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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • Yeah with Chevron gone this is fluff talk at this point. Nothing can be regulated without the Courts giving it an okay or Congress explicitly allowing it verbatim. The Loper Bright case paired with Relentless, Inc. has basically nullified novel regulatory authority without the Courts consenting.

    The framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment

    — Chief Justice Roberts (Loper Bright Enterprises, et al, v. Raimondo)

    Additionally, Robert’s indicated that the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 has always provided Judicial review of every regulation and that everything since that point must now be reviewed by the Courts.

    Biden is indicating that he’s going to produce a heat standard via OSHA which was formed in 1971, so OSHA’s ability to even make that standard and potentially their full authority is under question now. OSHA isn’t going to be doing jack crap for easily the next twenty years for the Courts to fully review their broad authority, unless SCOTUS overturns this judgement. For all we know, SCOTUS might hold OSHA to follow the exact letter of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 which would neuter them in a heartbeat. Luckily things like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which prohibits child labor in particular kinds of jobs will fall outside of that review and OSHA will still be able to enforce that kind of stuff since it’s explicit that OSHA enforces any labor law prior to the 1970 act.

    There is literally nothing any President going forward can promise without Congress completely having the President’s back or the Justices agreeing with the President. Basically, without at least 2 out of 3 branches agreeing, literal nothing will happen. This is literally the setup nobody will enjoy and will cripple Federal Government for the foreseeable future without those rare instances where Congress and the President are of the same political party.


  • And what exactly is there to stop the opposition from doing the same thing?

    Process. The same that that puts barriers on this discussion from AOC. The entire impeachment process is the understanding of the people who created this country, to have a political process that is departed from the legal process. That’s why being impeached doesn’t also mean criminally convicted and vice versa. Historically, if you were a vassal of the lord and had your fief removed, you couldn’t hold court with your lord AND you basically were penniless with the potential to end up in jail. The entire impeachment process is to separate those two things. That’s why the process is spelled out fully in the Constitution and the execution solely left to Congress to implement.

    There entire point of an impeachment is to execute some political justice without having legal justice married to it. What stops anyone from just abusing the process is the process itself and what it indicates for functioning government. If the goal is have no functioning government, then there isn’t anything that stops anyone from abuse. But no functioning government means that those in Congress would lose power, and a loss of power means they become less enticing for lobbyist to enact agendas, for people to seek recourse, and for States to enhance power within the vacuum.

    So an abuse of that power would end with them loosing more and more power. This is the same reason why Congress has had a hard time really pinning impeachment and contempt charges and have talked about inherent contempt for Garland (which inherent contempt is basically using Congress to enforce a contempt charge via the Sergeant-at-arms doing the arresting and Congress inventing a “trail” system all of their own outside of the Judicial system… which by the way SCOTUS way back in the 1930s, the last time this was used, indicated that THAT specific instance was not a violation of habeas corpus, but trying to ring Garland up on inherent contempt and trying to put him in Congress jail, would be such a complex process and likely wouldn’t survive a habeas corpus challenge, but who knows at this point? For all we know SCOTUS may be completely cool with Congress tossing people into Congress jail without a proper trail. But of course that brings with it ALL KINDS of ramifications about our Federal government jailing people in a a jail completely ran by Congress and outside the entire legal system, but I digress).

    Long story short, all of this stuff is political process. And you do all of this to further a political agenda to the public. But if the public isn’t backing that action, it has the ability to backfire in that entire you don’t get to come back to Congress or you weaken the overall power of the Federal government. So you have to look at the long term goal of anything you want to do with this process. Like the inherent contempt vote got delayed after the first Presidential debate. Biden’s performance was so bad that Republicans feel that they got what they wanted. The whole Garland audio tapes, the GOP wanted them so that they could play back the tapes to the public and show that Biden was losing his marbles. But now since the debate, there’s little reasons for the GOP to go down the tossing Garland into Congress jail and going down a path that’s likely to not play well for anyone except their most harden supporters.

    The process limits the process. That’s what prevent the whole “same thing”.

    Are we going to replace the court?

