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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

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Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#301

Post by oblio »

kyrra wrote: post #282
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.

Haven't the Swiss solved this?

Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#302

Post by SoftTalker »

jdc0589 wrote: post #286
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground. It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I hav…

There's a widespread misunderstanding about what congresspeople do.

They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#303

Post by johnnyanmac »

giantg2 wrote: post #123
mjamesaustin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones. Hooray for the Senate!

"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones." Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.

When larger states have half the seats they should have, it's very easy to overpower a larger state.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#304

Post by rootusrootus »

chimeracoder wrote: post #285
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned. The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person…

I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#305

Post by dashundchen »

hattmall wrote: post #235
whimsicalism wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.

I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that some people / land area are simply far more important than others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is more meaningful as a matter of state, but there positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw value than others. The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US…

I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that premise, it is immediately undermined by California.

California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.

Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?

Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.

So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#306

Post by noelherrick »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #293
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system. The real biggest problem in the US…

As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#307

Post by cthalupa »

rootusrootus wrote: post #290
cthalupa wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact…

I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.

Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA.

I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#308

Post by oblio »

hemp_is_canvas wrote: post #60

I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about 2020 when I discovered it. It's been quite the journey watching the industry boom and evolve and get better and better. I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic. Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night. On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant. I can…

> On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant.

There were at least 3 posts on /r/all yesterday.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#309

Post by pwg »

Y-bar wrote: post #140
danudey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires: 1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population 2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent…

> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with. > Thus comes the senate, where a ma…

> What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?

The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51 seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous state (California) receives two, just like a very small state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here refers to population, not land area]

If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2 senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a simple majority, all by themselves.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#310

Post by Terr_ »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

Equal State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I propose a workaround:

Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.

This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.

For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely.

This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before.

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union

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