U.S. Senate reaches agreement on $1.66T spending bill | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Senate reaches agreement on $1.66T spending bill

reuters.com

14 pointsmfiguiere40 comments

“Spending Bill passed by senators who didn’t bother to read the damn thing.” Would have been a better headline.

I doubt they could have read it in time even if they wanted to. It was over 4000 pages and they just got it earlier this week.

No, but they could have voted against it.

Exactly.

Even better would be a procedural rule that no Senator can vote on (or at least for) a bill that they have not personally read in its entirety. You want your bill to pass? Don't make it 4000 pages.

Too many loop holes, the sponsor of the bill should be made to read it, word for word, on the floor. Anyone who wishes to vote on the bill must remain on the floor for the duration of its reading.

And the whole thing should be televised on cspan.

I wonder what is written in those 4000 pages ? Lorem ipsum ?

Don't forget: "In a rush to get out the door before the coming weather front cancelled all their flights."

"Code compiled and deployed by programmer who didn't bother to read all of the modules and libraries it used." Better they be domain experts for sections they are interested in than try to pretend that they understanding the entirety of the workings of the government.

This is not even remotely the same, terrible analogy.

Correct will be "Code compiled and deployed by programmer who didn't bother to read all of the modules functions he uses".

"Let's just connect to internet using this npm package"

Why would it be a headline. It is a known fact that "senators", "representatives", "deputies", whatever they are called, do not bother to read the laws before voting them.

Just because it’s a”known fact” doesn’t mean it should be accepted behavior. The media should be calling them out and holding their feet to the fire, instead we get “nothing to see here folks, move along.”

It looks like they have not passed the spending bill itself, rather they have just reached some consensus on how to order and vote on a bunch of amendments, many of which the piece itself notes are likely to fail.

Why the heck does there need to be backdoor negotiations regarding which amendments will be heard by the larger body?. Which amendments get heard is a procedural question, right? so why do the objections / hold up seem to be based on policy?

To be clear, Im not really interested in the answer to that question. I'm sure there is a "good" reason for it, and I understand in the abstract why legislative procedure is often used as a tool for negotiations and political messaging.

But if I can get on my soap box and vent a bit, it never ceases to amaze me how much congress has hobbled itself by over-complicating the lawmaking process. Over-complicated lawmaking processes inevitably leads to further erosion of congressional power by delegating authority to some executive branch department, which are (comparably) far more effective and responsive.

Like, I'm not saying they should just swap to Roberts Rules of order, but for petes sake. Congress gets to set its own rules about how it operates, you only need a majority vote to change the process, IIRC. The house I can somewhat forgive, since they only have a year or so of real time in office before they need to start campaigning again. But senators get 4-5 good years, whats their excuse?

You would think that enough senators would be interested in actually wielding the power of their office to pass laws (or to pass laws that repeal laws) that they would get off their collective butts to make their institution actually semi-effective.

What boggles my mind is when visiting sites like Reddit, you will be ridiculed and titled a 'Russian actor' or a 'GOP Trumper' if even questioning anything pertaining to this war. Regardless of where you stand, its clearly evident that the propaganda machine running strong.

That said, our budget for this war seems to have no cap and that does concern me (especially just after a pandemic). Responsible spending isn't usually a trait shared by either political party (or any government body, for that matter) so I really don't have much room to complain. There's always some angle or piece that's missing from the whole picture - and that's usually by design. The older I get, the more convinced I am that our government doesn't really like or care for its own people, and that its primary focus will always be outside our own borders. Call me a cynic, but I think America peaked awhile ago and we've been on a downward spiral that was turbo charged by 9/11.

Maybe I'm just tired. Either way, I wish George Carlin was still around.

> What boggles my mind is when visiting sites like Reddit

Does it really boggle your mind though? Reddit operates as a left-leaning hivemind. The groupthink on that site has been strong for more than a decade at this point.

I wonder though. If all of the big social media sites appear to be "left leaning", maybe what you are really seeing is the center, and your calibration is off.

Wouldn't the political orientation of the moderation teams be relevant here?

If the moderators of all of these organizations were reflective of the general population, then maybe, but are they?

I'm of the opinion that that spectrum has been artificially shifted quite a bit in the last 5 to 10 years. This push has led to a lot of political unrest and has resulted in drastic polarization.

I think wokism has been taken way to far to the point it tries to subvert freedom of speech, critical thinking, and reality. Almost half the country is NOT far left and no amount of guilt tripping in the media is going to change that, and I say that as a very left person. We have to compromise and be civil and the people in the middle need to go vote despite the fact that both parties seem to want to be polar opposites.

The internet is still a place if the young. High schoolers, college kids, and people without children all have more free time and very much lean left.

> If all of the big social media sites appear to be "left leaning"

> [...] your calibration is off

Big social media moderation is systemically biased, for instance, Twitter is/was staffed overwhelmingly (at times almost exclusively) by people who support Democrats [1].

[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...

Yes, the reason those people support Democrats is that they are educated and live on the coast. Tell me where you live and what your level of education is and I am happy to place a very large bet on your political choices.

So you're admitting that basically this entire sector of the economy is a monoculture, but downplaying that there's any negative systemic bias cause that's somehow just a deterministic function of geography.

I am stating as a simple fact that education leads to a tendency to have a particular political affiliation given the current stances of the two major parties. This has nothing to do with a particular economic sector: college-educated truck drivers and college-educated lumberjacks would be the same. Reality has a well-known liberal bias so it turns out that this education-influenced tendency is more of a positive systemic bias than a negative one.

