politics

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You're absolutely right. No one will ever trust the U.S. again as long as the republicans remain active in your political system. They're nothing less than a bunch of fascist nazi terrorists.

Great comment. I'm saving this.

TLDR:

Trust is extremely hard to build, but very easy to destroy.

Very right; even if America was to dramatically reverse course right now, it's going to take a long long time to rebuild the international relations that have been absolutely demolished. That's after rebuilding the federal government itself after purging the cancer that currently consumes it; and there's going to be a lot more destruction before that happens.

I wish you luck America; it's not going to be an easy journey.

Tangential to this, but I've always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn't in the loop

Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.

The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet

Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he'd be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he'd be out of office and we'd be about half a year into Dubya's first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.

Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.

Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we're getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.

We receive their reply about a year into Obama's first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.

Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn't even get to take part in this particular conversation.

We won't get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn't croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)

So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president's hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.

Trying to be cagey for the sake of my own identity. Apologies. Some of this comment is vague. All of it is true.

I have close knowledge of a tightly regulated industry that passes the cost of its infrastructure onto consumers.
About 15 years ago, for about a 10 year period, the guiding principles of the regulatory bodies were that the companies would tend to their own infrastructure, and they did not take proactive steps to ensure that standards were upheld.
The inevitable happened. Record profits. Investment in infrastructure went down. Safety and reliability faltered.
About 5 years ago, things shifted. The political landscape changed, and the regulators stopped sleeping. Now the companies, with their investors and owners demanding these profits (and reliant on investor faith to stay solvent), must legally invest in their infrastructure while also maintaining profits so their investors do not abandon them and destroy their business.
The regulators, bound by law to achieve certain outcomes, are at a crossroads. What they regulate is a necessity. The public who pay for this are sagging under the expense of it.

It’s a shitty catch-22, where there’s no good way forward (short of nationalizing the industry and putting competent, politically isolated people in charge), but there was an easy, easy way to prevent this from occurring in the first place.
Some decisions cannot be undone.