America - The Official Thread

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I've always felt like people don't dislike the DST switch as much as they think they do. People dislike winter & darkness and DST is merely a proxy for that. If you're above the 38th parallel, it's gonna be dark in the winter at 5:30pm or earlier, DST or not. I suspect people will complain about how dark the mornings are if we go to perma-DST.

My opinion - I don't really care one way or the other, though I would enjoy not having to adjust my clocks twice a year.
 
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...and for what? Not a damned thing as best I can tell.
That's the only argument needed honestly. We change the clocks for literally no reason. Get rid of it. Also I completely agree on the daylight being more important in the evening than the morning. While people are work it might as well be pitch black outside which negates the worry about how dark winter mornings are @Eunos_Cosmo it's wasted time at work anyway so who needs sun?

I've always felt like people don't dislike the DST switch as much as they think they do.
I remember one time I was flying from Phoenix up to Saint George. I planned the route and my coworker called the FBO and said we'd be there at 2200. We took off.

We get there and there's nobody there. We were expecting a line guy to meet us and put the planes in the hangar. We look at the clock...2300. What the hell? Where did that hour go? Anyways, we called the guy and he showed up really pissed off because he was already here and left after we never showed up.

Apparently one of those two states, either AZ or UT, doesn't do whatever type of time exists in late September. I still don't know which state and I don't really care to. All I know is they're in the same time zone so the time should've been the same but it wasn't and that is insane.

If we really want to solve this problem for good then everybody should start using GMT or zulu time. No more fussing about. Work starts in NYC at 1400z and starts in LA at 1700z. Get used to it.
 
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That's the only argument needed honestly. We change the clocks for literally no reason. Get rid of it. Also I completely agree on the daylight being more important in the evening than the morning. While people are work it might as well be pitch black outside which negates the worry about how dark winter mornings are @Eunos_Cosmo it's wasted time at work anyway so who needs sun?

That's how I feel about it. I can use the sun in the afternoon to do yard work, or have the kids play outside. I don't do anything of the sort in the morning.


I remember one time I was flying from Phoenix up to Saint George. I planned the route and my coworker called the FBO and said we'd be there at 2200. We took off.

We get there and there's nobody there. We were expecting a line guy to meet us and put the planes in the hangar. We look at the clock...2300. What the hell? Where did that hour go? Anyways, we called the guy and he showed up really pissed off because he was already here and left after we never showed up.

Apparently one of those two states, either AZ or UT, doesn't do whatever type of time exists in late September. I still don't know which state and I don't really care to. All I know is they're in the same time zone so the time should've been the same but it wasn't and that is insane.

If we really want to solve this problem for good then everybody should start using GMT or zulu time. No more fussing about. Work starts in NYC at 1400z and starts in LA at 1700z. Get used to it.

Yea Arizona is on standard time year round, so most of the year it's not aligned with the rest of the mountain time zone.

The reason time zones exist is to place noon close to the time when the sun is highest. The idea being that you can always know, no matter where in the world you're talking about, what the local sun looks like at roughly 2 in the afternoon, or 10am, or 11pm, etc. Obviously as you get to the higher latitudes that kinda breaks down. Anyway, if we didn't care to align the sun with the clock, we could do away with time zones. But that's a pretty useful feature so I'm not entirely sure it's worthwhile to do away with time zones.
 
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@Danoff Time zones don't bother me in concept either but the borders are pretty obtuse sometimes. Indiana is a problem I've had to deal with many times - most of the state is Eastern but the southwest corner and far northwest corner are Central. Even in a small plane you can cover a lot of ground pretty quickly and it was common while surveying to cross these time zones several times a day. Eventually I just ignored it and said if I'm late I'm late.

The northwest corner being in Central somewhat makes sense in the context of keeping the Chicago metro all on one time zone but the idea of a metro area is pretty abstract to the vast majority of people. It's not exactly marked on a map. But a state boundary...that's a pretty solid and recognizable place to put the time zone boundary. Putting the boundary 5 miles west of South Bend though some guys farm field is not a good spot for it, particularly when our idiotic cellular technology can't manage to switch time zones more than half the time. A smartphone not using GPS data to switch zones and instead getting its time from a tower installed in a different zone a half mile away is a really stupid problem to have.
 
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Why is DST such an issue for some people? It's an honest curiosity. I have vaguely heard about it being "a thing" in the US before.

I'd say to most people in Europe, it's just something that happens twice a year. I don't look into it much more than that.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjALegQIIhAC&usg=AOvVaw0Qnq5kSgx1kmTp8PEbSgBj

The EU Parliament voted to abolish DST by 2021. The coming clock change is supposed to be the last one. I don't know if any country is planning to implement it yet (Ireland definitely isn't), but it's likely to happen in the near future for many member states.
 
The EU Parliament voted to abolish DST by 2021. The coming clock change is supposed to be the last one. I don't know if any country is planning to implement it yet (Ireland definitely isn't), but it's likely to happen in the near future for many member states.

