US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

Or, more concisely: Countries should aim to be poor.

To be fair to the nutballs, their proposal will actually slow it down as compared to not limiting immigration. That is, from their nutball perspective the proposal is an improvement, just not a total solution. For a total solution, they need to go full right-wing nutball and also ban women from working so they'll stay home and have proper Swiss babies.

I just don't think many people want to watch an awards show where there's a bunch of angry people trying to push a political agenda. I mean, I support their right to free speech, and I've always felt like the games industry abused developers, but you're in the business of entertainment, and hearing people complain about their industry (an industry that I support with multiple game purchases per year) isn't what I'd call entertainment. At most I'd watch it to hear what the big games are, and maybe to see someone get some recognition for their hard work on a particularly well made title.

Except that they aren't blocking sideloading. With the planned changes you can still install apps via:

1. Other app stores. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
2. By one-click installation from a web site. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
3. By ADB. No registered developer account required.

And for the cases that require a registered developer account, that account can be anonymous and free as long as the number of installs is small.

That would be fun, actually. I'd have to give them slashdot and substack. They'd have no idea what either of them are.

Well, it would be fun until they denied me entry.

FTFY

This is a gaslighting that he'll probably largely get away with, since most Americans -- especially his voter base -- have little contact with tourism or people from other countries.

His ongoing attempts to gaslight them over grocery prices, though, that one's going to be tougher. I'm surprised he's trying that. I mean, he's dumb, sure, and insulated from truth, but surely someone around him is smart enough and clueful enough to tell him that it would be better to sell it as a period of unfortunate but necessary pain on the way to long-lasting economic revival and stability. His base would eat that up, but even his diehard supporters are having a hard time reconciling "grocery prices are down!" with their own grocery bills, and he just keeps repeating it. He can cherry-pick specific item prices or gush about the lower-price of a (conveniently scaled-back) Thanksgiving dinner basket all he wants but people who actually buy groceries (such an old-timey word! <eyeroll/>) can see the truth during every weekly trip to the store.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.

True. If we were to make the decision based on medical and scientific bases, the drinking age would be 25.

So this isn't at all what you asked for, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway: Ubiquiti. You'll pay more and they're all PoE rather than wireless, but if you spend the money and run the wires (hey, you have to run a wire for power anyway, might as well use it for data, too) you won't regret the results.

Actually he tried and partly failed because it was only partly legal.

That might not stop him from trying, and unless Congress or the courts rein him in, it won't stop him from doing it. As I pointed out above, in this case it's unclear that anyone would have standing to sue (not taxpayers; it wouldn't be tax money -- maybe nVidia or China, but they like the deal), so stopping him would probably require Congress to act. And what are the odds that the Republican Congress would grow a spine?

"Not be possible" is too strong.

It's clearly possible unless Congress or the courts prevent it, even though it is clearly illegal. But Trump is doing lots of things that are clearly illegal, which is why the courts keep issuing injunctions to stop him (and then SCOTUS keeps staying the injunctions to let him go ahead and do it anyway, at least for a while). In a sane world, the fact that an action is illegal would be a stronger constraint because the president would have to be concerned that Congress would impeach and convict him, and he would have to be concerned about potential criminal liability. In the world that exists, the GOP leadership in Congress refuses to do their job to rein in the executive, and SCOTUS has declared the president above the law so there are few practical limitations on his power.

So far, the only thing that seems to really make Trump back off is when the stock market crashes.

Nevertheless, a slush fund of several billion dollars per year that the president is truly able to spend with complete discretion would be a significant additional increase in power because it's not clear that anyone would have standing to sue, so courts could not intervene regardless of constitutionality. Congress would be able to intervene, of course, but, again, the GOP-led Congress has almost completely abdicated. I had to add "almost" only because they actually did stand up to him on the Epstein files (sort of; the bill left Pam Bondi with near-total freedom to withhold anything she wants, not legally, but practically).

No, Trump is more secretive than most other presidents. You're confusing "unfiltered and disorganized" with "transparent". I do have to grant that he's incredibly transparent about his corruption. Well, maybe. He has been transparently corrupt in lots of ways, but it still seems likely that there's more corruption which he's keeping hidden.

Where did you read that? If it's true it would be momentous. A totally discretionary fund of $2-6B per year (based on nVidia's projections of selling $2-5B per quarter to China) would give the president enormous unchecked power.

I've spend some time searching and haven't found anything to substantiate this claim. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to see where you got the idea from.

There's an interesting new idea where you can get some journals to pre-approve publication of your study by first submitting your plan... so you outline exactly how you are going to perform the experiment and analyze it. Then the journal pre-approves it, you perform the experiment/study, and they'll guarantee to publish your results (if you follow your plan) no matter the outcome. The idea is to fix the problem where journals only want to publish surprising results because they're more exciting, but the problem is that surprising results are also more likely to be wrong, and also to get cited.

The scientific community generally knows they have a serious problem, and they want to fix it, but in my opinion they're moving pretty slow. I don't know if they understand how much trust they're losing every time a story like this comes out. Ultimately it's good that these studies are being retracted, but the slow and painful way it's happening is just crushing trust in science as an institution. I'd like to see the scientific community take a stronger and faster approach to solving these problems.

To be fair, throughout history when countries didn't get along (which was most of the time) they solved it by throwing young men into meat grinders to achieve their aims. The idea after WWII was to stop using armed conflict to settle disputes and do it with monetary coercion. This was a much better deal for young military-age men the world over. The fact that Russia gave a big F U to the western world and its monetary policy, and started throwing young men into a meat grinder again, is a disheartening development. The fact that the US is now run by a guy who idolizes Putin and wants to use those same tactics, and throw away the international monetary system... that's a really scary development.