After reflecting for a week, I've decided the simplest explanation for the five Justices that said only Congress can apply this is that they didn't want it coming back to them. So they said, in effect, "Don't go to the federal courts. Don't go to the DOJ or other executive branch agencies. Only Congress can do this."
Sometimes work on Monday feels like the reprieve from my Chevy Chase in National Lampoons movies lifestyle.
I know that feeling. I also remember one Monday when I came in, told my office mate I was going to be in the lab hiding, and not to tell anyone where I was unless it was the CEO wanting something (this was at a Fortune 200 company). Later in the morning he showed up to tell me, "People are looking for you because the CEO wants to talk to you."
I don't know that I've ever lived at a place/time where the eclipses were quite as frequent. From 2017 to 2029 (inclusive), Colorado's Front Range urban corridor had/will have four solar eclipses with >70% coverage. Three during 2023-2029 inclusive.
I didn't watch. Was Boebert among them? One of the things she's struggling to do is to convince the primary voters in her new district that she can be trusted to behave in public.
There are reasons that when experts rank the states' voting systems for accuracy, security, and ease of use, the top few positions are dominated by vote by mail states.
One of the reasons is that the scanners that tabulate the votes are part of a system that has audits from beginning to end. The scanners are audited almost continuously. Hackers don't have to hack just the scanners; they have to hack the system. Including the manual parts.
I have been informed elsewhere that the GRE exams on the computers are adaptive, in the sense that if you are getting everything right, subsequent questions are drawn from a more difficult pool. The final score is based on both the number of correct answers and the degree of difficulty.
If that's right, then having to answer and not being able to back up are reasonable.
What does test prep consist of these days? Many years ago I was a kid in a state that did annual standardized tests. My fifth grade teacher spent some class time on the basics of taking a multiple-choice test like that.
I've said before that the last time I took the GREs the tests were given on a computer that took away most of those strategies. You couldn't go to the next question until you'd answered the current one, and you couldn't go back to previous questions.
When I was a lad old enough to understand money, my Dad was a field auditor/engineer for an insurance company. At least a third of the time he was on the road. So I grew up with Mom's name on the bank accounts, and Dad got an allowance for personal expenses, because decisions had to be made and he wasn't there. Any sort of major purchase decision they made jointly and Mom got the final word. When did this make a difference in my life?
1) I got my reading jones from Dad. He taught me that some books are worth skipping lunch for because the allowance won't cover both. Some aren't.
2) I recall that when my wife and I combined "my" money and "your" money into "our" money I told her, "No two people balance a checkbook exactly the same way. I refuse to learn your way, and don't expect you to learn my way. Do you trust me to balance it?" After a sufficiently long silence I smiled and said, "I absolutely trust you to take care of the money," and dumped that whole burden.
Is it an alternate Tuesday? No? Well, I'll believe in conspiracy theories for a few minutes anyway.
Suppose you want to convert the US to an authoritarian state. We know from history that strong-president systems tend to fail eventually and almost always in that direction. One of the situations in which that failure happens is when the legislative branch locks up. The president gets away with taking over because the legislature can't address problems.
One way to get to that point is to overload the legislature. In a large complex modern economy, one way to do that is to pile on the minutia. Don't let them delegate to lower levels of government. Don't let them delegate to regulatory agencies. Encourage members of the legislature to draw everything out.
Sandworms are as impossible as dragons without resorting to magic. Estimate the strength of material necessary to support that mass and shape -- ain't going to happen without magic. Or the energy required to displace sand at any speed. Assume any sort of chemical source and you're stuck with impossible internal temperatures. The worms are one of the reasons I never read past the first book.