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Good lord, this statement from the office of the former president:

Trump
I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers.

That is one of the most pathetic and embarrassing things I’ve ever read.
 
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Good lord, this statement from the office of the former president:



That is one of the most pathetic and embarrassing things I’ve ever read.
Because everything has to revolve around him.

I still get a laugh when Trump wanted Operation Warp Speed credited with the Pfizer vaccine & it turned out the entire thing was funded by Germany.
Vice President Mike Pence was among Trump administration officials saying support from the government’s Operation Warp Speed program helped accelerate the development of the vaccine, which was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infections in an interim analysis.

The truth is that Pfizer didn’t receive any funding from Operation Warp Speed for the development, clinical trial and manufacturing of the vaccine. Rather, its partner, BioNTech SE, has received money -- from the German government.
https://fortune.com/2020/11/09/pfizer-vaccine-funding-warp-speed-germany/

Of course, Trump also took this as a slight when later claiming BioNTech purposely waited til' after the election to share its good news b/c again, the world "literally" revolves around him in his mind.

Edit* Just going to add this in to tickle @TexRex some more.

On the call, Trump urged Watson to focus her attention on Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta.

“You are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable — the dishonesty,” Trump said, according to the Wall Street Journal recording.

“Fulton is the motherload, as the expression goes,” he said.

Trump told Watson that if he wasn’t declared the winner in Georgia, the two Republicans who were up for a run-off the next month were likely to lose their seats in the U.S. Senate.

“When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” Trump told Watson, while claiming that she had the “most important job in the country right now.”

Amid his encouragement of Watson, he mentioned that “the people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me, they know I won.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-call-georgia-elections-investigator-recording
 
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Not only that, but apparently the new stimulus checks won't have Trump's name on them ...


... and Biden's so senile he's not even putting his name on them.
 
Simple: only a senile (or non-narcissistic) President would miss the opportunity to let everyone in the country know that they're getting the money directly from him.
Oh, I missed the sarcasm. That’s on me. I had forgotten about Trump insisting that his name be on the checks instead of the Secretary of the Treasury. Because Trump really is that insecure of a child.
 
Greene demonstrates an old gag of how Americans suck at knowing anything about the world outside of the mainland.
In comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida in late February that surfaced on Tuesday, Greene said: "I'm a regular person. And I wanted to take my regular-person, normal, everyday American values, which is, we love our country. We believe our hard-earned tax dollars should just go for America, not for what? China, Russia, the Middle East, Guam, whatever, wherever."
Guam, an island in the west Pacific Ocean, has been a US territory since 1898, following the Spanish-American War. Its residents are US citizens who pay federal taxes, but not federal income tax. Many people in Guam serve in the US military, and it's considered to be of vital strategic importance.
https://www.businessinsider.com/guam-offers-marjorie-taylor-greene-cookies-over-cpac-gaffe-2021-3
 
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Listening to Biden speak on Covid & the stimulus (& it's not like he's the most inspirational orator in US history) is like returning to planet Earth after 4 years in a parallel, bizarro universe.
I thought the speech - and the delivery - was impressive. But I'm a little dubious about throwing cubic tax dollars at a crisis which has severely damaged tax revenues at all levels. To pass a 1.9 trillion dollar spending bill without a single Republican vote was significant in terms of the governmental power now being wielded. I know my state government, now due for billions of federal dollars, is giddy with spending fever despite severe loss of revenues. IMHO it remains to be seen about China relations and the repatriation of manufacturing jobs à la Trumpian populism. Or do Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics still rule the economy from the grave as zombie overlords?
 
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It's been said that the best form of government is the enlightened despot, the only problem being what comes after he dies.
 
If the average politician actually followed what their constituents wanted.
Aaaaand, that will happen when pigs fly.

The phrase "get money out of politics" is beyond platitudinous, at least in lefty discourse, but it's the most surefire way to make politicians more concerned and knowledgeable about what their constituents want and need. It's easy to say "get money out of politics" but quite difficult to think of ways in which this could genuinely happen, especially when politicians on both sides benefit directly from nearly completely unregulated donation and lobbying laws. To me, the most effective way would be to pass a constitutional amendment to ban such practices, but how difficult it is to modify the Constitution, which in all honesty is not a bad thing, this probably won't happen for a long while.
 
How many lobbyists are there for each congressperson in Washington? Pretty sure it's in the thousands, and each one is carrying bags of money, perhaps making the current government the most corrupt in American political history?

I think most congresspersons are not trained in law, but most lobbyists are. That's why the politicians generally rely on the lobbyists to actual write up the laws.
 
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How many lobbyists are there for each congressperson in Washington? Pretty sure it's in the thousands, and each one is carrying bags of money, perhaps making the current government the most corrupt in American political history?

I think most congresspersons are not trained in law, but most lobbyists are. That's why the politicians generally rely on the lobbyists to actual write up the laws.
Imagine if they used that money for not bribing or corrupting politicians....

Sorry, that was a weird unrealistic thought. I'll try better next time.
 

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