    I mean, yeah, that’s the goal. SCOTUS has had about a dozen cases that they’ve overturned decades long, and in some cases century long, established rule. One or two per lifetime of a justice is a lot to completely overturn. This court has overturned nearly a dozen long established rulings. The entire point of a justice system is to bring about stability to the political process. Congress answers to the public, and the public can change their mind often, so random laws flying over the place isn’t unusual. SCOTUS is not elected and thus they faintly answer to the public. So they need to have some stability to maintain legitimacy. Even Robert’s talked about this in the ruling that overturned Roe and felt the majority was going too far.

    So I think if the court itself is saying that it is ruining their own legitimacy, bringing them up into the political process to answer to these statements the court itself is making is fair game. And I don’t think that’s unfair to mention in that whole process. Judges don’t answer to the public, so justices that massively change the landscape in short orders of time, are shaking the stability they’re supposed to be building. If SCOTUS wants to rewrite the law of the land, it needs to be gradual not as fast as possible.




  • If they don’t replace Biden, we will get another Trump presidency

    One, they aren’t going to replace Biden. Two, that outcome they aren’t entirely concerned about. There’s some who look at that and go “Biden couldn’t possibly win now” and the thing is there’s an insanely small amount of people who are at this point undecided. We could have the election tomorrow and the vast majority of people know which button they are pushing and there is nothing that’s changing that outcome.

    It’s basically Trump vs Harris at this point, but with Biden still being a stand-in, Harris doesn’t have to get up there and show how little she can tango with Trump. That would actually move the needle. If Biden started pushing daisies tomorrow that would actually change the calculus.

    But this debate, as far as I know, zero people have changed their mind about who they are voting for. The RNC is going to nom a felon. The DNC is going to nom a zombie. Neither group is making sane decisions at this point in time because none of them give a shit. They aren’t replacing Biden just like the Republicans aren’t replacing Trump. We are all on this short bus full of Senior Citizens to hell for better or worse. Kicking and screaming all along the way, this is who have for November.

    If you think Biden can win after the world saw the debate performance, you’re delusional.

    The DNC brass, they don’t care, it’s a Tuesday to them if they lose. If Trump gets into power and rounds up all the gay people and shoots them in the head, hey I guess we’ll get on that in 2028 or something is what the DNC has to feel about that. It’s not that pressing a matter for them. And if Biden wins, the Republicans will just obstruct November 6th, the day after the election, just like they obstructed on January 6th. It is water under a bridge if Trump loses.

    You know I heard all this nonsense about “we just need to get Trump out of office” back in 2020. And I knew the day of the 2020 election, Trump isn’t going anywhere. If Trump loses 2024, Trump isn’t going anywhere. What people ought to be concerned about isn’t Trump sticking around, it’s when Trump dies off. Because we’re not getting rid of the crazy, we’re just going to get version 2.0 of the crazy.

    The people most affected by whatever outcome happens, those are the ones that are going to take the win or loss the hardest. But the political parties, and especially the RNC and DNC, all of this is just drops of rain on the glass. They are not replacing Biden, that is who we have unless he specifically croaks before we can get to the election.

    So if you do not like Trump, you push the Biden button or just stay home. That is the strat here from the DNC. But there’s so little undecided here, there is no energy to change course. If say the undecided was like 20%, maybe. But everyone knows whose button they are pushing, these debates aren’t going to change that.

    If Biden doesn’t win in November, Biden wasn’t going to win in October of last year. There are zero things either candidate can do that could change some number of people’s minds at this point to radically change the outcome of this election. Any everyone is quite aware of this, that’s the reason the DNC is going to send in a geriatric senile man and the RNC is going to send in a pompous felon.

    The election is already over, we just haven’t cast the ballots. The debates are just bread and circus.

    The whole thing is from the DNC and RNC perspective is like that Futurama poster, “you gotta do what’cha gotta do.” The DNC is NOT replacing Biden unless he literally dies before we get to the election. That is the only way who is on the Democratic ticket changes.


  • Go in reverse of so much that’s come before the court should be grounds for most of them coming under impeachment.

