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Cake day: June 19th, 2026

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  • nanometer1625@thelemmy.clubtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comA system is what it does
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    2 days ago

    IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:

    • The presence of both a House of Representatives and a Senate, and both bodies need to approve legislation with a majority in order for the legislation to become law. This is fundamentally broken, because there’s no guarantee that both houses will be controlled by the same party. Imagine if a database locked up because it had only 2 replicas, and if they ever became out of sync, all writes would stop, with no way to achieve a majority.
    • The fact that the president can veto legislation. As above, this can result in a complete lockup of the government’s basic functionality, since there is no guarantee that Congress and the president are controlled by the same party.
    • The electoral college. The fact that it is capable of installing as president the loser of the election is an obvious and massive flaw.

    If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.





  • Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we created a dolphin with a human brain, or an octopus with a human brain, etc. Are brains plastic enough to adapt? What if after learning how to use one body, the brain was somehow transferred to / plugged into a different body? Would it be possible to learn 2 different bodies and even swap between them at will?