Vyor
My influence grows!
Still connects to the rest of the country in places, it's also managed really fuckin poorly.
Trump Investigations Thread
- Thread starter Rocinante
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Still connects to the rest of the country in places, it's also managed really fuckin poorly.
Because of stupid green pushers.
THE reason it connects to the rest of the US is because TX sells surplus electricity to other states.
Vyor
My influence grows!
It does, yeah. It also pulls from said rest of the country if something bad happens, natural disasters you see.
But, I don't know chief, that sounds like interstate-commerce to me.
That does fall under interstate commerce, but just because an action falls under interstate commerce doesn't mean you need an entire cabinet level department creating rules and regulations on the topic. In fact, if it is just a matter of interstate commerce, we already have a cabinet level department for it, which nobody mentioned as a useful and essential part of the Federal government, even though it handles a lot of the core responsibilities actually laid out under Article 1.
For instance, the Commerce Department runs the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the organization that handles defining all sort of industrial and trade standards across the US, from things like "what is an Inch" to "what are IT security best practices".
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Ixian
Well-known member
Andrew Jackson once played the "I have an army, what do you have" card blatantly telling the Supreme Court at the time that they could fuck off or try to stop him.
Now, I don't think that was a good thing, but a sitting President can get away with a lot if they want to and don't care about PR fallout, which a President in their final term in Office usually doesn't.
DarthOne
☦️
Problem is that Trump, assuming he even gets elected again and doesn’t fall victim to ‘fortified elections’, gets JFK’d or manages to get on the ballot at all, doesn’t have the military on his side. Or at least not the leadership and a fair portion of the rest.
He also didn't have the Posse Comitatus act.
But he was also a former general and the military liked him.
Vyor
My influence grows!
The power grid is larger and more interconnected than the fucking highway system. When you plug into your outlet, you are pulling power from the other side of the country. Not a lot of power, electricity tends to flow from the closest source and towards the closest draw, but you get some.
There are only 2 states not connected to it, Hawaii and Alaska.
They manage nuclear material, nuclear power plants, power plan regs in general, consumer device power inputs, home solar panels, emergency generators... it probably regulates and handles more things than the department of transportation and FCC.
Ok, what happens if you toss the Dept of Energy and let every state set it's own energy safety and use regulations, even for nuclear materials?
State's will no longer need to match up to the syne wave of the national grid, so lots of ways for state-to-state power transmission to become rather dangerous. State's will also no longer need to worry about Federal regs around nuclear materials, so can make as shoddy a reactor as they desire/can pay for.
I get it, you think the Dept of Energy is overly broad and shouldn't be a cabinet level situation, but the work the Dept of Energy does is very much an interstate commence situation, and that they exist at the level they do, because the implications of things under the Dept of Energy going bad leads to things like 3 Mile Island and worse.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
So? In Europe, we have EU psychopaths in Brussels who use this kind of 'logic' to centralise power in their hands. It's nonsense. Germany and Poland should be able to decide on their own policy. In addition to ensuring a free trade block (which is always the main thing), any kind of greater union really has only two major policy areas that should be run centrally: foreign affairs, and the military. (Hilariously, those are the two things the EU doesn't manage to centralise properly...)
And for the exact same reason, California and Montana should each handle their own affairs, too. Whatever the lunatics have turned it into, the United States were founded -- quite explicitly -- as a union of states. A league. A compact. Not a superstate. If states handle things differently, that's good. That's healthy competition. That's a battle of different ideas, each trying to demonstrate their worth, and being tested by reality.
Uniformity is stagnation and decline. You want variation. You want competition.
And yes, that can lead to errors. But at least to some degree, and usually to a great degree, those errors will be of limited scale. If you centralise things and a critical error is made... centrally... then the scale is not limited. Then everyone is screwed. That's what you want to avoid. This is why many ships and submarines need those watertight doors you can lock, so that if one compartment floods, you can still save the vessel, still prevent the water from getting everywhere.
