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To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the inf

To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill. The reality is, they just don't care about net neutrality. I'm still mad that they haven't passed the bill that gets rid of DST (or rather, gets rid of standard time). Everyone wants it in both parties. Just get it done. Even more annoying is the whole Section 174 debacle. Completely killing the field of software engineering in the US.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. My what a low bar
- jszymborski 3y ago
  "They didn't trip on their own feet"
packetlost 3y ago
> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns You mean they passed a bill that was necessary for them to get their paychecks. I fail to see how this is even remotely surprising.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I think their congressional salary is probably not where most members of Congress are deriving their main income. I think the paychecks their 'other' employers are cutting are more lucrative.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    It’s true but “keep the government from grinding to a halt due to pure inaction” is kind of the absolute minimum bar for congress that I don’t think it’s reasonable to call it a win.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
      And it only grinds to a halt because of rules they created.
pavlov 3y ago
“Congress avoided two government shutdowns” is like saying “I avoided pooping in my pants twice today.” It’s factually true and objectively a positive thing, but there’s nothing really commendable about it. The debt ceiling is Congress’s own creation, and Congress itself approves the budgets that cause the increase in debt. There isn’t another parliament on the planet that behaves so absurdly, fighting shadow puppets set up by itself.
- gmueckl 3y ago
  There are plenty of dysfunctional/autocratic/kleptocratic governments based on constitutions that are somewhat democratic in nature. The US is just a high profile example of government structure slowly sliding into one of these failed states (faster if Trump gets another term).
  - graycat 3y ago
    > (faster if Trump gets another term). I didn't keep track and don't have a good list, but a guess is that Trump did push through a lot of regulatory changes. If the media would publish a well documented list ...!! From all I've seen, I like Trump, but apparently a lot of people don't. I wonder where am I going wrong. Why do some people not like him? A guess is the now old collection of video clips from the MSM (mainstream media) still at https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908 https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908 Sooo, recently I watched several videos (still at YouTube) of episodes of Trump's old TV show The Apprentice. (1) From the business world I've seen, this guy was definitely, uh, different! In a way, tough to criticize since apparently he was very successful. (2) A surprise was the propensity of mess ups, in fighting of the apparently carefully selected candidates. When I think back, yup, I did see a lot of that but guessed it was incidental and would go away and wasn't too bad -- I was wrong, and Trump's TV show was closer to right. How Trump handled (2) was good to see, although maybe some of it was just "TV".
    - yterdy 3y ago
      Kindly read or listen to any long-form work by Sarah Kendzior. But I don't know if the statement you quoted is correct either. Trump isn't the politician who has people tracking their stock trades because they so consistently outperform the market (that would be legislators, including Democrats, who trade on insider information, but face no consequences because the arbiters of such judgment are... themselves). Unfortunately, I'm not sure that even a second Biden term will save us.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
> They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Aaaannnndd?... You're just going to leave out the banning of TikTok while claiming a victory for sending my money to other nations for wars I do not want to fund? And another thing </Andy Rooney>, government shutdowns are problems created ENTIRELY BY CONGRESS for never operating under a proper budget since 1997. All they're doing is fighting each other over a massive shell game of sending the right amounts of money to their donors' interests to guarantee reelection. "Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built. They're doing work alright, just not any that I want. Our system is nakedly and brazenly corrupt, and we don't seem to be able to do anything about it.
- yterdy 3y ago
  >"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built. This is the most baffling one. Everyone seems to forget that they also failed to pass the bill that contained the provisions that most working and middle-class Americans wanted. I've had multiple conversations where the counterargument was, "Well, at least they got part of it passed." No, that's actually worse. We got all of the expensive giveaways without any of the mitigating funding and policies. We literally would have been better off if nothing had passed.
- graycat 3y ago
