booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

There's not a goal post being moved. I'm describing now where the line has always been for a constitutional crisis: a judicial contempt order that gets disregarded by the executive branch. And the path to that is basically:

1. The executive branch does something illegal.
2. Someone sues in court.
3. The court rules that action to be illegal.
4. The executive branch doesn't obey the court order.
5. The court orders the executive branch to show cause why contempt should not issue.
6. The court finds the executive branch officials to be in contempt and orders sanctions (aka a punishment).
7. The executive branch disregards that punishment and refuses to enforce it or obey it.

Steps 1 through 3 are pretty routine, and happen all the time.

And there are off ramps that avoid that constitutional crisis. Maybe it's a case where the court's ruling gets overruled on appeal. Maybe the court finds that it doesn't have jurisdiction to rule on that issue. Maybe the executive branch backs down. One of those has happened so far in all of the cases that have ended.

It's the cases that are still active where things might go off the rails. This particular Salvadorean deportation case has made it further than any other (past the fifth step I described above) and is the one where DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting that he didn't have the answers the judge was looking for. In a closely related case, DOJ has suspended its own lawyer for admitting personal frustration with his client (that is, ICE/DHS). These are concerning and worth pushing back on at every turn, and to sound the alarms when that line is actually crossed.

This defeatist attitude, that Trump has already won and is unaccountable, is counterproductive. We're still busy fighting, and we can still win because we haven't lost yet.

No, and this is really important.

Intentionally disobeying court orders is a red line, in a way that merely breaking the law isn't.

If you argue that the Trump administration has already crossed that red line several times, and people start believing it, it carries less force when they actually do cross it. It's a big deal, and the mere fact that his administration is arguing that they haven't crossed it (yet) is important for a few reasons:

• The rank and file federal employees don't yet feel that they have the precedent to follow executive branch orders that would violate court orders.
• The political actors aligned with Trump don't yet feel emboldened enough to do the same, if Trump hasn't done it first.
• The resistance can point to that specific act, of crossing the red line, as a position to fight on, for both recruiting fence sitters and their effort to active resistance (and justification for no longer fitting themselves purely within the bounds of the law).
• On the other hand, crying wolf about the red line before it is crossed confuses those fence sitters (hyper technical arguments about whether and how the Trump administration broke the law don't carry the day) and makes it less politically powerful when that line is crossed.

So long as the Trump admin still pretends to care about the law, there's still a lane for lawsuits and litigation as active resistance. If the Trump administration starts openly flouting court orders, which has not happened yet, that opens up a new chapter.

Trump is pushing limits, but is still being really careful about what is technically legal. If they stop tip toeing around that line, then the resistance is clear to escalate into technically illegal conduct, too, while still aiming for a return of the rule of law.

Muddying the waters by arguing that the line has already been crossed is misreading where we are in this resistance movement.

And disclosure: I'm a lawyer and I have filed things in court against the government, so I have a vested professional and personal interest in believing that what happens in court still matters. But I also have an above average understanding of exactly what the constitutional and statutory powers of the presidency are, and what kind of actions would actually threaten the continued viability of our constitutional government.

No, it hasn't.

It's been threatened several times, and there's been plenty of arguments by Trump's DOJ that they didn't actually violate the text of orders (including in this case, where the judge didn't include in the written order to return flights that have already left U.S. airspace), or that any violations were inadvertent and not intentional, but this is the first case that is dealing with the question of whether the administration intentionally violated a court order.

The judge is taking the steps to learn the facts here, and the shocking thing is that DOJ just put the main attorney on administrative leave (and pulled him off this case) for conceding obvious things in open court. Despite just promoting him to his position the week before.

And the vastly wealthy will benefit, as they always do, by picking up those bargain basement stocks which will, eventually, become valuable again.

I don't think that's correct.

Imagine, if you will, an uptick in vandalism on Tesla Cybertrucks. Insurance companies notice and increase the price of insuring them. The used car market price for those vehicles goes down, with fewer people wanting to buy vehicles that are more expensive to insure and are more likely to be vandalized.

Is that price drop a dip that a savvy investor can take advantage of? Is there an investment case for buying used cybertrucks and then hoping that Elon's stink fades? I don't think so. The value of that thing has permanently decreased.

Look to American soybean farming. Trump put tariffs on China in 2018, and China retaliated with tariffs on soybeans, among other products. Brazil stepped in and started exporting a lot of soybeans to China, and maintained that market share even as the tariffs were canceled. Basically, American farmers never recovered. Buying up all that farmland for cheap wouldn't have done anything because the new owners of that land can't benefit from some kind of higher profits from that land.

Sometimes things drop in price because they just become less valuable. I think that's what's happening with American stocks right now, because the damage that is being done is hard to reverse.

Nope. This is more like The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler or, in The Dark Knight Rises, the billionaire who finds that funding Bane's rise to power doesn't actually give him any power, or another business dude learning that working with Bane doesn't even save him from the movement itself.

The billionaires thought they could buy influence and just get the things they want, while stopping Trump from getting what he wants. For whatever reason, Trump is a true believer in tariffs, so that's what giving him power will result in.

I'd argue that's reversing cause and effect. A cratering economy on Main Street often gets reflected as a crash on Wall Street.

Sometimes the outcomes diverge. One common analogy in finance circles is that the stock market is like a hyperactive puppy on a long leash being walked by a slow owner whose gradual movements trend in a particular direction while the puppy erratically moves back and forth near that owner. Maybe it's some kind of hype or panic moving markets in a way that's uncorrelated with the underlying economic activity. Or it's a specific play on a specific type of financial instrument that has become untethered from a thing it used to be tightly wound up with. Many financial panics happen when correlations between things break down, and all the financial engineering in a particular type of product relied on a bad assumption so that it spreads to other financial products.

