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[Folly]

Anybody of the psychological mindset to pursue presidency isn't someone interested in having less power.

Elizabeth Warren vows to pass law if elected allowing for presidents to be indicted

[Trekkin]

9 people can only handle so much. The small size of the Court serves as a hard limit on caseload, which is a good thing.

Even assuming that's true, though, we're nowhere near that limit, which makes me think a bigger Court wouldn't necessarily be any more productive.

In any event:

A system of checks and balances between branches falls apart as soon as you decide "This branch is checking and balancing me. IT MUST BE DESTROYED."

Okay, so did the system fall apart when McConnell packed the federal courts for conservatives or at some point during Trump's stonewalling of Congress?

[sluissa]

Anybody of the psychological mindset to pursue presidency isn't someone interested in having less power.

Elizabeth Warren vows to pass law if elected allowing for presidents to be indicted

And that, I think, is where my support for her ends.

Not that it's her craziest statement yet. But it's pure pandering, pure populism. The rules in place are in place for a reason, and while they're being abused horribly right now, they still have their purpose.

Almost any president is going to have to make some difficult decisions. Whether that's simple economic issues or sending soldiers to war. Any given decision is going to affect millions of people and some of them, at some point, will inevitably be damaged by the decision, even if the decision is the correct one for the country overall.

The legal protections for a sitting president are to allow them to make those decisions. The proper way to keep a president from doing anything too far out of line are the checks and balances that are already in place. That means congress can refuse funding, or impeach. That means the judicial branch can rule actions illegal or unconstitutional.

The problem isn't that we can't indict a sitting president. The problem is that the people who are in charge of reigning in a president going nuts aren't doing their jobs correctly because they care more about party politics than they do about the welfare of the country. The system we have in place isn't perfect. But it works well enough if the people in positions of power mostly... doesn't even have to be all... but mostly do the jobs they're supposed to do. But that's not happening right now.

[Egan_BW]

Is it easier to fix the system to work when congress doesn't do its fucking job of checking the president, or to fix the congress so that it does its fucking job?

[Folly]

The problem is that the people who are in charge of reigning in a president going nuts aren't doing their jobs correctly because they care more about party politics than they do about the welfare of the country.

This problem can then be traced back to the voters who keep those people in positions of power despite the fact they are not doing their jobs. Which then calls into question the very spirit of democracy. People need leaders because they are too stupid to know what's best for themselves. But if people are too stupid to know what's best for themselves, then how can they be trusted to pick someone worthy of leading them?

[Egan_BW]

Nobody can be trusted to pick worthy leaders, because finding a human worthy to lead is impossible~

[sluissa]

Is it easier to fix the system to work when congress doesn't do its fucking job of checking the president, or to fix the congress so that it does its fucking job?

It might be easier to fix the system, but this isn't a fix. This is breaking the system even more... and what worries me isn't that the system will be broken after this... but the fix that comes next to "correct" this blunder could be even worse.

Personally I'm going to put blame on the party system. Break that up. Make it so that people are more beholden to their voters than their parties. Make it so that you don't have a string of congresspeople afraid of bucking their obviously nutso president because he's the defacto leader of the party. Make it so that you don't have some idiot who can't get voted out because of their districts' demographics leading a chamber and enforcing their dumbass will on the rest who can't get a word in edge wise because "procedures".

The two party system is what's breaking this country.

[Levi]

Demarchy!  Demarchy!

Your politicians can't get too corrupt if you just assign the job to random people in your country.      

[Trekkin]

Personally I'm going to put blame on the party system. Break that up. Make it so that people are more beholden to their voters than their parties. Make it so that you don't have a string of congresspeople afraid of bucking their obviously nutso president because he's the defacto leader of the party. Make it so that you don't have some idiot who can't get voted out because of their districts' demographics leading a chamber and enforcing their dumbass will on the rest who can't get a word in edge wise because "procedures".

The two party system is what's breaking this country.

And how do you propose we "make it so"?

[Max™]

That is something which pisses me off about old white fuckbags like Sanders, for all the good his socialist-flavor ideas could do, the stupid old cunt is anti-nuclear. If you are anti-co2 for some reason (read: anti-poor people improving their standard of living) then you are either pro-nuclear or a monster.

Aren't those estimates sort of bullshit however? I recall a lot of those pro-nuclear things completely omit the costs to build the plants, or to decommission the plants, or store the waste, and only look at daily operating costs / outputs.

https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power

Nuclear is super-expensive if you factor in all costs. Also, there really aren't enough reserves to dig up to expand nuclear. It's estimated total cost-effective sources total 230 years of fuel at current rates. 2/3rds of that are not-yet-discovered but predicted sources. So there are about 80 years of known, viable sources of uranium. But that's at current rates which total 5% of worldwide energy needs. Scale that up merely by 4x to account for 20% of energy needs, and the known proven uranium reserves run out in 20 years, much too fast to even locate the remaining sources or develop tech to extract more uranium cheaply. Add to that that solar is only going to get cheaper and cheaper every year. Plus, the plants would take decades to come online, and the building process will create tons of CO2 in the meantime. It's a losing proposition.

