Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.

I'm not opposed to changing this agreement, in fact I encourage it, but if you're going to do so you need to compensate who bought the medallions.

Really? Show me a single instance of one of the legislators stating the intent was only to subsidize state exchanges.

Which is correct. When the words in the legislation are ambiguous then what matters is the intent of the legislators. And there's no reason to believe the legislators believed states on the federal exchange shouldn't get the subsidies (note to the obvious response, even if Gruber wrote that section and had that intent he was not a legislator).

And they have the power to say what it is when the current form violates the constitution, as does the ban on gay marriage.

You're also talking about two very different aspects of what the supreme court does.

In the ACA ruling the court was interpreting the implementation of a law that was passed.

In the Gay Marriage ruling they were deciding if a law was constitutional.

A ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional because a ban serves no good purpose, hence the fake studies on the welfare of children and the doom & gloom scenarios about the collapse of the family trying to invent a purpose so they could justify a ban.

But polygamous marriages are very widely one man with multiple women. They create a destabilizing gender imbalance in those communities leading to young unmarried men being excluded and they create domestic situations where women have very little power and are subject to abuse.

While there are some rare instances where polygamous marriages would be fine there are plenty of good reasons for the government to ban the practice and that makes it constitutional.

As opposed to everyone else, drafters and non-drafters, who for several years thought the law did what the government was doing and the court prescribed?

Gruber was important, but he didn't single handedly determine the intent for the law, he might not have even been involved with writing that specific section. It could just be he noticed the wording at some later date and attached what he thought to be a politically convenient interpretation and backstory. If anyone determined the intent it would be the POTUS and Congress and they were never ambiguous about its intent.

The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.

The controversial section is a bug.

Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?

The people smuggling the horns aren't exactly the most ethical businessmen. If you can sell them a fake horn for half the price they'll keep the profit, pass it on as real to the consumer, and the poachers might not be able to compete.

There will still be a few "legitimate" supply chains making sure they're getting the real deal, but it could put a lot of poachers out of business.

Basically this. I feel like it's basically meant to help supporters when defending their positions. Putin's supporters basically claim a) Russia isn't really doing anything in Ukraine, b) even if they are it's justified since the West started it.

Instead of jumping right to "b" opponents need to get past "a" and actually get the Putin supporter to admit Russia is even involved. It just puts another layer of BS that needs to be dispelled before you can debate Russia's actions directly.

My first thought is this looks like it's going to be one of those threads where people with progressively lower UIDs start posting.

My second thought is how sad it is that I'm able to participate with a UID over 500k

My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.

Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.

Maybe there's a succession plan in place already but this strikes me as a major question that needs to be addressed.

One could, but one could also argue that HFCS isn't any different than regular sugar, the difference with Trans Fat is there's a scientific consensus around one view.

The FDA shouldn't be banning things just because a few researchers and journalists have started thinking it's bad, if they'd have banned butter a long time ago and we'd all be eating margarine.

Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, because the main guys on the team were big C++ fans who found a way to justify their preference.

Not saying it was the wrong choice, particularly for the team in question, but I'm betting if you hand the project to another team you come up with a different language.

Also interesting is it sounds like they're using an automatic code generator to translate some of the stuff from C++ to Java to run on android, maybe it will work seamlessly but that extra layer always makes me nervous.

"If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."

I sure as hell don't purchase $120 in music per year, even when the CD was king I doubt many ever did.

So why do they suddenly expect us all to start spending as much on music as the most vociferous consumers?

$3-5 monthly, $36-60 per year, that's a price point where subscription services start making sense to me.

Think of it as a Prisoners Dilemma applied to a market economy. The Prisoners Dilemma generally means people cooperate within their group (optimal with repeated interactions) but defect with outsiders (optimal for 1-off interactions).

The West has had market economies for a very long time, we've figured that cooperating even with strangers is the best strategy at a cultural level so as a culture we've put in a lot of effort into telling people they should conduct business honestly even with strangers and not defect.

In China this kind of economy is a lot newer so people are following the default rule, cooperate in your group and defect outside. They'll change over eventually but I think it is a true phenomena that the Chinese won't feel the same pressure to cooperate with strangers.

More to the point do the comments represent his views in a meaningful way or are they just the result of some random speculation he had during the talk and decided to blurt out?

If he's made this his thing then sure, talk about it, but in general my issue with articles like is is that people say some random thing, it goes viral, and suddenly that is how they're defined to the world.

How many things do you say in a day? How many of those things, if they went viral, would accurately represent your views?