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
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)
Currently, the president is obligated to find a nominee that the Senate is interested in having as a justice.
Those are serious constraints on his power: he can't legally NOT act, and his actions must reflect the preference of the Senate, even if those aren't his own.
Your proposal turns that on its head, allowing the president much more latitude to nominate the person he personally wants even without review from Congress AND it gives him a way to intrude into Legislative Branch business, prompting the Senate to interrupt its other work to take up this issue.
Imagine, for example, if the Senate is working on legislation the president doesn't like. He could start sending over nominees that he knows they'd find unacceptable, just to have them stop work on that legislation to debate his nominees endlessly.
So yeah, an awful lot of power for the president to exercise unilaterally.
Well, #ActivityPub is very much focused on instances, not users, and it focuses on broadcasting content farther, not carefully tailoring where content goes.
I imagine this is a case of ActivityPub being intent on getting that DM to the recipient instance (not user) and letting the recipient instance deal with the rest of the picture.
Things similar to privacy aren't priorities in ActivityPub.
All of that would really undermine judicial independence and grant more power to the president, really undermining the system of checks and balances that are there to make sure citizens' rights are respected by officials.
We have representation through the legislative branch. We should not be turning the expertise of the judicial branch into just another popularity contest, as its job to craft logically coherent law is to important for that.
We see the mess that elections cause in Congress and the presidency. We should go running from the idea of bringing that to the Supreme Court as well.
Why would he step down?
After all, he doesn't exactly see eye to eye with the other justices that Republicans have been confirming lately.
Better in a VM than what?
Do you mean better single-user instances than multiuser instances, or better in a VM than in separate physical servers?
It seems like the House-passed bill to raise the debt ceiling is a pretty good rudder.
They already voted to raise the borrowing power, so if others have a different idea, that's a pretty good starting point.
Well, that's interesting. DM blocking on #Mastodon means your instance still receives the message, but it's simply not displayed to your face.
Just one of those quirky parts of #ActivityPub
It's not normal... nor is it how the US government works, not even in this dispute.
Bill paying is up to the Treasury in the Executive Branch, which has enough revenue to pay its bills. The Treasury takes in money on a daily basis throughout the year, and the amount it takes to service the debt, again on a daily basis, is much less than what it takes in.
Regardless of the #DebtCeiling the Treasury, according to its own reports, has the money it will need to pay its bills as they come due.
The real solution to this is for Congress to stop authorizing spending of money without providing financing for that spending.
The US can and the president legally MUST pay their bills.
The debt ceiling isn't the cause of this dispute. Bad governance and misleading political rhetoric is.
It's probably a matter of culture and establishing norms.
We should promote the idea of people building up, not tearing down.
At the end of the day, some people just really like to block. It helps them maintain echo chambers.
If that's what they're looking for, well, they can get it through blocking.
@newsopinionsandviews@masto.ai
That gets the picture backwards, though.
The 14th is about spending money, saying the president must service the debt. If anything it's about *retiring* debt, not creating more.
Biden has no way of raising the debt ceiling since that's a legislative process. He does have a way to order the Treasury to take on debt without authorization from Congress, but that would be impeachable since the Constitution is clear that such authority is in the legislative branch.
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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