Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Expecting the government to solve its problems by not giving it any money seems ... unlikely to work?

Jeff said:

Government is not, and has never been the problem. The people that we elect to serve in government are the problem,

Semantics, the government is the body of governing individuals running the country.

and we're getting what we deserve when we elect a reality TV show host.

We also elected an actor many moons ago, he did a much better job. California also elected a movie star/body builder and he worked out fine as well.

History demonstrates that the US government can certainly do better, as it did during and the decades following WW2 (save for racism and equal rights, which we still can't seem to get right).

We also had Watergate, Nixon, Vietnam, Asian Flu, and a whole host of other trials and tribulations, but I wasn't alive then so I can't fully comment. Dare I say less overall corruption and politicians taking care of other politicians? Or was it just that the generation that is currently causing most of us to take it up the pooper was busy setting themselves up for success and to make the rest of us take it up the pooper?

Nordic governments are also doing a pretty good job at things, where people consistently rate among the happiest people in the world.

No argument here, many European countries are vastly superior to the one we live in.

ApolloAndy said:

"Government is the problem" strikes me along the same lines as "media is biased" as if it's some intrinsic and unchanging reality. We have exactly the media that we've made popular, and we have exactly the government we elected.

Do we really though? Or did we elect these leaders based on carefully crafted images of themselves? Where in reality they planned on keeping some of their promises, but when it came time to pay debts to other corporations and individuals for promises and favors and donations that they were no longer serving the body of people they elected, but the almighty dollar instead?

Crazy thought, and some of you on here would be better equipped to answer, but instead of letting elected officials vote on the vast majority of bills and changes being made, pass this along to the citizens instead. Do this in an online portal, there has to be some magic method of securing this, or is it just too blatantly high risk and it would never pan out?

It's not semantics at all. Reagan famously dissed government when he said, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help," is the most terrifying sentence ever. But he was conflating government with its leaders while being the leader. His statement was not intended to sow distrust of government, it was to sow distrust of anyone not him. It's been in the GOP playbook ever since, and it's bullshit.

When you elect service oriented individuals, you get great results. I've seen it at the local level countless times. I've seen pockets of it in federal government at times, certainly when those leaders appoint experts instead of their family and friends.

Elected people as a proxy to policy voting would be catastrophic. Have you seen who they elect? Every idiot with an Internet connection thinks they're an expert about everything. Everyone can't be a leader.

Well my thoughts were let congress introduce the bills, and then instead of them voting, let the general population vote instead, either you get the two thirds or you don't. Let the population make the call instead of the proxies since Joe six pack most likely hasn't received any kickbacks or made any promises to large corporations recently.

California does that. It’s not catastrophic, but it’s very far from ideal. It means that every citizen has to be an expert on the issues at hand and some random Joe who saw a commercial or flipped a coin or misread the proposition has an equal vote. It means a LOT more money spent on campaigning and a lot less actual debate on substance.

TheMillenniumRider said:
Let the population make the call instead of the proxies since Joe six pack most likely hasn't received any kickbacks or made any promises to large corporations recently.

Sure, he only thinks QAnon is a real person and that underaged girls are being sold on Wayfair as expensive furniture. Joe is a super reliable guy.

Anyway, websites built by private companies fail all of the time. Nearly every startup grows slowly because they need the time to scale up. Twitter used to crash constantly, a celebrity could sneeze and it would fail. Nearly every online video game in the last 10 years has failed on launch day/week/month despite thinking they were ready.

Jeff said:

When you elect service oriented individuals, you get great results. I've seen it at the local level countless times. I've seen pockets of it in federal government at times, certainly when those leaders appoint experts instead of their family and friends.

The problem is not electing service oriented individuals. The issue is said service being offered as a lucrative way to personally enrich themselves to the tune of millions of dollars. That's why you'll find a lot more people on the county levels that genuinely want to serve, or at least at that level. You start seeing a lot less individuals who genuinely care about serving people when you get to city, state and finally, the federal level.

So kind of beaten to it here, but the gains from manipulation at a city level are far less than at the federal level. More money to be made if I can make something happen nationwide as a lobbyist. Not saying corruption doesn’t exist at the local level. But that it just isn’t on the radar of the big companies and lobbyists nearly as much.

As far as the qanons or flat earthers or whatever, they are a minority. Would not likely have enough voting power, and if they did they wouldn’t be crafting the laws The ballots could be a simple yes/no based on laws crafted by congress. Here’s what we propose, yes or no answered by the population.

Did not know about California, interesting as it could be a nice case study in exactly what I was thinking. Maybe isn’t that feasible after all.

Lastly, pockets of leaders don’t make for successful leadership. Pockets of failure with mostly overall success would be much more suitable than overall failures with pockets of good people.

It almost certainly also has to do with the way our elections are set up. With a two party system (no preferential voting) with generally low turnout, the way to win an election is basically to be as extreme as possible and "get out the base." Any indication of nuance, moderation, or compromise will be met with someone with a more extreme position claiming that you're soft on party principles or whatever. Then you get into positive feedback loops where the party moves away from center so it's most vocal constituents feel like they represent the "main line" and make demands along those extremes which are sometimes met, thus justifying the extreme position in the first place. Actually, to avoid the false equivalency thing, I'll just say that I'm 80% talking about the Republicans and 20% talking about the Democrats, here.

Don't even get me started on the electoral college.

Do we need two Dakotas?

I vote no. Same for the whole Virginia thing.

West Virginia has more people than both Dakotas!

What I have never understood is why is it not NW Virginia? At least that name would be more correct than W Virginia.

Oh there were several different names proposed before they finally settled on West (by gawd!) Virginia https://wvtourism.com/whats-name-origin-west-virginia-state-might-c...d-instead/

But let's not drift any further off topic than we already have ;)

I can’t image that something published by WV tourism has been peer reviewed.

there you go - back on topic.

US life expectancy decreased by a whole year, and 2.7 years for Black people.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/18/world/covid-19-coronavirus/...y-affected

A webcomic that I like to read made a great explanation of how the mRNA vaccine works using Star Wars as a reference.
https://xkcd.com/2425/

Is that based off of yet another Lucas "Special Edition?" That's not like any movie that I remember seeing.

Maclunky

I have no idea what the heck that is about.