But in many cases, they move together because the people buying and selling stocks feel sentiment driven by actual economic fundamentals.

Of course I have to show valid, government issued ID to vote.

Let's talk about flying instead of voting.

What happens if you fly somewhere, have your wallet stolen, and have to fly home without an ID? Does your country have a procedure for dealing with this case?

The answer is pretty obviously yes. There are methods of confirming identification by other means, for issuing a new identification card quickly, etc.

With voting, the question isn't whether government issued IDs can be used to streamline identity verification. Every polling site uses and accepts IDs. The question is what happens when someone doesn't have their ID on them, or can't get to the polling place in person: is there a procedure that still allows them to vote somehow? Those are the alternative procedures being banned by legislation like this.

The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon's purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn't have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn't really a helpful argument to make today.

the sliver of hope that most people can learn to see through bullshit

If the threshold for reevaluating those views requires getting knocked up by Elon and having a child support fight over Twitter, I'm not sure this method of persuasion is going to scale.

Copyright is for written, filmed, or musical work, as well at its derivatives.

It's a little bit more than that. There are 8 categories:

1. literary works;
2. musical works, including any accompanying words;
3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
4. pantomimes and choreographic works;
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
7. sound recordings; and
8. architectural works.

Sculpture is a type of visual work that can be copyrighted. So are architectural works. Not that a bar of soap would likely qualify as a sculpture, but there are 3 dimensional shapes that can be copyrighted.

Shapes can be trademarked, but an oval is not trademarkable because it is a very generic shape.

If it's not already in common use when trademarked, even simple shapes can be trademarked. Simple colors can be trademarked as well: UPS trademarked its shade of brown, Tiffany has trademarked its shade of blue. Specific design elements can be trademarked as well, like the recognizable Burberry check pattern, the iconic glass bottle shape of Coca Cola, etc.

And the Dove soap bar shape isn't just a generic oval. It's a precise 3 dimensional shape, with a raised center and a gradual taper to the vertical edges all around.

I couldn't find a registered trademark, but the shape is distinctive enough that they probably would be able to trademark it if they wanted to (or even enforce an unregistered trademark in that shape, at least in the U.S.).

Musk overpaid at $44B,

Yes, but about $14 billion was financed by debt rather than shares of stock, so the market cap immediately dropped to $30B as a result (enterprise value is market cap + outstanding debt because in a liquidation the debt would be paid out of the assets before the shareholders get anything). So in a sense, the current shares were worth about $30B at the time of the 2022 transaction.

If this new merger is a private transaction that values X at $33B and xAI at $80B, and everyone agrees, it's functionally the same as if it were worth $3.3B and $8B.

That's what I'm getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn't released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It's the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it's going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That's dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.

That's just not how chemistry works.

Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.

The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there's not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That's why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.

Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.

So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?

You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.

I use Signal to avoid government accountability.

We are not the same.

Veterans tend to vote republican. I'm guessing the numbers would be about the same for active members.

No, I don't think so.

I think it's worth noting that "veterans" as a population skew heavily towards old white men. If you weight for age, gender, and race, does that veteran population support Republicans at higher rates than non-veterans of similar demographic profiles?

Here's a 2023 Pew profile of veteran demographics that shows that:

• 11% were women, and 89% were men.
• 74% were non-Hispanic white.
• 28% were under 50 years old, 36% were between 50-69, and 37% were over 70.

I couldn't find active duty polling for 2024, but the active duty vote leaned Biden in 2020.

I suspect if people actually broke out veteran preferences by age, gender, and race, you'd see that almost all of the veteran support for Republicans can be explained by their other demographics, not really anything special about being a veteran.

Survivor children of social security beneficiaries do get social security, even if it's just one parent. It's not particularly common because you'd need to be young enough to qualify as a child, and your parent needs to be old enough to qualify for social security benefits, but some dudes have kids in their 50s and 60s.

SSDI, the main disability insurance benefit from social security, is not means tested. People pulling in millions can get it too, as long as they're disabled (and qualify from working long enough in social security paying jobs). Usually that means they're too disabled to work, but might have income from their investments or other sources. SSDI isn't means tested, but does look to your earned income to determine whether you qualify (after all, the disability payments are designed to offset the loss of earned income, but someone who does still earn doesn't need that stream of income as much).

SSI is the other disability insurance benefit from social security, and is explicitly an anti-poverty program that is means tested. So you have to demonstrate a lack of income in order to qualify.

Note that you can collect both, with concurrent benefits, but the SSI means test looks to your SSDI income, that counts against you.

There are a lot of anti poverty programs with pretty abrupt cutoffs based on income, or earned income, or even wealth, but many of the disability based ones have less stringent means testing or no means testing at all.

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

I think people paying attention to national politics but not necessarily state level stuff don't realize just how impressive Andy Beshear has been. In 2024, Trump won Kentucky 65% to 34%, more than 30-point lead. In 2020, Trump won the state 62% to 36%.

And through that, during the Trump era, he has campaigned on unabashedly progressive policy positions (marriage equality, abortion, universal pre-k, renewable energy and EV production, legalizing marijuana), and won statewide elections in 2015, 2019, and 2023.

In many ways, the 2023 win was the most impressive, because that was when the Democrat brand was getting dragged down, and incumbents in that era tended to have a bit of a post-covid drop in the polling numbers.

People like Andy are who we need in politics: unafraid to vote his conscience, and using that charisma and voice to bring the public along to support those things.