311–320 of 411 posts
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That’s not how this works. But the world is a lot better when people can admit the path they chose was wrong.
But... you saw that Trump said he wanted to turn the Gaza Strip into an Arabic Riviera and dispossess all the Palestinians... and he wants to take over Greenland, which is not an American territory? But everything is going great, right?
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Typically, democratic means voting people in Congress in, then Congress votes and represents their constituents. There is a reason the President was not initially elected by the people. The spoils system and the current systems failings are precisely that foresight. When Congress is weak, the Executive is unchecked. Go read the Old Whig 4
Sure, presidential electors should be appointed by state legislatures and the administrative state is unconstitutional. But if we aren’t relitigating all that: we have an administrative state, to which Congress has delegated vast authority. Given that, how is it possible to argue that we should then further insulate that administrative state from accountability to the only elected official who can effectively hold it…
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None of that implies a dictatorship. Also, consolidation in the executive branch does not imply removal of the others.
Where does the consolidated power come from if it's not from the other two branches? Power here is a zero sum game.
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You need experience to preserve and improve a service. If you want to destroy and sabotage a service, you place incompetent people at the helm. Even the CIA lists this as a strategy in its sabotage manual.
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The definition of competence is "having the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully."
You're posting in a forum mainly followed by engineers. Your average experience engineer knows well what a kid straight out of college brings in in terms of ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully. We know, because some of us are tasked with onboarding said kids to come straight from college. Some of us had the privilege of onboarding elite recruits from college, and even they need guidance to be effective at their job.
And you just assume these randos don't? They parachute into organizations, systems, and services they are completely oblivious about, they antagonize and are outright hostile to the existing staff and procedures, they even try to push code without knowing a thing about anything, and this doesn't raise any red flags with you?
> I think they can figure out a government ledger.
Do you really know, though? I don't think so.
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They're more likely to claim the agency knowingly gave $100 million worth of paperclips to the Taliban as part of a Marxist plot.* If you're going to make stuff up, why not go big and viral. * And yes, if you're not keeping up with the news cycle this is a thing that really happened, just with condoms not paperclips.
You have to wonder given the Gaza mix up - they saw money going to "gaza" and assumed it was the usual one rather than Gaza, Mozambique - whether they are going to do anything competently. I mean a techy seeing one word on a spreadsheet that looks iffy and putting hundreds of skilled people out of their jobs as a result is not a great way to run things.
> According to the HHS grants database, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Mozambique received more than $83m in funding since 2021 for reproductive health projects in two provinces: Inhambane and Gaza.
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There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society. Thats the distinction between the settler population (British people and African slaves, with a relatively small proportion of Dutch, Spanish, and French) and the immigrant population (everyone else). America is a country that happens to have a lot of people of immigrant ancestry. That’s an incidental…
> There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society. Irrelevant. The disputed fact was that America was not a country of immigrants. The idiotic assertion raised in the parent post is a refresh of the argument that the Mayflower landed settlers and not immigrants, which is nonsense due to the fact that the bulk of the population of the US are undoubted…