> Reality has a well-known liberal bias

That's a big claim in the middle of a totally different argument.

> education-influenced tendency is more of a positive systemic bias than a negative one

If anything, there's evidence that education has a negative influence in ways you may not expect. I seem to recall Germany being the birthplace of the modern university, "Humboldt's Ideal," and we all know how they ended up. In fact, doctors in Germany were 7x more likely than the average citizen to join the Nazi party. [1]

And the issue is more about disposition, the educated seem to have an extreme blind-spot because, as your argument evidences, they tend to think so highly of themselves. They also have the mental machinery capable of producing very enticing & sophisticated, but ultimately wrong justifications for horrible things. And in combination with a self-righteous moral self-concept, you're playing with some real fire.

Read C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, I'll quote:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

> that they are educated

Maybe it's useful to point out what you're not saying: That there is any sort of virtue in being "educated" (whatever that means).

Perhaps more to your point, most state run institutions seem to also lean left. This effectively turns your argument to "Educated people think like us and therefore we can trust them with the right choice for us."

That's because the college educate tech crowd tends to be democrats, with some libertarian and conservative hold outs. It's not because twitter is "left leaning" it's just a fact of the employment market.

If an organization is overwhelmingly of one political orientation, that's just inevitably systemically biased right? Unconscious bias happens for everyone, I don't care how sophisticated someone supposes they are.

It's a private company, they're allowed to be biased, while you can call that out, you can't really call it "wrong" as there is nothing starting you from stopping your own company and a few are out there now for those people who enjoy right->alt-right->nazi topics [gab, truth, mastodon, parler]. I posit you won't make much money as it'll be hard to find advertisers for said spaces (and obviously mastodon can just ban you from servers easily) My point is the tech crowd is highly center->left leaning, and you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire" 90% of them will get up and walk out when you are hiring.

> you can't really call it "wrong"

I can call censorship wrong whether private or public, thank you very much. And I can agree and actually support their rights to do it as a private company. There's no contradiction there.

> you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire"

I'm not saying they should, I'm saying that it is an extreme hypocrisy that the pro-diversity, anti-systemic bias crowd seems to be completely mum about their own glaring systemic bias. There is a very high value in having viewpoint diversity where there are people in your organization capable of offering insights where the majority has a complete blind-spot. Instead viewpoint diversity is squashed and people who don't toe the party line are vilified.

Genuine disagreement should be embraced in organizations but all too often people are not afforded the dignity of their own sense of judgement.

> social media sites appear to be "left leaning"

The actual users always appear to be pretty evenly split - it's the moderation policies that are inevitably biased.

Reddit hard leans to a younger crowd. There are plenty conservative hold outs there, but don't expect a tech-centric, very young, mostly college educated crowd to support conservative positions in the popular subs, it's just not ever going to happen. I'm pretty moderate and get yelled at all the time when I talk about the merits of capitalism over collectivism and communism, even though I support stuff like public education and state sponsored health care as a right. Most of reddit seems to think the government can make everything better, and I've lived long enough to know that's simply not true.

What I've seen said about it is that we're getting the golden opportunity to cripple a top adversary by never even putting American boots on the ground. We're paying 5% of the already-designated military spending budget to do it, and we're giving that 5% to American companies to send arms to Ukraine to let Russia run itself into the ground.

Is that not the case? Seems like a win/win if it is.

It's definitely a win for the US if it doesn't provoke Russia into attacking the US with nukes now or 10 years from now. (10 years from now Russia's security establishment will still probably be quite bitter about the US's assistance to Ukraine; that bitterness combined with contemporaneous US actions might provoke an attack.)

Russia's high-level security bureaucrats don't perceive the causes of the war in Ukraine to be what most of in the US perceive them to be.

If we no longer operate on MAD and instead cower to every threat of use of nuclear force, then do we simply let Russia take whatever they want?

There will always be pacifists and isolationists. It's a tough position to defend given what happened in WW2 when the Allies didn't act immediately to invasion and genocide. We won't make that mistake again and I don't think it's hard to convince people of that who aren't idealistic pacifists and isolationists. People get emotional for a reason. There are lots of connection still to things like the Holocaust. Russians, and Putin, for sure need to be held at bay. It's too bad that people won't be more civil about discussions, but don't be expect to be treated as a savior.

> There will always be pacifists and isolationists. It's a tough position to defend given what happened in WW2 when the Allies didn't act immediately to invasion and genocide.

The war in Vietnam and the wars in the Middle East are tough to defend.

I agree. The only middle east action I supported was hunting down bin Laden and freeing Kuwait. I had a couple of friends die unnecessarily and begged my brother not to join the armed forces and paid for his college tuition instead because I knew the same could happen to him. I don't think we should have been in Vietnam either. So we have something to agree with there. I do think we either pay now or pay a LOT MORE later when Russia beats Ukraine into submission if we stop supporting them (as NATO) by sheer size and resource superiority. That will include more Americans dying, because taking Ukraine will only encourage Russian land war ambitions in Europe. Ukraine has the will and inspiration, let's help them with all they need.

It’s the second time the last couple of years a 4k+ page spending monstrosity moves forward without giving enough time to anyone to even read it once. They included provisions for making monuments to themself: naming a federal building after Pelosi, FBI training facility after Richard Shelby, a trail after Michelle Obama. But the weirdest is that Patrick Leahy will get a school lunch program named after him. A school lunch program. This is some f*cked up level of narcissism.

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