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[Strife26]

In my opinion, users of drugs and alcohol should not be allowed to use something as dangerous as the internet. Therefore, I propose that any online crime committed under the influence should be (at prosecutor discretion) charged with an additional crime. Surely we can trust the hardworking prosecutors of America not to do anything stupid when restricting rights.

[smjjames]

Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of filling those vacant positions.

Then we'll find out what happens when those positions are unfilled....

[Puzzlemaker]

Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of filling those vacant positions.

Then we'll find out what happens when those positions are unfilled....

Sounds more like a sour grapes situation.

[smjjames]

Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of filling those vacant positions.

Then we'll find out what happens when those positions are unfilled....

Sounds more like a sour grapes situation.

It's more of a question of 'how well do those stuff function with the vacancies?' if anything.

[milo christiansen]

Trump just ordered this rule revoked.

Not bad, now to loosen the laws protecting "wetlands".

BTW: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was twisting the law like a pretzel to get those rights. The only thing they had on their side was a mandate related to "navigable waters", which any reasonable person would see does not apply.

If you have seen some of the thing I have seen declared "wetlands" (and the owner thereafter not able to do anything with) you would also be happy for anything bringing the EPA and USACE to heel. In some cases farmers couldn't even fill a little 1/2 acre hole because "wetlands" (don't you mean "mosquito infested thing I have to farm around"?)

But from what I have seen most forumites are city kids who know nothing of how things are in the world outside their concrete jungle.

[Puzzlemaker]

Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of filling those vacant positions.

Then we'll find out what happens when those positions are unfilled....

Sounds more like a sour grapes situation.

It's more of a question of 'how well do those stuff function with the vacancies?' if anything.

I meant more like, "I can't get these positions filled, therefore I don't need them."  Sour grapes is when you devalue something because it is out of your reach.

On EPA:  I view the EPA as more important for stopping people dumping poison into rivers and turning the earth into venus 2.0
While they certainly aren't perfect, I don't believe completely hobbling them is a very good idea.

[smjjames]

The ditches and drainages bit does seem ambigous and self contradicting because the summary says that it applies to man made ditches which act like streams. IMO it should also apply to ditches and drainages that funnel water to source of drinking water, or a stream that goes to a source of drinking water. The whole point of it is to protect sources of drinking water.

@Milo: That's true for me, heh, though I don't know if it's 'most' forumites as theres all sorts of walks of life. Though I agree that the one example of 'wetland' that you gave is definetly not a wetland, unless theres a thriving ecosystem, but yeah, something like that also sounds like a health hazard.

[Strife26]

There are things scarier than Reagan's famous nine words. "I'm from the government and I'm *not* here to help" is certainly among them. There's certainly good work to be done by EPA and as person from a farm state, farmers are very, very willing to screw everything around them, but getting embroiled in a kerfluffle with the Feds guarantees a lot of wasted time and money for little benefit to anyone.

[smjjames]

California isn't a farm state. We have plenty of farms, yeah, especially central valley, but it's not a farm state in the way say, Iowa, is.

[palsch]

BTW: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was twisting the law like a pretzel to get those rights. The only thing they had on their side was a mandate related to "navigable waters", which any reasonable person would see does not apply.

Well that's just false.

From the Vox piece I linked;

To understand this rule, we need to go back to 1972, when Congress passed the Clean Water Act. That law features dozens of regulations for anyone discharging pollution into the “waters of the United States” that could affect human health or aquatic life.

For instance, under the law, a facility storing oil that could leak needs to prepare a spill prevention plan aimed at minimizing discharges. If the facility is far away from any “waters of the United States,” however, it doesn’t face these requirements.

Now here’s the tricky part. The Clean Water Act doesn’t precisely define what “waters of the United States” actually means. That’s left to the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers. And it’s a subtle, complex question. For instance, the law is clear that major navigable rivers and lakes and the waterways connected to them should be protected. But what about streams that are only loosely connected? What about streams that are dry for part of the year?

In the 2000s, this ambiguity led to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that only ended up creating more bewilderment. In a split decision in Rapanos v. United States in 2006, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that Clean Water Act protections applied to wetlands that “significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other covered waters.” But Justice Antonin Scalia argued that protections only applied to wetlands "with a continuous surface connection" to navigable water — a far smaller number of wetlands. And it wasn’t totally clear which opinion took precedence.

