Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

Ha. When UK Supreme Court judges have the same level of comprehension as a kindergartner…

It's a 17 second video…

Why wouldn't you have just loaded it into the transporter buffer and then wiped the pattern (or beamed it harmlessly into space), Mr O'Brien?

Clickable links, for sure. But machine-handled links like RSS feeds and ActivityPub subscriptions? Maybe not.

If that's a UXO, I'm actually a little surprised it would be the police on the scene, rather than the army.

Does she sleep a consistent schedule & get enough sleep, or is she able to do this despite waking up after 5 hours of sleep at a time that's 4 hours earlier when working than on weekends?

I don't know Canadian politics nearly as well as I do Australian, so I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have a source. But my search tells me that the last time a Canadian vice-regal reserved assent was in 1961, when it happened to one bill (and another source seemingly telling the same story, but placing it in 1963). And that reserving assent isn't actually the same as withholding it, but instead leaving it up to the federal Governor. And in that case, the bill ended up being passed anyway.

The role of the monarch (and by extension, governors, lieutenant governors, and governors general) in the Westminster system is highly ceremonial. It is exceptionally unusual for them to exercise prerogative powers and often leads to constitutional crises when they do. I would not be looking to this avenue to stop any undesirable bills.

The comparison to the US seems to misunderstand what's going on in both the US case and the hypothetical Canadian one. They join of a court is to apply the law as it is written to the case at hand. I know Australian courts are better at this than American ones, and I suspect Canada is closer to Australia in this respect as well.

Sometimes, different laws have conflicting messaging about how they should apply. The court's job then is to decide which takes priority. If something conflicts with a codified constitution, almost always the constitution wins out. But when two pieces of ordinary legislation conflict, it can be more complicated.

A recent example comes out of the UK. A bill was passed allowing for deportations of asylum seekers to Rwanda. An earlier price of legislation forbade sending asylum seekers to unsafe places on human rights grounds. The court's declared that Rwanda was unsafe, thus forbidding the deportations. They decided the human rights law superceded the asylum deportation law.

That's where notwithstanding clauses come in. That's a clause in a piece of ordinary legislation that tells the court very specifically which legislation takes primacy when they conflict, especially if a court might be inclined to otherwise decide the other way. The exception being that if ordinary legislation would not be allowed to amend an Act (such as a codified constitution), a notwithstanding clauses in a different Act would usually not be lawful.

In the UK example, they passed what is essentially a notwithstanding clauses that said "Rwanda is a safe country for legal purposes".

And all of that is basically what's being talked about in Canada. It might be immoral, but none of it is unlawful.

The US is a completely different story. Their Congress hasn't passed shit. There is no notwithstanding clause for the courts to apply. The executive is just unilaterally deciding to ignore courts. There's no legal basis for this. Congress passes legislation, the executive extremes execute that legislation, and the courts interpret whether actions are in keeping first with the Constitution and second with legislation. It's a crisis when the executive just decides to ignore the judiciary. That would be true in Canada as well.

The difference is that, in Westminster system countries like Canada and the UK, the executive (usually) comes from the legislature. And it certainly at least has the confidence of the legislature. So if the executive wants to go against a court order, it has the ability to get the law changed. That's not defying a court order, it's changing legislation so that the previous court order no longer applies. Icky, but not unconstitutional, because that's literally how laws work.

(Though incidentally, I think it would be a good idea to codify in the constitution that special notwithstanding clauses are unlawful, and that legislation must be applied equally across cases. I'm not sure if that would be feasible without undesirable consequences though.)

Can, yes. But would she?

Seems like that would be a case for ignoring fortified nutrients in rating foods, not for banning the process entirely.

So, uhh...where's the "both sides" to this? "High standards when it comes to food regulations" doesn't work as an excuse for banning healthier food. That's absurd.

This is the #1 reason Norway should join the EU.

It is a joke about the Confederacy in the American civil war

Oh, I thought it was about the '60s–'80s with regimes like Pinochet and Banzer and the series of military dictatorships in Brazil.

Yeah I agree. I'd love to get rid of maps, but location history is just way too valuable to give up, and I couldn't find anybody else who does it.

I also really like navigation that's responsive to current traffic levels. Obviously even if someone else provided that, them having fewer users would mean it's not going to be very effective, but I'd be willing to switch to someone else who at least was attempting to do that, even if their userbase wasn't there yet.

Right now though...nobody that I could find even tries to do either of those crucial features.

German law literally restricts bike light brightness to a point of being impractical in the dark. It bans blinking lights despite research showing blinking lights increase visibility of cyclists. It requires cut-offs that make it so you literally can't see what's ahead of you until it's too late to react to it, if you're riding at speed.

If you're only ever riding at a slow 20 km/h on relatively well-lit city streets, it might be fine. But that's just not reality.

You're required to have a rear light, but it must be mounted between 25 and 60 cm above the ground...so you can forget about a light mounted on your helmet or backpack...or even at the most natural place for a light...at the top of your seatpost. It's fucking nonsensical. And to learn that despite all this bullshit making cyclists less safe, car lights are unrestricted? Oh boy, am I incensed right now.

Wait, Germany bans good-quality bike lights, but allows unregulated lights on fucking cars‽‽

As long as she has her orb to ponder.

Fun fact, the take up of agriculture actually made people's oral getting significantly worse than that of hunter/gatherers.

Most Aussies of around my age can remember getting (or at least knowing someone else who got) a full copy of Age of Empires on a CD contained in Kellogg's cereal. That was truly a great time.

Reading between the lines, this video is encouraging people to fuck with properties rented out through Airbnb, or at least trying to mess with the heads of the ‘hosts’.

I liked the comment under the video suggesting warning against the much easier method of sticking a bit of super glue in the mechanism.