There should probably be some kind of elected position, independent from the three branches, who's sole task is to veto presidential orders to the armed forces. The president having war powers without authorization of congress is probably desirable since congress is too slow, but some quick in the loop sanity check would be useful.
You mean like the ancient tradition of the Roman Censure. Someone who “monitors” the legislative branches and may “veto” any governmental action determined against the public good.
> The president having war powers without authorization of congress is probably desirable since congress is too slow, but some quick in the loop sanity check would be useful.
I disagree. The decision to go to war should always be slow and deliberate. I can't think of a single case where the President deciding to send troops on a whim without consulting Congress or getting their approval first ever worked out well.
I suppose the devil is in the details of "getting their approval" but it's worth noting Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War without seeking a declaration of war with congress.
That's because the United States official position in the civil war was that the south was a part of the US that was in rebellion, and not a sovereign state that we were at war with.
I don't see how that negates the action of sending of troops for combat. You're just arguing an excuse as to why congress wasn't sought to to declare war in this "case where the President decid[ed] to send troops." There is always some excuse for that nowadays, quite conveniently, so you're in good company.
Civil war is always an exception because of the special circumstances. Its not an act of war but a state of emergency which has it's own protocols regarding presidential powers.
A lot of government would be improved by making elected positions be very specific roles.
Why are we deciding military strategy from a guy that was elected to fix labor rights? Should the same guy running the school system also be in charge of selecting Supreme Court justices?
Also, the founding fathers had it right: An independent electoral college should decide elected positions, not the general public. Hiring decisions should be left up to people that are expert at hiring, not random people.
The only role the general public should have in government is deciding their representative - it's literally in the name!
And executive branch isn't supposed to be a representative. It's only role is to execute laws created by the representatives.
I'd argue it died during the civil war. The removal of secession as an option removes the most powerful check on federal power and set the cards for a collapse of constitutional constraints. Obligatory worth it cuz muh no more slavery (as if the white powers that be were ever really willing to die as a favor to the slaves themselves, one of the most laughable but widespread myths about the civil war).
Difficult to see how legalising secession would improve the US's situation right now.
Slavery was actually bad though and it's fascinating because one reads about all these deeply moral Americans who cared strongly about others, often along Christian lines, and you realise how deeply far the US has fallen culturally since doing something as intrinsically good as abolishing slavery. I mean can anyone imagine American society doing something as deeply good as abolishing slavery? The same people who elected Trump twice? I don't think so.
Solar power is 10000x as hard to permit where I live. I was able to connect to the grid without anyone looking at it. Laterally just hooked up a 200amp secondary connection straight to the grid without anyone from the government batting an eye and on the power in the house went. If I wanted even a 200W solar panel it requires a code inspection, a marked roof plan (my house doesn't even have building plans, so how to even do this?), license, special solar bond, and a special warranty and then clearance from the power company.
Fuck that.
Many counties have made it so that solar only makes sense if you are wildcatting it out in some remote place where the planning and zoning fascists won't find you out. In such case you can install it for an order of magnitude cheaper and then it actually makes sense.
Meanwhile I can build a 200 foot tall oil derrick on my land with NO PERMIT WHATSOEVER because of course the oil companies had the political influence to exempt oil related infrastructure from requirements.
I've thought about it. My thought was a giant oil derrick with a bunch of utilities on it. I also thought about just making the entire house part of an oil derrick.
I cannot speak to where you live without knowing where you live, but https://www.gosolarapp.org/ was incubated by a DOE lab to streamline residential permitting with automation, and many states override local planning for permitting and siting utility scale solar.
As always, this is an OSI layer 8 people problem; if you can and want to, get involved.
You can already cash pay to have imaging in my state, without any prescription, then send the images off to some voodoo witch in the Congo if you want. Seems to be the way to do it, just have the hospital do imaging and then the patient does with the image whatever they want. Then the hospital has no liability except in the case they did not image it correctly.
I used an MSR international stove when I was homeless. 1L of some sort of fuel (it takes gasoline, white gas, kerosene, etc) would last me at least a week and at least one form of fuel it accepts can usually be obtained somehow from somewhere. If you can come up with 1 gal gas / person / month it will cook rice or boil some meat easy enough. Of course if there is not even enough gas for 1 ga / person / month I think you are in deeper shit because there's not enough to even transport basic needed supplies and you are probably using mules like in Cuba (in which case, hopefully you can chop down a tree for wood).
I hope somebody would stop him. Using nukes in a war is just too bonkers to contemplate. Sure they would be small, but the road to big starts with small.
Dropping the bomb will be a massive loss for the US as it’ll legitimatize nuclear warfare. Right out of the attack, the US ceases being the first firepower and becomes equal to the rest of the nuclear ones.
Next Russia takes Ukraine in a week and rich countries will buy nukes from North Korea and Pakistan.
