domain:aerosociety.com
So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...
Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.
The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.
The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:
Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?
Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.
I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.
We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.
All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.
I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.
That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.
I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.
And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.
But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.
So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.
Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?
Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.
You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”
Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.
The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.
I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.
Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.
It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.
Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.
If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.
So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:
I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.
While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.
I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].
Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.
The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.
It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:
And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.
I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.
I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?
DirtyWaterHotDog
3hr ago
No radiation leak from any nuclear facility in Pakistan, says IAEA amid buzz after Indian claims
Addressing a press conference, Air Marshal AK Bharti said that Indian forces did not know about the site. He said, "We did not hit Kirana hills, whatever is there."
During a press briefing on Tuesday, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal was asked about social media buzz on ‘nuclear leakage’ in Pakistan after the Indian strikes.
“…Those are questions for them (Pakistan) to answer, not for us. Our position was made very clear during the defence briefing. As for your question, the Pakistani minister has already made some remarks on that,” he said.
India explicitly denied hitting nuclear facilities. The buzz was manufactured by media/social-media accounts.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3hr ago
What are some of your favorite classes? I'm interested in learning more.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3hr ago
I don't follow the argument? If a party of four goes to a full-service restaurant, I'd expect somewhere on the order of 1-2 hours of human time to be spent by restaurant staff on that party (between host, waiter, cooks, dishwashers, management, etc). Assuming that employees are ~1/3 of the cost of running a restaurant, and that the customers make the same wage as the restaurant staff, that's a per-person cost of 45 - 90 minutes of wages. Probably not something you want to do literally every day, but seems like it should be easily doable a couple times a week, not just as an "occasional splurge purchase".
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3hr ago
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
Can you rephrase the first bit of this? I'm not following.
07mk
3hr ago
Now, I've had a few people acknowledge this point, and accept that, sure, some asymptotic limit on the real-world utility of increased intelligence probably exists. They then go on to assert that surely, though, human intelligence must be very, very far from that upper limit, and thus there must still be vast gains to be had from superhuman intelligence before reaching that point. Me, I argue the opposite. I figure we're at least halfway to the asymptote, and probably much more than that — that most of the gains from intelligence came in the amoeba → human steps, that the majority of problems that can be solved with intelligence alone can be solved with human level intelligence, and that it's probably not possible to build something that's 'like unto us as we are unto ants' in power, no matter how much smarter it is. (When I present this position, the aforementioned people dismiss it out of hand, seeming uncomfortable to even contemplate the possibility. The times I've pushed, the argument has boiled down to an appeal to consequences; if I'm right, that would mean we're never getting the Singularity, and that would be Very Bad [usually for one or both of two particular reasons].)
This seems like a potentially interesting argument to observe play out, but it also seems close to a fundamental unknown unknown. I'm not sure how one could meaningfully measure where we are along this theoretical asymptote in relationship between intelligence and utility, or that there really is an asymptote. What arguments convinced you both that this relationship would be asymptotic or at least have severely diminishing returns, and that we are at least halfway along the way to this asymptote?
Corvos
3hr ago
I should note that Japan too has recently discovered the joys of ActuallyIndians. If you go to any convenience store or quite a lot of chain restaurants, all the staff are Indian now and have been for several years. Maybe since Covid?
It’s less so outside Tokyo but I imagine that’s a matter of time.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
First, this seems entirely unprincipled given that NATO (and its proxies) relies on conscription ultimately.
Second, I see here no reason to believe that AI or any sort of productivity improvement changes the base reality that it is people who exist who shape society. Japan's automation strategy is a pragmatic mitigation but doesn't change the destination of their society.
What the hell kind of twisted definition of "flourishing" are we using here that people being so secure and domesticated they won't have children counts? It's a zoo you're building.
Why is this a post in the culture war thread? You went to a store that you had a negative predisposition towards, had an encounter with an employee who you considered rude and unattractive, a fact you decided to share for some inexplicable reason. You predictably were shunned because you came with the express purpose of not purchasing anything and wasting the service workers' time.
I have no idea why your insults or opinion that 'starbucks was a shit-ass place full of soulless NPCs' are at all relevant here, nor do I agree with your hastily drawn conclusions about supposed 'curiosity' not being rewarded. If you have to question the point of your post, perhaps that is a sign it does not belong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
In fairness, given your approach, it's possible she mistook you for a journalist.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Gregory Clark on horses and the automobile comes to mind here:
There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed, and it certainly did not pay enough to breed fresh generations of horses to replace them.
And as others have pointed out in reference to this, domestic horses in the modern day do live much more comfortable lives than those workhorses of old… but there's a whole lot fewer of them around.