  > we don't seem to be able to do anything about it. I thought that, with our democratic structures, it would be really easy "to do" a lot about it, but you seem right: I don't get it and have been guessing that > It's always just a massive kickback scheme, is correct. A first problem is some basic vote counting: A politician does something, e.g., a "kickback scheme", that pleases < 10% of the voters by essentially stealing from > 90% of the voters. Soooo, at the next election, the politician should lose by at least 9 to 1, but apparently not and I'm wrong and the politician, correct? Uh, maybe the politician partitions the voters into 10 parts, has 10 schemes, and for each of the 10 steals from the other 9 to please the one, and everyone is happy even though everyone gets stolen from 10 times? My guess was, if a good majority, 80%, maybe as low as 55%, of the voters would write their Members of Congress objecting to the scheme, then Congress would STOP it, in a few minutes. But, nope. Apparently tough to get > 20%, maybe > 5%, of the voters to write their Members of Congress about even a "brazen" scheme. In simple terms, Congress is awash in powers, e.g., that massive one, "power of the purse". So, I have to believe that in any 10 minutes, Congress could have gasoline under $2 a gallon and falling, but Congress declines to do that. The blame is the media that wants eyeballs for ad revenue and, thus, creates divisions, grabs people emotionally, avoids exposing the schemes??? Or the voters are "apathetic"?? Politics is goofy, inscrutable, and the media is right? Uh, ABC, CBS, CNN, ... WaPo are short on money so are not really "right"? Back to something that makes sense.
bloppe 3y ago
The US trialed permanent DST in 1974. In the first 3 months, public support dropped from 79% to 42%. It was ended prematurely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_... Of course, there's no difference between permanent DST and abolishing DST but having everyone agree to shift their schedules forward by 1 hour. So abolishing DST altogether isn't really a better option. I used to think DST was stupid. Now I think it's actually the best we can do.
- tsavo 3y ago
  It could be much worse and end up with a system with smaller timezones with 30 minute offsets instead of DST. Or a single timezone for the continental US. DST is annoying but it's far from the worst.
- Auracle 3y ago
  People aren’t going to shift an hour. When I’ve argued this with friends it seems to idea is wholly incomprehensible. Standard time is what we should be on. Anything else makes it way too cold for kids in the morning in the winter, it’s better for our sleep cycles (especially teenagers), and it just makes sense as far as the sun’s position. If you want to go into work an hour early so the “sun is still up when I go home at night,” feel free.
  - bloppe 3y ago
    The linked Wikipedia page about the 1974 experiment says "some schools moved their start times later" in response. I agree that trying to get the entire population to shift everything on their schedules at the same time would be inconsistent at best. But many institutions would adjust to the seasons as they see fit. And you want to minimize the inconsistencies; people would pick different cutoffs, different shift amounts, etc. That's the whole point of why it was regulated in the first place. And DST is demonstrably good during the summer. It lowers crime and improves mood and productivity. It's just not good in the winter, because people in northern latitudes wake up in the cold and dark. It kinda does make sense to have seasonal shifting. So, unfortunately, the best solution in my opinion is in fact to just lie to ourselves about what time it is for half the year. AKA Daylight Saving.
mostlysimilar 3y ago
> Even more annoying is the whole Section 174 debacle. Completely killing the field of software engineering in the US. Elaborate?
- adolph 3y ago
  all expenses, in theory, incurred in connection with software development must now be amortized. Many technology and software companies will face significant increases in their taxable income because they are no longer allowed to deduct certain expenses https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/section-174-expenditures/ https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
ajross 3y ago
> To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill. The euphemization in this subthread is a bit out of control. In fact these are 100% partisan issues. The "pro shutdown" and "anti aid/infrastructure" camps who had been blocking progress are uniformly sitting on one side of the aisle, and the progress you are celebrating happened when their party split under duress and aligned with the other side briefly. That's not "congress" doing some work. That's a "pro work" and "anti work" partisan argument whose answer flips due to intra-GOP drama.
yterdy 3y ago
>To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill. That's just three different ways of saying, "Wrote checks to fill the pockets of monied interests, the bill for which will be paid for by the generations which explicitly oppose such policy." Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term.
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term. You do realize that half (and maybe a little more than that) of the elected folks in Congress do not support such things. That those folks represent less than half of the electorate is a different discussion -- but until you have clear majorities that support those initiatives (I and those I voted for certainly do), clamoring for everything all at once is a waste of time. The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face. That's not to say we shouldn't have better governance and more focus on making the world a better place rather than maintaining power. We definitely should. But asserting that unless all our elected representatives support our own beliefs/policy ideas and pass them post-haste is both unhelpful and not very realistic.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    >The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face. It's weird that you would put those words in my mouth when the actual reason for the dysfunction >That those folks represent less than half of the electorate is readily apparent to you. The point is that Congress is terminally dysfunctional. Avoiding shutdowns and passing grift doesn't change that. I don't want to hear all the reasons why things can't be done (perhaps the most unhelpful thing to do). I just want them done. And I have every right to be pissed abot the state of things until that happens.

