I think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.
What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.
With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.
The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.
It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.
Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.
Impeached, possibly. Conviction is effectively impossible.
That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches.
I'd argue that no system will work when so many voters are willing to overlook obvious crimes in order to remain in power. But even in less pathological circumstances, the legislative branch had too many internal checks to also participate in external ones.
It is because your congress and political system don't need coalition governments orvaby kind of agreements, winner takes it all. A true multy party system wpuld be mote flexible and less prone to catering to extremes on the left or right
The UK Parliament was by all means a two-party system, with Labour in one side and the Tories in the other. If anything it has become more diverse post-Brexit. Compare that with the Bundestag, where no party has more than a quarter of the seats.
There were 7 major political parties in Germany in 1933, so I’m unsure that there is overwhelming evidence that more than 2 political parties is protective against extremism.
There wasn't 7 major parties. Five maximum, even two could be argued. But '33 Germany is a weak argument against multiparty systems. Interwar Germany was not a well functioning democracy at all. They had armed street fights and deep political chaos going on for over two decades at that point. Hitler didn't have the majority and formed a coalition government. Only because Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the Reichstag could the nazis take power fully.
So the number of parties did actually block Hitler, and Presidential powers to subvert democracy was the problem. In modern multi party democracies an inability to form a government will result in a new election, not installing a dictator.
The Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party, the Center Party, the German People's Party, the German National People's Party, and the Nazi Party.
Germany is the best argument multiple people in this thread made for how a multiparty system prevents the move towards extremism, but we are within living memory of Germany collapsing into what was arguably the worst case of extremism in history.
Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.
By the time Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the Reichstag, the SA was powerful enough compared to the German Military and he had enough popular support that he could likely have taken power by force.
If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.
You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.
Germany is the best argument multiple people in this thread made for how a multiparty system prevents the move towards extremism, but we are within living memory of Germany collapsing into what was arguably the worst case of extremism in history.
Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.
If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.
You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.
The uk doesnt really count, because it also has a fttp election system for the parliament, there are always 2 big parties and then some minor ones.
Better example would be Germany.
There were 7 major political parties in Germany in 1933, so I’m unsure that there is overwhelming evidence that more than 2 political parties is protective against extremism.
The problem is we've kicked this can down the road for decades. We can't just let the president perform Congress's job, no matter how "stuck" they are.
I actually think Congress is the one who controls the reins still with this one. All they have to do is simply say “no“ and stop falling in line with the party because their president is in charge. They won’t do it, but they need to just agree enough is enough and legislate instead of handing it off to the president so they can’t be held accountable for their votes. Still, at the end of the day the ball is in their court.
3 has a really nice feel when you manage to get the early timing attacks off against the neighbours, but the later half of the game is too solved - the game ends with infantry + artillery stacks being the only units you need, and with the 3x4 city grid bring optimal.
4 in contrast had a bunch of different paths to power, and those worked even on high difficulties. There were also no optimal city grid the same way (though still being denser than civ5).
The plan is to put everything into a repo on github, this includes documentation on the file format, and also the rewrite of the original code in modern C++ and DirectX or Vulkan. I don't see much point in reverse engineering the old rendering engine - I can do it but I've got everything I need right now that I can just rewrite the game inside the browser.
I use it for personal projects and I find it substantially easier to mess around with compiling shaders to SPIRV, processing assets, etc... But some of my gripes are, although it _is_ lua, there is some magic fuckery going on. When you specify targets, things for that target need to be close to the definition, and it feels very odd in a lua language to not have `target("name", function (ctx) ... end)`.
Anyways, not going to die on that hill and I'll keep using it because it's simple and works well for my needs. One thing I do like is that I am not having to constantly keep a skeleton CMake project around to copy paste and setup.
People getting hung up on `_t` usage being reserved for posix need to lighten up. I doubt they'll clash with my definitions and if does happen in the future, I'll change the typedef name.
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