DradisPing
3hr ago
My guess is that due to whatever labour laws and corporate rules, they can do the shirt protest but can't talk about it with customers. She probably assumed you were some kind of spy from corporate trying to get her fired.
WandererintheWilderness
3hr ago
I don't really follow what the woman you met being obtuse has to do with anything. Surely, if there's a nation-wide strike and she wasn't part of it, she's by definition not representative of the average Starbucks employee?
celluloid_dream
3hr ago
Yes. Classic WoW has a lot of dynamics to it that keep people playing against their will, sort of. In some real sense, your guild has invested in you, and your character, by taking you along, giving you loot and such, so you feel like you owe them your participation, so that your friends can get their rewards too, and your group can keep progressing.
Probably better for Bubbles long term, but it was shitty the way it went down that night. She probably cried. Like getting dumped by your long term friend group and finding out half of them never liked you and were talking about you behind your back
I think the problem is that:
- We (often) bring them in to fill specific shortages, enduring the larger problems that arise (loss of cultural integrity, lowered trust, often high long-term welfare costs) because we need those shortages fixed no matter what.
- There is no incentive for them to continue fixing those shortages after they get a long-term visa.
- The shortages then remain unfilled, so we bring in more immigrants. Meanwhile the long-term consequences are getting more and more severe.
celluloid_dream
3hr ago
Yeah, Blossom was a unicorn. It's pretty rare to find someone with that combination of personality and skill. She lived somewhere exotic IIRC, like Hawaii or Alaska or something, so her internet wasn't amazing, and Classic WoW was one of the few games that was forgiving enough of network latency.
I cut Buttercup some slack because she had a tough job IRL (nurse, I think), and playing a healer in game is suffering, as you desperately try and keep people alive through their own mistakes, gradually failing at it. And yeah, maybe some insecurity
This incident was probably the inflection point in my enthusiasm for Classic. I stuck it out a while longer out of loyalty to the group, and we eventually cleared Lich King 25 heroic, widely considered the point at which you have beat the game, then quit. It was that, and other similar incidents, that made me realize the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The game mechanics naturally led to that sort of conflict, and it just didn't have to be that way. I didn't have to play that kind of game. Would be better if I didn't. Is better now that I don't.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
That stat doesn’t say anything about the five year trick. Or about Poles. Wait, it’s not even limited to migrants! This is like using the African-American unemployment rate to say that black immigrants are actually planning to quit. That’s not true for the U.S. and I would like to see better data for the U.K.
But let’s assume that 10.7% of Pakistani migrants are in fact arriving, cleaning bedpans for five years, then quitting to live off the King’s largesse. Why aren’t native-born Brits doing the same thing? To me, that suggests it’s not actually a good deal for anyone raised to expect a first-world standard of living. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrage @MadMonzer is talking about.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Thank you very much for this post. Your three-question analysis really helps highlight my differences with most people here on these issues, because I weight #2 being "no" even higher than you do (higher than I do #1, which I also think is more likely "no" than "yes").
That said, I'd like to add to (and maybe push back slightly) on some of your analysis of the question. You mostly make it about human factors, where I'd place it more on the nature of intelligence itself. You ask (rhetorically):
We probably seem magical to animals, with things like guns, planes, tanks, etc. If that’s the difference between animal intelligence → human intelligence, shouldn’t we expect a similar leap from human intelligence → superhuman intelligence?
And my (non-rhetorical) answer is no, we shouldn't expect that at all, because of diminishing returns.
Here's where people keep consistently mistaking my argument, no matter how many times I explain: I am NOT talking about humans being near the upper limit of how intelligent a being can be. I'm talking about limits on how much intelligence matters in power over the material world.
Implied in your question above is the assumption that if entity A is n times smarter than B (as with, say, humans and animals) then it must be n times more powerful; that if a superhuman intelligence is as much smarter than us as we are smarter than animals, it must also be as much more powerful than us than we are more powerful than animals. I don't think it works that way. I expect that initial gains in intelligence, relative to the "minimally-intelligent" agent provide massive gains in efficacy in the material world… but each subsequent increase in intelligence almost certainly provides smaller and smaller gains in real-world efficacy. Again, the problem isn't a limit on how smart an entity we can make, it's a limit on the usefulness of intelligence itself.
