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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Laws override precedent. The court’s job is explicitly to interpret the laws made by congress. Precedent is simply the way that previous courts have interpreted the laws at the time. If the relevant laws to the case haven’t changed since the previous case, that is where precedent comes in. If there are new laws written by congress then those are more important than precedent.

    Another user brought up the idea that they might still try to rule the new law unconstitutional but that would be a much harder bar to achieve legitimately since the constitution is intentionally rather succinct. Of course if the court is corrupt and no one actually challenges their power I suppose they could say anything they want- precedent overrules laws, anything they don’t like is unconstitutional, for the low low price of a vacation getaway you too can influence my rulings, etc. But legally speaking laws override precedent and doing away with a law because it is unconstitutional is an extremely high bar which can’t realistically be met by the vast majority of laws unless the law directly goes against the few rules that the constitution establishes.



  • That explanation ignores the “fix it” comment. Even being extremely generous and going with the line of thinking that you proposed and further adding that by “fix it” he meant that he would fix all of the problems of our country within the next term, that would still require the assumption that he has no values for which he believes needs to be stood up for after next term. Or more specifically that he doesn’t think it matters who is elected in the future. While I do believe that he is extremely egotistical and to a certain extent doesn’t care about anyone else, I have a hard time believing that he would be equally okay with anyone being elected even after his presumptive second term. The only way that I can see any of these comments making sense is if he is talking about rigging or altogether doing away with elections.

    And to be clear I’m not trying to argue with you since I understand you aren’t saying you agree with the statement you made. I’m just pointing out that you would have to do much more mental gymnastics than even that in order to get to some sort of excuse for those comments.


  • Bills in the US can originate from either the house or the Senate. If it passes one then it goes to the other. If it passes both then it goes to the President to be signed into law.

    E: technically there is an exception that bills for raising revenue have to originate in the house but that the Senate can propose or concur with amendments. But for all intents and purposes the vast majority of bills can originate in either body.



  • It is very clear legally speaking. There is a clause specifically to address this issue in the constitution called the supremacy clause. The way that it works is that if there is a federal law that specifies something then it takes priority over state laws. Some of the things that you mentioned would fall into both federal and state categories like education where states have some control but must also abide by federal regulations.

    The only exception to this rule is cannabis and the only reason that it has worked this way is because cannabis reform is so widely popular across the US that if the federal government were to withhold funding or otherwise punish states for making and enforcing laws that go against the supremacy clause it would not go over well for the politicians that make that decision. They know that federal cannabis regulations truly are outdated and not in touch with our modern society. That being said, supremacy clause is still in effect and the federal cannabis laws are still absolutely enforceable even in states where cannabis is “legal”. The federal government simply chooses not to enforce those laws there most of the time.

    Child labor laws absolutely do not fall into that same category as the vast majority of people don’t believe that child labor laws are outdated. The waters are not muddy on this issue at all.




  • As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.



  • To be fair, the point of the fediverse is that despite them being different platforms, they can all communicate with each other seamlessly. Mastodon users can see and comment on this thread for example without ever leaving Mastodon. They can even make their own posts on lemmy without leaving Mastodon. So it really isn’t necessary for a single platform to gain enough critical mass to overtake Reddit. Even on a singular platform it’s technically made up of many different individually hosted sites that we call instances. So even if lemmy were to have more users than Reddit one day, it’s an arbitrary place to draw the line. Why not claim that a single instance has to reach that critical mass instead?



  • I don’t understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn’t possibly be real users signing up? I don’t dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven’t seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you’re claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don’t understand.