rsuri

joined 1 year ago
[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Obligatory video (click at your own risk)

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago

It's overwhelmingly likely to be someone none of us have ever heard of. If nothing else because that's the base rate. Also because someone nerdy enough to care about this stuff before cryptocurrency existed couldn't possibly have a life.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I use it occasionally. Recently I used it to convert a written specification in a document to a java object. And it was like 95% correct - but having to manually double check everything and fix the errors eliminated much of the time savings.

However that's a very ideal use case. Most often I forget it exists.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago

And the school board president ran as a member of the "Libertarian Party".

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

The catch-22 is that the 3 liberal justices dissented from the opinion. So all 9 can be presumed to vote against Biden being immune for assassinating his opponent, and eliminating justices won't really help.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

To give a serious answer: The short answer is probably, the long answer is no.

The opinion was deliberately vague on that issue. A dissent said they could under Roberts' opinion, but Roberts calls that "fear mongering" without elaborating whether that's true or not.

It's also a pretty complicated opinion so bear with me. The whole thing comes down to this vague idea of official vs. unofficial acts which are supposed to be immune according to the court. Really, there's multiple factual allegations and the court said each one has some level of immunity (and if you think these are full of contradictions, I know):

  • Asking the DOJ to pressure states to investigate obvious spurious "fraud" claims and pressure states to throw out their results, and threatening to fire them if they refuse - here Trump is "absolutely immune" because the DOJ is part of the executive branch and the president has power to fire them, I guess for any reason now.
  • Trying to get Mike Pence to refuse the vote count and throw the whole country into a chaotic power struggle - presumptively immune, because the president and vice president can talk about their duties. Can be rebutted if the government can prove a prosecution wouldn't pose a danger of intrusion into executive branch functions, whatever the hell that means.
  • Trump personally telling state officials to change electoral votes - here Roberts says there's no basis for Trump to claim immunity because there's no presidential power to try and coerce state officials. However, he then says it's up to the lower court to consider if it's official or not before proceeding, and is entirely unclear on who has the burden of proof here.
  • Using twitter and a speech to organize and then start a riot at the capitol - similar to the above, the president has official duties relating to speaking but yada yada yada it's sent back to the lower court to decide whether this is official or not.

Conclusion: Ordering an assassination of a rival certainly sounds most like the first - the president has several official duties relating to giving military orders, and the military is part of the executive branch. The FBI is also part of the DOJ, so if Trump can order the DOJ to do something criminal, that itself could be an assassination. But as described in the article below, one could make an argument that no, the opinion doesn't actually say he do that with the military specifically, because congress has some powers relating to war (not convincing). However, to be fair to that opinion, this immunity ruling is such a stinker that lower and future courts will limit its holding as much as humanly possible. Plus seemingly contradictory aspects to it (Trump can order the DOJ to do things he can't do himself?) could be used to argue for exceptions to the overall immunity. But reading the opinion at face value, yes the president could order an assassination, and even fire generals who refuse to pass along those orders.

Longer answer though: This is the real world. If Biden gave such an order, it would likely result in a coup and an overthowing of the Constitutional order as a whole. And if order were somehow restored and Biden brought up on criminal charges, you could be your life that the 6-3 Republican majority on the court would find a way to either limit or perhaps overturn their prior ruling as it pertains to Biden.

For an alternative perspective on the same topic, here's a center-to-slightly-right-leaning law professor's take on this which does a pretty plausible job sane-washing the opinion.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

It's a good question. Her policies as mayor were very different from AMLO's, and it's frankly weird that AMLO (a fossil fuel fundamentalist and Trump-like populist) had a PhD climate scientist as his successor. But she is officially his successor and kept a lot of AMLO people. There's no easy answers, we'll just have to wait and see.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

It's pretty awful to see that there's basically nobody in mainstream media willing to stand up for immigrants given the vicious hate Trump and Vance are spewing at them. In past times Edward R. Murrow would end both of their careers. But now you just have some corporate talking head saying "we looked into the former president's claims and found no evidence that is true" when talking about lies that Trump/Vance picked up from actual neo nazis.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I've been in multiple relationships by now but I pretty much never dated or only very sparsely through my 20s, depending on what you'd count. A few reasons:

  • When I was younger online dating was much worse than today and had even fewer women, and I feel like approaching women in real life was much harder for several reasons, especially for me given my social anxiety, nerdiness, and lack of opportunity to cross paths with women in my life.
  • Financial difficulties - I was living with my parents as an adult and was focused on fixing that situation, and was embarrassed/pessimistic about dating.
  • I don't really fit in easily with the vast majority of people in terms of race, religion, activities, or attitudes about several things like money. It feels like race and religion have become less of an issue today, but I still struggle to find women I can relate to in terms of attitudes.
  • Overall questionable appearance - OK physique but with bad hair and clothes.

Sidenote: One thing that annoys me is the attitude of measuring people, both men and women, by their level of relationship success. There's very little that's fair or rational about attraction, in fact it's the best example area where rationality would be almost entirely futile. So don't feel bad about it, just do what you want for yourself and ignore judgmental people.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 33 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The former presidents act seems to imply that a former president can decline Secret Service protection and even get $1 million for doing so. So I imagine he could just decline protection and hire his own security. But that would make it pretty obvious that he's planning on fleeing.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

How do I page right

 

This seems insane to me. I live in a city where maybe 50-60% of people have cars, and most don't drive them that much. Yet every grocery store I'm aware of with the sole exception of the expensive Whole Foods has a fuel rewards points program. Reasons this should be controversial enough to enable a low-cost alternative:

  1. Many people don't drive and therefore pay a little more for groceries because it includes a perk they don't use
  2. It seems like a very ardent pro-fossil fuel move that you'd think would cause some sort of negative attention from environment activists.
  3. The subsidy typically applies as an amount off per gallon, so you end up really subsidizing big vehicles with big gas tanks. Again, really makes some customers subsidize others and you'd think people (other than me) would be annoyed at this.

But yet, virtually every grocery store does this. Anyone know why? Does the fossil fuel industry somehow encourage this?

 

I have a vague idea to create a wiki for politics-related data. Basically, I'm annoyed with how low-effort, entirely un-researched content dominates modern politics. I think a big part of the problem is that modern political figures use social media platforms that are hostile to context and citing sources.

So my idea for a solution is to create a wiki where original research is not just allowed but encouraged. For example, you could have an article that's a breakdown of the relative costs to society of private vs public transportation, with calculations and sources and tables and whatnot. It wouldn't exactly be an argument, but all the data you'd need to make one. And like wikipedia, anyone can edit it, allowing otherwise massive research tasks to be broken up.

The problem is - who creates a wiki nowadays? It feels like getting such a site and community up and running would be hopeless in a landscape dominated by social media. Will this be a pointless waste of time? Is there a more modern way to do this? All thoughts welcome.

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