mothballed

Republican Chester Arthur signed the Pendleton Act / civil service reform, which arguably virtually assured the way to gain power in the civil service was to add people or resources, meaning each president after had to grow the apparatus in order to implement their campaign promises or favors rather than just shit-canning all the previous people and regrowing it to the old size.

Before that the "spoils" system was able to check size of the executive branch as the people were allowed to elect someone to shit-can the previous servants. As it stands now the people have been essentially ripped of their previous voting power to elect an executive to make significant reductions of the civil service.

So I'd argue the Republicans did start it.

To get the party nomination you need to promise lots of things to lots of people, "I'm going to bankrupt the party favors to those who get me into power in order to help the little guy" might be a decent campaign slogan but you damn well better be pushing to put the peasants in debt/inflation as fast as possible if you actually want to get into office -- or else someone else will and snatch the nomination from you.

This guy only got punished because he wasn't enough of a bullshit artist to come up with an implausible but not-provably-false accusation against her, and he actually said the quiet part out loud about how this is used for tyrants. If he had just stuck to the story he overheard she was slinging crack or something he'd have likely gotten away with it with little more than side eyes and maybe some refresher class for appearances.

Lies and evasion. I see why you truly feel the ANC is your representative. Good luck to you.

1) Majority of blacks and SA have been polled as not supporting (or reforming against racist elements of) current bbbee, including citing it being used instead as a vehicle of corruption.

2) You are rebutting a straw man. I said individual blacks deciding on starlink for themselves, not supposed collective decision of some against others via (corrupt) "representatives", precisely because I knew you'd try such deception of arguing a representative means an individual black person who wants internet must agree with it.

3) Representatives != public opinion. Most people can't be single issue voters. See also, medical marijuana was illegal in US during long periods of supermajorities disagreeing with their reps on the issue.

4) "only foreign people like you seem to have a problem with it." LMAO, LMFAO even, there are other SA posters (and Musk) here with a problem with the circumstances, its not a foreigner conspiracy. You can't fool us this easily coming in telling us youre the South African here and you'll tell us its only foreigners when it's South Africans who disagreed with the situation from which many of us first found out about this.

5) "because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here." Curious to see what specifically this refers to. I did see him advocating against promoting genocide through songs calling for the genocidal act of killing of the Boer, which has been chanted in some stadiums and political rallies.

OK so it might be positive sum for blacks if South Africans buy internet from South African Musk (even if Musk vacuums the price as profit) but we can't have that because Musk 'hates' them in your estimation and you've decided individual black people can't decide what that they think about that for themselves even if they might be better off?

But the law criticized had nothing to do with hate or spying, so really you've done something sly and shifted the posts once we called bullshit as an out for a clearly illiterate policy.

I might suggest a basic course in economics. The fact someone else gets all the profit of the price paid for a service doesn't mean you dont also gain from what you received.

This is the problem of looking at intent in law. Plenty of racist law had the intent to improve the country. But is in fact often economically illiterate for helping the populace.

Economic opportunity isnt zero sum. The 'opportunity' the ANC is 'redistributing' is neglect and mismanagement of infrastructure. Kneecapping starlink doesn't do anything for blacks.

I've spent a little time in Northern Iraq and war torn Northeast Syria (Kurdish areas). You can, and I have seen people leave thousands of USD in the street and no one will touch it. That's a ~year wages in the area. Crime exists but you can hand almost anyone a year's wages worth of stuff and be sure they won't steal it, even if they badly need it.

You can call it religion, you can call it culture, you can call it fear of choppy choppy of the hand, or maybe the fact everyone and their brother has a full auto AK, but there's something on a whole other level happening with poor (and also rich thieves) people in much of Africa.

America has $0 property taxes in unincorporated Alaska, and possibly a few other places. The rates are determined locally. I pay very little but we also have no public roads and basically no fire or police -- you can pretty much pick what property tax rate you want if you're a little bit mobile.

If you can stomach it, the seafood canning and fishing industry in Alaska will usually (IDK what the situation is this year) hire anyone off the street, work them 16 hours a day for several months, and give them "free housing." You'll get dumped back in Seattle in several months with at least $10k in your pocket.

