401–410 of 446 posts
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Emm... and what prevents the USA from doing all the same things?
Labour laws, for starters. The conditions the average Chinese works in are abysmal, even from the American point of view.
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>success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course. That's an abuse of the judicial system. Politicians are elected exactly because the voters perceive a need to c…
Perhaps you don't think legalistic bureaucracy should matter, but the voters' representatives in Congress don't agree. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, government agencies must produce legalistic bureaucratic reasons for their actions; they may not act capriciously to suit the whims of political leaders or transient desires for a change. Congress certainly has the power to change this if they want to. But with…
Well, this is sort of against the spirit of the US constitution, at least as explained in the Federalist. I might even call it an abuse of the Legislative system.
I'm not speaking very confidently here, but by the spirit of it, the Congress should not do this much of micro-management of the Executive.
Surely the Congress should pass the laws which _prevent_ the Executive from doing stupid things, in particular collecting too much taxes, but it shouldn't really tell the Executive "do this, in this particular way".
To be honest, I suspect that the actual _reason_ every administration tries to undo as much of the actions of the previous administration as they can is because due to the amount of limits imposed on them by the Congress they they cannot do much else. Fighting the Congress is much harder than fighting the previous administration.
I seriously suspect that if the amount of regulation is decreased, it will actually be beneficial to long-term policy stability, because instead of fighting the decisions of the previous administration the current one would be busy with it's own projects.
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I think it's very telling that your understanding of the present situation is "you hate the other party's President".
The thing I find irritating is that the government has been doing things as bad the things Trump is doing for decades , and those things are actually bad and shouldn't be done, but people are now acting like Trump invented them. Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody c…
For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.
Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.
In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
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The thing I find irritating is that the government has been doing things as bad the things Trump is doing for decades , and those things are actually bad and shouldn't be done, but people are now acting like Trump invented them. Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody c…
Yes I think some of what he's doing isn't new, and yes some of it isn't new, just more brazen, but I think there's also a lot of new. For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term. Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of tr…
This seems like a pretty good example of how Trump is "different" but not actually different.
The traditional way this works is through prosecutorial discretion. You make friends with the politician and then when they're in office you don't get prosecuted or the case gets dropped or settled under favorable terms. Example: When Bush got elected, the antitrust case against Microsoft was effectively made to go away "for some reason" (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-political-...).
Doing the same thing with pardons is way more conspicuous, because instead of something that doesn't happen (prosecution) you have something that does happen, and in public view (official pardon).
Politicians traditionally care about distinctions like that because it makes it much easier to accuse them of the thing, whereas Trump DGAF. But it's fundamentally not a different thing and the actual problem isn't that Trump isn't being subtle about it, it's that they should not be getting away with it even when they are being subtle about it.
> Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions.
Eh. It's not that much different to campaign contributions and it's not really different at all to the longstanding practice of politicians or their family members owning a private company which then gets into a bunch of peculiarly advantageous business dealings while they're in office.
> In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
The problem with this one is it's the hating the other party's President one. Congress passed a law letting the President set tariffs, didn't repeal it for many years, and then the President started setting some tariffs. You can argue that it's a bad policy, you can argue that they should repeal the law that lets him do it, but he ran for office saying he was going to do this, got into office, and now he's doing it.
> There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
There are two kinds of laws in this context.
The first is the ones that punish him for doing something. Those are useless in this context because the executive isn't going to prosecute itself so you're down to impeachment and for that you need bipartisan consensus.
The second is the ones that prevent him from doing something. Take away the law that lets the President set tariffs and he can't unilaterally set any tariffs.
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> The legislature Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R > creates the laws, the executive Donald Trump (R) > executes the laws, and the judiciary SCOTUS (5-4 R) > interprets the laws. So Republicans create, execute, interpret, and enforce the laws. Congratulations on discovering how the party system works. Guess you're Big Poland (PiS) now. You can watch this on the news: Fox (R-Murdoch), CBS (R-Weiss), or read about it…
>> The legislature >Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R It's the Senate , not "Congress". Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives. >SCOTUS (5-4 R) > interprets the laws. Actually, it's 6-3, not 5-4. I get that you're not from or live in the US. Please understand, I'm not trying to insult or demean you. But you're making statements that are not true. I believe the term is "FTFY." And you'…
FTFY
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> The legislature Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R > creates the laws, the executive Donald Trump (R) > executes the laws, and the judiciary SCOTUS (5-4 R) > interprets the laws. So Republicans create, execute, interpret, and enforce the laws. Congratulations on discovering how the party system works. Guess you're Big Poland (PiS) now. You can watch this on the news: Fox (R-Murdoch), CBS (R-Weiss), or read about it…
Republicans don't have a sufficient majority in the Senate.
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GP was mocking you (not calling you names) because your comment was just a classic uninformed (some would even say stupid) opinion, and was presented as you "looking at wind as objectively as I can" Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it. _______________________________ Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim: > there's serio…
There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different. And you didn't address the environmental damage to the oceans. this case is specifically greenlighting off-shore windfarms. Iif this was on land, i wouldn't care what people do with their own money and resources. But it's got serious implications for whales, of which th…
Those are also tiny marginal percentages relative to the amount of fossil fuels that are saved, even if everything is constructed from virgin materials instead of recycled.
> But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
The largest threats to whale populations currently are
1. changing ocean temperatures and PH stressing them, and disrupting their food chains
2. overfishing disrupting their food supply and stressing them out
3. getting entangled in fishing nets, and being struck by boat propellers
Wind turbine installation may be a brief stressor when piles are driven into the seabed (but there are mitigation techniques), and operating noise from wind farms might be a mild irritant for them, but it's quite minor relative, and geographically constrained compared to other more significant day to day noise sources in the ocean such as a shipping, drilling, and fishing.
The impact of wind turbines on whales is inconsequential compared to other much more acute impacts (especially net entanglement and boat strikes). There's a pretty wide literature on this.
> You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
I don't take your complaints seriously because your complaints (whether by accident or by design) happen to very closely coincide with deliberate misinformation spread primarily by fossil fuel companies to try and limit threats to their business model.
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Republicans don't have a sufficient majority in the Senate.
They do. The 60 votes requirement is just a handshake agreement 50 votes + the vice president can remove at any moment.
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I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance. There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very f…
>America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. The same founding documents that insisted that all men were created equal, and that America was for, of, and by those men but not THOSE men ? The same document that spent a significant quantity of it's rather short length handing out provisions to literal slaveowners? Those same founders thought it would be better to split off the wh…