ignirtoq

There’s also the question of disposable income. Top X% have more wealth and income than us, and that excess is basically all disposable. Most of the income and “wealth” of the bottom of the economic ladder is tied up in survival needs, so it’s even less of a possibility than at first glance.

Viruses evolve, some quite quickly. The flu isn’t the fastest (looking at you, HIV), but it’s up there. Over time, existing vaccines train your body to fight something that doesn’t quite match what’s in the wild (i.e. efficacy goes down with time). That’s why there’s a different seasonal flu vaccine every year.

They create flu vaccines on a yearly cycle, and a pandemic can kick off in a matter of weeks and months, so if it doesn’t match the preplanned cycle, they’ll have to invest more resources to creating the most up to date vaccine off-cycle.

Idk overall more jury trials sounds better than judges just getting to decide.

I don’t have enough information on the topic to form an opinion about whether trial by jury for these cases is better overall for society. But I do know this is not the right way to make this change. This was a case between a hedge fund manager and the SEC, and now as a result OSHA can no longer enforce anything? And with no prior warning for anyone to make any preparations. How could that possibly be the right way to make this change?

How so? I’m arguing for SCOTUS not to take a wrecking ball to our government by suddenly making unlawful procedures that have been relied on for so long they are assumed in laws passed by Congress decades ago. Should alleged violations of those laws be tried in front of a jury instead of this other mechanism? Maybe, but how about we make that change in a way that doesn’t suddenly render those laws de facto unenforceable with no warning?

Yes, I agree with that reading of history, but just because things have been a certain way, doesn’t mean they have to be that way. I concur that the historical precedent for the SCOTUS is to stand in the way of progress, or often to cause regression, but that doesn’t mean we have to quietly accept it. Especially if and when there have been historical departures from that trend that demonstrate things can work differently, and work well.

(Not trying to be confrontational, just trying to prevent a nihilistic reading of your comment.)

I had heard about this case basically removing a powerful tool for the SEC and effectively requiring them to spend way more money trying cases in front of a jury, but I didn’t know there were so many other agencies that aren’t even allowed to bring jury trial cases and are only allowed to bring the type of case that the SCOTUS basically just eliminated. More and more I’m having trouble not seeing the actions of the SCOTUS majority as a deliberate attack on the US government itself rather than “correcting” earlier rulings that have been precedent for decades.

Roberts turned to history in his opinion. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.

Some courts have gone too far, Roberts wrote, in applying Bruen and other gun rights cases. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” he wrote.

In dissent, Thomas wrote, the law “strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process.”

The government “failed to produce any evidence” that the law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, he wrote.

“Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” Thomas wrote.

Am I taking crazy pills? Why is some arbitrary reading of history the sole mechanism by which these opinions are being made? What happened to the textual literalism these justices claimed to follow? Doesn’t that require reading the words in the Constitution and making judgements from that?

Why is the arbitrary choice of legislative implementation of the state governments of the 1800s determining what laws states are allowed to have in the 2000s? If they passed a law that was unconstitutional, but no one challenged it for 200 years, then it’s suddenly not only constitutional, but now a metric against which new laws can be judged to determine if they are constitutional? How is that anything but laws “trapped in amber”?

Did I miss the slow court transition to this singular decision-making process? Or was this a sudden shift that I just missed the headlines? I knew they used suspicious historical reasoning in Dobbs to throw out abortion rights, but do they do that for every case now?

Humans getting it? Yes, from farm animals. Humans getting it from other humans? Not yet, but I wouldn’t bet on that staying the case forever.

There are two aspects that make this different from COVID. One is that the mortality rate is much higher: near 50%, whereas COVID was around 1-3%. That’s the bad difference. The good difference is that it’s a flu variant, and we’ve studied flu variants for a very long time. I’ve heard there’s already a vaccine, but I haven’t verified that claim from any reputable health organization.

So if people actually follow health advice from officials, this could be handled much better than COVID. But if they don’t and they get it, it’s a coin flip if they die. And people are already doing things like drinking more raw milk because the CDC has identified the virus as being in raw milk from infected farms, so draw your own conclusions.

The Tribunal accepted that creed should include non-religious belief systems, yet still rejected ethical veganism because it “does not address the existence or non-existence of a Creator and/or a higher order of existence”.

What the hell kind of “non-religious belief system” addresses the existence or non-existence of a “Creator”? Are they trying to expand “creed” just enough to cover a particular definition of atheism and absolutely nothing else? The whole point of atheism is that is doesn’t have to address a “Creator” because the laws of nature work just fine without that question being addressed. Sure, some flavors of atheism take a stance on the question, but not all of them do. Are those flavors of atheism suddenly not a “creed”? How could they possibly justify that without applying a biased religious lens (which by its very nature violates basically all atheist “creeds”)?

Edit: I just realized this is exactly like when people who do not understand the first thing about homosexuality ask a male couple which one is the “woman.”