Ever play Doom (2016)? It's about renewable energy.
Pesky little--very minor--side effect that it's extracted from Hell, and using it causes the denizens of Hell to spill over to our side. One would say they are "unleashed".
By raising the price of oil so much, our dear leader is trying his level best to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
This is a terrible idea. Assuming nothing bad happens (other than the mass death, of course), there would be shocked pikachu faces from half of Americans and then some, not to mention those in other nations. If something bad happens (edit: other than the initial mass death, of course), the faces would instead range anywhere from panicked to vaporized.
He has considered it. He's a psychopathic fantasist. No one sane would have started this war.
But the consequences would be catastrophic. Not least that Russia would very likely nuke Ukraine to try to force a surrender. And France would have to decide whether to respond in kind.
Trump would not - of course - nuke Russia. Likely not even if Russia launched a first strike.
And it's unlikely Iran would surrender, because Iran has set itself up as a patchwork of semi-independent forces. The immediate response would be a mass missile strike on desalination plants and oil installations in Israel and the Arab states.
The absolute best outcome would be plumes of smoke all over the Middle East.
The worst outcome would be all of the existing minor nuclear nations - North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel - deciding the safety was off, and why not?
This is the guy that ignored warnings that Iran would respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. He was briefed on exactly this scenario and decided he knew better. That is to say he's been proved capable of making incredibly bad decisions, it's just a matter of who speaks to him directly before. One of these days it might be the wrong person.
Interestingly I did a double take when looking this up as there is also an even worse "1976 Cavalese cable car crash" in the same vicinity 22 years earlier, this time the fault of a car operator and a design weakness.
In a twist of fate, the person partially responsible for the 1976 disaster was named Schweizer. The one partially responsible in 1998 was Schweitzer.
So if we are hoping whatever nationality/occupation pair is gone that is responsible for Cavalese car crashes, you'll be hoping to eject more than just Americans (it is not clear to me whether Schweizer was Italian as the last name seems more Germanic and apparently they were a seasonal worker). Maybe instead it is more specific to eject anyone with the name Schweit?zer ...
An overabundance of investment without an outlet would just decrease yields. Hypothetically the yield could go negative.
It is a self correcting problem. If the yields are too low people can spend it on hookers and blow before dropping it into a money shredder. The yield shouldn't drop much below the premium for the time preference of money.
I had a vehicle with no back seats when my child was in a car seat. It was great because I could attend to them while driving. Since there were no back seats they could not cite me as it was an exception to the law.
I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. Sure they're safer in an accident, but when I drove another car with rear seats I found myself constantly looking back to deal with the child thus more likely to cause an accident. Yes maybe you should just neglect your child while driving, but they will exact penance if you do so, by non-stop screaming so loud you can't hear emergency vehicles or other possible road hazards.
This common sense mindset would invalidate so many 'safety' laws and I'm all for it.
Studies make so many invalid assumptions (and usually don't even state them) to force the data / statistics to fit clean a/b or null testing.
But to put a dent in the status quo, we really need a greenlight to just dump however many kids in the back again, no matter the number of kids or seatbelts.
And before anyone gut reacts to this- ask yourself why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?
Probably for the same reason government trucks aren't required to have emissions controls on them, at the end of the day the King will do whatever they like and reason backwards why it applies to the subjects but not the crown.
> I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back.
I thought that a major reason for placing children in back seat was because of the air bags in the front seat representing a danger to them when they deploy.
(But maybe kids don't trigger the weight needed to activate the passenger side air bag anymore?)
You can also usually just turn off the passenger-side airbag. I know there's been a button on every car I've owned to do so, for when you've got something heavy in the front seat that isn't a passenger.
I've never had a car where you could disable the passenger-side airbag. We did have a car like that in the 90s, but it didn't come that way from the factory: my mother had a mostly-irrational fear of them (she was on the shorter side, but not so short that it could actually be a danger for her if it deployed), so we somehow got an aftermarket mod that let her disable it when she was riding in that seat.
Of course, she drove that car often enough too; not sure why she felt having the driver-side airbag enabled all the time was safe, but not the passenger-side airbag. (Mom was... often inconsistent with how she reacted to her fears.)
Check the area near the hinge on the front passanger-side door, there should be a labelled thing you can turn to disable it. (using a key or screwdriver, similar to the rear childlocks)
It might be due to me being in Europe, but every car I've ever seen with an airbag for that seat has had it along with a sticker warning about it in the sunvisor area.
Some newer vehicles will automatically disable the front passenger airbag if there is nothing in the seat or if there is weight in the seat but less weight than a typical adult.
Pickup trucks without a backseat have long had the ability to manually disable the passenger airbag.
Or you are poor enough you get paid to pop out more kids and it's cheaper to uber twice a month to the grocery store because you have no job for which you'd need a car nor the cash to buy it.
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