volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@NanoBookReview Well it's complicated in a very important way: since policing is primarily a local or state matter, the Supreme Court has to have a certain level of deference to the other governments involved, requiring a high bar to call them out on individual cases.

This is critical because of how it points us to the importance of reforming local and state governments and laws, as they are the primary setters of police policy.

If you just skip ahead and talk about the Supreme Court, it lets all of those local actors unaccountable for being the real ones at the heart of this problem.

But of course, they love to avoid accountability.

@Jimijamflimflam One doesn't aid through inaction.

That's a logical contradiction, and echoes an acceptance of punishing someone for something they didn't do.

@marynelson8 The procedure for counting Electoral College votes doesn't leave it up to the Speaker, fortunately.

I don't know where this story is coming from, but I do see it going around, and it's not in line with the US voting system.

@prefec2 I get the impression from the screenshot that he was beginning to provide the alternative, but whoever took the screenshot cut it off @taylorlorenz

@prefec2 is that people who have been selected are not qualified then why would he use the phrase independent of their merits?

To me that pretty explicitly says that his point is NOT they are unqualified.

I think you're misreading the quote.

@taylorlorenz

@oldguy52 SCOTUS doesn't rule on science, though. It has neither the expertise nor the authority to such rulings.

That kind of decision gets made in Congress, and SCOTUS merely reinforced the laws that Congress has made, decisions that themselves should be scientific.

Whether the president's authority to regulate huge swaths of the area of the country should or should not be expanded is up to Congress. SCOTUS would be acting outside of those very scientific processes should it impose its own will on the law.

@prefec2 you're ducking his point, though.

Musk says WP is inherently hierarchical, and your reply here basically confirmed that by describing how the hierarchy is organized.

Alright.

Musk goes on to say that the people higher in the hierarchy, the ones you said were elected or selected, show up with their biases, which is only human. You didn't address that, but it was his point.

I also see that the screenshot cuts off something about community notes, which is probably key context to his statement.

@taylorlorenz

@tc_morekindness well, it doesn't mean changing the Constitution, as the Constitution allows each chamber to set its own rules.

But the thing is, we elected these people, and we keep re-electing them. And there's little sign that we aren't going to re-elect the members who voted us into this situation.

We got the government we voted for, that we're apparently approving of, so what needs to change is us and our votes.

ANYWAY, the problem is that I don't think *Democrats* are open to any reasonable powersharing based on their voting positions so far.

They went scorched earth on this, so I don't expect them to pivot now.

It seems like they're winning the messaging game, so I don't think they have much motivation to pivot now.

@Apanthropist_1 I'd say the problem isn't that you measure the economy by how well the rich are doing.

It's that maybe measurement of the economy isn't the answer to the question you should be asking.

IOW, let's not focus on the economy when what we're talking about are the ones the economy is leaving behind.

It's asking the wrong question.

@prismnpen I wish the article had actually cited legislative language, or legal language, or case law, or whatever so we could see the actual details of the defense.

Without that it's hard to identify solutions, as we'd need new language to modify existing language, which like I said, means we need to see the legal language.

The anecdotes are fine to illustrate what we need to address, but without presenting the broken piece leading to those outcomes we can't really talk about how to best fix it.

@jayreding and don't forget that Democrats could simply decline to vote.

They don't have to support any Republican candidate. They don't have to "help" Republicans. They could simply stop actively engaging and thus empowering the GOP hardliners.

@Setok that's right, some complaints are that the Mastodon/UI level and some are deeper.

Some are solvable and some not.

BTW, if you weren't familiar with the history, some things like the lack of quoting in Mastodon were due to the strong personal opinions of developers who thought they were simply bad and should never exist here.

So that's another issue: sometimes it's not lack of funding or developer resources. It's developers intentionally choosing to leave out functionality they don't like.

@lari @petri

@petri yuck.

IMO this highlights an attitude around Fediverse that isn't the grace and light that so many Fediverse users make the platform out to be all about.

@Setok @lari

@Setok right, I don't think federation is itself the problem. It's how the federation was designed around here, with the big focus on http-like requests between instances, inboxes and outboxes, and the rest of the core design.

It didn't have to be this way, but to change it now, to do things like moving content distribution to other layers of the communication protocols that could better address multicasting for example, would give you just a completely different system.

@lari @petri

@lydiaconwell Ha! I mean it reflects on the scalability issues with Fediverse's ActivityPub protocol, so it's not purely a reflection on Threads.

@lydiaconwell My impression is that the resources required to interface their system with Fediverse proved more than they expected, so the effort got pushed to the back burner.

@jwilker they actively voted for this, though.

The Republican conference overwhelmingly rejected the eight and rejected the motion to vacate the chair. Democrats did not have to support the motion, but they did, they stood up and chose to vote yes on the shutdown motion.

We should not allow them to escape. Blame for standing and voting yes to the question, particularly since there's a good chance that vote will put them in a worse position to influence legislation, harming their own causes at least in the short term.

@NPR

@Setok so I lost track of that thread, and then I found it again and realized I hadn't finished it.

I see that the thread really went on to focus on developer attention and funding, but now let me emphasize that I'm saying there are core problems to ActivityPub that can't be fixed with just some more developer focus or funding.

AP was to its core built around instances, not users, and so many complaints that people have come directly from that design decision. It's not like a developer can just change that. To make AP center on users would make it an entirely different protocol.

At that point you might as well just use one of the alternatives that's already doing that.

This is the model that the entire system is built on. No interface changes are really going to fix it.

And this isn't even getting into the major efficiency problems with the model, this is just what is conceptually required.

@lari @petri

@Setok and for something that is still throttling its own use during this stage of roll out.

I'm surprised it's still in limited use mode, but even now it seems to be doing quite a lot.

@petri