Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan, which China is opposed to.
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 often where bills originate, and the Senate is the latter half of the process.
As is the Senate. (Bills for raising revenue must originate in the House, but otherwise they can and do go in any order.)
Yup, seems like the Senate is where bills perish.
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.)
> 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?
1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 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.
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.
Slippery slope fallacy.
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.
No need, I’ll get the door myself.
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.
Neither of these are exactly unusual or extreme positions w.r.t systems of government.
Or is this just a whine about the U.S.?
The parent comment just gave reasons for that (among other things).
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.
When you patch one aspect it throws the other aspects out of whack.
I'm curious- do you have something particular in mind?
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.
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.
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.