191–200 of 299 posts
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Even Russian people? Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.
As a Russian national: no, the USA is not yet at nearly the same level of corruption. The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.
In practice, it turns out otherwise.
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This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership. Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many m…
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would…
But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.
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Congress always had the power to remove delegated power from an institution if it didn't like how that institution was performing. It's also had the power to disband the executive branch regime at any point since January 20. Everything that is happening now is happening with the complete approval of Congress.
Correct, and congress hasn't been exercising that power for the better part of a century now. The War Powers Resolution was 1973, for example. I don't know what the exact solution is, but something needs to change in the structure and incentives of congress to incentivize them to exercise power again. Eliminating the filibuster and drastically increasing the total number of representatives seem like the best ways to…
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Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information. Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers…
> We lived through the unregulated version for centuries In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass…
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It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
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I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that. What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.
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> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would…
And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’. But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming t…
This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that: > Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned. They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.
The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under. Just quot…
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The idea that being "bad for business" is a sufficient disincentive to dissuade commercial entities in a free market from harming and killing people is risible. Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money. I expect the argument you want to…
Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in f…