volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@OyVeidt

No, the Constitution, Article one I believe, specifies that Congress is given the authority to raise debt, so not only is the debt ceiling constitutional, it's constitutionally required.

The debt ceiling is just the term we used to refer to the amount that Congress has chosen to authorize to be borrowed.

It's not made up. It's right there in the text of the Constitution.

@farbel

You forgot the option where we might be worried about it because the Democratic administration is threatening to default on debts despite the constitutional obligation to pay them.

I honestly am a bit worried about it.

@SusannaShakespeare

They released it and voted it out of the House a couple of weeks ago.

@shoq

Well setting also matters.

I've been hearing conservatives correctly point out that this wasn't supposed to be a debate or interview, but rather a town hall, so why did the journalist keep trying to debate?

His steamrolling of the host reflected what a town hall is supposed to be, getting his answers out for the public to scrutinize, trying to get past her attempts to derail the event into something else.

There's a time and place for fact checking. This event was not that time or place, so the host just came across looking out of place.

@JuanWild@newsie.social

Krugman has been a very slanted political commentator for a while, and it's really a shame. He used to speak from a position of authority but he has given all of that up to be just, well, pretty awful.

This is a perfect example of that.

Puppet Kevin McCarthy? No, it's not a puppet, it's just that people legitimately disagree and legitimately vote differently, and it really does take a lot of effort to bring people together these days just because of how bad the situation has become.

@antares

Not quite.

14th Amendment says that the president has to pay debts, and the Treasury has enough revenues to pay the debts, so there is absolutely no reason for the SCOTUS to shoot it down.

So long is Biden does not tell the Treasury to ignore debts the 14th Amendment is satisfied, and if he does tell the treasury not to pay debts, that would be impeachable.

At this point this is all up to the executive branch, again since the Treasury has enough revenue to service debts regardless of whether to that ceiling is raised or not.

@TruthSandwich

That's funny, one of my major takeaways from this was that ACA has proven to be as bad an idea as so many predicted. Doesn't exactly make me want to double down on failure.

So many people I know, myself included, had negative health care impacts from the ACA.

Let's reverse course, let's not keep going down the line that has proven to be so bad for so many.

@craigpc

@sean

I think you really missed the part where ownership is fundamentally about people. People own things.

So when you say capitalism is about property, well you follow the trail there a step farther, capitalism is about property, and property is about people's ownership stake, so capitalism is also about people.

The rest is just a restatement of that with more steps.

Hell I would point out that democracy is really even less directly associated with people as It goes through all the steps of governance, all the procedures and bureaucracies, before it gets down to people.

But yeah, I think you really overlooked that point that you hovered around a few times there.

@giraffeslava

Gotta say, it's really sad to see a person choosing ignorance over information for whatever motivation.

@mastodonmigration

A lot of us criticize ActivityPub as being not so much decentralized as centralized around instances.

I WISH it was more decentralized. Bluesky seems to downplay those concentration points from what I've seen.

@profcarroll

@xenomachina

Does it make a difference (and I'm not saying this IS the case, I don't know) if the system is actively courting that experimentation, intentionally being open to people answering those questions as best for their applications?

In other words, if this is complete, there's just not as much to it as a person of a certain preference might want?

@enkiv2 @evan

@helplessduck

I don't know if you've come across it, but I have: a lot of people were questioning whether Trump had changed, pointing to some recent media appearances and changes to his campaign staffs.

So giving him the hour of air time helped people realize what plenty of us have been saying for years: he has not and cannot change.

The airtime helped people see for themselves that he's just as awful as ever.

If you've talked to people on the fence like that, you might see how beneficial the airtime was for informing them, with their own eyes, that he's not even able to be normal in this setting.

@AliceMarshall

I think she's in a tough place these days.

It used to be she could be just a rather academic administrator, following data to make informed decisions, but her new position is political, not technocratic, so she's having to balance what she knows to be right against what the political system gives her to say.

One could argue that she should just quit if the role is so compromising, but even then, she'd be giving up a major chance to influence the politics in the right direction even if the outcome isn't great.

It ends up being a tough call.

@BernieWonIowa@mastodon.social

Well, Democrats had every opportunity to provide funding for their programs when they passed their appropriations bill, but they chose not to, leaving us in this position.

I wouldn't focus so much on rewarding GOP as holding Democrats accountable for actively setting this situation up... but we reelect the people responsible for it, so I guess we're cool with it.

@DemDifference

I do, in fact, think unemployed people should be counted as unemployed people, yes.

BLS chart shows that prime-age participation remains below trend from its pre-pandemic recovery, showing quite a lot of people don't have jobs but aren't reflected in the unemployment numbers you're crowing about, even excluding a lot of the unemployed people you'd rather not recognize.

@parismarx

Echoing a couple of other people here, I can't imagine a different way to get end users the experience they probably want and value.

So to build up, what are the alternative ways of doing this, if not big-data-centralized? Is there a way to get around the efficiencies of having it all in one place for processing?

@bigbee @markstahl