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Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

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Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#881

Post by 4ad »

peteretep wrote: post #274
melling wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you haven't been paying attention. Many people don't believe in Global Warming, or at the very least don't want to even slightly impact the economy. The Democrats weren't going to hold office forever, and neither will the Republicans. The best thing for everyone would be for market-based solutions that have clear advantages. Solar, wind, electric cars, nuclear, etc. Republicans, for example, will put solar on…

> Many people don't believe in Global Warming I spent a lot of time reading the "Ask Trump Supporters" Reddit this cycle. Climate Change was one issue where almost all of them broke with their candidate, which was pretty interesting to me.

Surely you don't think reddit is a representative demographic for the american society...

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#882

Post by piotrkaminski »

ubernostrum wrote: post #782
postcarnival wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what, then let's offer solutions and try to get them enacted? why all the armchair bitching on this site as if everyone is an expert just because they write code? what he did is nothing short of monumental and he WANTS to help America. If everyone is so damn smart then get involved and suggest changes. It's not like he's a fucking robot that is going to sit back and count how many marble statues he has in his gard…

Want money out of presidential politics? Make everybody run using only the presidential-campaign fund. You know, that one that you check the box on your tax return to give a couple bucks to? As for Congress, we also already have a good fix, we just never got around to passing it. Congressional politics are full of money because the districts are too large, on average. The districts are too large because in the 50 sta…

I applaud the principle, but I think having 6400 (320M / 50K) members of the House of Representatives may be a little much to get actual work done.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#883

Post by notahacker »

redler wrote: post #834
adamgravitis wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus

The actual Tacitus quote doesn't really serve your argument. It's "The more corrupt the government, the more numerous the laws." -- you've got it backwards. Complexity is one thing (although it should be obvious that complex domains often require complex descriptions). But number is arbitrary. Suppose there exists a set of three distinct regulations regarding ways to safely manufacture a drug, and a dangerous new pro…

The other thing is that presumably it's easily circumvented by dressing up multiple distinct regulations as a single new regulation.

If you make a habit of making regulations long and multifaceted because scope to pass new ones is limited, it probably becomes easier to bury terrible ideas in amongst things people actually really want to pass.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#884

Post by awqrre »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #43

Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. The scariest things for me are the backing out of cli…

> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated.

Doesn't sound that ridiculous to me, we have to find a way to eliminate useless/ridiculous regulations because they just pile on...

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#885

Post by syshum »

onion2k wrote: post #854
burgreblast wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you guys deal with re-factoring code? Imagine a codebase that has been largely additive for 100 years. While the "+1 minus two guideline" has plenty of shortcomings in the long term, there is lots of low hanging fruit now, and it's an important mindset shift. Guys, don't just add LOC. Refactor, clean it up and make it better. Remove blocks we don't use anymore.

Government is strongly limited by time. There's a hard ceiling on the amount of things that can be proposed, debated, and voted on within a term. Consequently, if there are things in the statute that are no longer used it's often better to simply ignore them than to spend precious time in the house arguing about removing them. It might only take 5 minutes to call the house to order, have someone stand up and say "We…

>>>Government is strongly limited by time. There's a hard ceiling on the amount of things that can be proposed, debated, and voted on within a term. Consequently, if there are things in the statute that are no longer used it's often better to simply ignore them than to spend precious time in the house arguing about removing them.

That is exactly why all laws should have sunset rules built into them.

We should have listened to Thomas Jefferson who wanted all laws, even the constitution itself to expire every 19 years

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#886

Post by dagw »

adamgravitis wrote: post #786
redler wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not unlike how an opposing party will criticize a bill based on its number of typed pages. The thump of a couple of inches of paper on a podium makes for great and reductive theater. It's likewise naïve to consider the number of regulations to be a direct barometer of the goodness or badness of regulation in general. Next we'll see the refactoring of existing regulations into smaller or larger components to a…

Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus

Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal

Sure, but the priority order should be: complexity,length,number.

Simply concatenating 50 regulations into one super-regulation is not a win.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#887

Post by notahacker »

laughfactory wrote: post #818
JosephHatfield wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how elections themselves aren't term limits. You want to end someone's reign, vote them out. Am I missing something?

You're missing the incumbent bias. It's well known we prefer the devil we know to the one we don't--even if we objectively have good reason to dislike the incumbent. Which is to say if, after electing someone to office, we immediately 1) forgot we voted for them, and 2) became completely unaware of their continuing existence and actions in office only then would elections be truly a sufficient substitute for term lim…

But of course incumbent bias is still dependent on the candidate not being unpopular.

I can see arguments for term limits, particularly in positions where the composition of the electorate means the other major party isn't likely to seriously challenge the governing party's preferred candidate (usually the incumbent) which makes their position very safe indeed.

But anti-corruption isn't one of them. Arguably, from a point of view of anti-corruption, the incumbent needs the special interests a lot less than the new challengers...

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#888

Post by awqrre »

nkw wrote: post #152
kbenson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the thing to do would be higher interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law. Sure, but how many of those exist at a federal level? Those are often city, county and sometimes state regulations.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/711 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/707 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/710 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/46 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2285 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1716E https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1730 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1762 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/…

> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1730

no postal service carrier uniform allowed on Halloween

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#889

Post by Aoyagi »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #872

"SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections." -- sounds rather Russian, don't they have a law now forcing Amnesty International and others to register as "foreign agents"?

Yes, but I don't see any parallels there.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#890

Post by seanp2k2 »

dgacmu wrote: post #279
nkw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/711 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/707 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/710 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/46 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2285 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1716E https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1730 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1762 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/…

Some of those can and should be consolidated - but they're not all quite as flippant as you might think. The prohibition of transport of water hyacinth, for example, is because it's a massively bad invasive species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichhornia_crassipes#United_St... Sure, it too should probably be consolidated - perhaps under the Lacey act or the Plant Protection Act or Alien Species Prevention and Enfor…

Yeah, once AI can do stuff like that, I'll be impressed. Right now it's somewhat useful but the consumer applications are all just lame gimmicks.
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