vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
He had the affairs, but someone decided to release this information now, despite the Trump administration supposedly knowing about the Chinese spy for a while now. They even waited until just after the midterms to leak the information.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
Congress did approve large settlements under Obama.
The cases where Congress didn't under Obama were usually because the government was suing a private company, and the settlement was being paid out by the company not the government.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
When people say Trump is doing something 'unprecedented' I feel like 9/10 times it something that either Biden or Obama did or tried to do first.
I've been a little unpersuaded by this line of argument, since Trump's version often ends up being worse than the "precedence."
I don't like Obama's Dear Colleague letter, but Obama was trying to change policy on something non-central to a university's core function. Trump's Harvard letter was about 70% reasonable, and then the unreasonable 30% went so much further than Obama's that he managed to make Harvard look like the good guy in that whole affair, and Harvard had been flagrantly violating the law for years.
Obama's sue and settle stuff is similar. When Obama did big payments as part of it, he had Congress approve the spending. Trump set up a non-adversarial process involving himself, and then settled with the government to create a big fund to give money to whoever he wanted, and he didn't ask Congress to approve the settlement fund, which makes it much, much worse.
Like, you can't keep saying, "but I do have precedence" over and over again, while doing something 20% worse each and every time. Sure, there have been a lot of US presidents, and basically every one of them has done at least one thing that was legally questionable. You shouldn't speed run doing every single precedented rotten thing any president has ever done.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
Preserving "our democracy" in plain opposition to a majority of voters.
I mean, at least some of the logic of constitutional republics as opposed to direct democracy is that some things are literally off limits to vote on. In theory, even if 90% of Californians were in favor of dispossessing every legal gun owner in the state, the Supreme Court would strike such a law down, and rightly so as a matter of law.
While trans rights are not enshrined in the Federal constitution, state courts can have different precedence around state constitutional provisions that might validly allow them to strike down a law like this under their state constitution. I don't think they should if they want to win going forward, because the same blue wave that gave the Democrats Texas also rejected trans rights even in already purple or blue states, and I think the Democrats have better odds in the next few years if they field "normal" candidates, who don't take the "wrong" side of an 80/20 issue. If they boil the frog like they did with gay rights, I think they'll have better odds on trans rights.
Would it be too expensive in a world with cheaply made, abundant humanoid robots to replace laborers in agriculture, trucking, grocery stocking, etc.?
There will always be scarcity and opportunity cost of some kind, but I don't really see why basic subsistence for the masses would be out of reach for a future with more technologically achieved material abundance than we now have. If AI ever starts messing around in the world of atoms in a big way, UBI seems like a trivial option.
The bigger problem is there wouldn't be a lot of incentive to set society up to keep the human masses alive, if the humans don't provide any benefit to society over another robot, either physically or mentally. Like, even if the decisions are made by humans, if the humans are relying on the advice of AIs, there's probably a sense in which humans are really just rubber stamping decisions made by smarter, more powerful AIs, because those will tend to have the best outcome for a given human policy goal.
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