Hacker News Reader

Comment by bookmarkable | Hacker News Reader

Well, that was 15 minutes I'll never get back. Listening to Congressmen and Congresswoman always leaves me with the same question - is this really the best we can do?

The same mumbling paid off clown show we could've heard from in 1950 or 1850. Yes, more diverse, but aside from demographics, the same people are still in Congress year after year and are clearly not fluent in the modern world.

View on HN

Well we need to encumber the two dominant parties with the most restrictions in fund raising, block them from setting rules as to who can be in debates let alone setting onerous ballot requirements. We already do not do enough to prevent them from profiting from their position nor enriching their friends and families. That money doesn't come from the people.

I honestly don't think many of these people are even capable of downloading an email attachment.

That's probably a good thing as if they were we'd have them opening up malware all day long.

Probably a feature not a bug

I think that part of the success of the US is that it’s so hard to change things with all the checks and balances. So the representatives don’t matter much and just a way to occupy the need to appear to have governance.

So Congress is like the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B [0] and that might be good because if it was full of Ship A people they would just be stomping over each other. and if it was Ship C people we’d be minmaxing and micromanaging.

[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...

Just because we’ve never had a military coup isn’t a very high bar to gauge our system of checks and balances

American exceptionalism intrinsically relies on comparing itself to the worst countries in the world and being ignorant of other developed nations.

It also intrinsically relies on being exceptional.

There’s certainly many flaws, but it’s not luck that we’ve avoided coups for a couple hundred years. Seems pretty well designed and built on lots of previous successes.

My comment wasn’t so much saying US is best, but just pointing out that having idiots elected and futzing about in DC seems like not such a bad idea.

A feature in 1780 that has been a bug for a long time, with several patches around the edges already

As long as there is democracy yes, this is the best it gets. Cherish it, because it will get much worse over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com