Volunteered to help the HOA remove tree stakes on Saturday. This is a largely sane HOA. At one of the last lots the woman living there gave permission for us to go inside the front fence and remove two stakes. She assured us that her large dog -- some sort of mastiff cross that clearly violates the HOA's rules on dog size -- was under control. Just as we were finishing she opened her front door and the mastiff got through the gap. There was much barking and growling and the rest of the group got through the front gate. I was the last one in line and just before I was out the dog snapped at me. Put a hole in my jeans and left me with a shallow tear in the skin on the back of my thigh a couple of inches long.
The HOA notified the property management company with a formal request that the dog be removed. The resident will be notified on Monday, and if the dog is still there in 30 days animal control will take it. Because there is a biting incident, if the dog is taken it will almost certainly be put down. I feel badly for the dog. My injury is slight; every few years I do worse to myself be falling off a bicycle. It's a 110-pound part mastiff; someone(s) obviously failed at the training and socialization a dog that's going to get that big needs. I've been back over my recollection of the important seconds multiple times; did I do something wrong that triggered the aggressive dog?
When we moved 3+ years ago, my wife's dementia was already at a point where keeping her on task was difficult. As a result, an embarrassing amount of stuff from her office and the basement just got thrown in boxes and moved. It all went into the basement of the new townhouse, which despite the upstairs being considerably smaller than the old house, has a larger basement. Since the kids and I put her in memory care 11 months ago, and it's clear this is permanent -- or until the money runs out -- I have been (very) slowly working my way through the basement, recycling and discarding.
One of the things the builder left was a 12x24' piece of the carpet. I don't know that it's that size, but that's what the note on it says. It's folded, not rolled, so takes up more floor space than it needs to. I've got enough space now to, with some care, unfold and refold and otherwise manipulate it and get it rolled up. That's this weekend's project.
My daughter wasn't happy when I told her. "Dad, you're 70. Should you really be doing things like that?" I pointed out the dumbbells by the couch and told her that if the TV got turned on after dinner, I spent 20-25 minutes using the dumbbells and my body weight for strength training. Her daughters are lunatics. I've caught all of them doing something insane on hikes or at the playground. Caught in the sense of grabbing the waistband of their jeans as they overbalanced and were going to fall into the river.
Medicaid. Medicare is a purely federal program. Not that I blame Philip. When I worked on the Colorado legislature budget staff, doing presentations before the joint budget committee, I almost always hesitated to make sure I said Medicaid.
One of the fundamental skills a politician should have in a media age is "hit your mark, deliver your lines".
I have read stories about The Apprentice that flat out say Trump couldn't do it. He would, for example, fire the wrong person and leave the set. Then the director and writers were left to find enough footage they could splice together to make that fit some sort of story.
Even in Reagan's second term, as dementia set in, his years as a professional actor left him with the ability to learn the lines, hit the mark, and deliver them on the first take.
I had a great deal more respect for actors generally after a tech job required me to make a bunch of video clips. Hit the mark, deliver your lines, sound like you're as enthusiastic about it on the fifth take as the first.
Recall that it's Colorado, and not all of the TABOR restrictions (and other amendments) have been removed at the state level. Those provide incentives to structure things oddly. It was one of the "interesting" things about working for the legislative budget staff. One year we went through the statutes for regular unemployment "insurance" and changed every instance of the word tax with premium, then declared UI to be a pseudo-agency whose revenue and spending didn't count against those limits.
All those Trump properties are leveraged up the ying yang so a liquidator probably can’t muster the necessary cash by just selling one.
I have been told by lawyerly types that order of precedence in New York is employees, then government (including judgements), then secured debt. They said that if the state seizes Trump Tower and sells it for enough to satisfy the judgement, both Trump and the secured debt holders take a bath. IANAL and can't speak to the accuracy, just saying that I've been told that.
At some point in the last few years, a discussion like this here on the site concluded that qualifying to be a belay person at the local climbing club was not an unreasonable thing.
The statistics say that a lot of marriages don't survive the PhD grind and the publish-or-perish period that follows. When I think through the list of PhDs I've known well enough to find out some of their personal history, more of them than not went through a divorce during that period.
