problem is voters demands for purity from their politicians

[eru]

No transparency at all is also bad.

I'm afraid an ugly compromise of muddling through with some transparency is the best we can get in practice. At least if your democracy features voting, and especially first-past-the-post voting.

As one alternative, filling your parliament up via sortition might eliminate the downsides of transparency.

[KennyBlanken]

> Public needs to know who when and how is adding these lines and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time, not post-factum.

This is what the press and various independent groups already do. They have people that pour through the stuff, as well as getting tips and press releases from congressional reps and third party interest groups. It's just that there's only so much they can cover, and most of the public can't be bothered to do more than turn on the evening news.

There's a lot of good, in-depth journalism out there. You just have to look a bit harder for it.

[umanwizard]

How would using git prevent what you’re talking about? Instead of one congressman proposing a bill with thousands of pages he hasn’t read, he’ll submit a pull request with one commit whose content is thousands of pages he hasn’t read. What difference does it make?

[__MatrixMan__]

If I were putting government procedure on a blockchain, I'd want something stronger than SHA1 for the edges.

[dullcrisp]

What? Why?

[__MatrixMan__]

Because it's outdated and not fit for use in adversarial contexts: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha...

Most git repos are not adversarial, so they get away with using it. A malicious commit which put a loop or a fork in your commit history would just be rejected--if not by the software, then by the maintainer.

But if you're tracking the state of some legal procedure in congress or whatever, you really don't want anybody playing games with history, since presumably it would determine important societal outcomes like whether a bill became law.

[dullcrisp]

I thought the explanation was that SHA1 collision attacks on git repositories weren’t feasible, not that we don’t care about people sneaking things into our git repositories.

[__MatrixMan__]

I did a bit of research (landed here: https://marc.info/?l=git&m=115678778717621&w=2). It's not that

> we don’t care about people sneaking things into our git repositories

But rather that in the event of a collision, git would not sneak the attacker's malicious code into your repo. The best such an attacker can expect to achieve is to create confusion. In a project-maintainer scenario, that probably just means rejecting the PR--hardly an outcome that would justify spending the money on the hash collision in the first place.

In a we're-voting-on-whether-or-not-to-change-the-law scenario, confusion about the outcome of the vote could have dire enough consequences that an adversary might indeed care enough to bother with the calculation.

That's not to say that this is the only way in which git would be a bad choice, it's just the first that came to mind.

[refulgentis]

I don't want to be mean or assert without evidence, but, I'm not really sure how to respond: #2 simply doesn't happen, or even close, and it's also not a common partisan interpretation I'm being smug about. It's just flat out wrong, both parties don't try to ram a bill through, the government actually does shut down, and there's no calendar association.

[dh5]

I believe there actually often is a calendar association but only because the US fiscal year starts October 1st, and funding legislation needs to be enacted before then.

[refulgentis]

Your'e right. Raising the debt limit is a separate event, in theory there could be a shutdown if no appropriations are passed October 1st, and that was the flavor through 2000.

The idea that there's some sort of forced budgetary event on the calendar, related to the debt limit, that's then raced through to have competing solutions, then laden down with pork is Not Even Wrong, i.e. in the Pauli sense, and plainly wrong.

You raising the October date does leave open that maybe they're thinking of budgets and think the minority party in Congress has peer footing as a solution / is required to make a budget. That, at least, would explain the pork mention.

[slt2021]

[flagged]

[refulgentis]

No, please consult Hacker News FAQ re: come with curiosity, good comment is something we learn from, comments get more nuanced as thread continues.

Separately, I can't tell how the articles are related.

I am not claiming there has never been a debt limit issue in US politics, if that is what you are asking.

[prawn]

Are those thousands of pages made public at the time?