My impression (primarily from former representative Justin Amash) is that individual congresspeople have almost no power. Bills are crafted and introduced at the party level, and your choices are to vote with them or not. If you don't vote with the party and are in a safe district (which most are), the party will support candidates who will go along with the party line in the primary. The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can't take the risk of a primary challenger.
First, I want to know if which parts of this are true, and in more detail. One guy tweeting does not constitute proof. Are elected officials sitting around watching Netflix all day, or do they still have the power to privately horse trade to support their goals.
Second, assuming it is true, where did the power go? Parties aren't real, the power must be in specific humans or incentive systems. Does it all rest in the top three elected officials of each party? Their staff? Unelected party officers?
I'm very interested in evidence and arguments in either direction.
Some social groups develop a dynamic where you can steal status by criticizing someone else's taste. I first observed this on fark.com in the mid-2000s, where a woman would develop a reputation as hot, and then men would find more and more fault with her, to dunk on the guys praising her.
Now I'm noticing it as I try to buy well-made but not crazy expensive women's sweaters[1]. There's a pareto frontier of cost vs quality, and I don't see any shame in not maximizing quality. But any brand I check on reddit, no matter how expensive, has been denigrating its quality. Of course I can't know that this is to make themselves feel emotionally bigger, but it's always portrayed as a fundamental truth rather than a data point. And it's always "no they're gross" rather than "X has better quality for the money and Y is cheaper for the same quality"
But then I went looking for examples, and it seemed a little more complicated. It was harder to find the sneering comments than I expected. At least some people claim that, for the high-quality knock-off brand I was considering, it's about respect for intellectual property. That definitely could be cover for status-policing but I 🤨 at knock-off legos so I think there's some legitimacy to it.
In this odyssey I also learned that "discount resellers" like Marshalls, and TJ Maxx[2] market themselves as selling overstock from other stores, but in fact most of their stock was always intended for their stores. Name brands will license their branding to the discounters to produce cheaper products with the designer label, so you can't trust their quality. For TJ Maxx and Marshalls you can check this by looking at the last digit in the ID number (1= produced for discounter, 2 = genuine overstock).
Normally I'm fine with Amazon fast fashion but they save money on warm things by knitting them out of tissue paper. I suspected this problem was inherent in cheap sweaters but was afraid paying more would just get me more expensive tissue paper. I didn't feel like going through 10 return cycles, so I tried out spending real money on well regarded brands.
It worked out okay, but a week later I found some delightful sweaters for $13 at Ross Dress For Less. One snagged a thread while I was in the store and I'll be shocked if they're wearable next winter, but for now they are quite warm[3].
the tragedy to me is that there was enough physical space for everyone, but people clustered into a much tighter area than they needed to. The drop off at one space was sharp even though there was at most a very mild physical feature delineating it.
their legislators already wanted to regulate the big AI companies, and they (and their staffers) are smart enough to distinguish it from the sloppy AI bills they usually see
This got me thinking: what's the marginal return on placing or educating staffers, as opposed to electing a believer?
Yeah it's possible all you need is a few high powered people who Get It and a good ecosystem for lobbying everyone else, but then you have to evaluate the lobbyists.
For politicians in particular I mean skills like "knowing who to defer to" and "horse trading to get the bill passed without losing critical parts".
But thinking about the ecosystem as a whole, writing and nursing good legislation is also a skill I don't particularly know how to evaluate, which means I couldn't evaluate PACs or lobbyists even if I had perfect knowledge of their actions and thoughts.
1
agreed- I'd be especially interested in expansion or links on how the loss of local media affects things.