Sure, we can say "but thorium" to get around the uranium issue. Except, then we're banking on a sci-fi answer of coming up with currently non-existent tech.

None of the alternatives are remotely viable, so if you want to get off fossil fuels but don't want nuclear and understand that nuclear waste is a bullshit bogeyman then you should have to come out and say "I hate poor brown people and don't want them to improve their standard of living ever."

[Madman198237]

Max he literally just outlined the reasons why nuclear fission is not a cure-all for energy problems and is indeed possibly not even a viable option to provide a serious percentage of world power consumption.

And thinking that nuclear may not be a true replacement for fossil fuels does not make someone a racist and, well, class-ist? I guess? Anyway, claiming that it does is patently ridiculous.

As for nuclear waste being a "bogeyman", well, I suggest you do research as to why exactly we have limits on exactly how much radiation people are supposed to be exposed to and just how radioactive and long-lasting nuclear reactor radioactive leftovers last as sources of dangerous radiation.

Solar, tidal, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, none of them is going to make fossil fuels go away. However, if you are smart and make use of all alternatives where each of them is appropriate, then yeah you could manage to almost completely reduce or outright eliminate dependence on fossil fuel energy.

[wierd]

There's a big issue with renewables, and Trekkin hit it on the head;

See for instance, the idiots in my own area.

There's a huge wind energy deployment that wants to get regulatory approval in my area, tied up because "The revolving shadows! THE REVOLVING SHADOWS! And the WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP noises! OMG! AND THE LIGHTS! OMG, THE BLINKEN LIGHTS! IT MAKES ME INSAAAAANNE!'

Yeah, I wish I was kidding. Here. have a bit of local press coverage.

https://www.hutchnews.com/news/20190410/reno-county-wind-farm-opposition-remains-strong



People are fucking idiots that dont comprehend the larger picture. I agree that the people doing the deplopyments need to be held liable for any ACTUAL damages that might happen (You know if a turbine blade falls off or something), but seriously, we have people arguing about fucking shadows here. FUCKING SHADOWS.

"Oh yes, global climate disasters and raging crop failures! GIVE ME THOSE! Not those dreaded whooping noises, blinken lights, and oooh-- SCARY SHADOWS!"

Idiots.



It's the damn marshmallow experiment done en-mass, and people are too dumb to figure it out.

"COAL NOW, AND DISASTER LATER!! Thank god theres no blinky lights, strange sounds, or scary shadows! I'll take that radioactive plume of coal ash any day!"

 Vs

"OMG, shadows and noises, and blinken lights that are new and scary!! Oh, but lower energy rates, and a move towards a sustainable energy source that doesn't kill the planet."


Except people dont see it that way.  They see it as "WHAT!? CHANGE!? OMG!! You want to build tall things that make noise and have flashy lights so planes wont crash into them!?  But.. But...!!"

And they start making absurd demands and excuses to prevent such developments.

Fucking shadows.  Really,  FUCKING SHADOWS.

[nenjin]

What blows my mind about nuclear power is that we essentially have these giant reactors just to boil water, to make steam, to turn turbines.

We need that future tech were fission products are directly translated into usable electricity, rather than what we currently do which is have a huge, elaborate process for making steam which generates radioactive waste water. (Can't do much about the disposal of fuel cells.) I get that it's better than using coal fuel, and requires less total volume and space than either hydroelectric or wind power. But it's still amazing to me that all the power of science and nuclear fission essentially comes down, still, to just making steam.

[Lord Shonus]

A system of checks and balances between branches falls apart as soon as you decide "This branch is checking and balancing me. IT MUST BE DESTROYED."

Okay, so did the system fall apart when McConnell packed the federal courts for conservatives or at some point during Trump's stonewalling of Congress?

McConnell used slimy tactics to take advantage of a perfectly natural opening on the Court. Not only was this limited to a single seat only capable of shifting balance within the existing system, but he took a massive political risk by doing so - had Clinton won, she'd have had every right to nominate a candidate far less moderate than Garland.

As for Trump's current stonewalling,  that is a serious failure of Congress to check the President properly. The proper solution to this is to give the relevant Senators a strong rebuke in the next election for refusing to step up.


Still, neither of these are even a hundredth of the danger that court-packing represents. By way of an analogy, introducing court-packing as a response to McConnell's behavior would be "you didn't die when you stubbed your toe, so it must be OK to shoot you in the face."

[wierd]

No, what you need is FUSION.

Did you know that helium is a rapidly disappearing commodity? Do you understand the implications of not having access to helium, once its all gone?  Maybe you should.

Know what fusion produces?

Helium.