When I was on the state legislature budget staff here, during the summer interim between sessions the staff would go see field work within the agencies in each of our portfolios. I sat in the back of the room while a case worker had her monthly meeting with a family where she was trying to make the family court's arrangement work. Two kids. Mom wasn't there because she was in drug rehab again. Dad wasn't there because he was in jail after breaking someone's face in a bar brawl. Two sets of grandparents who obviously despised each other. After the session, the case worker told me I should attend all of their meetings, the family was much better behaved with the guy in a coat and tie sitting in the back. Then I went out to my car and cried for a bit before I went back to the office.
The next day someone asked me what I had learned. "I don't know without looking it up what we pay our case workers. It's not enough."
Notice that the Artemis III landing as currently planned requires SpaceX to make at least a dozen SH/Starship flights, with at least three versions of Starship. A big fuel depot in low Earth orbit, a smaller fuel depot in low lunar orbit, the lander itself. More likely, two dozen flights.
NASA is required by statute to use SLS/Orion to carry the astronauts from Earth to LLO. Almost $30B in development, running expenses to be able to build and operate the system about $2B per year, cost of the completely expendable SLS/Orion pair another $2B per launch. SpaceX is supposed to do the rest for a total of about $4B.
It's a pretty safe bet that very few, if any, of two dozen SpaceX launches will be carrying people and life support.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Law ‘Splainer: Trump v Anderson”
After reflecting for a week, I've decided the simplest explanation for the five Justices that said only Congress can apply this is that they didn't want it coming back to them. So they said, in effect, "Don't go to the federal courts. Don't go to the DOJ or other executive branch agencies. Only Congress can do this."
On “Weekend Plans Post: Prep (Maybe) For The Eclipse”
Sometimes work on Monday feels like the reprieve from my Chevy Chase in National Lampoons movies lifestyle.
I know that feeling. I also remember one Monday when I came in, told my office mate I was going to be in the lab hiding, and not to tell anyone where I was unless it was the CEO wanting something (this was at a Fortune 200 company). Later in the morning he showed up to tell me, "People are looking for you because the CEO wants to talk to you."
"
I don't know that I've ever lived at a place/time where the eclipses were quite as frequent. From 2017 to 2029 (inclusive), Colorado's Front Range urban corridor had/will have four solar eclipses with >70% coverage. Three during 2023-2029 inclusive.
On “State of the Union Open Thread”
...willing to spar with the hecklers...
I didn't watch. Was Boebert among them? One of the things she's struggling to do is to convince the primary voters in her new district that she can be trusted to behave in public.
On “Opposing Ranked Choice Voting Is Opposing Representative Democracy”
There are reasons that when experts rank the states' voting systems for accuracy, security, and ease of use, the top few positions are dominated by vote by mail states.
One of the reasons is that the scanners that tabulate the votes are part of a system that has audits from beginning to end. The scanners are audited almost continuously. Hackers don't have to hack just the scanners; they have to hack the system. Including the manual parts.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024”
I have been informed elsewhere that the GRE exams on the computers are adaptive, in the sense that if you are getting everything right, subsequent questions are drawn from a more difficult pool. The final score is based on both the number of correct answers and the degree of difficulty.
If that's right, then having to answer and not being able to back up are reasonable.
"
India is a huge democratic country that is aspiring to be in the liberal developed country club.
Modi and his bunch seem to be winning overwhelming victories on the premise of becoming a Hindu nationalist country.
"
What does test prep consist of these days? Many years ago I was a kid in a state that did annual standardized tests. My fifth grade teacher spent some class time on the basics of taking a multiple-choice test like that.
I've said before that the last time I took the GREs the tests were given on a computer that took away most of those strategies. You couldn't go to the next question until you'd answered the current one, and you couldn't go back to previous questions.
