Check out my digital garden: The Missing Premise.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • In a sense, that’s how this works and always has.

    Presidents are very limited in what they can do by design. Most presidential campaign promises rely on the planets to align (i.e.: Congress to actually do it’s job and legislate, which it often doesn’t). Presidential failure is misnomer, imo, because it’s Congress who writes the laws. Biden’s executive orders can be overturned as easily as he overturned Trump’s. At best, the president provides a vision on where he thinks the party should go but Congress does the heavy lifting.

    And if he fails, not only do we not get the progressive promises, but the other president takes more away.

    That’s how conservatives think too about their president: if he fails, not only do they not get to roll back the administrative state, but then a progressive can tax the more to put more criminals on the street.

    The misconception is that this must be a bad thing. What makes it bad is that Republicans are bat shit insane and want control of everything. But if their views were not moderate and they believed in democracy, then it wouldn’t be so bad. Still disappointing though.


  • Term limits.

    A president’s first term tends to follow a particular pattern: bold action at the very beginning to see what they can get through Congress. They focus on things that will improve their chances to be re-elected. Biden likes to cite the Inflation Reduction Act and it’s policies and some others.

    Toward the end of their first term, they start looking forward to our year long election season. There’s less policy implementation and more campaign promises.

    Assuming they get re-elected, they can’t be president for a third term so why not go bigger than the beginning of thy first term? Now they can get to work with worrying about the political consequences because there are none for them. And the greater their accomplishments in their second term, the better their party looks.

    In short, political incentives differ between terms, with term limits making bolder action more desirable and likely.









  • Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”

    I’m right there with him. I have a hard time seeing how all this technology has made a better society.

    Sure we wiped out Polio, but we don’t have a society anymore where a modern Jonas Salk would not patent the vaccine and give it away for global health. It wouldn’t make economic sense.

    We might have televisions with 8k resolution, but we’re watching a show of people living their lives rather than living our own.

    Social media is ubiquitous and ironically the reason the US has a loneliness epidemic.

    What’s the point of all of it if society isn’t better off? It just feels like we’re wasting energy to waste energy then become alarmed when they energy creates problems, so them we have to waste more energy to solve it.

    Imo, it makes me sense to…just stop. Take a step back, sit down, and chill out.