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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The rationale is that the powers aren’t unchecked, but that the check for official constitutionally listed acts of the president is Congress, not the courts.

    Article 48 gave the presidentisl office the power to unilaterally bypass the legislature.
    This supreme Court ruling delineates the line between the individual and the office with regards to the judicial system, not the relationship between the office and the other branches like article 48 did.
    Rather than granting new powers or preventing restraint of the executive branch, it purely limits the consequences the individual can face out of office.
    The concept of presidential immunity existed prior to this case.

    The ruling essentially listed three categories and their immunity status with regards to the courts. In my opinion, two of them are reasonable and the third shouldn’t exist.

    It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment. The office of the president or the government as a whole may be prosecuted, and Congress and the courts can hammer out the exact meaning of the core powers, but the individual is only liable if Congress uses their power to assert that something was definitely not a valid presidential act.

    It’s reasonable to me to say that being the president doesn’t grant you broad immunity for non-president things. The president does not have the constitutional authority to drink and drive, so if they do they’re just a person subject to criminal prosecution.

    It’s unreasonable to me to say that in areas where the president acts officially, but their authority is shared with Congress or an inherent power of the office that they might not have immunity depending on how it impacts the role of the president.
    It’s weird to say it, but in this case I agree more with Coney Barrett that the more appropriate test is to see if the law applies to the official act and then determine if in this case it would interfere with a delineated core power.

    In her own separate concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the majority “that the Constitution prohibits Congress from criminalizing a President’s exercise” of his core constitutional powers and “closely related conduct.” But she would have courts approach the question of immunity for other official acts differently, by focusing first on whether the criminal law under which a former president is charged applies to his official acts and, if so, whether prosecuting the former president would interfere with his constitutional authority.

    Applying that principle to the facts of this case, she suggested that at least some of the conduct that serves as the basis for the charges against Trump – such as his request that the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives hold a special session about election fraud claims – would not be immune. “The President,” she concluded, “has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power.”

    https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/07/justices-rule-trump-has-some-immunity-from-prosecution/

    I ultimately think that it would have been better to say that the president (individual) cannot be criminally prosecuted for exercising specifically enumerated constitutional powers unless Congress has impeached and removed from office and send it back to the lower court. They’re perfectly capable of deciding if a particular act was an executive overreach or not on a case by case basis, and the fact that this has never happened before is a pretty solid argument against needing to worry about a “chilling effect” on the exercise of presidential power. The president should be chilled, it’s practically in the constitution. Any power not given to the government is reserved to the people, clearly implying that the constitution should be read as stingy with power to the government, and generous with rights to the people. The president, as a member of the government, should be encouraged to worry about wandering around in legal grey areas.



  • Do you think that source contradicts what I said?

    Mr. Miranda asked Ms. Wasserman Schultz whether they should call CNN to complain about a segment the network aired in which Mr. Sanders said he would oust the chairwoman if he were elected. “Do you all think it’s worth highlighting for CNN that her term ends the day after the inauguration, when a new D.N.C. Chair is elected anyway?” Mr. Miranda asked. Ms. Wasserman Schultz responded by dismissing the senator’s chances. “This is a silly story,” she wrote. “He isn’t going to be president.”

    Shocking. She didn’t speak kindly of a person who publicly attacked her, and opted to leave the story alone instead of doing anything.

    Same information, but cast with additional context

    Most of the shocking things mentioned in the emails were only mentioned, and are then dismissed.

    Your mistaking opinions and preference bias, which all people have, for unfair bias. Do you actually expect that the people who run a political party don’t have an opinion about politics?

    The coin thing didn’t happen.. At best she won six out of a dozen, which is what you would expect. The reality is more complicated.

    You grossly mischaracterize the agreement.
    From the article:

    This does not include any communications related to primary debates – which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC.

    Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.

    HFA will be granted complete and seamless access to all research work product and tools (not including any research or tracking the DNC may engage in relating to other Democratic candidates).

    In other words, her campaign agreed to give the DNC money to prepare for the general election, and in exchange they got to look at those preparations.
    This was definitely the Clinton campaign assuming she would be the candidate, but it’s not exactly a smoking gun for financial impropriety regarding the primary.

    Honestly, if your campaign can’t find a lawyer or accountant who can understand campaign finance management, you probably actually shouldn’t be in charge of a country. The financial arrangements weren’t particularly obtuse or obfuscated for moving millions of dollars between multiple political entities in multiple states.


  • Quoting a phrase from an internal email out of context makes you seem disingenuous. The emails that were stolen show people being mean, but it also shows that they were consistently not rigging anything. Or does someone making a shitty suggestion and then a higher ranking member of the party saying “no” not fit the narrative your drawing? Or that the only time they talked about financial schemes was after the Sanders campaign alleged misconduct?

    In context, Sanders told CNN that if he was elected, she would no longer be the chair person. The internal comment was “this is a silly story. Sanders isn’t going to be president” at a time where he was already loosing.

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to resign.

    She did. Eight years ago.

    Tldr, party leadership preferred Clinton over Obama. Turns out that preference without misconduct doesn’t have much impact.

    you refer to a 76 year old career politician like Sanders as a new person.

    Oh please. It’s even in the bit that you quoted: new to the party. I act like he was new to the party because he was, and his campaign was run by people who didn’t know the party structures. When their inexperience with the party tools led to them not taking advantage of them, they cried misconduct for the other campaigns knowing about them.



