Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing.
Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.
Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She is 2 heartbeats away from being President (she would become president if both the President and Vice President became incapacitated).
The House is similar to the UK Parliament. She is elected to her position by the members of the House.
Since Democracts control the House this term, they elected Nancy Pelosi as Speaker for this term.
The President has primary responsibility for foreign affairs. The Speaker taking this action could be interpretted as stepping on the toes of the President, or could have tacit approval of the President as a kind of stalking horse.
The House is one of two chambers that make up Congress. The House is a representational chamber by population, whereas it's counterpart the Senate is fixed at 2 members per state.
The House is often where bills originate, and the Senate is the latter half of the process.
The Senate was designed from the beginning to be an obstacle. If you can't get both a majority of people, and a majority of states to agree then it should stay a law at the state level instead of the federal.
> I'm choosing to interpret this as a sarcastic jab at HN's US-centric tendencies
It wasn't a sarcastic jab.
> willful ignorance
Do you expect everybody in the world to know how the US government works?
> It would take two seconds to look this up.
I looked it up immediately after looking up Nancy Pelosi on Google. This is what I got (Wikipedia):
"The United States House of Representatives, usually referred to as the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber."
Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
So I typed in a simple explanation.
This is the honest truth. Believe it if you want to.
(I actually got a better understanding of what US House of Representatives is by reading other comments here.)
FWIW, there's also "simple.wikipedia.org", which has plain-English definitions for many of the most popular entries in regular Wikipedia. Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
> Didn't want to bother with it.
I suspect this is the root cause of the problem. I could see why you'd post such a question here if you had tried Googling, found no relevant results, and ran out of options for doing the work yourself. But that doesn't sound like what happened. Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you. That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time. Do you see the problem there?
> Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
Thank you for taking the time. Much appreciated.
> Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you.
No. I did not decide to let others do the research.
I simply stopped doing the research. Didn't want to find out more, because deep knowlege of the House of Representatives does not add much value to my life. And neither is it a topic I'm interested in (like, I have spent hours reading and learning about comets because that's something I'm interested in, even though it too doesn't provide much tangible value to my life).
> That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time.
Wrong. It's like saying I don't want to spend too much time on this.
I never asked anybody else to do anything on my behalf. Frankly I never expected this to upset people.
I don't know. I'm not an American and I know what the house of representatives is, I also know what the chinese national congress is and who is the president of France and who is Modi. I suggest it is a good thing to invest some time into reading international news, because so much of what influences our daily life is determined by international politics and the big players in it.
> Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance." Of course there's nothing wrong with needing to look up words, especially in one's non-native language, but anyone could feign needing to exhaustively depth-first search words in the dictionary to understand any concept regardless of how basic it is. Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
> I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance."
The meaning I came up with in my original comment wasn't wrong, was it?
My goal was to find out who Nancy Pelosi is. Finding out what's House of Representatives wasn't the top priority.
I don't understand why you're upset with me not digging deeper into what the House of Representatives is.
> Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
It's not the slippery slope fallacy, because I'm not saying anything about incremental steps inevitably leading towards anything. You complained that looking something up doesn't work because you then need to look up all the words you encounter in the definition. I pointed out that the same could be true for any explanation regardless of its source (and likely would be true, because words like "congress" would almost certainly feature in anyone's explanation).
Well, Congress is a term used by a number of countries, not just the US, for their legislative bodies. The main difference between a Congress and a Parliament as far as I recall is that Parliament has a combined legislative and executive role, where Congress is solely legislative.
Senate and the nuance of our bicameral legislature is going to be more bespoke, like me having to look up the House of Commons vs. House of Lords in the UK.
Sort of... I didn't get the impression he stayed at the Capitol because he thought it was the right thing for the country, but instead because he felt staying was the better option for his own power and legacy. I mean, I'll take it, but I'd prefer our leaders were slightly more principled than that.
In France you have a strong president that combines the role of a monarch and prime minister, but the role of "constitutional gatekeeper" is shared by the Constitutional Council, Supreme Court and Administrative Court. The latter three are actually entities that use their power.
The idea of having two houses of parliament is common in most large countries, and it is also common for those houses to be segregated from the executive (EU etc...).
The US is a political and cultural mess, but a lot of those issues aren't inherently due to the political system involved.
It's just that when a majority of the American people want certain changes in policy, they are not able to get them passed even though the country is a democracy.
The parent comment just gave reasons for that (among other things).
The United States is not, strictly speaking, a democracy. The people don't make decisions. They elect people who make decisions, thus it is a republic.
I hear a lot of people in technical (predominantly US) forums make this distinction. Where does the perception that Republic or democracy are conflicting concepts come from?
Republic and democracy are orthogonal concepts. A republic is a form of government where the head of state is elected. So it is in conflict with a monarchy, where the head of state is passed by inheritance. In democracies decisions are made by the people through various means, like elections. In fact many (most?) republics are democracies, where the head of state is elected by the people. The US is one of them, the "the original" one Athens was as well.
However there are republics where the head of state is e.g. elected by a clique of oligarchs or the military. They are undemocratic republics.
Don’t forget that the President and Senate are both elected on the basis of land, rather than population. And the presidential allotment is winner-takes-all for most of those land areas. Definitely doesn’t disenfranchise large population centers, it’s fine.
The patches to the constitution aren't as deeply thought out as the original one. The Senate wasn't even an elected institution until 100 years ago, whether that is better or worse than an appointed system is mostly a false dilemma as there are more than two options. Pointing out that our constitution isn't really geared for the current process is a first step of getting more inspiration on how it could function.
When you patch one aspect it throws the other aspects out of whack.
"Basis of land"? LOL. Are you referring to the 50 individual state governments that make up the United States of America? Most Europeans don't know this, but the first government in the world to ban slavery was the U.S (Vermont). The US isn't one homogeneous zone. There are 50 individual governments that write their own legislation, have their own taxation systems and have military's (state guards). California is free to create their abortion access legislation as is Texas. Many states in the US legalized Weed despite the fact that the federal government has some bizarre policy in place (which isn't constitutional).
I hate to burst your bubble but Pope Zachary ended slavery in Rome in the 740s, banning the slave trade and manumitting all slaves already present by purchase of the church & state.
Seems like a significant security risk that it is publicly trackable?
I've seen AF1 land at the airport here (Bozeman) -- it flew in to the area at high altitude then circled tightly reducing altitude until final approach. I assumed to reduce the chance of a stinger hit from mountain-men.
As you noticed from AF1, the people who manage the flights of nation-level VIPs are extremely cautious and have a rich, well-informed risk model. You can imagine these airplanes have many countermeasures (SPAR19 is a C-40C, which is a military version of a 737). For all we know it was a decoy plane.
Hiding it from the army is not the point. Who knows if there'd be another maniac with a homemade gun or explosives out there, just like what happened with the ex-PM of Japan.
What's the risk of a plane flying over the Sea above the reach of "simple" weapons is being tracked?
A military-level attack against the third highest representative of the United States is a quite certain way to launch a war, maybe even nuclear retaliation, based on how quickly and well "prove" for attribution is unveiled.
However getting attention is a key purpose of that trip.
When US representative fly to Taiwan secretly it's disabled but whole world was talking about Pelosi going there and China's treats to shoot her down for day or two. Putting that flight for whole world to see is actually more secure than trying to keep it secret.
Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing.
Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.