volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@BioGeoMeFi. That's not what the ruling said at all, and the LA Times should be called out for these misleading headlines.

In fact, in the ruling, the Supreme Court went out of its way to emphatically recognize the illegality of bribery. That was a core part of the decision. But as happens so often, it doesn't matter what efforts the Court might make to head off misinformation, these reports go viral anyway.

What the Court pointed out was that the people we elected to Congress changed the law a while back, and the Court respected the legislative process. It wasn't the Court making a change, it was an entirely different branch of government, and if we want to have the law revisited, we are welcome to ask them to fix it.

But we're not going to get there by blaming the Court for something they didn't do based on something that was the opposite of what they said.

@alwillis Well I don't know about the rest of us, but what that headline is doing is misreporting Supreme Court decisions, it seems 🙂

No, the Supreme Court did not wipe out anti-corruption laws here. That's not what the ruling said. What it says was that Congress changed the law decades ago so that it applied to some cases but not others, and the Supreme Court simply respected that legislation.

The Supreme Court didn't make the change. The people that we elected to Congress made that change. And if we don't like it, we should probably elect better people.

But this headline is completely wrong compared to the actual opinion, and it's this kind of thing that leads so many to lose faith in journalism today.

@AmericanScream you say that and yet I spend Bitcoin on meaningful things often enough.

Maybe you don't, maybe your experiences are kind of narrow, but if you're interested in this topic, then I think you probably need to know that people do spend Bitcoin meaningfully without converting it to something else.

I've bought everything from food to landscaping services paying in Bitcoin without any conversion, just off the top of my head.

@rayhindle no, because SCOTUS is not sitting to judge Trump here. They cannot grant him immunity under this case.

This case is mainly procedural, and that doesn't get enough attention. It's mainly a question about when an accused former official can challenge an accusation itself, regardless of guilt, and that goes beyond Trump.

All of these people thinking the Supreme Court might or might not throw the book at Trump misunderstand that this case has little to do with Trump's actual guilt or innocense.

@Nonilex

@bigheadtales no, that's the opposite of what SCOTUS ruled.

They emphasized that bribery is illegal, but Congress passed a law in 1986 that broke gratuities out from bribery.

The ruling goes out of its way to recognize the 15 year maximum sentence for bribery under the law.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-108_8n5a.pdf

@GottaLaff

@curiousgawker oh, I would frame that slightly differently: it's not that he was found guilty of interfering with an election but that he was found guilty of lying.

The reason I frame it that way is because in the course of this case Trump wasn't merely bloviating or exaggerating or using the other language that his supporters have always excused. Instead, he was flat out lying to his supporters about substantial matters, things like lying about what he was actually charged with for example.

Trump supporters don't care about the election interference. But it is possible that they might start caring if their own loyalty was being betrayed, if they started to notice that Trump is lying to them about these starkly factual issues. It's part of the railway to undermine the guy.

Unfortunately it seems too late to change strategy now.

@curiousgawker Well what they say is that they do like the cops on the ground even as they criticize the management.

Yes, it is a simplistic version of the world, but that's what they promote.

@AmericanScream I don't think that's right.

An enormous function of Bitcoin is that since you control your wallet you can spend without relying on anyone else disappearing.

@anarchistquotes such a person doesn't seem to have gotten out much, because there are absolutely thieves who engage in theft without the need for famine.

But even skipping over that bit of naivety, the concept of all belonging to everyone is inherently contradictory given the fundamental concept of belonging.

@curiousgawker Well it depends on what media sources you're following.

A whole lot of people don't follow the sources that tell that story but rather much more cynical stories painting the picture that none of this really matters so much.

So it's not so much people detached from the elections as it is people attached to different media sources that tell dramatically different versions of events, parallel worlds, day in and day out.

The population effectively lives in different realities these days.

I like to refer to it as the book club theory: everyone showed up to the book club having read books with the same title but completely different plots, which makes it really hard to discuss the book!

@KimPerales but it all goes to emphasize that these are questions for Congress, not the president, and we need to think harder about the people that we are electing to Congress, who haven't bothered to fix these things.

This stuff should never be up to the executive branch of government. This stuff is to be decided through the democratic process in the legislative branch.

But we keep reelecting numbskulls who don't do their jobs. I guess we're okay with it.

@alan I'd say it's a case of that being the worst possible way of doing things, except for all the alternatives 🙂

Every method of choosing representatives has trade-offs. Personally I think the issues of district shape that you are bringing up is worth accepting in return for the possibility of judging candidates individually, even if the voters might all too often shirk that responsibility.

@KimPerales That's not how originalism works, though. It doesn't force courts to transport us back to the 18th century, it just forces courts to transport us back to when laws were written, even if it was a law that was written just last year.

We are perfectly able to write new law and originalism will demand that we respect whatever modern law we come up with, so long as it was properly passed through the democratic process.

The rulings that came out today were a great example of that as the court recognized the authority of law made in the last couple of decades.

@Delphi You're still missing the point: with out production pay doesn't matter because there's nothing to buy.

If there's no bread on the shelf because it wasn't produced then it doesn't matter how much you were paid, you still can't buy the bread because it doesn't exist.

Without production none of the rest matters.

@Delphi if there's no bread it's a moot question! :)

@Loungagna wrong branch of government.

SCOTUS pointed out that *Congress* made this change to the law.

Well, we elected those congresspeople, so what can ya do?

@GottaLaff

@957dd3687817abb53e01635fb4fc1c029c2cd49202ec82f416ec240601b371d8 that's not what they ruled as it wasn't the federal government doing the censoring.

That was core to the ruling.

@Delphi again, my focus isn't on the business but on the fellow humans that are counting on the goods and services being offered.

A business can only succeed to the extent that it's offering goods and services to humans who need them, but so often that gets overlooked.

If you go to the store and there isn't bread on the shelf because workers were prevented from working the hours they need to make the bread or costs are increased to the point where the bread can no longer be produced, you lose out. Real people lose out.

Never forget the downstream negative impacts when you start messing with production that people are relying on.

@Delphi well the limitation on working hours more directly impacts productivity than living wage. (And, for that matter, limitations on how I can apply my labor, the hours that I'm allowed to work, certainly makes me unhappy and impacts my agency)

But even when it comes to living wage, such proposals often make it just not mathematically viable to offer goods and services to customers, with resources being taken away from where they are needed in order to write those paychecks.

You can't productively make food for people if you can no longer afford the ingredients as the budget is skewed by living wage implementation.