  • So what were the advantages? The usual one I hear listed is superdelegates, which doesn’t matter if more people voted for the winner, or that they didn’t proactively inform his campaign about funding tricks that the Clinton campaign already knew about.

    Are you saying that Clinton was an independent who just happened to align with the party for her entire political career?

    I’m not sure you know how political affiliation or “people” work. Being a member of the party for decades vs being a member for months matters. Those are called “connections”, and it’s how most politicians get stuff done: by knowing people and how to talk to them.

    The point of a primary is to determine who the candidate is, not who the party is more aligned with. Party leadership will almost always be more aligned with the person who has been a member longer, particularly when that person has been a member of part leadership themselves. It’s how people work. You prefer a person you’ve known and worked with for a long time over a person who just showed up to use your organization, and by extension you, for their own goals.
    We have rules to make sure that those unavoidable human preferences don’t make it unfair.

    The Obama campaign is a good example. He didn’t have the connections that Clinton did, so party leadership favored her. Once they actually voted, he got more so leadership alignment didn’t matter and he was the candidate. He then worked to develop those connections so that he and the party were better aligned and work together better, and he won. Yay!

    So what rules did they break for Clinton? What advantages did she have over Sanders that she didn’t have over Obama?
    Which of those advantages weren’t just "new people to the party didn’t know tools the party made available?”



  • George Washington eschewed political parties because he didn’t want to establish a precedent where his choice as first president set the standard everyone else had to conform to, and there’s a little irony in people holding him up as an example in that light more than 200 years later.

    He, and the other founders largely, disliked political parties in their entirety, not just having some specific number of them.
    They also built the system that enshrined the two party dichotomy as the only option, actively sought to ensure that the “right” people could override the will of the people if needed, and founded the parties they had previously argued against.
    They are far from infallible bastions of correctness in this matter.







  • CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.

    So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.

    Hype train goes chugga chugga.

    As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.

    So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.



  • Oh, to me it just doesn’t remotely look like they’re interested in surveillance type stuff or significant analytics.

    We’re already seeing growing commercial interest in using LLMs for stuff like replacing graphic designers, which is folly in my opinion, or for building better gateways and interpretive tools for existing knowledge based or complex UIs, which could potentially have some merit.

    Chat gpt isn’t the type of model that’s helpful for surveillance because while it could tell you what’s happening in a picture, it can’t look at a billion sets of tagged gps coordinates and tell you which one is doing some shenanigans, or look at every bit of video footage from an area and tell you which times depict certain behaviors.

    Looking to make OpenAI, who seem to me to be very clearly making a play for business to business knowledge management AI as a service, into a wannabe player for ominous government work seems like a stretch when we already have very clear cut cases of the AI companies that are doing exactly that and even more. Like, Palantirs advertisements openly boast about how they can help your drone kill people more accurately.

    I just don’t think we need to make OpenAI into Palantir when we already have Palantir, and OpenAI has their own distinct brand of shit they’re trying to bring into the world.

    Google doesn’t benefit by selling their data, they benefit by selling conclusions from their data, or by being able to use the data effectively. If they sell it, people can use the data as often as they want. If they sell the conclusions or impact, they can charge each time.
    While the FBI does sometimes buy aggregated location data, they can more easily subpoena the data if they have a specific need, and the NSA can do that without it even being public, directly from the phone company.
    The biggest customer doesn’t need to pay, so targeting them for sales doesn’t fit, whereas knowing where you are and where you go so they can charge Arby’s $2 to get you to buy some cheese beef is a solid, recurring revenue stream.

    It’s a boring dystopia where the second largest surveillance system on the planet is largely focused on giving soap companies an incremental edge in targeted freshness.



  • Yes, neither of us is responsible for hiring someone for the OpenAI board of directors, making anything we think speculation.

    I suppose you could dismiss any thought or reasoning behind an argument for a belief as “reasons” to try to minimize them, but it’s kind of a weak argument position. You might consider instead justifying your beliefs, or saying why you disagree instead of just “yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.



  • Those aren’t contradictory. The Feds have an enormous budget for security, even just “traditional” security like everyone else uses for their systems, and not the “offensive security” we think of when we think “Federal security agencies”. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco will change products, build out large infrastructure, or even share the source code for their systems to persuade the feds to spend their money. They’ll do this because they have products that are valuable to the Feds in general, like AWS, or because they already have security products and services that are demonstrably valuable to the civil security sector.

    OpenAI does not have a security product, they have a security problem. The same security problem as everyone else, that the NSA is in large part responsible for managing for significant parts of the government.
    The government certainly has interest in AI technology, but OpenAI has productized their solutions with a different focus. They’ve already bought what everyone thinks OpenAI wants to build from Palantir.

    So while it’s entirely possible that they are making a play to try to get those lines of communication to government decision makers for sales purposes, it seems more likely that they’re aiming to leverage “the guy who oversaw implementation of security protocol for military and key government services is now overseeing implementation of our security protocols, aren’t we secure and able to be trusted with your sensitive corporate data”.
    If they were aiming for security productization and getting ties for that side of things, someone like Krebs would be more suitable, since CISA is a bit more well positioned for those ties to turn into early information about product recommendations and such.

    So yeah, both of those statements are true. This is a non-event with bad optics if you’re looking for it to be bad.