You left out "trade secrets". That would be plausible if the software were sufficiently innovative.

That's "tool using", not "tool making", but I wouldn't be surprised if dogs could to simple tool making. A cow was recently documented making a backscratcher.

If rolling a styrofoam ball is using a tool, adapting a towel to a flyswatter is making a tool. I'll admit that I've never met someone who was that limited. Everybody used to be able to whittle something, if not something fancy, but I think that knives are now generally not used that way. I don't even know if rubber bands are still used to launch folded paper (which is multiple instances of tool making).

I don't think I ever suggested that this was a Trump-only problem... indeed I specifically highlighted at the end that conservatives should worry greatly about what an unlimited liberal president will do, and I pointed out at the beginning that presidents have been pushing the boundaries since Nixon, at least.

Regarding your claims about Biden... bringing him up is kind of a non-sequiteur. As the other commenter pointed out, Biden very much followed the traditional path with respect to treating the independent federal agencies as independent. Do you have any counterexamples? As for #3, Biden did abuse the pardon power and I wish he hadn't done it, but as far as I know there is zero evidence that he did it to protect people from prosecution for illegal acts that he ordered.

Finally, on #1: Yes, the ruling happened during the Biden administration, but the ruling was entirely about Trump. I'd go so far as to say that if Biden had been the subject of the case, the conservative justices would have ruled the other way.

While Trump didn't initiate the move towards a more powerful executive, if he achieves status as king-in-all-but-name, he'll be the one that did 90% of it.

I agree that Trump has not yet achieved full control over the executive branch. The uncertainty over whether Slaughter will go his way is a remaining obstacle. We'll know soon.

Not at all.

Car batteries have to have high storage to weight ratios. A reduced-capacity battery holds less power but still weighs just as much.

But weight doesn't matter for grid storage. If the batteries only have half as much capacity, just stack up twice as many of them. And in fact it's not a case of "half capacity". I'd bet Waymo retires them when they get to 80-90% of capacity, because reduced capacity means more time spent charging and less time spent working. If the grid storage system gets a battery with 80% of its original capacity, it can likely use that battery for decades before it has to be retired and recycled.

And, of course, lithium ion batteries are highly recyclable, so there's no reason not to expect them to be recycled when they're finally taken out of service in 2060 or so.

That's not really correct, though. The batteries aren't worn out or unusable after 15-20 years... they just have maybe 15-20% less capacity than when they were new. So a battery that provided 400 miles of range, now only provides maybe 320 miles. So it becomes a question of how much range reduction the owner is willing to tolerate.

I bought a Nissan Leaf in 2011. The early model Leafs were something of an outlier because they lacked a thermal management system for their batteries and they had a very small battery, both of which caused them to suffer much more severe degradation than basically all other EV models. My 2011 now has about 70% of its original range, and that original range was only about 80 miles with a good tailwind. So now it can only go about 50 miles on a full charge. In the winter, that drops to about 40 miles... less if you use the heater.

Is the Leaf's battery so degraded as to be useless? Depends on your use case. For many use cases the Leaf's battery was too short-ranged to be useful when it was brand new. For a typical commuter, though... it was fine when it was new, and now it's marginal to insufficient unless you can charge at work.

As it happens, my son -- a college student -- still drives it daily to and from school and work. In the summer it can get him to school and work and home, without charging (he charges it from a wall outlet at his apartment). In the winter, he has to charge either at school or at work. Both have chargers (proper L2 charger at school; wall outlet at work -- but it's enough).

I wouldn't put up with that at my stage in life, but there are plenty of people who would. Heck, in college I drove a car with an unreliable starter; I always parked on an incline so I could start it by rolling and popping the clutch. This is even more true of vehicles that start with a larger range, say 300 miles, and more reasonable degradation. Your 300 mile-range car may become a 250 mile-range car over the course of 20 years of use. More likely, if you're the sort who buys a new car, you'll keep it for a few years and then sell it or pass it to someone else when it has lost only a few miles of range, but there's no reason not to expect it will stay in service for 20, even 30 years... mostly likely until it's in an accident or has other issues unrelated to the battery that aren't worth fixing.

