Recent Democrat presidents have not gone after legal immigration the way the Trump administration has. And in recent years, the only proposed comprehensive immigration reform bills - to try to make the process less broken - have only had Democrat support.
You are correct the deportation numbers are similar, but the picture is bigger than just deportations.
Structurally, I don’t think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?
“Conservative” can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren’t lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the “two Santas” scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the “redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling”).
US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.
It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. “The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We’ve said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it’s serious!”
It sucks so bad that it’s such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don’t know if we have a path to that.
In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.
I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.
You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it’s not universal.
Insider trading is a bipartisan rep problem for sure (legal! since they make the laws!) Not sure it’s any better or just different: in the case of the reps, the corruption wealth gains are not direct money from taxpayers. Stockholders get the short end of the stick on that one.
But the president historically has held to higher standards. What Trump is doing is a new level of corruption, both for the specific office of president and for the direct taxpayers source of his wealth gain. It’s reasonable to have fresh outrage over it, even for people with outrage fatigue on the Congress insider trading issue.
Trump famously slammed Obama’s frequent golfing at a rally in February 2016, promising that, as president, he would give up visiting his courses in Scotland and South Florida.
“I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” Trump said. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”
And this is a conservative estimate!
Most of the costs come from military and law enforcement salaries, which haven’t kept up with inflation, so the figures aren’t adjusted to current dollars… the real costs are almost certainly higher than these unadjusted estimates.
What do you mean by “it” that they all do? Because it’s definitely not spending this much time, or amount of money per trip, that they’re all doing.
In contrast, former President Joe Biden’s trips to Wilmington, Delaware, and Rehoboth Beach cost far less than Trump’s golf trips because he used smaller aircraft or helicopters, as the local airport cannot accommodate a 747.
Former President Barack Obama was also known for his frequent golf outings, but they were far cheaper than Trump’s, as he would also use smaller aircraft or play at nearby courses, including on the course at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.
The apologist say it’s good for networking. Which maybe in theory, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny how he’s using it.
Trump has also used golf as a tool for influence and relationship-building. Politicians and world leaders, from Finnish president Alexander Stubb to US senator Lindsey Graham, have played rounds with him, seeking to win favor or maintain alliances.
And the stretch to justify continues:
Trump’s latest health report also cited his frequent golfing as proof of his physical fitness, framing it as part of an active lifestyle.
Obligate ram breathing is kind of mind-blowing. They have to swim to flow water through their gills because their gills have no muscles to flap like most fish have.
Only a few sharks are obligate ram breathers, though. Many species are able to take breaks from swimming.
I believe it depends on the latitude, since away from the equator the Sun rises at an angle and not straight up. It can be low enough to still be below the visor, but risen enough to have moved far enough south (if in the northern hemisphere) to be problematic when driving southeast in the morning or southwest in the evening.
I found this image on Google search that I think illustrates the phenomenon: https://share.google/okYRf16lB1vegnVax
http://stevekluge.com/astronomy/riseazimuth.html
At the Equator, where the Sun rises and sets perpendicular to the horizon, the Summer Solstice Sun rises 23.5° north of due East, and sets 23.5° north of due West.
The Sun moves around a lot over a year. I don’t think it’s practical to try to plan a grid around it.
The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.
You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.
If the government procurement person doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, they are likely to choose the bidder who also doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, and is the low bidder because they don’t realize what they are getting themselves into.
By the time everyone realizes how much more is really required, they are already halfway through the project. The government could have saved money by choosing a more realistic higher bidder to start with. But once they have half a program from the low bidder, throwing that away and starting over doesn’t save any money. Better to just finish with the team that’s invested with the project.
I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.
It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.
And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.
Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.
If it gave party leaders more in depth knowledge of which candidates had broad appeal (which is likely - knowing how popular each first + second choice combination is gives power to data analytics), they could more accurately spend resources to win more general elections. Actually giving the party more power.
Eventually. They would have to completely rebuild many of the established campaign strategy tools. I think sunk cost fallacy (we invested in these tools, we can’t switch to a system where our expensive software and stuff isn’t used!) is a more powerful block here than power hunger.
Amendment. Or as the other comment alluded to, interstate compact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
They believe the other option would have resulted in even worse outcome. As long as they can imagine it being worse, they can believe voting for their (misguided, but not as much as the other) team is the right thing to do.
The silver lining is that if their team is less inspirational, some voters will become discouraged and stay home instead of voting.
In Amsterdam, seniors and those with disabilities can drive tiny cars (like the Japanese Kei cars, I think) on bike paths. They have the protection they need for their health issues, they go slow so their slowed reaction times aren’t a safety risk to themselves and others on a regular car road, and they have full access to groceries and medical appointments and social visits. Win-win.