are you aware that voting takes about an hour one time on one day - so whatever it is youre thinking we do 'instead', we can still do as well? of which you havent suggested anything other than to sell people bridges
The comment is meant to illustrate that I don't think their statement is different enough to contradict.
The lack of effort to vote is obvious. As is what happens when you vote out all of the incumbents.
It's not a solution, that is obvious. Mostly because it's not suggesting anything concrete, either.
My suggestion is quite a bit more concrete. It's grounded in reality. The level of organization required to vote out ALL incumbents, is better used actually solving the problem.
I wouldn't presume to present such a solution, as I am only me. I would happily suggest voting in specific people over voting out the incumbents, at the very least.
oh i think the disconnect is that the statement "vote out all incumbents" is much more of an expression of sentiment for individual consideration as a baseline and not an attempt to organize and control the vote to get exactly that output by treating voters like programmable robots, which is not democratic anyway
If you think the current administration hasn't pushed this so far beyond, and so much faster, what any previous administration has done - since maybe the red scare - I don't have a bridge to sell you. Because honestly, you shouldn't be anywhere near anything involving public welfare.
> The number of warrantless device searches at the border and the significant invasion of privacy they represent is only increasing. In Fiscal Year 2022, CBP conducted an all-time high of 45,499 device searches.
I really doubt the previous administration was trying to deprive people of their liberty based on their political beliefs. The current administration very clearly is. I can't speak to any changes in the phone search policy, but your right to freedom of expression is gone at the federal level.
Both things are simultaneously possible:
* This admin is actively hostile in a specific way (eg towards immigrants)
* All govts have been hostile for a (very) hot minute (see: patriot act, snowden stuff that happened across different presidents).
And a bonus:
* This is not a new thing, a is related to why people occasionally talk about "the swamp"/the "deep state"/"3 letter agencies". NSA has self interest to stay alive regardless of admin.
And this aspect (of "some parts of the govt aren't really affected by the elected reps) isn't a new thing at all either - see: Yes (Prime) Minister.
There have been discussions on HN about this topic across administrations. That is not to say that there aren’t differences in degree, but the government has long maintained that it has special rights to conduct searches at the border that would not be permitted elsewhere.
Given that travel hadn't recovered from covid in 2022, that 45k to 55k increase mean even less.
Has the % of people searched actually decreased?
I don't trust the current U.S. gov (or any U.S. gov, really), but the figure isn't actually increasing in a significant way. The US. remain as unwelcoming to visitors as they have been since 2001. Nothing to see in this report.
I’d look for a change in slope. A permanent change that adversely affected tourism would decrease the slope, but maybe not so much as to make it negative.
Between 1995 and 2015 (capturing data before and after 2001) the US's change in tourism increased at a faster rate than France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Austria, and the UK. Spain may have increased at a slightly faster pace, but it's close.
This is meaningless without a denominator. How much has international tourism increased in those years? What percentage of international tourists visited the US before and after 2001?
Many of us have been warning that the systems built by presidents before Trump, would be abused by a president like Trump, and here we are. I think the critics of the system are the ones with public welfare in mind and ask you to take a deep breath.
Well they did but I would be willing to bet that their successors will not remove laws allowing this. They may relieve it little bit but why would they remove such potentially valuable tool?
Government always want to have as much control as it can possibly acquire.
"The previous administration is only doing what the last administration did!" seems to be the rallying cry of the Trump administrations.
If Obama and Biden really did suck that much, and if Trump's the savior that they claim, he should be doing less of it, not more.
Of course, that's blatantly ignoring the whole premise of Trump - a wannabe dictator implementing totalitarianism for the far-right in exchange for an opportunity to use the presidency for his personal gain in direct violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution - but that would be the improvement, not just the targeting of people you don't like with the same tactics.
