World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[Flake]

I just cannot believe all the unforced errors this administration (and its allies) are making. What is this? Open Mic Night at the Government Lounge?

On one hand, I am completely in opposition to everything this administration is pursuing except for infrastructure reform. On the other hand, the seeming incompetence makes me hope we can ride this out and then just chuckle about this 20 years from now.

[Sarge]

This is what happens when you have multiple factions within the party that aren't in lockstep. It also doesn't help that the AHCA was deeply unpopular with many, both from the left and the right. I thought it was a relatively terrible bill.

The thing is, the Republicans sent up a repeal bill 60 times, but didn't send the same bill up this time. They were awfully brave to do so when they knew it would be vetoed, which tells you it was nothing but a show vote, red meat to placate the base. Most of them didn't mean it at all.

[MrPopo]

I also think a factor is that before the passage it was easy for Republican lawmakers to get behind the very conservative wing and go "government healthcare is a terrible idea!" Their constituents who it would affect were willing to listen to their arguments that it will be a bad idea. Then those same constituents suddenly got healthcare. So now those more moderate Republicans are finding themselves in the position of not being able to see eye to eye with the very conservative wing. It's one thing to block something from ever happening, it's another to say "this thing you've got that's helping you? I'm going to take it away." By being hitched to the "and replace" part of the horse it meant that aspect was going to be opposed by the far right, thus removing the advantage of the majority the overall party has in Congress. And obviously the "repeal" part of the slogan was going to be vehemently opposed by Democrats barring the GOP actually coming around and saying "You were right about healthcare, but can we make these tweaks?"

[akeley]

"Online privacy" is a fairly laughable concept in 2017 (thanks fb/Google/whatever !) and yet today`s vote allowing ISPs to sell your browsing history managed to disgust me all the same. Wonder how it went? (I`m in Europe so no news here yet)

It`s time to switch to a VPN full time I suppose, even though I run a fairly tight ship and don`t use the aforementioned internet "friends". Only reason I haven`t done it yet is because some private trackers are fairly sensitive to VPNs.

[marurun]

Thing is, ISPs have always been allowed to do it. The rule that was voted out was scheduled to go into effect soon, so all this does is allow business to continue as usual. That doesn't mean I like it...

Opera has a built-in VPN, though it mostly just encrypts content and does not obscure connection points.

[akeley]

Well, yeah, they stomped on the incoming opt-in clause. A forward-looking bunch, no doubt.

I used to love Opera but things got messy since it went Chromium. Luckily, VPNs are fairly cheap these days. Atm I`m using that CyberGhost from HumbleBundle ...it was only one-machine deal though so will need to shop around for something better soon.

[marurun]

Grrr... The Trump administration is doing more stupid.

Coal promotion (pointless in the face of natural gas, wind, and solar) is the main point of one of his latest executive orders, but that's not the worst part of it.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the order is that federal agencies will be told to stop considering climate change when reviewing infrastructure projects. That includes ignoring things like sea level rise and increasing flash flooding, which could easily destroy the infrastructure or render it irrelevant.

Dumb! Dumb dumb dumb! This will lead us to spending money on projects which will then become pointless or simply fall apart because they were inappropriate.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03 ... lly-drops/

[BogusMeatFactory]

Grrr... The Trump administration is doing more stupid.

Coal promotion (pointless in the face of natural gas, wind, and solar) is the main point of one of his latest executive orders, but that's not the worst part of it.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the order is that federal agencies will be told to stop considering climate change when reviewing infrastructure projects. That includes ignoring things like sea level rise and increasing flash flooding, which could easily destroy the infrastructure or render it irrelevant.

Dumb! Dumb dumb dumb! This will lead us to spending money on projects which will then become pointless or simply fall apart because they were inappropriate.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03 ... lly-drops/

But jobs

[Ack]

We've reached that point where even the heads of Exxon are like "Seriously dude."

[prfsnl_gmr]

We've reached that point where even the heads of Exxon are like "Seriously dude."