I was expecting some kind of analysis showing that otherwise normal people who adopted GOP politics simultaneously transitioned to showing sociopathic behavior, like in a measurable, scientific way. Instead the author gives a definition of sociopathy (“acting without feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame coupled with a tendency to reject the concept of responsibility”) and proceeds to label the policy positions and enacted laws of the GOP as sociopathic.

Applying neuroscience terms developed for individual people to actions of groups does not seem scientific at all. Isn’t that the field of sociology? I’m not really sure how such a labeling helps the conversation, especially from a neuroscientist. I don’t disagree with the positions, but this isn’t neuroscience, so I can’t really take this author as any sort of authority or expert on this; I feel like this article has the same level of expertise as a Lemmy comment (like mine).

https://archive.ph/flBZ1

The best way I have heard it phrased is that tolerance is a social contact. By being intolerant, they break that contract, and we have no obligation to follow through on our part if they don’t do their part.

The 10th amendment doesn’t change the supremacy clause. It simply makes explicit what’s implicit in the supremacy clause: federal law takes precedence over any and all state laws and constitutions when they are made in pursuance of the US Constitution, so the 10th amendment clarifies that if it’s not a power granted to the federal government by the US Constitution, then it’s reserved for the states. To invoke the 10th amendment in this case you would have to prove the federal government is acting beyond its constitutional scope, which would require either proving it’s going beyond EMTALA or that EMTALA itself is unconstitutional. They are not making either claim in this case.

and whether you like it or appreciate it or not, he’s got a history of public service

Would that be the charity that’s a front for embezzling charitable donations, or the presidency that he used to enrich himself by vacationing in his own properties, requiring the federal government to pay exorbitant, arguable falsely inflated, prices with taxpayer money for housing the Secret Service in Trump properties and selling national secrets to hostile governments?

Republicans in Idaho asked the Supreme Court to decide whether state bans or federal law take precedence.

This is absurd. Federal law always takes precedence, even if it’s a section of a state constitution versus a law passed by Congress. Period. It’s the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, and it’s quite clear. The supremacy clause doesn’t cover executive order, but this case is about EMTALA, a law passed by Congress.

Now if they want to argue the Biden administration’s enforcement of that law is going beyond the bounds set by the law, that would be something SCOTUS would need to decide. But as far as I can tell they aren’t arguing that. They’re saying if the Court lets the Biden administration require emergency abortions in opposition to state law, then that will let them require elective abortions as well, which is an even more absurd claim since the scope of EMTALA is strictly for medical care when the health or life of the patient is at risk without it.

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Biden has been backed into a corner on this. The immigration system is fundamentally broken and not equipped to deal with modern needs, but that has to be fixed by Congress. Biden had legislation he was favoring, and regardless of what your opinion on it was, Republicans made it clear they won’t let absolutely any changes to immigration happen with a Democrat in the White House, no matter how much they may agree with them.

His options under executive action are extremely limited. The strategy of letting the system flounder to illustrate the need for reform has only worked against him, so now he’s trying something else. I don’t agree with the current system, the reforms that he proposed, nor this executive order, but man, there just isn’t a good solution here, and he’s feeling the political pressure on it, which while it may be misdirected is nonetheless real.

I find the very term “content” fascinating, because the exact definition you choose puts it on a kind of spectrum with “useful” at one end and “measurable” at the other.

When Daniel Ek talks about “content,” he means any pile of bits he can package up, shove in front of people, and stuff with ads. From that definition, making “content” is super cheap. I can record myself literally screaming for 30 seconds into the microphone already in my laptop and upload it using the internet connection I already have. Is it worth consuming? No, but I’ll get to that. And content under that definition is very measurable in many senses, like file size, duration, and (important to him) number of hours people stream it (and can inject ads into). But from this view, all “content” is interchangable and equal, so it’s not a very useful definition, because some content is extremely popular and is consumed heavily, while other content is not consumed at all. From Daniel’s perspective, this difference is random, enigmatic, and awe inspiring, because he can’t measure it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “useful” definition where the only “content” is good content. My 30 seconds of screaming isn’t content, it’s garbage. It’s good content that actually brings in the ad revenue, because it’s what people will put up with ads to get access to. But what I would consider good content is not what someone else would consider good content, which is what makes it much harder to measure. But we can all agree making good content is hard and thus almost always expensive (at least compared to garbage passing as content).

And that’s what makes Daniel Ek look like an out of touch billionaire. The people who make good content (that makes him money) use the more useful definition, which is difficult to make and expensive and actually worth talking about, while he uses the measurable definition that’s in all the graphs on his desk that summarize his revenue stream.

Oh absolutely. With the rising food prices, my family has had to shift to making those rotisserie chickens a regular part of our weekly plans to keep our grocery bills down. (We eat the meat and then boil the bones/carcass into broth, which we can have as another meal of soup.) As prices continue to rise, they become a better and better deal.

To be fair, Costco has acknowledged they lose money on the sausages (and rotisserie chickens) and use those cheaper items to draw in customers to buy other things they do make money on.

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.