On “Allowances”
When I was a lad old enough to understand money, my Dad was a field auditor/engineer for an insurance company. At least a third of the time he was on the road. So I grew up with Mom's name on the bank accounts, and Dad got an allowance for personal expenses, because decisions had to be made and he wasn't there. Any sort of major purchase decision they made jointly and Mom got the final word. When did this make a difference in my life?
1) I got my reading jones from Dad. He taught me that some books are worth skipping lunch for because the allowance won't cover both. Some aren't.
2) I recall that when my wife and I combined "my" money and "your" money into "our" money I told her, "No two people balance a checkbook exactly the same way. I refuse to learn your way, and don't expect you to learn my way. Do you trust me to balance it?" After a sufficiently long silence I smiled and said, "I absolutely trust you to take care of the money," and dumped that whole burden.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024”
All good conspiracy theories borrow from reality :^)
"
Is it an alternate Tuesday? No? Well, I'll believe in conspiracy theories for a few minutes anyway.
Suppose you want to convert the US to an authoritarian state. We know from history that strong-president systems tend to fail eventually and almost always in that direction. One of the situations in which that failure happens is when the legislative branch locks up. The president gets away with taking over because the legislature can't address problems.
One way to get to that point is to overload the legislature. In a large complex modern economy, one way to do that is to pile on the minutia. Don't let them delegate to lower levels of government. Don't let them delegate to regulatory agencies. Encourage members of the legislature to draw everything out.
On ““Dune: Part Two” Movie Review”
Sandworms are as impossible as dragons without resorting to magic. Estimate the strength of material necessary to support that mass and shape -- ain't going to happen without magic. Or the energy required to displace sand at any speed. Assume any sort of chemical source and you're stuck with impossible internal temperatures. The worms are one of the reasons I never read past the first book.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024”
9-0 that states can't strike candidates for federal offices based on Section 3. 5-4 that only Congress can do so.
On “Weekend Plans Post: One of Two Things You Can Be Sure Of”
Volunteered to help the HOA remove tree stakes on Saturday. This is a largely sane HOA. At one of the last lots the woman living there gave permission for us to go inside the front fence and remove two stakes. She assured us that her large dog -- some sort of mastiff cross that clearly violates the HOA's rules on dog size -- was under control. Just as we were finishing she opened her front door and the mastiff got through the gap. There was much barking and growling and the rest of the group got through the front gate. I was the last one in line and just before I was out the dog snapped at me. Put a hole in my jeans and left me with a shallow tear in the skin on the back of my thigh a couple of inches long.
The HOA notified the property management company with a formal request that the dog be removed. The resident will be notified on Monday, and if the dog is still there in 30 days animal control will take it. Because there is a biting incident, if the dog is taken it will almost certainly be put down. I feel badly for the dog. My injury is slight; every few years I do worse to myself be falling off a bicycle. It's a 110-pound part mastiff; someone(s) obviously failed at the training and socialization a dog that's going to get that big needs. I've been back over my recollection of the important seconds multiple times; did I do something wrong that triggered the aggressive dog?
"
When we moved 3+ years ago, my wife's dementia was already at a point where keeping her on task was difficult. As a result, an embarrassing amount of stuff from her office and the basement just got thrown in boxes and moved. It all went into the basement of the new townhouse, which despite the upstairs being considerably smaller than the old house, has a larger basement. Since the kids and I put her in memory care 11 months ago, and it's clear this is permanent -- or until the money runs out -- I have been (very) slowly working my way through the basement, recycling and discarding.
One of the things the builder left was a 12x24' piece of the carpet. I don't know that it's that size, but that's what the note on it says. It's folded, not rolled, so takes up more floor space than it needs to. I've got enough space now to, with some care, unfold and refold and otherwise manipulate it and get it rolled up. That's this weekend's project.
