51–60 of 153 posts
Nasa.gov[1] and justice.gov[2] resolving and have valid TLS certificates for me. > In the end, nothing good will come out of this shutdown. Some people believe increasing border security and funding to reduce crime, reduce sex trafficking, and better protect border agents and law enforcement as good. [1] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=nasa.gov&latest [2] http://ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=justi…
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Nothing to do with SSL, but a fair amount of US government websites are hard down, on purpose, due to the funding dilemma. Like: https://www.data.gov "Due to a lapse in government funding all Data.gov websites will be unavailable until further notice." Which is pretty odd, because putting up these blocker pages probably costs more than just letting the sites run unattended.
It's not just salaries, though, they technically have no budget. So there's no money to run the servers.
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Because most of the government is a waste of money and exists merely to perpetuate itself. The fact that it just shuts down sometimes is a great indicator of just that. It’s an entity that is accountable to nobody because no matter how well or poorly it performs it just collects revenue anyway. You can’t #deletegovt. The sooner people move away from viewing it as a good employer, the better. There’s no smooth or eleg…
Instead of downvoting the parent, make an actual argument instead. You'll find it difficult. If the current shutdown proves anything, it's that many functions of the federal government are un-essential to daily life. Those un-essential parts should be eliminated.
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Maybe we can stop being obtuse? The senate can end this by passing a budget and override the president's veto. They're choosing not to.
This is the part that people so easily forget. The power is truley in Congress' hands. That said, appropriations bills must originate in the House and the new speaker and flock of freshman Representatives haven't passed anything yet.
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Trump is asking for less than 1/1000 of our annual budget for border security. We spend 10x that on foreign aid annually. This entire thing is political BS over what amounts to a rounding error while congress almost unanimously approved $38 billion in money for Israel
Maybe we can stop being obtuse? The senate can end this by passing a budget and override the president's veto. They're choosing not to.
For sound political reasons. You may not like those reasons, but they aren't being "obtuse" in the sense they do not understand what they are doing because they lack the wits to comprehend. Minimizing your opponent with those kinds of terms risks you underestimating them.
The "base" that voted in most of the Senate voted in Trump. At the federal level, they pretty much count as a single voting bloc, and that's very powerful in the electoral landscape. And for that base, the wall is very nearly a single-issue vote factor (among a few other issues that base holds similarly dear). You may not like it for various practical reasons, but they currently vote slightly more consistently than Democrats in slightly more precincts where it counts. This might tilt soon to Democrats for demographic reasons, but for the purposes of analyzing this record-breaking shutdown, we must take this base's effect seriously.
Both the Republican senators and Trump need to at a minimum show that base that they were overridden by the Democrats on the wall issue, or they will definitively lose in 2020. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not hold a super-majority to force both houses to pass a bill, retrieve a veto from Trump, then override the veto. So the Democrats are stuck in a deadlock legislatively.
Where the Republicans are vulnerable is public sentiment. If the Democrats stir up public sentiment against Senate Republicans by somehow showing all Democrat politicians are throwing in their financial lot with affected Federal workers and simultaneously casting the GOP Senate Republicans as "Richie Rich" Marie Antoinette's, then that can weaken Senate Republican resolve to block Democrat-sponsored funding bills enough to punt the ball into the executive branch with some ass-covering statements to their base that they were somehow legislatively outmaneuvered by the dasterdly Democrats.
The problem with this kind of approach is realistically, even many Democrat senators are relatively wealthy [1], and quite a few Republican senators are not Scrooge McDuck diving into gold coin piles. It's political theatrics through caricatures, and Trump has a proven, astonishing ability to out-theatrics his opponents and make it stick (that's the part that continues to surprise me), and that's a wildcard.
But if the Democrats somehow neutralize the Federal workers' pain, and convincingly show they can outlast the Republicans (probably by showing they'll take it all the way to 2020 if necessary), then they defang the GOP's obstructive strategy. It would take a hell of a big war chest, however. Which is why I don't see it ever happening.
Would love to hear others' ideas on how Democrats can force Trump's hand on this shutdown issue, as this is certainly an interesting political problem that will be studied in the future by students of politics.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr...
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Because it doesn't actually impact most people yet. Obviously that's cold comfort to the government workers who are currently unpaid, but I guess people are selfish. The shutdown is a cumulative thing. For instance, the FDA food inspections aren't happening. For a week, it's not likely to make a big difference. But a month? Three months? Eventually people will get sick and it'll be a huge issue. TSA agents have mostl…
> Trump has even said the shutdown could last months, but of course you'd be an idiot to take him at his word. Wait, why? I was considering this as a possibility before he said anything about it. It totally seems to me like this could go on for multiple months.
Serious question for US members of HN: how do you tolerate these shutdowns? I mean, apart from the loss of services, including websites, it seems like many federal workers aren't being paid. Will they be paid back after the shutdown impasse is resolved or is the money they didn't/couldn't earn lost to them. This seems unfair and, in the meantime, how are they supposed to go about their lives? Overall it seems potenti…
I realize this is being portrayed in the media as a total government shutdown, but that's really not the case.
The US has multiple levels of government. Federal, State, County, and Municipal.
State, County, and Municipal governments (which are the ones that really provide essential services), are operating normally.
For the Federal government, any self-sufficient or quasi-self-sufficient operations (like the USPTO, USPS, etc.) are unaffected. Any operations that already had their budgets passed are unaffected.
We're talking about a fraction of the total government here. There's more drama here than anything else.
Yes, there are people whose lives are affected, but they're a small fraction of the population. I believe there were estimates of 400k? Even if we bump that up to a million to be conservative, we're talking about 0.25% of the population.
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Government departments are legally required to budget for the possibility of a shutdown, which means they have to keep the money around that they will use to shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
Yes, but this coupled with the fact they shut down things that don't otherwise really require a human to actively working proves that it's all just a political ploy.
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Because it doesn't actually impact most people yet. Obviously that's cold comfort to the government workers who are currently unpaid, but I guess people are selfish. The shutdown is a cumulative thing. For instance, the FDA food inspections aren't happening. For a week, it's not likely to make a big difference. But a month? Three months? Eventually people will get sick and it'll be a huge issue. TSA agents have mostl…
> Trump has even said the shutdown could last months, but of course you'd be an idiot to take him at his word. Wait, why? I was considering this as a possibility before he said anything about it. It totally seems to me like this could go on for multiple months.