it's basically the American mindset vs the European one (or anyone not in the US?).

He's very likely being defensive.

I approve every command myself, and no, it's still much faster than doing it myself.

But I like the general fallacy behind this that people fall for all the time: taking the past value of a variable as a complete predictor of its future value (applies to other stuff like investment returns e.g.)

yes, it's the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy

If you're using a heuristic, it can be fine, but only if you also know that it's only a heuristic, instead of thinking that it's truth and lambasting anyone who suggests otherwise.

They really don't have any money.

They don't have lots of money, that's for sure. But "saving" money by doing slashing costs on things which will literally cost you much more money in the short to mid term (like the whole dengue epidemic, for which prevention was cut, resulting in many more cases resulting in lots of healthcare costs and lost productivity) is not a way to govern a country.

Using a different form of mismanagement to "fix" a mismanaged country doesn't really help.

Yes, and he is not a president.

Fair point. He also wasn’t elected by anyone to run the country.

You should really look into how judges interpret laws (rules, basically). There are two schools I know of: purposivism and textualism (I agree with the latter and it doesn't take into account intentions. That's the basis of how the recent case Van Buren v US was decided, I would recommend reading it: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf). But in both, you have things like canons of interpretation and background principles and so on. It's always awesome to see how people who have to deal with the problem have thought about it, because they have usually invested a lot of time into it and come up with insights. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation

The justification for textualism is that it's better to be wrong in a precise way, than to try to be right in a fuzzy way. But both models are wrong. Bit rot is real and applies to laws. It's not possible to keep laws up to date with what they would be if lawmakers had infinite resources to dedicate to lawmaking and maintenance, even ignoring the huge issue of democratic consensus and parliamentary procedure issues.

(All models are wrong! Some useful!)

The law is a tool which imperfectly models the goals of the lawmakers.

For lawyers judges, the beauty of law is that the law has plenty of room to support contradictory interpretations.

That's not the argument for textualism. You can read law review articles and papers on SSRI to find more.

*typo, I meant SSRN.

so many butts!