_aavaa_ 3y ago

> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. My what a low bar

jszymborski 3y ago
"They didn't trip on their own feet"

packetlost 3y ago

> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns You mean they passed a bill that was necessary for them to get their paychecks. I fail to see how this is even remotely surprising.

idiotsecant 3y ago
I think their congressional salary is probably not where most members of Congress are deriving their main income. I think the paychecks their 'other' employers are cutting are more lucrative.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  It’s true but “keep the government from grinding to a halt due to pure inaction” is kind of the absolute minimum bar for congress that I don’t think it’s reasonable to call it a win.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
    And it only grinds to a halt because of rules they created.

pavlov 3y ago

“Congress avoided two government shutdowns” is like saying “I avoided pooping in my pants twice today.” It’s factually true and objectively a positive thing, but there’s nothing really commendable about it. The debt ceiling is Congress’s own creation, and Congress itself approves the budgets that cause the increase in debt. There isn’t another parliament on the planet that behaves so absurdly, fighting shadow puppets set up by itself.

gmueckl 3y ago
There are plenty of dysfunctional/autocratic/kleptocratic governments based on constitutions that are somewhat democratic in nature. The US is just a high profile example of government structure slowly sliding into one of these failed states (faster if Trump gets another term).
- graycat 3y ago
  > (faster if Trump gets another term). I didn't keep track and don't have a good list, but a guess is that Trump did push through a lot of regulatory changes. If the media would publish a well documented list ...!! From all I've seen, I like Trump, but apparently a lot of people don't. I wonder where am I going wrong. Why do some people not like him? A guess is the now old collection of video clips from the MSM (mainstream media) still at https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908 https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908 Sooo, recently I watched several videos (still at YouTube) of episodes of Trump's old TV show The Apprentice. (1) From the business world I've seen, this guy was definitely, uh, different! In a way, tough to criticize since apparently he was very successful. (2) A surprise was the propensity of mess ups, in fighting of the apparently carefully selected candidates. When I think back, yup, I did see a lot of that but guessed it was incidental and would go away and wasn't too bad -- I was wrong, and Trump's TV show was closer to right. How Trump handled (2) was good to see, although maybe some of it was just "TV".
  - yterdy 3y ago
    Kindly read or listen to any long-form work by Sarah Kendzior. But I don't know if the statement you quoted is correct either. Trump isn't the politician who has people tracking their stock trades because they so consistently outperform the market (that would be legislators, including Democrats, who trade on insider information, but face no consequences because the arbiters of such judgment are... themselves). Unfortunately, I'm not sure that even a second Biden term will save us.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

> They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Aaaannnndd?... You're just going to leave out the banning of TikTok while claiming a victory for sending my money to other nations for wars I do not want to fund? And another thing </Andy Rooney>, government shutdowns are problems created ENTIRELY BY CONGRESS for never operating under a proper budget since 1997. All they're doing is fighting each other over a massive shell game of sending the right amounts of money to their donors' interests to guarantee reelection. "Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built. They're doing work alright, just not any that I want. Our system is nakedly and brazenly corrupt, and we don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

yterdy 3y ago
>"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built. This is the most baffling one. Everyone seems to forget that they also failed to pass the bill that contained the provisions that most working and middle-class Americans wanted. I've had multiple conversations where the counterargument was, "Well, at least they got part of it passed." No, that's actually worse. We got all of the expensive giveaways without any of the mitigating funding and policies. We literally would have been better off if nothing had passed.
graycat 3y ago
> we don't seem to be able to do anything about it. I thought that, with our democratic structures, it would be really easy "to do" a lot about it, but you seem right: I don't get it and have been guessing that > It's always just a massive kickback scheme, is correct. A first problem is some basic vote counting: A politician does something, e.g., a "kickback scheme", that pleases < 10% of the voters by essentially stealing from > 90% of the voters. Soooo, at the next election, the politician should lose by at least 9 to 1, but apparently not and I'm wrong and the politician, correct? Uh, maybe the politician partitions the voters into 10 parts, has 10 schemes, and for each of the 10 steals from the other 9 to please the one, and everyone is happy even though everyone gets stolen from 10 times? My guess was, if a good majority, 80%, maybe as low as 55%, of the voters would write their Members of Congress objecting to the scheme, then Congress would STOP it, in a few minutes. But, nope. Apparently tough to get > 20%, maybe > 5%, of the voters to write their Members of Congress about even a "brazen" scheme. In simple terms, Congress is awash in powers, e.g., that massive one, "power of the purse". So, I have to believe that in any 10 minutes, Congress could have gasoline under $2 a gallon and falling, but Congress declines to do that. The blame is the media that wants eyeballs for ad revenue and, thus, creates divisions, grabs people emotionally, avoids exposing the schemes??? Or the voters are "apathetic"?? Politics is goofy, inscrutable, and the media is right? Uh, ABC, CBS, CNN, ... WaPo are short on money so are not really "right"? Back to something that makes sense.

