Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Germans just cannot help themselves, huh? (Score 0) 49

And than you look at the US doing this crap for far, far longer. Bug-planting by law-enforcement has a long, long tradition in the US. The difference is that in Germany, so far, this was completely illegal for law enforcement. Whether this will stand in Berlin remains to be seen, but I doubt it.

Comment Re: Size (Score 1) 196

Do you have trouble with reading comprehension? I specifically answered to "How many countries have banks the size of Credit Suisse?", nothing else. And, as it turns out, that insinuation was complete and utter nonsense.

You are just an asshole trying to move goalposts when your bullshit gets called out. How repulsive.

Comment Re: There is a shortage of radical imams (Score 1) 196

USA: 4,453,908 Muslims. Funny. Incidentally, Germany has more Muslims per capita than Switzerland.

And what does LGBTQ rights have to do with whether "Islam has always been an integral part of the Swiss experience"? Are you mentally challenged?

All I see here is that you are full of shit.

Comment Re:TL;DR: Gotta keep the bubble going (Score 2) 127

And anyway, Presidents cant make laws.

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.

Comment Re:Age verification is a backdoor to gov't trackin (Score 1) 49

Yes. And when the "think of the children" lie has run its course, they will just continue with one of the other horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

These are malicious people, plain and simple. They want everybody monitored and dislike anybody having freedoms. And they will stop short of nothing to get there.

Comment Re:Size (Score 1) 196

It is a lot of historic reputation. But I actually know 3 (!) Swiss numbered account systems personally (don't ask). They used to be anonymous a long time ago. They are not these days. The identity of the account holders has to be verified carefully in each case and has to be given to the government. The reputation of the Swiss banks refers to a situation that does not exist anymore and has not existed for quite a while.

Slashdot Top Deals

An inclined plane is a slope up. -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play"

Working...