volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
@stanstallman Don't forget the most critical part when it comes to #Trump: loser.
But yes, if you listen to Republicans and the things they're focused on, it does make a ton of sense.
Just to give one quick example, one small piece of the picture, the guy runs on this idea that "they" are out to get Republicans. His whole thing is that he will fight for them against that supposed threat. So, you mention twice impeached? That is a bonus for him! It both "proves" his rhetoric that they're out to get Republicans AND shows him fighting.
It really does make perfect sense, and if we understood each other better we'd hopefully be able to squash those notions and take those talkingpoints away from him.
Weird way to draw attention to the point by not addressing the point! Again, this is why I'm criticizing it as a distraction.
If the paper wanted to draw attention to how often people were being failed by insurance, then it should have talked about how often people were failed by insurance.
But it didn't. It went off on this irrelevant statistic.
That makes me think this is a newspaper article trying to get clicks by using a sensationalized stat that will get people excited.
Sadly, that doesn't help draw attention to how insurance companies are or aren't failing.
House Republicans voted against this bill 200 to 9, and that the legislation didn't even provide borrowing authority to fund it is probably a pretty good sign that they were right.
Democrats voted us in to this position as a block with only one vote against.
It's silly to say Republicans agreed to this when they put pen to paper fighting against it.
I mean, they already passed legislation to approve the additional borrowing power.
It's some hostage taking when Democrats set up this situation by voluntarily passing their spending bills in the last Congress without providing funding, and then not taking yes for an answer when Republicans voted it forward.
The GOP was handed hostages, they released them, and Democrats are insisting on keeping it going for some reason.
It's clearly constitutional, though, as the Constitution explicitly assigns to Congress the authority "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;"
Biden has no authority to borrow money without congressional authorization, and anyone buying that debt should be aware that without legal authorization it's not valid, and they would have no claim to get it back.
The Whitehouse needs to compromise, exactly as the US system was designed, to make sure the president doesn't have such unilateral authority.
@debasisg@mstdn.social
That's not how federal spending works.
The Treasury spends money throughout the year, so the issue right now is money that has not yet been spent, has not yet been charged to the credit card.
Yes, there has been a ton of misinformation about this, but you can read the Treasury's daily summary of spending here, showing that it's not a matter of not paying back unless the president orders Treasury not to pay out of the money that it is taking in:
Wow, government shutdown? Economic collapse?
All after House Republicans already caved and voted to extend borrowing power to keep it going?
Not only do you have the story backwards, but you're rushing so far in the wrong direction that you're seeing this weird apocalypse.
The Treasury has income regardless of the debt ceiling being raised. It's there in their daily balance sheets.
The hyperbole is not healthy.
History teaches us the dangers of that path, but it sure is a popular one.
Really, it comes down to hubris, people with best of intentions who think they can solve difficult problems that are really quite thorny, with all of those unknowns.
So unintended negative consequences are so common in our past. But it's hard to learn lessons from the path when, oh this time will be different, this time we can definitely engineer the system that will only have upside!
This time is rarely different.
Since the appointments clause doesn't ask anything of the Senate, what leads you to believe inaction is not available?
Again, this is an Article II instruction to the president, but there is no parallel instruction telling the Senate to do anything, which I'd say leaves it up to them.
And that's setting aside the way this all fits naturally into the system of separation of powers, coequal branches and all of that.
It'd be strange to me to interpret the appointments clause as allowing the president to command the Senate to act, for many reasons, not the least because it doesn't say so.
You're missing what I'm saying.
I'm saying we need to be focusing on how frequently people are being denied that care, but this statistic doesn't say that, and so it's a distraction from exactly that thing that we should be caring about.
Like I said, I want to know how often insurance companies are improperly denying claims, but this statistic doesn't address that.
Far too few people are pointing out that the section of the US code this relies on doesn't clearly say it's legal.
Far too few also are comfortable cutting democratic review out of unilateral executive action, the president acting against his Congress.
I'm certain that your intentions are good, trying to help the most people, but all too often the unintended consequences end up doing more harm than good.
I fear this sort of thing is exactly one of those cases.
All too often well-meaning regulation ends up stalling progress, disempowering exactly the people it meant to serve, and generally being caught grappling with unknown unknowns, and that is especially dangerous in an area such as tech, where paradigms can shift in mere years.
It's one thing to see the failures of, say, zoning laws that play out over generations, but tech moves so much faster, with so much more downside risk to fingers accidentally put on the wrong scales.
It's simply false that clean debt ceiling bills were passed 3x under Trump, as you can see in this example, the definitely not-clean bill they passed in 2019 after a good bit of negotiation.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-116publ37/pdf/PLAW-116publ37.pdf
So you see, once the designer starts adding the exceptions like those, it becomes clear that this problem is thornier than it sounds at the beginning :)
And one issue to emphasize is that the rules, and exceptions to the rules, will likely favor incumbents over challengers, if nothing else because the rules will focus on what's already being done without looking at the unknown that will come next.
The "I don't know of anyone" part naturally raises issues of the challenger with a great idea who's not yet known.
To be clear, it is not the job of the Senate to consider presidential nominations. That would run counter to independence of the branches, and it would allow the president to have influence over the Senate's work, which raises conflicts of interest.
Instead, in the US system of government, it is the *president*'s job, not the Senate's job, to run the appointment process. It's an Article II responsibility laid on the executive branch, not an Article I responsibility on the Congress.
If the president fails to nominate someone the Senate is interested in, then he is given no authority over the Senate to interrupt legislative business to force consideration.
No action is the default for ANY business before the Senate that senators aren't interested in spending time on.
That government can't borrow dollars will come as a huge surprise to all of us who have lent dollars to the government.
OF COURSE government can borrow dollars. And, even more, it DOES borrow dollars.
It's just silly to deny this simple reality.
Why does that matter?
We want insurance companies to first and foremost abide by their legal responsibilities, and that figure has nothing to do with whether insurance is functioning as it is supposed to function.
Whether my claim is approved or denied correctly or incorrectly has absolutely nothing to do with the rate at which the company is denying other claims.
It's a distraction from the issues that actually matter.
That's a fine example, as it shows how tricky this stuff really is:
Fediverse is a distributed platform, so how would that apply to a service provider working here? If my instance accidentally locks me out, does it get off the hook completely by saying the user can pursue already stored data from other instances? What if the technology is designed around storage in the distributed system, so the instance can't help retrieve stores data anyway?
That such rules may assume centralization in an increasingly decentralized internet, of late, shows how those general guidelines would be hard to craft.
The allowed to be deferred forever is a key feature of the check on presidential power, though, both requiring him to find a nominee that the Senate finds compelling and preventing him from interfering in the business of the other branch of government.
Remember, by design to support the consent based approach of the chamber, procedures in there can take a lot of time. They literally do not have time to do everything all hundred members want to do.
Whether that approach is for better or worse, it is the approach that the Senate has adopted forever.
Really, if we don't like that the Senate isn't interested in an candidate, we should elect better senators, not bypass this protection built in to the system.
A related issue that I always try to highlight is that many users here misunderstand the privacy settings, believing their content to be more secure than it really is. I think that's a serious issue.
In this case, I'd argue that ActivityPub/Mastodon doesn't really have a DM feature, as many know that term. The messages aren't direct or secure. Instead, they're sent to the remote instance with a note saying the content is only for the remote user, but it's really up to the instance to deliver it privately or rebroadcast publicly or whatever.
The lack of two way interface in blocking reflects that.
It's up to the remote instance to do what it wants with the content, hopefully dropping it into the void if the user asks for that to be done. Or might publicly broadcast later, idk (to borrow the phrase)
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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