volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@alanrycroft

Wow, the Secretary of State not wanting to speak out of his lane is not the dramatic playground tit for tat that Tapper seems to project onto it.

It sounds like Blinken was being professional, not engaging with this press muckraking, and that's exactly what he should be doing.

This drama about offending a billionaire who clearly doesn't care about such things is nonsense from Tapper.

@filsalustri

Excuse the double-response, but I was passing some commercial cooling towers today and thought they'd be a great example to answer your question.

In many commercial and industrial settings they've realized that by transporting heat to centralized plants they're able to deal with it more efficiently, creating less additional heat for the same amount of end-use cooling.

Those sites could line up minisplit systems for every office to handle the same amount of heat, but carrying it away in a single evaporative cooling tower handles the same amount of heat more efficiently and effectively.

@mxtthxw

@darnell

Right, but so what? It doesn't matter what Musk may have issues with, either he does or he does not have the legal protection he's claiming here.

He might believe with every fiber of his being that he has federal legal protections against the CA law; but that doesn't impact whether such federal law exists.

So same with GDPR and DMA and whatever else. I don't care what Musk WANTS; if he doesn't have such legal protection against regulation then he doesn't have it.

This question isn't about Musk at all. It's about what the laws actually say.
@EU_Commission

@empiricism

I'm just still left a bit puzzled as to why you began this thread talking about polling data when you're so quick to ignore peoples' opinions as wrong.

If the data and voters' personal preferences are so subject to being wrong, why bother with any of it?

It seems more straightforward to just say you're looking to impose certain policies no matter what the democratic process might have to say about that.

@watson@freeatlantis.com

For someone who demands respect an awful lot of the country declines to give it to him.

Or maybe that's the difference between demands respect and commands respect.

And it's why he can't win the EC vote, because far too many voters will not vote for him under any circumstances.

Because they don't respect him, based on his behavior.

@darnell

Aren't GDPR and DMA in a vastly different position?

In this case, Musk is suing California saying that the CA law runs afoul of federal law, but is there some higher law above EU Commission that would similarly block GDPR?
@EU_Commission

@lauren

I'd agree to an extent.

I wouldn't go so far as saying it's a very bad situation; I think it's less than ideal and something the system should work on improving.

I'd also say changing the way you write is just like any other communication: there are always compromises when meeting others halfway during any engagement.

You know, reading the room.

And heck, it's not the worst thing in the world for a system to encourage more complete thoughts in each bit of content, even if that's more for the benefit of all more than for the author.

But yep, it's something that needs fixing around here.

@eribosot

I think people are often too quick to say they don't understand the law so they'll just let others figure it out for them.

That's especially troubling in a society that values transparency and democratic values, as it effectively gives up on knowing what rules for us are, allowing a different class of people to argue among themselves post-hoc whether we should face punishment.

And it prevents us from holding lawmakers accountable if we decide we can't understand their work.

So yeah, I'm pretty against the idea of relying on lawyers. We should understand the laws ourselves in part so that we can hold the lawyers themselves accountable

@allpoints

@empiricism

First you started with polling data about what the people want.

I point out that when you include costs the polling data might show different wants from people.

Now you're basically saying what the people want doesn't matter because they want the wrong things because of rich people?

Which is it? Do we care what the people want or not? Do the polls matter or not?

@filsalustri

If nothing else, heat pumps are the common way of actively moving heat around.

But there are all kinds of clever ways to move heat around, ranging from taking advantage of natural phenomena like flowing rivers through chemical reactions and radiative cooling.

But again, it's not so simple as a rate dictated by the properties of materials. Other factors, particular temperature gradients, play huge roles.

The simplest example is that heat conduction is proportional to the difference in temperatures, so the rate of heat conduction varies depending on temperatures on each end for the same material.

@mxtthxw

@mreader I mean, his intervention was at the request of the US to provide that communication service that nobody else was in a position to provide.

It's not that the US government can't allow him to intervene; it's that they felt they had no choice but to request that he act to help Ukraine.

If the US doesn't want his service anymore, well he's said he'd rather not keep providing it, so I guess he's on your side?

But so far the US government is continuing to pressure him to stay in.

@SteveThompson

You literally quoted the reason other than "because he can"...

@sesivany well, what do they say when you ask?

Personally, I like the idea of Bluesky over Fediverse because it's not so instance focused, it's more user focused, but that's just me.

I couldn't care in the slightest anything about where any of these platforms are developed.

@tiredaidworker you've overlooking that the Constitution made very clear the distinction between the Supreme Court and lower courts, granting Congress some authority over the one but not the other.

The checks and balances operate differently between the two different types of courts, with the Supreme Court having judicial independence that was not granted to lower courts.

@oldguy52

Well, I'd submit one tweak: since we elect and reelect (and so validate) the members of this Congress, they don't see fit to represent us any differently in such matters.

Either way, these are the people we've chosen to empower, and so there's your answer.

@GottaLaff

@empiricism

The big problem is that steps governments would take to mitigate climate change themselves involve consumption.

But using eBikes, busses, and trains is still on the plus side of the ledger, consuming those services. The cost side is all of the projects that would lose out on the resources being redirected to support those things.

Are people going to willingly give up another use for this kg of steel because it was needed to build that bus? Perhaps not.

Point is, there is no free lunch, and once people are shown the price tag they often decide not to buy.

@IgnatiusJReilly

Not law, regulation.

So the way it works is that Congress writes laws that often allow the executive branch to go through the notice and comment process to specify how they will be implementing the law, so different administrations are allowed to promulgate different interpretations of the law. That can get pretty messy, so it would be nice if we would elect congresspeople who wouldn't put all of that on the executive branch's shoulders, but never mind.

So a lot of people in the national labs were recently told by the executive branch that their classification in the Department of Labor policies were being revoked, they lost their jobs and they were reclassified as wage earners instead of salaried professionals, with a whole bunch of strings coming from that, restrictions on their abilities to control their work hours and stuff like that.

These aren't new laws. These are new policies coming from the president under the new administration, and it really screwed over a whole lot of them.

@guardian

@tiredaidworker Oh yeah, the Constitution absolutely does impose separation between the branches, and the framers of the Constitution wrote quite a lot confirming that it does!

And putting that aside, I would think that judicial independence is an idea that people generally can get behind.

We see other countries engaging in corrupt acts against their judiciaries, and one would hope we would hold ourselves above that, but here we have a drive to breach that independence. It's not a good look.