K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@valleyforge I don't think voters hold senators responsible for the justice's behaviour, really. If a Senator votes for his party's nominee, nobody gives him a hard time about it - it's only when he shows disloyalty by failing to support somebody that he might give ammunition to a rival in the primary.

For instance, I see a lot of conservatives trashing Chief Justice Roberts lately. But nobody's seriously going back to his confirmation hearings and using that as an excuse to ditch the Senators who approved him (quite a few still hold their position, actually).

@valleyforge As I recall, it was a response to the perceived corruption in that the Senators often ended up being cronies of the state legislators, or at least people to whom the legislators owed some favours. In theory, the Senators were indirectly answerable to the people since a state legislator would be punished by the voters for electing an idiot; in practice, the electorate proved unwilling to hold poor performance of a Senator against the legislature that elected him.

Every day @users posts some reports similar to this one - here are some annotations to help you understand why they have the shape they do.

tagging @freemo since he's mentioned in the image

@SecondJon The main one I (not a member of any political party, but I think I can argue the democrat position well enough) see is that there now exists a strong, recent precedent not to do the thing. That the democrats didn't like the rule last time is less important than that the rule exists. Following the rule only when it benefits you is inconsistent with the integrity citizens expect from their elected leaders.

Principles aside, I think there's a pragmatic justification, too. Looking at the 538 models, the democrats are very likely to retain the lower house, something like 3:1 favourites to win the presidency, and likelier than not to control the senate. If I were the republican senate leadership, I'd offer a deal to the democrat senators: this senate won't consider the nomination, and in return the democrats publicly pledge not to expand the Supreme Court to add more liberal justices during the next administration, should they win. Then:
- refusing the deal would indicate that democrats plan to pack the court, which is close to political suicide in an election year, plus the republicans confirm the conservative justice for a 6-3 majority in the meantime
- accepting the deal would leave the court with a 5-3 conservative majority pending the outcome of the elections, and gives the republicans a serious feat of statesmanship to point to.
If the democrats should accept and then renege on the deal, or refuse it and win the senate anyway, it doesn't really matter - they'd be as happy to expand the court to thirteen and pack it 7-6 as they would be to expand it to eleven and pack it 6-5. So there's not much downside for republicans in making the offer.

@dragfyre Just want to bring to your attention that the IRC bots (SubWatch and BahaiFYIBot) seem to have disappeared from the channel. If you're already aware of this, please disregard.

@freemo To be more specific, *global* air travel reduction is the issue. A lot of that fuel is exported to foreign countries, and their choice to implement a lockdown, not Canada's, reduced their airlines' demand. Even Canada's domestic airlines are more dependent on international travel than American ones - because Canada is on the great circle routes between the eastern USA and Asia, and between the western USA and Europe & the Middle East, a lot of their business is sixth-freedom traffic. Travel restrictions between America and the rest of the world hit Canadian airlines hard, and Canadian lockdown policies were more or less incidental.

@freemo Canada's economy was almost certainly going to nosedive in the pandemic in any case - CAD is a petrocurrency. Lots of segments of industry globally, most severely air travel, cut way back on energy consumption since March. When selling oil is your business and everyone starts buying less oil, the value of your business is going to decline. Forgoing a lockdown can't change that.

Just a reminder to be cautious about interpreting correlation as causation.

@Cristobalite Well I guessed Blue Jackets, given that you said Ohio haha.

@Cristobalite Let's go Jackets

@arteteco I've only had it up to ten or twelve devices attached at once, but it worked admirably under those conditions. (Strictly speaking, we might've had fifteen *people* with a few pairs sharing devices).

I haven't used Teams, but Nextcloud Talk is more comparable to Jitsi Meet than to Skype. In particular, desktop users must use a browser instead of a standalone client, which is fine but means you're out of luck if yours doesn't support WebRTC (notably, Pale Moon).

@dragfyre Hey bahaibot on reddit is all of a sudden posting a lot of biographies to the history subreddit. Looks like it's been going off pretty close to every ten minutes for the last hour. I have a guess you might run that bot too - is this the intended behaviour?

Hey @freemo the web interface looks to have changed recently. The "read more" link used to expand a long status in-place; now it just loads it in the rightmost column. Any way to bring back the old behaviour? If I want to load a status in the rightmost column, I'll click the body text itself. If it matters, I'm using the material theme.

@freemo @louiscouture Ah okay, here that is a difference between renting and leasing. You might have to give some months' notice before raising the payments if someone rents a property from you, but if it were a lease you couldn't raise the payments at all before the lease term expires.

@Demosthenes I like Tusky; I found Fedilab to be super battery-hungry.

@freemo @louiscouture

I think I'm missing something here trying to follow the argument. At the point when the landlord is paying his mortgage off at $1800/mo or whatever, those payments are due whether the house is occupied or vacant. If he decides to not rent it at a loss he has to eat the whole cost himself; if he rents it at a loss the rent money will defray part of the cost. Apart from keeping the housing supply low - which is exactly the problem Barcelona wants to fight - I don't see what advantage the landlord gains from leaving the house empty.

@freemo Top story on HackerNews will do that lol

@freemo

Kind of. It's another case where the app is not necessarily controlled by the same people as the service is. You can subscribe to any repository you wish from F-Droid by entering its URL. By default, the app ships with two repositories enabled: one hosted by the app maintainers and one hosted by the Guardian Project, but there are others you can find online.

Criteria for inclusion into a repository are set by the repository owners. The F-Droid repository hosts only open source apps, and the Guardian Project repository hosts only Guardian Project apps. As far as I know, the app itself enforces no restrictions on the content it will allow a user to access.

@Khrys

@freemo Yup. Google's starting assumption is that the app and the service are controlled by the same organisation (and this is actually a valid assumption in most proprietary, and even several FOSS, apps). So consequently they can punish you for mismanagement of your service by interdicting your app. Now we come along with our federated peg and it doesn't fit neatly into their hole for siloed apps, and their assumption breaks down.

@freemo The only reasonable model I see if Google takes a hard line on this is for apps to maintain a whitelist of known well-moderated instances, given how easy it is to set up a cheap instance to troll from. And if the app developer is supposed to be personally responsible for the content accessible through the app, then he'll probably only whitelist an instance he has control over. So you'll have a QOTO app, Gargron will have a Mastodon Social app, &c. If Google doesn't like some instance's moderation policy they ban its app.