Congress: “Oh hey, they sounded an alarm. Let’s go ahead and add that to the muffled pile of past alarms that have been sounded.”

I think it’s a joke about physicists not understanding tolerances.

I remember hearing an old story about a company buying signs from a contractor. The contractor produced all kinds of things, so it was fairly straightforward to send them the CAD file and stop worrying about it. One manager did an audit, and realized they were paying hundreds of dollars each for these basic signs. They weren’t fancy or anything, and were just signs throughout the facility that got updated regularly. So why the hell were they paying so much for what should have been a simple print job?

After some investigating, the manager discovered it was because the company didn’t want to hire an artist to design the signs; They just had one of their engineers do it. And the engineer who did the design forgot to change their default tolerances from 3/1000 of an inch. So to comply with the order as written, the contractor was busting out calipers and meticulously measuring the spacing and sizing on each letter before it shipped out the door.

Yeah, lots of folks don’t realize that cat and dog food are required to be fit for human consumption… Not because of accidental “toddler found the bag of dog food” scenarios, but because of the “destitute people on social security can’t afford anything better” scenarios.

Yeah, my parents are hardcore preppers, for all the wrong reasons. For the longest time, it was the “Biden is going to roll tanks down the streets” type of prepping. But now I’m seeing the prepping in a new light, because it could 100% turn into a full blown “nobody can afford soup, and the government is actively dismantling the soup kitchens while forcing people onto the streets” economy.

Hell, the photographer would be dead too.

Accelerationism hasn’t proven to be an effective method of dealing with him so far. There’s no reason to believe that pattern would change because of this.

Yeah, Biden’s term was simply quiet. For the most part, the government ran properly and things didn’t break. But he also refused to actually spur the DOJ into action, because he didn’t want it to be seen as a frivolous witch hunt. He was more focused on keeping the peace than he was on actually protecting the country from domestic threats.

New Mexico license plates specifically say “New Mexico USA” because so many New Mexican residents kept getting pulled over for having “foreign” plates when traveling throughout the US.

It also applies to parts, not just finished vehicles. That’s one of the most impactful parts of it. It’s specifically to stop the “car is 99% built when it is shipped in, and American workers just tighten a few bolts to call it finished” scenario that you described.

I think this may be a “broken clock is right twice a day” scenario, because it seems to actually be targeting the methods that auto manufacturers used to skirt taxes.

The issue is that the US doesn’t have any national ID system aside from passports. Each individual state runs their own ID system, and they set their own requirements for those IDs independently. So IDs in one state may be much easier to get than in a neighboring state.

The US also has a long history of using voting laws to disenfranchise minority voters. Back when black people were given the right to vote, many states enacted laws that required literacy tests or ballot taxes for anyone who didn’t own land. These were designed specifically to prevent black people (mostly former slaves who were never taught to read, who didn’t own land, and who couldn’t afford the tax) from voting. Those were eventually ruled illegal, so states simply pivoted towards requiring tests for IDs instead. Requiring documentation that slaves didn’t have (like birth certificates) and requiring a fee be paid for the ID. This effectively put a gate on the ability to vote, without explicitly requiring a test or tax to vote. Basically, if an ID requires a tax and test, and voting requires an ID, then voting implicitly requires a tax and test. But since it was a step removed from actually testing or taxing the voters, the courts didn’t find it illegal.

So with that history in mind, Americans (at least those who know the history and aren’t racist) tend to get squirmy whenever voter ID laws are brought up. Because voter ID laws are almost always backed by some sort of implied racism. For instance, many minorities need to jump through extra environmental hoops to get an ID. Cities (where many liberal voters live) tend to have inadequate facilities to actually process all of the people trying to get IDs. But rural areas (where conservatives tend to live) often have nearly no wait times because they are properly staffed and funded. If a liberal person in the city wants to get an ID, it often requires taking an entire day off of work for it, because wait times are measured in hours instead of minutes. So by making IDs harder to get for liberals, they effectively gate liberal votes.

It depends on how you interpret it, but the most strict interpretations could actually require a passport to vote. Which is just asinine.

Also worth noting that he doesn’t actually have the authority to do this; Elections are left up to the individual states. But if nobody actually stops him from doing it anyways…

It’s so they don’t have to follow official records keeping policies.

Yeah, I had to work backwards for this one…
Conversion therapy = bad.
Banning conversion therapy = good.
Overturning the ban on conversion therapy = bad.
Vetoing the overturning of the ban on conversion therapy = Good… I think?

It’s laying the groundwork for “if you complain we’ll take your benefits away completely, because you’re a fraudster” instead.