Last I knew they were moving to all web-apps with web-terminals for everybody.

I think the reasons the pardon power was given to the president still make sense, so abolishing it is a step too far. Instead, it should just be weakened a little, probably by adding a review by a non-partisan review board plus a limit on the number of pardons a president may issue. The review board shouldn't try to decide if the pardons are "correct", but only whether there is a presidential conflict of interest.

The question of what something like this should look like was interesting to me, so I had a long conversation with Claude to collaboratively design a solution. The high level of the proposal is:

1. If someone files an objection within 30 days, the pardon is reviewed by a 9-member panel of judges selected algorithmically from all sitting federal judges. Unobjected pardons sail through.
2. Reviews must be completed within 60 days or the pardon is automatically upheld.
3. The panel examines the pardon for evidence of presidential impropriety, mainly conflicts of interest. The president can file counterarguments to objections.
4. If 6 of the 9 judges vote to overturn the pardon, it's voided.
5. If the president has three or more pardons voided during a term, the burden shifts and pardons are void unless a majority of the panel approves them.
6. To prevent the president from flooding the judiciary to exploit the time limit to get his pardons through, a given judge's queue of reviews is limited to n = 16. Any assigned pardon above this limit automatically receives a vote to void the pardon.

The selection algorithm Claude proposed (after some refinement) struck me as brilliant: use HMAC-SHA-256(pardon_id || date_of_first_filed_objection) to generate a sequence of judge IDs to fill the panel. It's publicly verifiable and hard to game, providing an essentially randomly-selected pool. The president can try to game it by ordering the pardons to use the pardon_id value to pick a "friendly" panel, but opposing parties can also game it by picking the day they file... and both sides have very limited options, so gaming it effectively will be possible, but hard, and rarely successful.

Some other important bits: Objections may be filed by anyone but are filed under oath and bad faith objections are also subject to sanctions and contempt orders by the panel. Successful bad faith objections may also expose the objector to civil suits by the failed pardonee. Pardons take effect automatically on day 31 if no objections are filed and on day 61 if the panel doesn't collect enough votes for a disposition. Pardonees who are in custody may demand a hearing to request conditional release. The judge will evalaute their request based on the nature of their alleged offense, their risk of flight and the apparent likelihood that the pardon has the appearance of impropriety, and will decide whether the pardonee should be held or released, and on what conditions.

I think this would work quite well.

Yes. And if Trump's massive abuse of that power is not enough, nothing will be.

Yes. Welcome to the newest "shithole" country.

In some parts of Europe, that would mean executives getting punished personally if caught.

Indeed. Although that "Office stack" already exists (LibreOffice) and who needs Exchange to begin with?

At the moment all that is keeping MS alive is momentum. But their usability and security are getting worse and, at least in Europe, o365 is actually not legal to use for privacy-relevant data in many cases. The legal system has just not yet caught up with many of these uses.

Yep. And anybody is fucked if their servers go down or their cloud gets hacked again.

I know of one pretty large bank that cannot move to o365, because that would be illegal. (Data has to stay under their control....)
Maybe they will go LibreOffice, nothing really to prevent them from that.

You may manage for a while if enough people are locked-in. Abut after that you will be out of the market for a long time.

Sad as that is, it seems Xi is doing something right. Probably for the wrong reasons, but it still works.

If you are right about Chinese culture (I have no idea), then the US is toast. As soon as tech progress slows in an area (and slowed a lot in IT, even if many desperately try to pretend otherwise), long-term stable supply and services is what consumers and enterprises will buy.

Nice quote!

The worst forms of greed are outlawed, like anti-trust and price-gouging. But in the land where Mammon is the highest god, these laws do not get enforced.

Well, MS thinks they are invulnerable these days. Look at the insecure and barely functional crap they dare to put out. Look at their cloud getting hacked (a deadly sin). I really do hope they are badly misjudging the market, but they may not be. At least for a while still.

Both. Tariffs force price increases and then many just increase more than needed. So directly tariff-caused and indirectly tariff-caused (combined with greed) on top of that.