Edit: genuinely perplexed on the response. This saved my ass one winter when I had nothing for rent.

The effective tax rates have went down modestly, but approximately no one was paying anywhere near that. They were playing the same financial engineered fuck fuck games that are played today to get around it. It's the poor and middle class that can't get around those tax rates.

The amount you can capture by directly enjoying it is crazy. You get double taxed on your labor. Once when you earn it, another when you spend it, and then the people you pay get taxed yet again on that! Plus their regulatory costs of licensing, insurance, property taxes, compliance, the cut of the shareholders/owners.

If you just do it yourself... there is no one to tax or take anything off the top. It often ends up you double your "income" from your work or better.

55+ crushing it on the asset inflation mania they got at ~zero interest, the youngins left holding the bag of the inflationary cost renting out houses their seniors got negative real interest mortgages for.

A good portion of my family is from the third world. And I have lived in the third world (multiple continents, and some of the most war torn places on earth). The housing situation was something I admired as basically anyone could build and own a house. I found it inspiring and realized then the code and zoning game was largely a scam, walking away with the exact opposite conclusion you had expected. Those people generally built the safest house they could with what they can -- the regulations would only make them poorer and less safe, possibly casting them in the street if they cannot afford to meet them where they're not the building inspector's problem anymore (this is the luxury of the building inspector, the downsides of his vigilance is unseen to him and cast into the streets where they likely have an even worse fate).

>the inspections and building to code costs very little and is free and government provided in most cases.

It would have been basically impossible to build my house if there were code inspections. I was only available weekends.

> Even if you get away with it legally,

I have "gotten away with it" and the house is fully legal and recognized. The county literally issued me a closed permit saying they exempted me from inspections. Instead of building plans it just shows a square on a map.

I'm confused whether you want more welfare, or you're trying to ban jobs below a certain "living" wage floor (which are probably mostly occupied by the poorer).

There is a somewhat intermediate of this, proposed by Milton Friedman, called the negative income tax. I can't say I'm sold on the idea but it does solve some of the problems of the local maximums encountered that keep people trapped in the welfare system and from trying to get more lucrative income.

Doubt I'll ever sell the house. I might gift it to an LLC and then sell the LLC though. Or just bulldoze it when I'm done with it, it has already paid for itself and I never built it with an intent to profit off of it.

My grandpa built a similar house under similar level of scrutiny roughly at the same point in life as I did, it was still standing and in good order when he died. At this point it's basically already paid for itself vs rent even valued at $0.

The fallacy here is you're trying to frame things in terms of "deserving." An African child deserves life and wealth as much as an American one. A guy slaving 16 hours a day ripping shingles off of roofs "deserves" a mansion and high-dollar escorts as much as the playboy heir of some mega-corp. Some starving African child probably deserves to rip the computer/tablet/phone you're writing this with out of your hand and sell it for a bucket of rice to feed his family. Play this fallacy out to its extension and the whole thing collapses in any system that's attempted to roll out the "deserve" system beyond a pretty constrained fraction of its GDP, and then both the deserving and undeserving end up worse off.

I'm sure they've employed an army of lawyers for US IP law which isn't something easily reproducible in Japan.

No you can look down on "us." Just maybe come up with a better plan next time on how to get the non-fascists in power than high-IQ semi-polite versions of calling the voters retards / immoral / horrible while verbatim and literally saying you don't want their votes. If that's what you do, a fascist will come along and come up with a better plan.

You can sit in your tower of better/worse ranking game all you want, you probably are better than "us" but you can't just rest on the fact that you're better and that's going to get you to the finish line.

Yes im absolutely certain the broken redistribution system is one of the most pressing problems in US, but of course its not the only one. Not because recipients dont "deserve" a living but rather it poisons the productive and it provides the wrong incentives to recipients while conditioning them to depend on a bloated government that now has total leverage on their life (and of course, virtually assured votes to whoever are bribing recipients with OPM redistributed away from the big bad other voter), all while speed running towards a ruinous national debt even if they deserved the moon and stars and were paid it.

If you're asking me personally, on this topic? Wide open borders, not even a wall, zero employment eligibility checks, but no welfare. Only way to win is to also benefit others in voluntary trade or seek voluntary charity. I have no problem with "illegal" immigrants, only those who purposefully target and drain the coffers of Americans by popping in for a citizen-baby and then run every public benefit available with their anchor baby.

