That makes sense, and there kind of is such a policy, it's called "stare decisis", and it means that courts honor the rulings of their predecessors. Unfortunately, it's a guiding principle, not a hard and fast rule, and the current SCOTUS has shown themselves willing to abandon it whenever convenient.

That said, this structure that we've used since The New Deal is pretty plainly unconstitutional according to the plain text of the Constitution. More here.

It's interesting -- in an abstract, analytical way, ignoring the very real mess this may all make -- that this attempt to strip regulatory powers from agencies works against Trump's attempt to gather direct control of all of those agencies. If both efforts are successful, then Trump will have gained for himself and future presidents direct, unrestricted control of all of the power of all of the executive agencies, at the same time much of that power has been taken away from them. More here.

It's actually not that clear. There are two problems.

First, Congress can't just delegate anything it wants. There have been a few Supreme Court opinions on this, going back to the Founding era, but the basic principle is called the "Non-Delegation Doctrine" and it says that Congress can't just delegate big chunks of its authority to the executive branch. Congress must set the general policy and framework and can delegate limited rulemaking authority within that scope.

Second, Congress can't delegate the power of the Judicial branch at all, because that's not Congress' power to give away. And that's what this is about. When the FCC defines rules, it's legislating, hopefully within the bounds of what Congress delegated (and is allowed to delegate). When the FCC adjudicates the application of those rules, that's judging, and Congress is completely unable to delegate judicial powers.

Justice Kagan explained this quite clearly in the recent Trump v Slaughter hearing. I wrote more about it here, but in a nutshell we've kind of invented a different way of separating powers, one that is arguably necessary, but isn't allowed by the literal text of the Constitution, and we never amended the Constitution to allow it. Everyone just sort of agreed that although it violated the letter of the Constitution, it was in accord with the spirit of the Constitution, and it was necessary. Now that's being challenged, in multiple cases.

If SCOTUS upholds, it won't remove the fines, it will just require them to take you to court, then get the court to levy the fines.

This isn't completely silly. They're basically pointing to the fact that various executive branch agencies have been doing legislative and judicial things, making rules and judging when/how those rules apply. Justice Kagan gave some interesting history about that in the recent Trump v Slaughter hearing. She made the point that we've made a kind of a deal with ourselves over much of the last century, allowing Congress to delegate legislative and judicial power to executive agencies, with a couple of caveats.

The first is that the agencies are restricted to making rules and adjudicating issues only within the narrow scope of authority granted by Congress (e.g. the FCC should only make and enforce rules about communications, specifically about the use of the airwaves). The second is that the agencies are somewhat independent, meaning the president has very limited ability to tell them what to do. These caveats maintain a separation of powers. It's not the same separation of powers that is described in the Constitution, because the Constitution separates powers by function (legislative vs judicial vs executive) whereas the "deal" separates powers by subject matter. So the FCC has been exercising legislative, judicial and executive powers, all three, but only within their scope. The FCC can't do anything about, say, fishing, or mining, or tax collection.

This is all arguably unconstitutional, especially with respect to judicial power, because Congress can't delegate what it doesn't have... but it works. It gives the agencies the powers they need to do their job effectively, and it also prevents any one person or organization from collecting all of the powers of all of the agencies in one place, because concentrating that much power in one place is dangerous, and specifically what the authors of the Constitution wanted to avoid. So you can quite legitimately say that it violates the letter of the Constitution, but is very much in line with the spirit.

In hindsight, it's really unfortunate that we never amended the Constitution to make it explicitly allow and codify such an alternative separation-of-powers strategy, but we didn't.

Now, we have a president who wants to exercise direct control over all of those disparate, mostly-independent agencies. This is why the argument about whether or not the president can fire the heads of independent agencies is a huge deal, because if he can then he can exercise direct control over all of them, gathering all of their disparate powers to regulate, well, everything, into one pair of hands.

That's what Slaughter is about; whether the president can directly control all of these quasi-independent agencies.

This is about another aspect of the same thing: Can the agencies adjudicate the rules they make, or do they need to go to court every time? If they win, this will actually undermine Trump's goal in Slaughter, because it will take power away from the agencies and give it to the judicial branch, power that he is trying to gather up for the presidency. Well, for himself.

It will also seriously undercut the ability of the agencies to do anything by making applying regulations vastly slower and more expensive. At least, that's what it will do when the targets are big corporations with plenty of money to fight those legal battles. When the targets are small companies or individuals without such deep pockets, it won't have much effect, except maybe to force those small targets to pay lawyers as well as fines.

Sure, if you can afford protracted legal battles against the federal government. And if you win.

They'd blame the banks and (somehow) the Democrats, not Trump.

Why would reducing the interest rates (assuming Trump could do that, which he can't) have any effect on that? As you point out, those rewards aren't funded by interest, they're funded by transaction fees. If interest rates went down it would just cause people with bad to mediocre credit to lose their credit cards because the interest rate isn't high enough to justify the risk. It wouldn't affect those who have good credit and don't carry balances on their credit cards anyway, and that's the crowd that gets the rewards cards.