"The short answer is that the state of post-Rapanos wetlands jurisdiction is a mess," Richard Frank of the University of California Davis told Greenwire in 2011. In the ensuing years, whenever a dispute arose over whether a landowner needed a Clean Water Act permit or not, courts had to resolve it on a case-by-case basis.

So under Obama, the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers tried to bring clarity to the matter. They sifted through more than 1,200 scientific papers to figure out which types of bodies of water were clearly important to aquatic ecosystems and therefore deserved protection, per Kennedy’s opinion. And they found that many upstream tributaries that fed into larger bodies of water were essential — and had been too lightly regulated.

So basically it was a science-based approach as to what the law needed to cover to clarify a legal mess that required legislation over every individual case to see who needed permits and who didn't. All of the exemptions that existed before the rule existed after, and all of the regulation that existed after existed before. If anything the rule restricted the EPA more than it did before. As this piece concludes, after going through the arguments against the rule;

If the Trump administration withdraws or weakens the Clean Water Rule, it is likely to leave regulators interpreting case by case whether tributaries and adjacent waters are covered, as they have been doing since 2006, and land and water owners guessing about what they can do with their resources. So in the end, repealing the rule won’t answer the underlying question: how far upstream federal protection extends.

This is instead likely to strain the EPA's resources due to extra legal questions and fights over what they should and shouldn't be doing. Remember that such things go both ways; the EPA can be - and often is - sued for not enforcing the law when the environmental impacts have knock on effects. Until and unless the Clean Water Act itself is repealed the EPA must enforce it, only now it is less clear what that means.

Seriously though, that Vox piece is a good read and has a lot of juicy external links.

[Frumple]

Rural all my life, here. Floridian, even, so I've been in a swamp the whole time.

It's something to be complaining about wetland when the EPA et al is what's between these shitholes being just shitholes and being shitholes with poisoned water tables and toxic waste in the nearby woods. Folks 'round here actually include some old people, that remember times when the EPA and related environmental protections were weaker. If you think those were better times, you weren't actually paying attention to what they were saying.

Personally, I don't want to go back to buckets of battery acid being dumped in the river without a care in the world. On top of all the other shit. Haven't met that many farmers that all are that supportive of it, either, if you can get them to speak on particular issues rather than vapid broad stroke bullshit. Not the small ones, anyway, that actually have experience with what's on the other side of environment laws for the folks out here that ain't giant farms or industries looking for somewhere to tuck death slow or quick away from the cities.

Now, the big farms, lot of those ones that would love not having to care where their pesticide runoff is going, again, and to hell with their neighbors and the local land.. Plenty of folks want enviro laws weakened, but not a single goddamn one has rural residents or small farmers interests in mind.

[milo christiansen]

Runoff is a problem, mostly due to idiots who put too much on (#1 reason they are idiots? putting too much on wastes money.)

Filling in a skeeter hole is not a problem.

The EPA is needed, but over the years it has become too strong.

[Strife26]

So instead let's castrate it and see how things go. Let's see how long it takes before the rivers run orange.

Gubberment: an especially blunt tool

[Starver]

Trump makes unsupported claim that Obama was 'behind' town hall protests

"I think that President Obama is probably behind it, because his people are certainly behind it," Trump added. "In terms of him being behind things, that's politics, and it will probably continue.

By now, it's pretty obvious that many things Donald says are Freudian slips of his own practices (accusing Clinton of abusing trust funds, the press of making up baseless fake facts, prior officials of dubious connections with foreign powers, etc, etc, etc).

Thus I'm half inclined to believe that (whether or not it had any effect) he's inadvertently revealing what his people have been doing at some point...  His memories of a strategy meeting, whizzing around, just found themselves suitably filtered and put straight back out through his mouth or twitter-fingers, as we've seen before, without any intervention by his self-control centre (probably huddled off in a corner).

[Rolepgeek]

Runoff is a problem, mostly due to idiots who put too much on (#1 reason they are idiots? putting too much on wastes money.)

Filling in a skeeter hole is not a problem.

The EPA is needed, but over the years it has become too strong.

Over the years the environment has gotten worse, so it makes a certain amount of sense.