dctoedt

17 ms·

241.
by dctoedt 2y ago
> But will the American people see what the rest of the world sees, or will they continue supporting Trump and Vance? Attributed to (the half-American) Winston Churchill: "The American people can be counted on to do the right thin
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by dctoedt 2y ago
As pointed out by @thevarmint, UNODIR is a longstanding military abbreviation for "unless otherwise directed." And that'd be a useful code to include in the subject line of the email as an attention-getter and summary, e.g.:
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by dctoedt 2y ago
Glad I searched for UNODIR before making this comment! And that'd be a useful code to include in the subject line of the email, e.g.: To: Boss From: Me Subj: UNODIR by [DATE], upgrading the production database
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by dctoedt 2y ago
No reason to flag it — it's a useful explanation of a clearly-established truth.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> But anything that requires actual competent governance, from infrastructure to foreign policy, has been total shit my entire lifetime. "Far from perfect, but reasonably serviceable" ≠ "total shit"
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> The "living constitution" angle doesn't get you anywhere. Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've lea
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Democracy isn’t sensitive to manipulation. So I guess Russia, China, Iran, etc., have been wasting their time and money in seeking to manipulate elections. And the thousands of political consultants around the globe have been just sc
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> The laws were broken in the 1930s when we created the unconstitutional monstrosity that is the modern executive branch That's bibliolatry, directed to a long-obsolete interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federa
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> We don’t have surnames, but instead two given names. ... So I have my dad’s last name .... Did your dad choose your last name? (Which, I've read, has a specific meaning in Hebrew, but I'm guessing your family isn't Jew
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> What requires a label is the theory that there’s an independent civil service insulated from the President and political appointees. The "executive power" is what's enumerated in Article II — most notably the All Other
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Musk at least is an agent of the guy who just won the election. Yeah: The guy who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. That guy. Who wasn't elected absolute monarch, no matter what the unitary-exec
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Are the republican party committing acts of violence against their opposition, so as to push them out of Congress and establish a supermajority? Update: "The judge, for her part, seemed initially unconvinced that FBI agents coul
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by dctoedt 2y ago
I'm waiting for the unitary-executive crowd to admit that they're monarchists at heart — and not constitutional monarchists.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Why not have a “living constitution” that reflects our view of what modern developments demand? Because "[y]our view" is dangerously naïve about human nature, and might have been serviceable in earlier times but less like
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Does the US constitution have an emergency decree mechanism whereby the president can effectively assume full power and suspend civil rights? It could well be in the offing: Egged on by Musk, Miller, etc. — and putting his people in
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by dctoedt 2y ago
Edit: And it's not just presidential supervision, it's the whole checks-and-balances thing — designed as safeguards against just the sort of thing we're seeing now.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
That’s pretty black-and-white thinking, with no apparent recognition that there are shades of gray.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> what’s the constitutional standard for how much the president needs to supervise those to whom he delegates authority? It’s GOT to be more than seems to be happening now.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Live by the unconstitutional delegation sword die by the unconstitutional delegation sword. Now that comment is just lawless — it's in the same general category as the "thinking" that led to Rudy Giuliani, John Eastm
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> The Constitution requires that voters must be able to effectively change government policy through the election of the president. Forgetting about Article I, are we?
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> I’m pretty sure they all have Trump’s and Bessent’s authorization. From what I've (very-superficially) read, zero of the prescribed clearance protocols were followed before giving the DOGE Boys access to highly-confidential syst
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by dctoedt 2y ago
Maybe less than four years. The mid-terms are next year, and I've been reading that a lot of GOP officeholders are terrified of what's going on but also terrified of opposing The Dear Leader — because of fears for their personal s
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by dctoedt 2y ago
And the same is true about people who don't recognize blindingly-salient historical parallels with 1930s Germany.
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> I’m cheering on the DOGE strike teams. I'd cheer if the DOGE strike teams in OMB, etc., were to be arrested, indicted, duly tried and convicted, and imprisoned for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and possibly the Econ
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> the democratically elected president That doesn't trump (so to speak) all other considerations — Adolf Hitler was "democratically" chosen. (And yes, I'm going there.)
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> Is it possible your conversation partner had looked up fountain pens recently? Yes, that's possible — I'd given her a pretty-nice fountain pen that'd been in my desk drawer, unused, for many years (it was a speaker tha
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by dctoedt 2y ago
> It's also quite possible that you're in the range of other listening and facial recognition devices that you do not have control over. Dining room at home, not in range of anything else with a microphone that I can think of
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Ask HN: Why does my iPhone show me ads relevant to a dinner conversation?
6 points by dctoedt 2y ago|10 comments
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by dctoedt 2y ago
In his 1958 juvenile novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (I read it years later as a tween), Robert A. Heinlein described this as a "skew-flip maneuver" that would get someone from Earth to Pluto in five days at 8G (!). And appar

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