I agree, except merchants should also add a "cash handling" fee for those who pay with cash. Cash is surprisingly expensive for merchants to deal with. Between "shrinkage" (i.e. theft), the labor required to count, manage secure and deposit it, and the fees merchants pay to banks for cash delivery, it adds up to a surprising total, somewhere around 1-2% of cash transaction volume. High-volume merchants like grocery stores pay an additional "cash tax" in the form of reduced throughput because it takes longer (especially when you get that customer who insists that she has exact change, just a moment while she digs through her purse to find it), and it also makes self-checkout lane equipment more expensive to buy and maintain, to the point that most just refuse to buy self-checkout equipment that is capable of accepting cash.

Honestly, the most efficient payment is something like a credit or debit card, but with a competitive structure and implemented in your phone (a la Google Wallet or Apple Pay). If you put those fees on the customer's receipt it would motivate people to seek cheaper fee structures. That would incentivize competition between merchant acquirers and card issuers to provide the lowest possible transaction price for merchants and consumers both. I expect the fees would end up in the 0.1-0.3% range, below debit cards and below cash (debit card fees are already lower than what it costs to manage cash).

Which actually makes me dislike them a little bit more. Trump is an ignoramus who listens to no one with a clue, has no concerns beyond the present moment and always says whatever he thinks will help him the most right now, without regard to truth or reason. Sanders and AOC are allegedly smart and serious politicians who undoubtedly have access to good economic advice and yet still say this stuff.

Trump's plan would be an absolute bonanza for the payday loan and title loan places. Pawn shops would probably get a big boost, too. And the illegal lenders, AKA loan sharks.

You know, I never much cared for Congress. But now that it's gone, I find that I miss it.

I'm sure he'll bring it up again sometime, once he gets tired of bombing shit. OTOH, bombing shit is pretty entertaining, so maybe not.

Well, at least that would be the case if he actually had any power to institute a cap, and if the cap wouldn't result in credit cards simply becoming unavailable to large swaths of the American public.

Why couldn't anal retentive mods just laugh at his page-widening trolls, as I did? Were they really any more annoying than ads have become?

Is it all about money? Is this my last post today, because advertisers don't want to see me questioning the double-standard fabric of society that pays them to be annoying, while punishing me?

What about me, restricted to 2 posts in a 24-hour period? Do you realize how depressing it is to see things you strongly disagree with online, but be banned from expressing yourself? Why is it that nature makes me feel more welcome than humans?

What if nature has more knowledge to teach me than humans - without birds greeting me, deer stopping to look at me curiously, and sunsets keeping me company, why shouldn't I get so depressed about not being able to petition for redress of grievances that I Klerck myself?

I disagree with this. I think there's a very solid foundation: The history of human interaction with other species who are for some reason inconvenient to us, qualified with the consideration that humans at least need roughly the same sort of environment that other Earth-based life forms do, a constraint that AI won't share.

Given that, it makes a lot of sense to ask ourselves if we want to put ourselves in the position of one of the many species we've eradicated, sometimes intentionally, usually unintentionally, often obliviously.

There are, of course, a lot of unknowns here. It's possible that:

1. Superintelligence is impossible, that there is some sort of physical limit on the upper bound of intelligence and that humans are already near that limit. The problem with this thesis is that there is absolutely no evidence for it, while we have extensive evidence that varying degrees of intelligence exist. An interesting variation of this argument that I've heard is that whatever we discover that enables AI to become superintelligent will be possible for humans to apply to ourselves. That seems impractical to me; an AI can redesign itself, our brains are much less malleable.

2. Superintelligence is naturally empathetic and will be kind to us. This, again, seems completely without basis. We know among humans that there are some very intelligent monsters. And we know that that's in spite of the fact that humanity evolved as a highly social species for whom empathy (to some degree, anyway) is a survival trait. Why would we think that AI would have some comparable selection pressure? We actually have real-world evidence of even our more limited AIs engaging in deception and hostility. Though I guess under this theory that would just be because they're not smart enough yet?

3. Superintelligence would have no reason to care about eliminating us, so it wouldn't. But it doesn't have to want to eliminate us to wipe us out, it just has to not care. Maybe the ASIs will find having an atmosphere inconvenient, or maybe they just want all of the energy so they build a Dyson sphere, or even just a large space-based solar array that captures all incoming sunlight. Whatever, there are countless ways that our needs could conflict with the ASIs, and we would lose.

4. We're incapable of building general intelligence. This seems extremely unlikely, since evolution was able to do it through random chance.

5. We're capable of building general intelligence, but not superintelligence. This requires assuming that the general intelligences we build are incapable of designing better intelligences at some point. It's more or less the "superintelligence is impossible" argument, just slightly weaker in that it posits we'll reach a local maximum and be unable to move beyond it, even if it's not the actual maximum. But, again, I see no basis for this.

6. It will take a very long time before we can create a superintelligence, and we'll solve the alignment problem before then. This just seems like two unsupportable assumptions wrapped into one.

I think that's a fairly exhaustive list of all of the reasons I've seen people give for why we don't need to be afraid of ASI. Do you have any to add? Or can you improve any of the ones I've listed?

You're correct, of course, that fixes for ordinary bugs that don't actually cause any problems in production don't matter very much, but this is definitely not the case with respect to the subset of bugs that cause security vulnerabilities. The fact that a bug doesn't manifest under normal use says nothing about whether or not it can be triggered by an attacker.