You should look up the actual data on the effects of the emissions controls, rather than relying on anecdotal experience. They're a really, really good idea, and I don't think they're actually going to get rolled back, and if they do, they'll get reinstated.

I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.

I don't think an ICE version would be legal. You can't really hit the emissions targets without electronic engine controls.

As for charging, your house is the charging station. You might have to run an outlet and plug in an EV charger. If you've got a welder you've almost certainly already got a NEMA 14-50 or similar that will work. And if you don't have a welder, you should fix that ASAP! Everyone who lives in the sticks should have a welder and know how to use it.

They try, and often they succeed for a while, but they eventually get disrupted by market changes. The most important thing is to be vigilant for regulatory capture. It's when businesses can enlist the power of the state in maintaining their moats that they can stay on top indefinitely.

And for your knowledge.

This is the enormous oversight in the Labor Theory of Value. Knowledge is actually more significant than labor. Without the requisite knowledge, labor and capital produces nothing useful. With it, the labor and capital generate something people want. With more of it, less labor and less capital produce more output, or better output.

It's understandable that Marx didn't notice the value of knowledge. He was mostly thinking about agricultural production, implemented with practices that hadn't changed significantly in generations, maybe centuries. The knowledge was already so well-dispersed among the relevant population that it was easy to just assume it as background knowledge, like knowing how to walk and talk. And it changed so slowly it was easy to miss that increases in knowledge enabled increases in production.

But ignoring the contribution of knowledge leads to failing to recognize the power of innovation. That leads to all sorts of foolishness, including a failure to recognize the power of competition and other forces that motivate innovation. The history of countries who tried to follow Marx's ideas are replete with examples of incredibly-foolish decisions by central planners who failed to understand the value of knowledge, both direct and embodied.

Another sort of knowledge people tend to ignore is managerial knowledge, at all levels of the chain and most especially in the allocation of capital (the labor involved in capital allocation is also often ignored). All those irritating financiers who seem like pure parasites are in fact doing critically-important knowledge work (and it is work) by making capital available to the enterprises who can make effective use of it, and withdrawing it from less effective enterprises.

Perhaps the biggest form of knowledge that is ignored is the knowledge encapsulated in prices, which is collectively generated and refined by countless people in every supply chain. Encoded in prices is deep knowledge of every stage of the supply chain and the value that it represents for one usage as compared to another. This is the single biggest source of foolish behavior by central planners. There is simply no way for them to discover the deep, detailed knowledge encoded into prices, and as a result they make terrible choices about how to allocate capital, labor and human knowledge. Markets also don't do it perfectly (we're human), but they do it far, far better. This is the single most important reason why capitalist economies massively outperform centrally-planned ones, though the other reasons also contribute.

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

However... it should be very possible for EVs. You'll still need a little computerized control of the charging subsystem, but that's it -- and that could be an easily-replaceable module. The rest could be incredibly simple. No more complicated than an electric golf cart, just scaled up.

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

The poster is a troll, and I completely disagree with the framing that Thomas is some devout defender of the Constitution, but there is actually a point here. The point was highlighted by Justice Sotomayor in the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter.

The TL;DR is that we've been pretty egregiously violating the Constitution's separation of powers for a century, and everyone has just quietly agreed to look away. We've been looking away for very good reasons, and what we really *ought* to do is amend the Constitution, because this is an area where the Constitution's 18th-century design does not work for the 20th (or 21st) century reality.

The longer explanation:

The Constitution sets up a strict separation of powers. Only the legislature can make laws. Only the executive has the wherewithal to enforce the laws. Only the judiciary can interpret the laws, and their constitutionality. Each serves as a check on the others. The president can veto legislation. The legislature can refuse to fund the executive's initiatives. The judiciary can invalidate laws and issue orders to the executive... but the judges have to be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It's solid partitioning of power, designed to prevent the monarchical abuses the founders were familiar with, abuses that occur when one man (or woman, or small group) has the power to make the laws, enforce the laws and interpret the laws.

Very nice. But it doesn't work in the modern world.

