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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I would lean towards no. I’m me. I don’t consider the things that people seem to associate with their “inner child” to be exclusive to children, so I don’t feel a tension between my desire to act responsibly and my sense of wonder, joy, and playfulness.

    Age isn’t a mask hiding the inner child, it’s a toolkit that helps them appreciate and engage with those things. My childish delight at birds flitting about the bird feeder is only enhanced by being able to buy my own, keep them filled, and the ability to understand more about everything that goes on with them. I have the experience and faculties to answer questions I have, which only deepens my appreciation for the “common” wonders we see everywhere. Experiencing more of life and it’s lows only makes the highs sweeter.

    A child plus age and experience is an adult. You don’t need to lose the happiness to get there.




  • Very very little. Some will have vaguely nice functional upgrades, like the spray hose being integrated into the faucet opening, a button to temporarily change the flow limiter for more power, integrated soap dispenser or things like that, but you’re almost always paying mostly for particular aesthetics.

    Oh, and some come with under sink hardware. A normal faucet that comes with a nice water filter or a near-boiling water dispenser can reasonably cost a fair bit more, assuming you want those things.


  • NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I’ll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.

    Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they’re organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.


  • Check engine light? That’s fine, if it goes wrong it’s just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

    Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That’s a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

    Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
    If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?


  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.


  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.



  • So, you’re correct that active emergencies take priority.

    That being said, in essentially every place that has 911, both numbers connect to the same place and the only real difference is pick-up order and default response.
    It’s the emergency number not simply because it’s only for emergencies but because it’s the number that’s the same everywhere that you need to know in the event of an emergency.

    It should be used in any situation where it should be dealt with by someone now, and that someone isn’t you. Finding a serious crime has occurred is an emergency, even if the perpetrator is gone and the situation is stable.
    A dead person, particularly a potential murder, generally needs to be handled quickly.

    It’s also usually better to err on the side of 911, just in case it is an emergency that really needs the fancy features 911 often gives, like location lookups.



  • Google analytics is loaded by JavaScript. There are also other things like Google analytics that are also loaded by JavaScript.

    Updating a website can take time, and usually involves someone with at least a passing knowledge of development.

    Google tag manager is a service that lets you embed one JavaScript thing in your page, and then it will handle loading the others. This lets marketing or analytics people add and manage such things without needing to make a full code deployment.
    It also lets you make choices about when and how different tracking events for different services are triggered.

    It’s intended usage is garbage tracking metrics and advertising. Some sites are built more by marketing than developers, and they’ll jam functional stuff in there which causes breakage if you block it. These sites are usually garbage though, so nothing of value was lost.






  • For the military thing, I think there’s coverage for that. The constitution gives Congress the authority to govern the conduct of the military, as well as when it may be used. The president’s “just” the commander, but they’re bound by the same rules for the military that Congress made. I think the best case a rogue president could make there would be that they should be court martialed rather that tried in a civilian court, and I’m unsure if that’s better.

    Since Congress has authority over the conduct of the military, I can’t actually think of a situation where “being commander” was the defining thing, and not their conduct as commander. Closest I got was some sort of negligence resulting in death, but that’s derilection of duty and part of conduct.

    I believe the executive power thing is essentially “control of the executive branch”. I think that one is actually fairly well fleshed out since it’s the leading source of disputes, since it’s all about what the president can tell a part of the executive branch to do.
    It would essentially be “the president is not criminally liable for firing the attorney general”.

    So yeah, I think the sane conclusion would be that the president is de facto immune to laws that currently don’t exist, and likely never will that are insanely narrow in scope.

    I unfortunately don’t think the court is playing a game.
    I think their slow handling of the case was partly avoiding claims of the courts influencing the election, and partly it just being complicated and unprecedented.
    I think they were very clear that the other acts are basically anything the president does “as president”, particularly since they ruled that it’s okay for the president to ask the justice department about options for replacing electors, because the president gets to talk to the justice department.

    I think it’s also worth reiterating that this doesn’t prevent the courts from preventing an action, or other checks against presidential actions, only the consequences the individual may face afterwards.
    The president has the same authority to order the military to disband Congress as they did before, I just might be harder to sue them for it.



  • Those are all great points.

    To be clear, I don’t agree with the notion that the president requires immunity in order to be “undistracted” while being president.
    I think that immunity for explicitly delineated powers makes sense purely from a logical point of view: the constitution says the president can do a thing, therefore a law saying they can’t do that thing is either unconstitutional, or doesn’t apply to the president.
    If they’re impeached it wasn’t a valid use of their powers and they are potentially personally criminally liable.
    I feel like it’s less traditional immunity and more an acknowledgement that the legislature can’t criminalize things in the constitution, and someone can’t be guilty of a crime under an unconstitutional law.

    It’s the not-enumerated official acts bit that’s wonky to me.

    I don’t think anything that trump did would even remotely fit under an enumerated power of the president, which are pretty clearly and narrowly defined. Nowhere does the constitution empower the president to futz about with elections. If Congress delegated that power to the president, then the president is acting in the bounds of a law they can break.