admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I love having mysterious cables that may or may not do things I expect them to when plugged into ports that may or may not support the features I think they do.

Executive immunity isn't limited to official acts in any case. That limit has been theorized, but existing case law has not established it. The outcome of this SCOTUS case will likely be the official answer - and the only hope of any good outcome is that the court granted cert because they intended to establish that limit to limit presidential power.

While possible, I'm not optimistic that this is the intent.

Fun fact: presidential immunity does now show up anywhere in the Constitution or federal law. It is entirely an invention of the courts.

Nixon v Fitzgerald is the big case in question. And the court at the time -- corrupt as always -- gave the president broad immunity rather than, say, limiting the immunity to just acts related to the office of presidency. The SCOTUS basically said that only political solutions -- impeachment or elections -- can get past executive immunity. That's basically standing law. It's real fucking bad.

Also notable that this case should not have even been granted cert. There was already a settlement. The case was over. One must interpret the court's decision to grant cert in that case to be entirely based on their desire to legislate from the bench and do a favor to the office of the president.

The current very-corrupt SCOTUS picking up this Trump case leaves me very worried.

And the way they determine "unusual" is by doing this absolutely ahistoric, arbitrary polling of current policy. They cherry pick whatever statistics serve the politics of the person writing the decision.

e.g., when ruling whether it was "unusual" to execute people with cogitative disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia), they did a tally of how many states allowed execution in these cases vs did not but deliberately omitted how many states do not allow ANY executions. Then concluded that slightly more states allow executions of the mentally unfit than don't even though it was absolutely incontestable fact that the vast majority of states did not allow this kind of execution.

Ignore that the ruling technically banned those executions... because it factually didn't, since it left it up to states to define cognitive disability however they pleased and the behavior of the kill-happy states was not affected by the ruling.

They never were. Libertarianism is a more or less a fake ideology that is, in practice, just a thin veneer over garden-variety conservatism.

People who actually care about being staunch defenders of individual liberties call themselves liberals because that's what the word means.

Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.

Glad to see news that it wasn't. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would've made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.

I mean, his admin is ALSO currently trying to block the Kroger/Albertsons merger, for example. So this is clearly not the only thing going on.

One thing people forget about Roe and Casey is that it was a bad decision in the first place.

Privacy about decisions in care should absolutely be a patient's right, make no mistake. The government has no business intervening in medical decisions made between competent medical professionals and their patients so long as everyone is acting in good faith and with proper consent. Including a patient seeking an abortion. The state has no sufficient interest to intervene in these decisions that justifies the profound violation of a person's liberties. In that sense, Roe is good policy that should be on the books. But it kind of never was, because it only ever really extended this specific right in the case of abortion. Which is just needlessly limited.

And it also wasn't really protecting the right to autonomy over your own body through access to abortion or otherwise. It was instead just forcibly shoving some abortions under the umbrella of this limited, incomplete right to privacy in medical decisions, with a bunch of huge loopholes formalized. In spite of what people say, there was factually no Constitutional right to an abortion under Roe. The Constitutional protection you had was one that just made it impossible in practice for the government to stop the abortions from happening, but it did so in a weak and circuitous way that, as we saw, was easy to undo.

So while the practical effect was a more just society, the reality of the decision was that it failed to truly fulfill either of its promises.

So yeah, I understand why a serious advocate for both body autonomy rights and for privacy rights would not be super stoked to merely restore Roe. In a vacuum, you really would want to separately and clearly protect both of these right formally and resiliently. But I also all but guarantee that nearly all of those "abortion rights" groups' members, if push came to shove and this was going to vote as a ballot measure or some such, would turn out and vote for it.

Good on them for pushing for more. But the advocates saying they are in a hurry to get this fixed are also right; every minute the right is missing from the state normalizes this flagrant violation of individual liberties and makes it harder to restore rights to their citizens.

The ruling will get replaced by a new piece of legislation that "fixes" the loophole and re-legalizes IVF. Probably reasonable quickly. Even the lunatic fringe conservatives didn't intend to shut down IVF.

The real scandal here isn't even the chaos caused by the court going wild like this -- though that certainly is a scandal.

What we should be concerned about is the fact that a member of a fringe religious cult that actively believes in doing away with the separation of church and state (the Seven Mountain Mandate) is not just actively and enthusiastically legislating from the bench, but is citing actual religious principles and scriptures in his decisions. And nothing is being done about it.

This justice sincerely believes literal demons have infiltrated the government and need to be engaged in holy war. He's a fundamentalist zealot. He is violating his oath to the rule of law on a daily basis.

I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That's the thing to really like about Rust -- you can be pretty much fearless in it. It's just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.

I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally... but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It's mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

I still think it's a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it's incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.

It is West Virginia. 31/34 state Senators and 89/100 delegates are Republicans. It is a Republican show through-and-through. Anything that happens there is going to be Republicans.

Getting the best value is frequently an economic mistake for a buyer because it does not take into account the present vs future value of money. Not to mention how it is sure to increase your waste/shrink factor and so can eat up its own savings.

Don't deliberately overconsume just to feel like a savvy buyer. Buy a reasonable amount for your own needs and no more. I get that we all like Costco, but the business model really isn't that good for typical consumers.

This is just a firehose of abuse corporate would be opening up on their employees. Just the most incredibly opportunity to ruin some retail lives.

Arguably more stuff is going to be collected and sent to more people if it's turned off. But it will be in a more piecemeal though likely more personally identifiable way. At least that's what Google would definitely argue

I genuinely don't know if the counterfactual is worse than the actual here. Either way bad.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Speed limits themselves are only very loosely related to safety (85th percentile rule and civil engineering voodoo science) and the speedometer is more about staying on the right side of the police state when confronted with roads that overwhelmingly signal to drivers that they should be going WAY faster than is legal.

And even then those speed limits, at least outside of the comparative safety of highways, are almost always set well higher than what is actually safe for the neighborhood or useful to keep the traffic network freeflowing.

What really gets me about these expensive gadget helmets is that helmets are fundamentally a consumable good. They can only take so many bangs and bumps, so much sweat, so much all that before they start to wear out. The miscellaneous wear and tear on them. Getting dropped on the ground, banged against things, taken apart and washed and put back together. And for most helmets, once the foam wears out, that's it. They no longer are fit to purpose as a helmet and should be replaced.

Back when I rode a motorcycle -- which was commuting to work for the better part of 2 decades -- I always got the most affordable, comfortable DOT-labeled helmet I could find. Any extra gadgets had to be aftermarket addons that could be portable. Because things like headphones, for me, always lasted 2-3 times as long as the helmet.

MAYBE a really high-end helmet has a longer service life. But I am skeptical even a really fancy one worn by a commuter using it near-daily would last more than maybe 4 or 5 years. They're going to have lifetimes like smartphones, for sure. Which means these gadget helms sure do have a high subscription fee to use.

I dunno, if you're relying on a number to determine if you are proceeding at a safe speed, I am a bit skeptical you have sufficient mastery of whatever motor vehicle you are operating.

Just as if you're relying on a speed limit sign & law enforcement to control what speed drivers go rather than road design feedback, you have insufficient mastery of your engineering trade.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/6/22/facing-an-uncomfortable-truth-about-speed-limits