when it started getting really bad, i started replying stop. it maybe made things a little better but i still get a fair number if these (including this one). it definitely hasn't made it any worse.
Penalties for violating the law would either be the monthly salary of a lawmaker or 10% of the value of each asset they buy or sell.
Because I'm sure no one would make more than that and just take the trade off. And then take credit for saving the tax payers money. That's definitely not the kind of thing that would happen in the Congress I know.
This generational. I've seen a number of names I thought of as grandma names come back into fashion. People who are young enough not to have experienced grandmas with those names pick them. Gertrude is a grandma name to me, BTW, not a great-grandma name. I actually had a grandma named Gertrude. Welcome to old. (Edit: my brain glitched from Mildred to Gertrude there. Looking forward to Alzheimers.)
Maybe, but if true it means that whether the child is choking on feathers or bowling balls, they are ejected at the same speed, which is a great advantage of this technique.
The solution to this is either reform from within, or by regulation. The former requires that involvement that I talked about, starting at the local level. That is how grassroots works. Reform has happened before. We did not use to even have democratic primaries.
We could argue about which of those two approaches is more feasible, but I would argue that any regulation from above is going to be incomplete and imperfect, and the people involved are going to game the new system just as they have before to their advantage and to hold onto power. The only long term solution is more involvement from below. Democracy cannot work with the minimal level of involvement that we have come expect.
Not at all, nor am I saying it's a good system. But the realities of how individuals shape the system and determine who is making discisions starts at the local level, and happens over time, and it does come to reflect the interests of those who choose to participate, and not those who don't. This is just the reality of how power operates.
Where do you think 'the party' comes from, the people who make these bad decisions? Are you active in local politics? Do you educate yourself and vote in local elections? Most people act like the only election there is, is the presidential election, and wonder why they feel disconnected from the choices. Well there are a million small choices going into who that pool of bad choices is winnowed from, and who is making backroom decisions playing into it, and most people are clueless how any of it works, uninterested to learn, and completely checked out. Well that's how we end up here.
i love when scientists take a swamp of arbitrary language terms and decide to impose some arbitrary specific meanings on them for purposes of their specific discipline and then convince people who don't really get how language works (i.e. most people) that the definitions are authoritative. it's fun to watch the cognitive dissonance when this collides with actual usage and people get all angry and righteous.
when it started getting really bad, i started replying stop. it maybe made things a little better but i still get a fair number if these (including this one). it definitely hasn't made it any worse.