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
Keep in mind how bureaucratic it can be inside well-established journalistic outfits.
For one of the mainstream outfits with someone pushing to join Fediverse I can imagine a ton of meetings talking about everything from budget, through technical workflow, through reputational impacts with marketing, through even having it cleared with legal.
They have #Twitter figured out. This #Fediverse thing gets to be more complicated.
A site like #Newsmax simply has less to lose, and maybe fewer employees demanding consultation.
Well, keep in mind the way #SCOTUS functions: it answers specific questions, that might have implications for others, but it's not ideally bound by answers it's not giving to questions it didn't accept.
Lower courts are to read those implications, hopefully correctly. Maybe this decision will cause lower courts to reject asset forfeiture if/when it's challenged, though.
The Court may have wanted to use this case, with an obviously correct answer, to move the needle in lower courts when it felt like the legal environment wasn't ready to attack the practice head-on.
The Court does act strategically.
I think you're overlooking that this was not at all a scientific matter. It was a legal matter, and as much as we might want the law to be completely on the same page as science,
The question the Court had to answer was NOT what the science said. The question was what the representatives in the Legislative Branch wrote into law, *whether scientifically sound or not* as that's how the democratic process works in the US.
We are free to elect lawmakers that make laws following science or not, but if we do elect unscientific lawmakers, well, it's not an unelected court's role in our system to override the representative system.
Yes, the justices agreed unanimously that the EPA was never granted the authority that it claimed, even if justices had differences of opinion about where to draw the line in response.
The Clean Water Act simply never authorized what the EPA said it did.
Which of course legislation can fix if it needs to be fixed. And now it can be done properly and legally.
@memeorandum
The current Congress didn't pass the legislation setting up this dangerous situation. That was the last one. This Congress has already voted on a cleanup of the mess, though.
So you have that story backwards.
As for implications, also keep in mind that any Congress might not be particularly interested in sanctioning a president who tries to bypass the coequal branch, and breaks the law to issue debt that threatens US debt in general.
If the purchasers of that debt have to take a haircut in order to protect checks and balances, well, Congress might be pretty interested in that outcome.
@newsopinionsandviews@masto.ai
There's little sense taking the time to go through the legislative process on these bills when so much will depend on how the debt ceiling conflict plays out.
The one will impact the other.
So it seems reasonable not to spend days working on legislation that would be outdated before the voting even gets to the LOC.
Oh, I misread your previous comment. I see what you're saying now.
Firstly, DOES this law apply only to counties with high populations? I believe I read about another that had such language, but as I skim this one, I think it might be a different law. I don't see the magic number, but feel free to correct me by quoting the limitation.
I only see general "a county office administering elections" and a search for "million" also came up blank.
But to the point, it may be that the legislature wants to focus resources where they will have the biggest impact. I don't know the details of how TX organizes its small and large elections.
The law also doesn't let the partisan decide that. It requires investigation that can be challenged and overseen by courts, given the specific protections of the law.
This law is not the blank check some excited reporters present it as.
No, the #SCOTUS didn't weaken EPA power to enforce the Clean Water Act. That gets backwards what the argument actually is.
The issue is that the CWA didn't authorize this power in the first place, so the EPA was acting outside of the Act.
If we want the EPA to have this much expanded authority, fine, that's what the democratic process is for. Let's have those discussions about how it would work, and the tradeoffs involved.
But that the EPA wasn't enforcing CWA in these cases is the entire core of the argument that the Agency lost.
Or alternatively respect the democratic process an stop trying to get around the rule of law simply because the president isn't being given the power he's demanding.
A much better way forward, I'd say.
That gets it backwards, though.
The issue is that those wetlands were never protected by the Act in the first place, so this had been the federal government claiming authority over twice as many (much?) wetland as the legislative branch ever authorized.
If we want to expand federal power like that, it needs to go through the democratic process.
Well, it's not that they weaken CWA protections for wetlands, but rather point out that the EPA was claiming authority that the Act didn't grant in the first place.
The protections remain the same, but EPA is called out for exceeding the Act.
Again, you miss that this isn't about whether the concerns are true--maybe they are, maybe they aren't--but about systems to address public concern that they might be.
If there is a lack of confidence in the voting system, that in itself is a problem, even if the concerns are absolutely wrong.
So, this law provides a means for engaging with the public to address their concerns and sort out what's really going on, for the sake of fighting back against those who undermine public confidence in the democratic process.
From what I remember, that sort of thing was one of the goals when #BlueSky was being designed as user-focused instead of instance-focused like #ActivityPub.
Maybe not that *specific* thing, but the general ability for users to manage their identities more on their own. Which includes users finding such unanticipated use cases :)
It's part of the general account portability that platform offers.
Even this sort of rhetoric emphasizes an administration not wanting to be serious about how spending works.
Deficits aren't caused by tax cuts. They cannot, mathematically, be. Instead, deficits are caused by spending beyond receipts, but the admin wants to deemphasize the 's' word that Republicans are happy to run with.
You might say tax cuts cause spending to add to the deficit, but it is literally the spending doing the action.
volkris
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Post Editing is now available on @pixelfed !
This was the most wanted feature for me 
#pixelfed #fediverse #ThankYouDaniel #LongLiveFediverse #LongLivePixelfed
They are two separate questions.
But the president gave Congress this opportunity to at least make some progress on the one in exchange for expansion of power on the other.
The bill addresses cases of suspected "recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration" and lists out six types of problem (A-E).
Those suspicions alone undermine faith in voting operations as we see pretty strikingly in the US, so this provides a system for addressing those concerns and hopefully finding that the worries were misplaced. Or adding additional oversight should they be confirmed.
And this is definitely a problem around the world. Different places address it differently, in their different circumstances.
It's not magic. It's official authority under the US system of government.
With executive authority constitutionally vested in the president, the president is the one setting such internal executive branch policy in the first place.
There are many reasons for this, including making sure presidents can be held responsible and impeached for the deeds of their branches, but it would be a tail wagging the dog situation for the president to be so constrained by his own underlings.
Well right, because this situation wasn't caused by tax cuts for the ultra rich. Financing for that stuff was already settled. Those books were closed.
THIS situation arose out of the appropriations bills from the last Congress and Biden that promised to spend money without actually authorizing financing.
The current situation was directly chosen by that legislation, not by tax cuts or whatever. They may have their own problems, but they're different problems.
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