You imagine centralism, in this context, as a safeguard against local mistakes. I urge you to see if from the other side: decentralism is a safeguard against central mistakes. And that's infinitely more important. It saves the ship from sinking, even if a critical mistake is made.
Vyor
My influence grows!
And then you plug your computer in and it explodes because the syne wave shifted.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
Yes, it is a well-known fact that this happens daily in Europe, where every country has its own power grid, and yet the bordering countries have them connected to serve as each other's emergency back-up.
Get real.
See, here you are falling into the Euro trap of seeing US states as akin to European nations, and operating from there for your argument.
Montana and Cali are states, not nations, and do have 48 other states they coexist with and need to share regulations with regards to safety and commercial laws.
Also, 1865 and Appomattox Court House would like a word about the US not being a 'United' nation/'superstate'.
When it comes to industrial safety regs and things like national scale energy policy, that's a Federal level issue very much under the Interstate Commerce rules.
Now if we want to toss all nuclear shit under the DoD, and that includes nuclear power programs that were previously civie, there is an argument for that, but it runs into the fact the DoE is more focused than the DoD in general.
Not in nuclear safety regulations, you don't.
Fissile materials work under laws that give no shit about human politics or local vs state vs federal power, only hard physics, and what works and what doesn't is pretty fucking well known.
Trying to play with nuclear safety regs like that, just because people feel the Dept of Energy's remit is too broad, is possibly irradiating the nose to spite the face.
Radiation and nuclear materials aren't things that care whether you prefer centralization of power or not, only whether you respect the hard physics involved.
The amount of money needed to do serious radiation and nuclear work is not at all trivial, and states should not be expect to each have their own Dept Energy level nuclear materials and policy dept and budget.
There is damn good reason to have a whole Dept at the cabinet level to address the issues, because Dept of Energy also works with DoD nuclear units as well.
Gutting the Dept of Energy would gut the nuclear triad, never mind what it would do to the civie grid, and that is why the complaints about it being overbroad feel like we want to pretend the Founders knew what an atom bomb and nuclear reactor would be and would have expected it to be handled at a 'small level' to avoid empowering the Interstate Commerce 'unnecessarily'.
Vyor
My influence grows!
The EU actually regulates that. Nice try though!
stephen the barbarian
Well-known member
i am a fan of the 70 maxims.
but moving on, turn out that Jack Smith may or may not have been properly appointed.
What? No. This is an utter strawman of my argument. But even that aside, this is a situation of "tell me you know nothing of electrical engineering in the US without telling me you know nothing about electrical engineering and I'm so lazy and convinced I know how things work I'm not even going to do a cursory search on the topic."
Firstly, even though I would argue it is entirely within Congress' power to establish a uniform code for electricity under the "Establishing a Uniform System of Weights and Measures" clause of Article 1 (no need to even touch the Commerce Clause here), but guess what?
We didn't even do that.
The standardization of the Power Grid in the United States is done via the "National Electric Safety Code", which, despite it's name, is not, in fact, governed by the Federal government, but by the PRIVATE Electrical industry organization "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers". Want to know something else? Even the smaller side at a national level is private, with household level electrical standards being set in law by Local and State governments under their local Building Codes, based on the advise of the "National Electrical Code" which is again not set by the Federal government despite the name but against by a PRIVATE industry organization, in this case the "National Fire Protection Association".
And just to literally drive this point home and put a stake in this entire train of thought, the Department of Energy's OWN WEBSITE explicitly links to the IEEE standards and states they "help" develop them, not that they establish, manage, or otherwise dictate them.
In other words, for the very thing you're claiming the Department of Energy is ESSENTIAL for, that the Federal government MUST DO or CHAOS would reign... Private Industry and Associations already handle, have handled, and continue to handle.
So, if they're not setting electrical standards, which I admit I think they could do, and not being a bloated bureaucratic nightmare holding back deployment of Nuclear Power through Red Tape and Overregulation explicitly meant to make Nuclear power prohibitively expensive to build and deploy... what good is this Department of Energy anyway?
