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I think there's actually a helpful analogy to software development here. If your company can only release once every 2–8 years, then naturally the releases wou

by notJim 5y ago

I think there's actually a helpful analogy to software development here. If your company can only release once every 2–8 years, then naturally the releases would become huge. Unfortunately, our government is so bogged down by divisiveness and the filibuster, etc, that is the state we're in. Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. As a result, that bill becomes enormous, just like the software release. As with software, the fix is likely to make it easier to pass more small bills, but the very systems that lead to the current status quo make reforming it nearly impossible.

nybble41 5y ago
> Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. The fact that they want to pass bills which only have a bare majority and not a super-majority is a big part of the problem. If you can't get super-majority (or more like near-unanimous) approval for your bill, odds are that it's not good law or something the government ought to be doing. But the focus is always on these huge, controversial proposals with razor-thin margins and getting them passed over the strenuous objection of approximately half of Congress and a large fraction or possibly even a majority of the population at large. In short, the system is utterly broken.
- int_19h 5y ago
  To be honest, at this point whether some policy is "partisan" or not rarely has anything to do with its merits, and more about where it originates from, and how it's packaged. Just look at those studies when people were asked about "Obamacare" vs "ACA: (the latter has a lot more support, even on the right!). So those razor-thin margins? They're not necessarily because the bill in question is not good. Indeed, the very politicians who vote against it might concede that it's good - in private. But they have elections to win, and voters to rile up to win them. Not to mention that Congress, by design, is not really a good representation of public opinion. In fact, Senate is skewed so badly at this point that it's possible to pass and ratify a constitutional amendment through votes of politicians representing less than 1/4 of the country's population, so long as they're concentrated in the right states.
idrios 5y ago
Yeah I really like the analogy to software. I noticed the parent comment said "separating these things into entities with specific concerns," which is almost verbatim the maximum of following Separation of Concerns in software design. We changed policy at my company from requiring one senior dev to approve pull requests to needing 2. Approvals went from nearly instant to taking much longer, and as a result we did start making longer PRs because of the nuisance of tracking down the second approval for very small changes. When I think about how congress needs 50+ senator approvals for any change to happen, it's no wonder to me that pork and riders became the standard.

by notJim 5y ago

nybble41 5y ago

> Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. The fact that they want to pass bills which only have a bare majority and not a super-majority is a big part of the problem. If you can't get super-majority (or more like near-unanimous) approval for your bill, odds are that it's not good law or something the government ought to be doing. But the focus is always on these huge, controversial proposals with razor-thin margins and getting them passed over the strenuous objection of approximately half of Congress and a large fraction or possibly even a majority of the population at large. In short, the system is utterly broken.

int_19h 5y ago
To be honest, at this point whether some policy is "partisan" or not rarely has anything to do with its merits, and more about where it originates from, and how it's packaged. Just look at those studies when people were asked about "Obamacare" vs "ACA: (the latter has a lot more support, even on the right!). So those razor-thin margins? They're not necessarily because the bill in question is not good. Indeed, the very politicians who vote against it might concede that it's good - in private. But they have elections to win, and voters to rile up to win them. Not to mention that Congress, by design, is not really a good representation of public opinion. In fact, Senate is skewed so badly at this point that it's possible to pass and ratify a constitutional amendment through votes of politicians representing less than 1/4 of the country's population, so long as they're concentrated in the right states.

idrios 5y ago

Yeah I really like the analogy to software. I noticed the parent comment said "separating these things into entities with specific concerns," which is almost verbatim the maximum of following Separation of Concerns in software design. We changed policy at my company from requiring one senior dev to approve pull requests to needing 2. Approvals went from nearly instant to taking much longer, and as a result we did start making longer PRs because of the nuisance of tracking down the second approval for very small changes. When I think about how congress needs 50+ senator approvals for any change to happen, it's no wonder to me that pork and riders became the standard.