bloppe 3y ago

The US trialed permanent DST in 1974. In the first 3 months, public support dropped from 79% to 42%. It was ended prematurely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_... Of course, there's no difference between permanent DST and abolishing DST but having everyone agree to shift their schedules forward by 1 hour. So abolishing DST altogether isn't really a better option. I used to think DST was stupid. Now I think it's actually the best we can do.

tsavo 3y ago
It could be much worse and end up with a system with smaller timezones with 30 minute offsets instead of DST. Or a single timezone for the continental US. DST is annoying but it's far from the worst.
Auracle 3y ago
People aren’t going to shift an hour. When I’ve argued this with friends it seems to idea is wholly incomprehensible. Standard time is what we should be on. Anything else makes it way too cold for kids in the morning in the winter, it’s better for our sleep cycles (especially teenagers), and it just makes sense as far as the sun’s position. If you want to go into work an hour early so the “sun is still up when I go home at night,” feel free.
- bloppe 3y ago
  The linked Wikipedia page about the 1974 experiment says "some schools moved their start times later" in response. I agree that trying to get the entire population to shift everything on their schedules at the same time would be inconsistent at best. But many institutions would adjust to the seasons as they see fit. And you want to minimize the inconsistencies; people would pick different cutoffs, different shift amounts, etc. That's the whole point of why it was regulated in the first place. And DST is demonstrably good during the summer. It lowers crime and improves mood and productivity. It's just not good in the winter, because people in northern latitudes wake up in the cold and dark. It kinda does make sense to have seasonal shifting. So, unfortunately, the best solution in my opinion is in fact to just lie to ourselves about what time it is for half the year. AKA Daylight Saving.

mostlysimilar 3y ago

> Even more annoying is the whole Section 174 debacle. Completely killing the field of software engineering in the US. Elaborate?

adolph 3y ago
all expenses, in theory, incurred in connection with software development must now be amortized. Many technology and software companies will face significant increases in their taxable income because they are no longer allowed to deduct certain expenses https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/section-174-expenditures/ https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...

ajross 3y ago

> To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill. The euphemization in this subthread is a bit out of control. In fact these are 100% partisan issues. The "pro shutdown" and "anti aid/infrastructure" camps who had been blocking progress are uniformly sitting on one side of the aisle, and the progress you are celebrating happened when their party split under duress and aligned with the other side briefly. That's not "congress" doing some work. That's a "pro work" and "anti work" partisan argument whose answer flips due to intra-GOP drama.

yterdy 3y ago

>To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill. That's just three different ways of saying, "Wrote checks to fill the pockets of monied interests, the bill for which will be paid for by the generations which explicitly oppose such policy." Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term.

nobody9999 3y ago
>Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term. You do realize that half (and maybe a little more than that) of the elected folks in Congress do not support such things. That those folks represent less than half of the electorate is a different discussion -- but until you have clear majorities that support those initiatives (I and those I voted for certainly do), clamoring for everything all at once is a waste of time. The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face. That's not to say we shouldn't have better governance and more focus on making the world a better place rather than maintaining power. We definitely should. But asserting that unless all our elected representatives support our own beliefs/policy ideas and pass them post-haste is both unhelpful and not very realistic.
- yterdy 3y ago
  >The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face. It's weird that you would put those words in my mouth when the actual reason for the dysfunction >That those folks represent less than half of the electorate is readily apparent to you. The point is that Congress is terminally dysfunctional. Avoiding shutdowns and passing grift doesn't change that. I don't want to hear all the reasons why things can't be done (perhaps the most unhelpful thing to do). I just want them done. And I have every right to be pissed abot the state of things until that happens.