My daughter wasn't happy when I told her. "Dad, you're 70. Should you really be doing things like that?" I pointed out the dumbbells by the couch and told her that if the TV got turned on after dinner, I spent 20-25 minutes using the dumbbells and my body weight for strength training. Her daughters are lunatics. I've caught all of them doing something insane on hikes or at the playground. Caught in the sense of grabbing the waistband of their jeans as they overbalanced and were going to fall into the river.
On “Presidential Standards and Fitness”
Medicaid. Medicare is a purely federal program. Not that I blame Philip. When I worked on the Colorado legislature budget staff, doing presentations before the joint budget committee, I almost always hesitated to make sure I said Medicaid.
"
One of the fundamental skills a politician should have in a media age is "hit your mark, deliver your lines".
I have read stories about The Apprentice that flat out say Trump couldn't do it. He would, for example, fire the wrong person and leave the set. Then the director and writers were left to find enough footage they could splice together to make that fit some sort of story.
Even in Reagan's second term, as dementia set in, his years as a professional actor left him with the ability to learn the lines, hit the mark, and deliver them on the first take.
I had a great deal more respect for actors generally after a tech job required me to make a bunch of video clips. Hit the mark, deliver your lines, sound like you're as enthusiastic about it on the fifth take as the first.
On “Don’t Learn the Wrong Lesson From Laken Riley’s Murder”
Recall that it's Colorado, and not all of the TABOR restrictions (and other amendments) have been removed at the state level. Those provide incentives to structure things oddly. It was one of the "interesting" things about working for the legislative budget staff. One year we went through the statutes for regular unemployment "insurance" and changed every instance of the word tax with premium, then declared UI to be a pseudo-agency whose revenue and spending didn't count against those limits.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/26/2024”
Assorted Arab sovereign wealth funds?
"
All those Trump properties are leveraged up the ying yang so a liquidator probably can’t muster the necessary cash by just selling one.
I have been told by lawyerly types that order of precedence in New York is employees, then government (including judgements), then secured debt. They said that if the state seizes Trump Tower and sells it for enough to satisfy the judgement, both Trump and the secured debt holders take a bath. IANAL and can't speak to the accuracy, just saying that I've been told that.
On “On Parenting and Divorce”
At some point in the last few years, a discussion like this here on the site concluded that qualifying to be a belay person at the local climbing club was not an unreasonable thing.
"
The statistics say that a lot of marriages don't survive the PhD grind and the publish-or-perish period that follows. When I think through the list of PhDs I've known well enough to find out some of their personal history, more of them than not went through a divorce during that period.
"
When I was on the state legislature budget staff here, during the summer interim between sessions the staff would go see field work within the agencies in each of our portfolios. I sat in the back of the room while a case worker had her monthly meeting with a family where she was trying to make the family court's arrangement work. Two kids. Mom wasn't there because she was in drug rehab again. Dad wasn't there because he was in jail after breaking someone's face in a bar brawl. Two sets of grandparents who obviously despised each other. After the session, the case worker told me I should attend all of their meetings, the family was much better behaved with the guy in a coat and tie sitting in the back. Then I went out to my car and cried for a bit before I went back to the office.
The next day someone asked me what I had learned. "I don't know without looking it up what we pay our case workers. It's not enough."
On “Throughput: Oydsseus Edition”
Wanted: Potential astronauts with terminal illness for one-way trip to the moon...
"
Notice that the Artemis III landing as currently planned requires SpaceX to make at least a dozen SH/Starship flights, with at least three versions of Starship. A big fuel depot in low Earth orbit, a smaller fuel depot in low lunar orbit, the lander itself. More likely, two dozen flights.
NASA is required by statute to use SLS/Orion to carry the astronauts from Earth to LLO. Almost $30B in development, running expenses to be able to build and operate the system about $2B per year, cost of the completely expendable SLS/Orion pair another $2B per launch. SpaceX is supposed to do the rest for a total of about $4B.
It's a pretty safe bet that very few, if any, of two dozen SpaceX launches will be carrying people and life support.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.