Part of the reason why immigrants were so successful and beneficial in the 1870-1920 era boom was that labor was so badly needed in the burgeoning age of industry. But really, the other half is there was no other option -- you did something productive or you were completely fucked.

I don't think we'll find a solution then. We'll argue about it until another country finds the solution for us in the form of superior economic success and then the illegal immigrants will start the cycle over there. Shit-canning welfare might be the easiest way to get rid of non-productive illegal immigrants but shit-canning your entire economy works to get rid of all new immigration and then it's not a concern anymore.

No, the EO is dogshit malpractice of executive power. And the amendment is effectively impossible to amend in this day and age. We are stuck with birthright citizenship.

Realistically the only option we have that might work is shit-canning most welfare and incentives for non-productive immigrants to enter and make it pointless to pop out the kid unless you have a plan to make both them and yourselves productive members of society. Illegals showing up and popping out a kid and getting free WIC, claiming (stealing) the newborn citizen's welfare benefits, public schooling, chain migration via anchor baby etc are all going to have to be fixed through congress during some fluke period when the filabuster can be overcome.

If you're going to misportray about the qualifiers I used, why not just say "women are biological weapons" or "people are biological weapons."

You selectively dropped them off, because you are acting with deceit.

Until the 1930s you could mail a machine gun straight to your door with no scrutiny. What point was there in arguing an individual right in the early 20th century when you could mail order a machine gun or TNT with no background check straight to your personal collection and people were literally inventing the precursor to the M1 Carbine in prison with the blessing of the warden. If you want to go back further to the 19th century, privately owned warships with cannons were owned, gattling guns, and everything under the sun by individuals (the main laws, were on storage of explosives/powder -- interestingly even up to this very day it's legal to possess but not freely store high explosives without any license).

You can point out certain collective broad groups like blacks didn't get a collective nor individual legal access to arms, but given how racist the courts and "scholarly" academic institutions were at that time it's no surprise they spent little time covering it and found little representation in the legal system and little scholarly commentary.

It was after the passage of the NFA and the GCA, the main gun control acts of the US, which happened in the mid 20th century, where suddenly all these militia fuck fuck games started to enter the chat (at one point, SCOTUS claiming short-barrel shotguns taxed by the NFA not being protected because the military didn't use them -- they were wrong but the defendant was a dead guy with no representation so it was a poisoned appeal case to set precedent and no one was there to show the light infantry at the time were actively using them).

We weren't, if we were this conversation couldn't get here. If we were you couldn't play the militia fuck fuck game, since the right to keep and bear arms is ascribed to the people and not the militia.

The answer is easy in the plain-text case, whether you are associated with the militia is moot, as the plain text unambiguously says the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

It's only in the non plaintext case can you start handwaving that right is restricted to militia yada yada.

Congress defines most every able body male as part of the unorganized militia and there is no public armory for them to store their arms (this only available to organized militia) at or use leaving only a private armory (consistent with historical at time of founding where private persons stored their militia weapon at home), so I'm not sure it makes much difference in practice whether the right ascribed to the people be connected to being a militia servicemember or not for the purposes of the example of owning a select fire infantry weapon.

Probably the main effect is to grant women and the more elderly the right to bear arms as well.

===== re: below due to throttling =======

>Congress defines… historical precedent… but we were talking about a plain-text reading of the Constitution.

That makes it easy then.

The plain text ascribes the right to the people not the militia so it's moot whether they're in the militia or not in such case to have the right to keep and bear arms.

1) The question I refer to is the ancestor to which our comments are under. A question under which we are responding, but not a question authored by you.

2) My apologies for not being more explicit -- the specifics of the loss of the "libertarian" "crypto bros" is not a wholistic cause but rather a small fraction of the cause but more importantly also a symptom. A symptom of something that happened in broader society of alienated or ignored voters being hoodwinked by smooth talking fascists that showed up with a message more enticing than "we don't want your vote" or "you're a self-selecting bloc of marks" or "your values are fucked." You can hate they're that dumb, or that immoral, or what not but at the end of the day their vote still counts as much as yours.