valdemar81
10mo ago
Seems fixable by better defining it as a "line item", not "arbitrary subset of words" veto ... until the legislature gets the bright idea of making the entire bill one long line item.
valdemar81
10mo ago
This isn't even a hypothetical: there are currently 42 national emergencies in effect, though thankfully the COVID one did end on April 10, 2023.
Yes and yes. It's very common for presidents to issue last-minute pardons, and Trump was no exception.
In his last full day in office, Trump granted 143 pardons and commutations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Donald_Trump#Chronology
Furthermore,
A federal pardon can be issued prior to the start of a legal case or inquiry, prior to any indictments being issued, for unspecified offenses, and prior to or after a conviction for a federal crime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_States#Modern_process
valdemar81
1yr ago
Check out the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress. Looks like some of the more recent examples involve Trump aides refusing to appear for the Jan. 6 hearings.
valdemar81
1yr ago
What does it mean to have a financial sector that comprises X% of the economy?
The financial sector makes the rest of the economy more efficient, capturing a percentage of the increased efficiency for itself. For example, if the rest of the economy produces value x, finance boosts it to 2x and captures half the increase (0.5x), then finance is 0.5x / 2x = 25% of the economy.
If one country has its financial sector boost and capture a portion of a different country's economy, you could even end up with a situation where the value captured by finance in the former country exceeds the value produced by the "real" economy in that country.
valdemar81
1yr ago
Try this opposite reframing:
The final two candidates in the election in a democratic yet absolute dictatorial country make statements:
- Red: If elected, I will have everyone who didn't vote for me executed
- Blue: If elected, I won't have anyone executed based on this vote
Who do you vote for?
For true equivalence, we probably have to assume that the candidates are otherwise equivalent. But if we choose Red in this scenario, it's scary to imagine that Red could even "mug" us by also having worse policies that we'd sacrifice for the "guaranteed survival".
valdemar81
1yr ago
How about this analogy for the situation?
A robber walks into a bank, shows a gun to the teller, and demands to be given money. (they don't actually point the gun at anyone, and later it's determined that the gun had the safety on and did not have a round chambered.)
A security guard sees the gun and shoots the robber. Earlier that day, they had posted to social media, "man, my job is so boring. I wish someone would try to rob the bank so I could shoot them".
Is the security guard guilty of murder?
valdemar81
1yr ago
For example, the OG bathroom bill from North Carolina in 2016 set the inquiry as "The physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person's birth certificate."
I don't think this is quite "nobody", because North Carolina law does appear to allow for the sex on a birth certificate to be changed if:
A written request from an individual is received by the State Registrar to
change the sex on that individual's birth record because of sex reassignment
surgery, if the request is accompanied by a notarized statement from the
physician who performed the sex reassignment surgery or from a physician
licensed to practice medicine who has examined the individual and can certify
that the person has undergone sex reassignment surgery
ref. https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/BySection/Chapter_130a/GS_130a-118.pdf
So this sounds more like an example of bathroom use being set to "strict evaluation" rather than self-identification.
valdemar81
1yr ago
I don't think it's accurate to say that the information was "all public to begin with", because Musk had enrolled in the FAA privacy program that periodically rotates tail numbers. ElonJet was deanonymizing it by correlating with other information, then publishing that non-public mapping.
Jets that fly with the temporary identification number can be easily found on the ADS-B Exchange, as shown by a screenshot shared with Insider that shows the jet that Sweeney says is Musk's was flying on May 7 with no callsign, no tail number, but had "PIA" flagged.
ref. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-appears-use-faa-tool-block-jet-tracking-twitter-2022-10
(even this quote is conflating two definitions of "easily found" - yes, the plane appears on the public list of all planes, but there is no indication that it is Elon's without the additional deanonymization performed by Sweeney.)
I think a useful analogy is Bitcoin transactions. In some sense they're "all public to begin with", because the record of all transactions and their corresponding addresses is in a public ledger. But someone who analyzes transactions and correlates them with other information, then publishes a mapping of addresses to their owners, isn't "just publishing public information", any more than someone who publishes a mapping of Twitter account names to their physical addresses is, since the set of all physical addresses in existence is public.
I was imagining the legislature would work around the limit by doing something akin to minification to make the bill technically one "line item" that does 6000 things.
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