The reason is that the US is much, much bigger and the world is vastly more complicated than it was in the 18th century. Regulations need to have a level of detail and sophistication that just isn't feasible for generalist legislators, and we don't want to leave the drafting of regulations to lobbyists. What we need is government experts in focused areas (fisheries, energy, mineral policy, telecommunications, etc.) whose full-time job is understanding the minutiae. Then lawmakers can write laws providing broad guidelines for the experts, who study the issues, write the regulations, subject them to rounds of public review and then enact them.

On the judicial side, the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, remain the final line for adjudication, but they're designed to grind very finely, which means they grind very slowly, and at great cost, especially since judges are also generalists so the litigants need to educate them on the detailed issues. To make enforcement of the detailed regulations practicable, we also need, effectively, specialist judges. The way we've handled that is by authorizing the same federal agencies who make the regulations to adjudicate their application.

Oops. Does this sound like we've lumped lawmaking, law enforcement and adjudication all together inside the federal agencies (in the executive branch), in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, directly defeating the founders' work in dividing them up, re-enabling tyranny?

The letter, definitely. The spirit... not exactly. The other thing we did was to divide those powers up not by category (rulemaking, enforcement, judging) but by subject matter. So while each agency holds great power over its little fiefdom, that power is limited in the aggregate because the potential fisheries tyrant is completely separate from the potential telecoms tyrant. This limits the total power of each and prevents them from getting so big they can't be slapped down.

Unless it doesn't.

This scheme only works if those agencies are independent within the executive branch. And they cannot be independent if the president is free to fire anyone in the executive branch at will, which is what Slaughter is all about. If the president can fire anyone, then the whole of the executive is subject to his will, which means all of those subject-matter-isolated threads of power get gathered up into a single pair of hands.

And if that happens, we're back to monarchy. An elected monarch, perhaps. And possibly with a limited term, and with a few gross checks on power, slow and uncertain in application. But we have a single person with the power to control nearly all of the federal government's power to make, enforce and adjudicate the law, relegating the formal legislative and judicial bodies to backstop positions, generally unable to act fast enough to prevent tyrannical abuses.

So... what we ought to have done is to have amended the constitution to bake the independence of the executive branch agencies into the system. Or, we ought to have created parallel legislative and judicial sub-branches so that each area had its major functions isolated within the Constitutional framework.

This wouldn't have been difficult in the case of the judiciary, though we'd probably have had to create a different hiring process for the thousands of low-level adjudicators required -- going through presidential appointment and Senate confirmation for all of them would be impractical. But on the legislative side, we'd have needed a Constitutional amendment to enable the massive numerical expansion of the legislature necessary for all of the expert rulemaking roles, and those people would also need an entirely different hiring process. Voting on all of them would be impractical.

But fixing the problem correctly in either of those ways was hard, while just ignoring the issue was easy. And ignoring it worked fine for a while. We saw the first potential issues with Nixon, and ever since Nixon almost every succeeding occupant of the White House has chipped away at agency independence. Until Trump 2.0 when we have a president who has smashed a battering ram through all of the norms that maintained it, and is trying to get judicial blessing (the Slaughter case).

If you think the presidential immunity ruling was bad, that's nothing compared to what will be unleashed if SCOTUS finds fully in Trump's favor in Slaughter. We'll have a king with the power to (among many, many other things) unilaterally direct the imposition and enforcement of regulations that impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on telecoms companies. In this case, for what I think is a good reason. But whether it's a good reason won't matter if the president wants to do something for a bad reason, he'll have the power.

Particularly dangerous is the combination of:

1. The immunity ruling, plus
2. Absolute authority over the executive branch, plus
3. The unlimited pardon power.

The president can order anything at all done, federal employees will have to do it or be fired, and if it's a crime (a) the president is immune and (b) he can pardon everyone who does his dirty work.

I think the final backstop of impeachment and conviction by the legislative houses is likely to remain in that case as the only real limitation on presidential power. For the conservatives who think this is a good thing, they should think really hard about what a president AOC who decides to fully use the power of the Unitary Executive might do.