You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

That would, indeed, probably be a good solution. The doing of it, though, is "not simple".

If you could trust an LLM not to hallucinate, that would be a good job for LLMs. There was a system called PLATO that tried something like that several decades ago, but it was both much too expensive and much too limited. Also much too inflexible.

While that's true, you should also expect a huge number of species to go extinct during the change. I expect humans and cockroaches would survive, but that our civilization would is much less certain.

I *think* you missed the sarcasm. The Mesozoic isn't exactly recently.

OTOH, it has a half-life of (IIRC) less than a decade. Of course, it decays to CO2.

Very good analysis. And he did modulate some rather draconian "bathroom bills." I can't help but wonder how many Democrats are actually registered as GOP so they can help keep him in office!! - past the "caucus system"!

Good on them!

The demographic that helped put Trump into office was actually Hispanics. Do you think they cared if his opponent was black or not? Or the fact that his opponent came off as a clown that only cared about abortion as the single greatest issue facing the nation?? Or that "new arrivals" were taking the very jobs that they work at?

I'm pretty sure there's a list of reasons where race was not a primary factor. Not to mention that Obama, a black person, was elected president.

When everyone cops out and single mindedly puts their scapegoat excuses front and center, 'demented' people who actually vote will continue to vote for the 'wrong' person.

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I don't believe it's been proven that Trump is personally a pedophile. Merely that he is friends with a few.

Sunk costs can make it hard to withdraw. I wouldn't read too much into that. And the precise number isn't as important as their size, which doesn't seem to be mentioned, or at least featured.

The dementia reaches across party lines. The GOP is insufferable in some areas, but the question needs to be asked "exactly how did they get elected?" The reason is a person who was really suffering from dementia wrongly decided they could run and win the presidency a second time.

So just keep that in mind when you throw the "demented" word around. Spoken as a political infependent.

Pretty much agree, except that I'd use a continuous equation, probably a logistic function, have trades of over 20 years have a negative tax, and have trades of under 10 ns have a tax rate greater than 100%.

They've also removed, or made more difficult to use, features that I depend on. Probably to satisfy the phone market.