Now, I've had a few people acknowledge this point, and accept that, sure, some asymptotic limit on the real-world utility of increased intelligence probably exists. They then go on to assert that surely, though, human intelligence must be very, very far from that upper limit, and thus there must still be vast gains to be had from superhuman intelligence before reaching that point. Me, I argue the opposite. I figure we're at least halfway to the asymptote, and probably much more than that — that most of the gains from intelligence came in the amoeba → human steps, that the majority of problems that can be solved with intelligence alone can be solved with human level intelligence, and that it's probably not possible to build something that's 'like unto us as we are unto ants' in power, no matter how much smarter it is. (When I present this position, the aforementioned people dismiss it out of hand, seeming uncomfortable to even contemplate the possibility. The times I've pushed, the argument has boiled down to an appeal to consequences; if I'm right, that would mean we're never getting the Singularity, and that would be Very Bad [usually for one or both of two particular reasons].)
AnonymousActuary
3hr ago
ChatGPT suggests this: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/patrick-collison/.com
Speaking as someone who is against the draft, I am also against forcing women into performing an equivalent sacrifice.
We're in the age of automation and exponential productivity growth. Surely the solution is simply to guarantee security and flourishing for everyone. I cannot imagine any version of the world where solving that engineering problem is actually harder than convincing millions of women to sacrifice their security.
For goodness sake, we're already most of the way there!
As for being conquered, I'm willing to bet everything on NATO. A planet-spanning military alliance that spends more on weapons than the rest of the world combined will not be overcome so easily. China might get Taiwan back, but they're not going to land troops in San Francisco any time soon. In the long run, AI will change the nature of the game in a way that makes population dynamics obsolete long before any power rises that can credibly challenge NATO.
roystgnr
4hr ago
The idea of technological determinism (of which "when technological changes to economics says we don't need these people, ethics will evolve to agree" would be an example) is still a pretty controversial one, I think, for lots of both bad and good reasons.
Marx was a huge early booster of technological determinism, and other ideas among Marx's favorites were so genocidally foolish that we should default to being skeptical in individual cases, but it's not proven that every idea of his was a bad one. He also didn't apply the idea very successfully, but perhaps that's just not easy for people whose foolishness reaches "death toll" levels.
There are some cases where trying to apply the idea seems to add a lot of clarity. The emergence of modern democracies right around the time that military technology presented countries with choices like "supplement your elite troops with vastly larger levies of poor schlubs with muskets" or "get steamrollered by Napoleon" sure doesn't sound like a coincidence. But, it's always easier to come up with instances and explanations like that with hindsight rather than foresight. Nobody seems to have figured out psychohistory yet.
There are also some cases where trying to apply the idea doesn't seem to add so much clarity. Africans with mostly spears vs Europeans with loads of rifles led to colonialism, chalk one up for determinism, but then Africans with mostly rifles vs Europeans with jets and tanks wasn't a grossly more even matchup and it still ended up in decolonization. These days we even manage to have international agreement in favor of actually helpless beneficiaries like endangered species. Perhaps World War 2 just made it clear that "I'm going to treat easy targets like garbage but you can definitely trust me" isn't a plausible claim, so ethics towards the weak are a useful tool for bargaining with the strong? But that sounds like it might extend even further, too. To much of the modern world, merely keeping-all-your-wealth-while-poor-people-exist is considered a subset of "treating easy targets like garbage", and unless everybody can seamlessly move to a different Schelling point (libertarianism might catch on any century now), paying for the local powerless people's dole from a fraction of your vast wealth might just be a thing you do to not be a pariah among the other people whose power you do care about. If population was still booming, the calculation of net present value of that dole might be worrisome (let's see, carry the infinity...), but so long as the prole TFR stays below replacement (or at least below the economic growth rate), their cost of living isn't quite as intimidating.
That theory sounds like just wishful thinking about the future, but to be fair a lot of recent history sounds like wishful thinking by older historical standards.
This is all wildly speculative, of course, but so is anything in the "all-powerful and perfectly obedient machinery" future. I stopped in the middle of writing this to help someone diagnose a bug that turned out to be coming from a third party's code. Fortunately none of this was superintelligent code, so when it worked improperly it just trashed their chemical simulation results, not their biochemistry.
ThenElection
4hr ago
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
I don't know if your first question is meant to be rhetorical, but I'm going to assume it isn't.
I got to Starbucks about 2-4 times a month, depending on how much driving I'm doing on weekends. I can order from the app before I leave home, and by the time I arrive at the shop the drink will be ready for me. The only exception is their nitro cold brew, which I think the employees wait until you get there to pull to preserve drink quality. The employees pretty busy when I get there, but will respond with a "Have a nice day!" when I thank them for the drink. The seats in the café are almost always all occupied.
These are suburb Starbucks, and notably there's no other local coffee shops in the area. One of them is unionized, I have no idea about the others.
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