311–320 of 367 posts
What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23998308/tesla-cybertuck...
What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.
You got a laundry list of responses, the take away is that even with modern technology and abilities it is completely impractical to do the sort of inspecting that people seem to think is common place. Even for just one industry, but people seem to think every industry has regulators inspecting every factory. There just aren't enough people or money and if you did somehow do that the bureaucracy would collapse down o…
Yes, sure, it’s impossible to inspect and regulate every single thing all the time. But the US is doing a piss poor job where other nations at least have a decent baseline.
This is by design by the way, underfund agencies so that politicians keep getting money from their corporate buddies.
Even essentials such as food production is abysmally inspected in the US due to too few inspectors being available.
Most EU countries don’t have these issues and their “bureaucracy” hasn’t collapsed down onto itself.
Your comment is just another “this is an uniquely American issue and if we were to do it right the sky would come falling down” type argument that is trotted around everytime a fundamental issue, that has been solved elsewhere, is exposed.
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> If gridlock was intended, what's the purpose of the formal simple majority requirement to pass laws? It isn't a simple majority. You need both houses of Congress (which were originally representing separate interests) and the signature of the President, or you need two thirds in both the House and Senate to override a veto. In theory you could require unanimity, but then you could never pass anything, even if it ha…
> It isn't a simple majority. You need both houses of Congress (which were originally representing separate interests) and the signature of the President, or you need two thirds in both the House and Senate to override a veto. The simple majority I'm referring to is about both houses of Congress in isolation. In the House of Representatives you need 218 out of 435 reps, while in the Senate it's 51 of 100. That's what…
Of course, since they can take as long as they want, that means in practice they can delay the vote indefinitely. But that doesn't seem substantially different than some committee being able to kill a bill by just never passing it through to the full Senate even if it would pass there. It's just another opportunity to prevent government action if there is insufficient consensus.
And "60 votes to end debate" and "60 votes to pass a bill" aren't the same thing, and therefore aren't superfluous. The Senate passes many, many bills by a vote of less than 60 to 40, because many Senators will vote to end debate on a bill they intend to vote against. The filibuster is a means for the minority party to moderate a bill that they generally don't support. If the majority party submits an extremist version of a bill, the minority threatens to filibuster it unless they replace it with a moderate version. Then they don't filibuster the moderate bill but still vote against it, and it passes along party lines with less than 60 votes.
Also notice that it doesn't take 60 votes to amend the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster. If the majority wanted it enough, they could remove the rule and then pass whatever they wanted with 51 votes. But then so could the other party, the next time they're in the majority. There are enough Senators who don't want to see that happen the next time they're in the minority that there aren't 51 votes to change the rules. Even if there are 51 votes to pass a bill the other party is filibustering.
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The standard for corruption is higher than “I don’t like your decision.”
So you think anyone can get their trades reverted on the stock exchange if they ask nicely? Oopsie, I clicked the wrong button, now please revert the trade that lost me some money. If some get such preferential treatment it's clear cut case of corruption, you don't need to catch them with the proverbial smoking gun to know it
Much easier to just go by gut feeling though isn't it.
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> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have. This immediately falls apart, by that logic we should literally have no government or society to speak of. "Only as much power as you think the worst possible person should have" would mean literally no power - there isn't a single decision in my life I would pass off to the worst person I could think of. Wha…
In addition to all of the theoretical responses provided, I would also say that the US has withstood the test (so far). Trump is probably one of the “worst”* people and held the highest office. And yet despite the fact that it happened, the US is still chugging along. Bad things happened but the quality of life is similar to pre-trump presidency (as long as you are willing to discount for covid’s impact on the world)…
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In addition to all of the theoretical responses provided, I would also say that the US has withstood the test (so far). Trump is probably one of the “worst”* people and held the highest office. And yet despite the fact that it happened, the US is still chugging along. Bad things happened but the quality of life is similar to pre-trump presidency (as long as you are willing to discount for covid’s impact on the world)…
Interesting, if Trump is so bad, why do you think half of the country will vote for him?
The reason Trump is popular is because he is willing to lie and make false promises in order to gain support. Any one can do this, you just have to have no moral boundaries and some charisma. For example how Enron, Theranos, and that crypto guy are able to defraud billions of dollars from investors.
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> The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances I don't think this viewpoint can be supported empirically. The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that there's no split possible between the executive and legislative branch. I think the result of this in the US is that…
I'd argue that the US biparty system tends to have fewer checks and balances than a parliamentary system. In many ways, it's winner take all. President + 50%+1 in the lower legislature + 50%+1 in the upper legislature = a huge amount of power. Historically, I think it's been exceedingly rare to have as finely balanced government as recent times have featured. And to me, the Supreme Court is less about the people curr…
Those are 3 separate bodies, each independently elected.
Versus the parliamentary system where it's one election for a combined executive and legislative and sometimes with a token senate. Power is far more concentrated than the US system.
What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.
Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1] Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people w…
What's funny about this is that if you were to ask a group of brokers (IE: the ones with authority over the business - terminology is inconsistent between states...), they would probably tell you that the state has a great deal of oversight, but I'd agree with you - by and large no one is actually watching them. I was with a group of fellow brokers not long ago and it came as a clear surprise to them that the state would no longer be actually auditing them. The state wouldn't make it official policy, but it was a wink and a smile that they wouldn't. There were gasps around the room and it was really rather an insightful moment. While I am new in this role, it was obvious to me the state wasn't actually auditing anything - and frankly, why should they unless they've had a consumer complaint? But the fact that very experienced brokers were surprised by this was interesting.
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> The founders themselves would have told the modern Supreme Court that it's bonkers. > expected large swathes of it to be amended and replaced Would they have? There exists a mechanism to amend the Constitution, and it seems reasonable to me that the Supreme Court would insist on textual originalism until the text is amended through that legal process.
Here's Thomas Jefferson writing to James Madison in the early 1790s: "The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water… (But) between society and society, or generation and generation there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation…