So "the only adults in the room" want to starve poor people and deprive them of affordable health care in order to give a few pennies on the dollar of tax breaks to ultra-wealthy people that really don't need tax breaks due to being ultra-wealthy.

Please reexamine your world view.

So you want air cargo to get really expensive then. It's one thing when you're dividing your suggested "ATC surcharge" across 200 seats - quite another when it's just a freight carrier eating the whole meal.

Enjoy the cost difference the next time you simply must have something manufactured in China on release day.

Oh look at the shitbag trying to explain away raping children.

How morally compromised do you have to be to equivocate such horrible behavior? Oh, but I forgot - it's the Republicans that are "the party of law and order" and "the party of personal accountability" right?

What a sad fucking joke you people are. Righteous and indignant right up to the point where one of yours is credibly accused, and then it's equivocation, whataboutism, and excuse-making all the way down.

Think about this critically:

If a private insurance company is profitable, how is that efficiency? By definition, it's money being spent on "health care" that isn't actually paying for health care.

If you have a profit-seeking entity (or multiple of them) in your payment stack, and they are profitable, those profits are an expression of inefficiency.

It goes even further than that - why would the Democrats even trust this administration to negotiate in good faith at this point, when they've already shown no regard for written spending laws by exercising a non-existent line-item veto on spending they don't like?

There is literally zero reason to "take them at their word" when they say they will negotiate after the government is reopened, because they're giant fucking liars. And, even if you do craft legislation that takes care of the ACA subsidy beef, there's no guarantee they aren't crossing their fingers behind their back and will do whatever the hell they want anyway.

This is what happens when you cannot trust the opposition in a negotiation, because they have already proven themselves as bad-faith negotiators.

Pretty hilarious that you seem to think that the Democratic position is "we get everything we want" when that's not even close to reality.

Also hilarious how you're bitching about Republicans not being able to enact their own "policy priorities" because of parliamentary procedure when the last 5 years is absolutely LOUSY with shitbag Republicans blocking military promotions over completely disconnected policy demands, and threatening shutdowns every single time a spending bill would lapse.

And you know what happened with each and every one of those spending bills during the Biden administration? Leadership would sit down and negotiate.

What's not happening now? That.

Fuck you for blaming Democrats when it's Republicans that refuse to negotiate AT ALL. When you're in power, you have to govern. And when you govern, you do so with the consent of the governed, as expressed via their representation. And if you can't get the votes, change the bill until you can. That's how it's always worked, and will continue to work.

That's democracy. If you don't like it, find a different country.

Everyone seems to forget that the Cloture rule used to require 75 votes to end debate, and it was lowered to 60 at some point in the 1970s or so.

Somehow it wasn't bedlam afterward, even though there was no shortage of people claiming it would be.

Cloture definitely has it's uses and one of those is to prevent the idiotic messaging bills you see in the House - if nobody is going to vote to end debate to move to final passage, don't even bother writing it.

Or - and just hear me out on this - they could sit down and negotiate a deal where nobody gets 100% of what they want, but everyone gets 80% of what they want including the American voting public.

You know, like how the last 250 years of government operated.

Why can't they do that?

Republicans have had like what, 15 years to put up a replacement plan?

Where's that at? Let's hear what their ideas are and choose between the current flawed incumbent system, and their proposal.

Oh, that's right, they only have "concepts of a plan" - but that doesn't stop them from trying to shit all over the current system that is still better than what came before, isn't it?

When are you going to stop lapping up this bullshit?

It needs one signature for it to become permanent congressional record - nothing can be done to remove it once they get that one more signature.

Gee, I wonder why he's not bringing the House into session and swearing in the Democrat from Arizona that won special election, and has pledged to sign the discharge petition the instant she's sworn in... ?

In which case they will buy themselves a year.

And they will lose the midterms.

And then Democrats will start using the cloture-motionless Senate rules to start undoing everything they can, and blocking everything they can including suggested regulatory changes under the Congressional Review Act.

They will have the ability to stop anything and everything with a 51 vote threshold, and the minority party will have absolutely no powers.

Eliminating the filibuster is the fastest way to get to whipsawing policy. The Senate should always be a place where reasonable compromise occurs, and the filibuster is what helps to ensure that - if you want party-line messaging bills that are destined for the recycle bin, go watch CSPAN1 where they do that all day in the House of Representatives.

Without additional context, this is the correct interpretation.

The additional context necessary to understand why it's his fault: nobody in this Congress with an (R) next to their name takes a shit without prior permission request and authorization from Trump.

If they refuse to be an independent body of government as designed, then the person they swore fealty to is responsible. If they had any backbone whatsoever, Senate Republicans would be negotiating. But they aren't - because they're so afraid of a shitpost from the Cult Leader that would transform them from promising politicians destined for greatness into beshitted ex-politician talking heads on cable news.

The GOP has no leadership other than Trump - everyone else is an obsequious toadie who can't fall in line fast enough, and can't agree strongly enough.

Define "effective". Musk is great at self promotion but if you looked at the details, he just made everything worse.

No he did not. What he exposed is that he does not understand basics of things. For example, Musk claimed there were fraud in the Social Security Administration because he found "duplicate SSNs". What he exposed out is he does not understand basics of data and a fact table can have duplicate foreign keys . . . because it is a fact table. It would be like me claiming there is "MASSIVE FRAUD" in my companies sales data because there are duplicate Customer IDs.

What he proved is he is an idiot. What you proved is you believed him without looking at details.

Will it have excess capacity that Amazon will lease? If no, then this cable has zero effect on Europe and North America. That was my point. I simply did not understand why the OP would have objections to a private companies building something that affects no one else.

Except there are alternatives. A developer can sell their game on Epic Games, Steam, GOG, Microsoft, etc. Now Steam is the behemoth and if a developer decides to ignore Steam, that will greatly affect sales. Developers that feel they need to sell on Steam because it has the largest majority of potential customers is very different than "nobody can offer an alternative".