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
And then everyone realized the Articles of Confederation sucked.
Vyor
My influence grows!
The IEEE is... weird.
Very, very, very, very weird. As in, they adopt standards for everything from how your CPU does floating point rounding to LAN to fucking "Recommended Practice for Nanoscale and Molecular Communication Framework" (actual working group title btw).
But they have no enforcement mechanism, at least for people that didn't sign on. They rely on patent and contractual controls to do things and even then it's limited. The Department of Energy gives them a bit of a bigger stick to wave around for that.
They also don't have any standards for the safe handling of nuclear waste, though modern nuclear waste could ironically tank a nuclear bomb and not do anything too bad.
Ok your taking offense from Skall where none is meant or intended.
And old Jewish saying is do not create evil where none exists, and in this case no harm was meant. What he was saying was if a far less organized europe can work this out so can we. You have far too much faith in government insitutions and their capabilities and how much they bring to the table.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
Ehr... Bacle's argument was that "States will no longer need to match up to the syne wave of the national grid" if states run their own grids and you don't have a central authority commanding them, whereas my response is that it's insane for states not do what's practical and work together even if they are not all centralised under one authority.
My point isn't "you shouldn't co-operate", my point is "co-operation among different parties is better than lumping it all together under one central authority". My point is about avoiding single points of failure.
You both fail to grasp that, and are both way too busy obsessing over a false dichotomy ("centralism" OR "total chaos") to see that this is not actually the point that is being made. Just to clarify, again: I'm not against agreements between states (or other entities) to keep things running smoothly; I'm against centralising power structures, because centralised systems are inherently too vulnerable to all-encompassing failure. Compartmentalising is an essential feature when it comes to preventing real disasters.
(P.S. The mechanism by which the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany work together to allow interaction between their power grids is a treaty separate from the EU, which predates the Maastricht Treaty. In fact, it was originally a treaty involving the country of West Germany. In other words: no, you don't need a centralised political authority to do such things. Nice try though!)
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You're by-passing my actual point. In fact, I think you're "falling into the American trap" of having had a large union for so long that you fail to see that countries much smaller than most US states can run things competently, by their lonesome, without such a union. This fact proves that US states do not inherently need the Federal government to do all sorts of stuff for them.
Literally. Reality itself demonstrates that I'm right about this. The dangers you imagine are really just that: imagined.
By your logic, Britain has doomed itself to nuclear holocaust by voting for Brexit, because they now lack the EU to ensure that their nuclear reactors are safe. Except, wait... the EU had very little to say about that anyway! European countries handle this themselves. British, Dutch, German, Belgian, and French standards are all handled nationally. Yet they all have nuclear power (well, Germany had it, effectively). And all handle it safely. In fact, I stress again... the only big nuclear disaster in Europe was caused by the highly centralised USSR.
Europe has many problems, compared to America. But at least in Europe, many people realise what a dumb idea the EU's wish for centralisation really is. In America, you've lived with this Federal crutch for so long, many of you no longer grasp that you can walk without it.
Again: stop imagining disasters. If the Dutch and the English can run nuclear power stations without having Brussels handle it all for them, then the good people of Virginia and Texas can surely manage the same without Washington breathing down their necks. You don't need those centralist busy-bodies. They just made you believe that you do. The dependency is entirely imagined.
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Hard disagree. They weren't perfect, but some pretty skewed historiography (the same school that also vilified the second amendment, by the way) has deliberately painted them in an overly negative light. Surprisingly much got done under those Articles. They did need reform. The wishes of the centralists were way over-blown, though, which is why the Bill of Rights even exists: to prevent centralist over-reach that would otherwise certainly ensue.
The tenth amendment seems particularly relevent to this whole discussion, since it's essentially a formulation of the principle I'm defending here. As many powers as possible should be reserved to the lower levels. Only a limited number of tasks should be granted to any central authority.
Clearly that principle didn't somehow inform only the Articles, only to then be discarded. It remained relevant. So your framing here is misplaced.
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