    Like that should kind of be a rule. If any court made up of at least 40% the prior overturns case law more than 50 years old absent a constitutional amendment or Federal law laying the foundation for such an overturn, should be brought before the Congress on impeachment inquiry.

    Like the whole way they’ve redefined the 2nd within the last ten years that overturned 200 years of prior understanding, that alone should have most of them barred from federal office for the rest of their lives. And how they redefined it without so much as a Federal law to point to or a hint of a Constitutional amendment suggesting the way they’ve made it now.

    A literal garbage court sits the bench. What’s worse is that one day the lean in the court will change and Republicans will cry about judges legislating from the bench.


  • HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

    HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

    We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.


  • Gustafson said in a statement following her defeat. “What we have to say about giving birth and everything related to it is secondary to whatever the men of the Republican Party want.”

    Any woman in support of the GOP is asking for this outcome in the end. Subjugation at the heel of their man. Someone elsewhere had mentioned Uncle Tom’s, folks who kowtow to those who would enslave them in desperate acts for a glimmer of affection. Fundamentalist see people as pawns, not friends, not allies, not equals, but as tools to further their agenda. That’s why towards the end, Uncle Tom was flogged to death by the very people whom he sought to curry a modicum of favor.

    Similar story is Phil Valentine, mocked the COVID virus, derided any notion of a vaccine. Did exactly as his Republican peers did and said. Wanted nothing more than to kiss up to Trump and had bigger aspirations in the political sphere than his talk radio show provided. Got sick from COVID, spent the remainder of his life suffering to catch a breath alone in a hospital. There was a big moment of silence and remembrance on the radio the next day, by the end of the week it was “Phil who?” The people who he sought to have elevate his status in life forgot about him the second his situation turned unfavorable to their agenda.

    Today, outside of his family, the majority of people who remember him are the exact people he mocked and taunted on his radio show. And it’s not a remembrance of who he was that those people remember him, it’s a cautionary tale. One doesn’t get “into the group” with fundamentalist. You simply exist in the group until your utility runs out and then you are removed from the group as demonstration of the group’s resolve.



  • I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

    China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

    At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

    Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

    The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

    For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

    Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

    We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

    I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

    I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.





  • But, but, that would be … ˢᵒᶜⁱᵃˡⁱˢᵐ

    GASP

    How about cutting foreign defense spending

    We could, but remember that a lot of that defense spending are people in the US’ job. About 2M would be on the block for chopping.

    Or getting rid of insanely wasteful farm subsidies

    I mean don’t stop there. Especially at just that point. Relax the restrictions for crop insurance. Reduce the barriers between farmers and grocers. Literally break up the giant grocery stores. Kroger’s is a fucking bitch ass. One of the reasons we have to pay massive subsidies is because there’s distinctly a lack of a free market in the farming and grocery business.

    And while we’re at it. Tell John Deere to fuck off.


  • Refusing a subpoena by Congress isn’t what Bannon is hoping for. If you believe that Congress is investigating is outside their scope, it’s too political to be a lawful investigation, you still have to answer the subpoena and then testify under oath your belief as such. This was something pointed out in Watkins.

    So the only way SCOTUS can overturn the conviction is finding some new ability to ignore a subpoena, which I’m not sure how they can justify a new power without it also coming off as SCOTUS removing Congressional power, a clear violation of the separation of power.

    You can walk into a hearing and literally sit there and not answer. You can indicate that they’re full of themselves. Your 5th Amendment right overrides government oversight in personal matters. They were seeking Bannon’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, he literally could have gotten up there, gave them the middle finger, indicated his fifth amendment right, and sat there with arms crossed the rest of the time. And he totally could have had SCOTUS get him off scotfree with a Watkins argument, the end.

    But if you DO NOT even fucking go, well you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. Because now, SCOTUS has to invent something to save your dumbass, and reasons to invent a new thing that could potentially backfire are based on how much it’s worth it to them to do such.

    Literally guy could have done all kinds of things to make this easier for him. Just not showing was quite possibly the dumbest way to do it.