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.

Yea, it’s an interesting one. AFAIU, the delineated powers are basically command of the military and the power to pardon. I really don’t see how a Crime can generally be applicable to either of those. It’s not like “commanding the army” can just become a crime.

But regulating what the army can legally do … seems like a very natural thing. I don’t know if individuals of the military in the US can be responsible under ordinary law for anything. If so, then I don’t see why that would extend to the president should they order something that’s obviously a crime. If not, then that’s that. And again, there are probably natural exceptions to carve out regarding the very nature of military action that would lead to preposterous inconsistencies if they could possible be made generally criminal … where again, it seems to me that you don’t need immunity … it’s just the nature of the power that is amenable to falling within the meaning of legislative regulation.

Beyond all of that though … there’s the opening line of Article II:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America

WTF is “the executive power”?! I’m sure there have been attempts in the US to give it some shape … but I’d also wager it’s been left somewhat nebulous too, involving elements quite distinct from whatever powers Congress/Law can confer. Does that count as an enumerated power?

Otherwise … yea I’m with you. The “official acts” thing seems more than wonky to me … seems downright expansive. Excluding military action and whatever “fuzzy” powers may be considered intrinsic … I’d imagine most of the executive’s powers come from legislative laws. So the body conferring power can’t constrain it to “not doing something criminal”!!!

I’ve wondered since having a brief look at the decision that the SCOTUS is playing a game here … where they do not want Trump’s trials to affect the election and are hoping to clarify this decision and what “official” means at a later date after the election.

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.

Yea I dunno … why not just have no immunity? It’s not like the whole idea of the separation of powers to ensure power is freely exercised … it’s the opposite.

If a president has to pause for moment before doing something to ask their lawyer if it would be a crime … maybe that’s the point of having fucking legal system and constitution?

Sotomayer’s dissent provided pretty good evidence (AFAICT) that the framers would have put criminal immunity into the constitution if they thought it wise … because it was a known idea at the time that had been done by some states regarding their governors. They didn’t. Cuz that’s the whole point … “no man is above the law”.

And as for Congressional impeachment being paramount … I’m not sure that’s either necessary or even consistent with the Constitution (again, as Sotomayer’s dissent addresses).

For example … Article 1, section 3 (emphasis mine):

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

In short (AFAICT) … impeachment and general legal liability are not the same thing … and the latter totally still applies.

Beyond all of that, the general law probably achieves everything that the majority’s decision was worried about (while they were conspicuously not worried about all of the other things that one should be when crowning a king). Civil immunity is a well established doctrine (government’s just too big and complex a thing for civil responsibility to make sense). And while I don’t know anything about it, there are similar-ish ideas around criminal responsibilities that just don’t make sense for the very nature of a governmental responsibility, war, I think, being a classic example. Sotomayer again speaks about these things.

Overall, once you start to squint at it, the whole decision is kinda weird. To elevate the separation of powers to the point of creating literal lawlessness seems like plain “not seeing the forest for the trees”.

The bit I wonder about, without knowing US Constitutional law/theory well at all … is whether a democratic factor has any bearing. A criminal law is created by the legislature, a democratic body. And also caries requirements for judgment by jury. So couldn’t an argument be made that the centrality of democratic power in the constitution cuts through any concerns about the separation of powers that the SCOTUS had, and enables democratically ordained law to quash concerns about whatever interference the judiciary (or legislature?) might exercise with the executive.

I know there’s the whole “it’s not a democracy, it’s a republic” thing … but the constitution dedicates so much text to establishing the mechanisms of democracy (including the means by which the constitution itself can be altered) that it seems ridiculous to conclude that democratic power is anything but central.

Science coms whinge: not a single graph! Come on!

Otherwise, my own experience … exam hall exams are awful … they’re distracting, the number of people around is distracting, they’re often either cold or warm … this result makes sense.

I’ve taken exams in smaller spaces and they definitely felt more calm.

Every browser released since 2020 supports this

It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.

Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?

But nah. These goobers got high off npm modules and did shots of JSX in the bathroom at lunch time.

Fucking LoL!

Anyone here have thoughts about doing basic interactive stuff with at most vanilla JS?

I’m sympathetic, but to a limit.

There are a lot of academics out there with a good amount of clout and who are relatively safe. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything remotely worthy on these topics from any researcher with clout, publicly at least. Even privately (I used to be in academia), my feeling was most don’t even know how to think and talk about it, in large part because I don’t think they do think and talk about it all.

And that’s because most academics are frankly shit at thinking and engaging on collective and systematic issues. Many just do not want to, and instead want to embrace the whole “I live and work in an ideal white tower disconnected from society because what I do is bigger than society”. Many get their dopamine kicks from the publication system and don’t think about how that’s not a good thing. Seriously, they don’t deserve as much sympathy as you might think … academia can be a surprisingly childish place. That the publication system came to be at all is proof of that frankly, where they were all duped by someone feeding them ego-dopamine hits. It’s honestly kinda sad.

Yep. But that is all a part of the problem. If academics can’t organise themselves enough to have some influence over something which is basically owned and run them already (they write the papers and then review the papers and then are the ones reading and citing the papers and caring the most about the quality and popularity of the papers) … then they can’t be trusted to ensure the quality of their practice and institutions going forward, especially under the ever increasing encroachment of capitalistic forces.

Modern day academics are damn well lucky that they inherited a system and culture that developed some old aristocratic ideals into a set of conventions and practices!

Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.

Woah woah … this is legit awesome! Just tested (on lemmy.ml) and yep … seems to be working like a charm!

Give up to matc-pub for the PR (and maybe a new core dev for lemmy too?).

I figure this makes live megathread style posts/chats more viable … which is certainly cool!

I’ve mentioned this before, but an interesting possibility might be to enable selected posts to be “live chats” through a websocket like process as lemmy used to be, just for selected posts for certain windows of time, whenever a live chat dynamic is sort.

It’s the sort of thing that could be scheduled and subject to admin approval or something if resources are a concern.

Otherwise … awesome to see!

Despite not being in contact with GenAlpha or the education system ATM, this generally resonates. From what I’ve gathered the education system has been transformed into a production line with KPIs to hit and large bureaucracies rather than solid foundations in their purposes and ideals. And this is a trend, AFAICT, beyond just Gen Alpha. The other dimension is the continued rat-race-ification and capitalism gamification of education and its continuation into professional life. Either the world is going to shit and there isn’t a point to anything or it’s all about being born into wealth or hacking the system in which case nothing means anything again. That world view has leaked into the education system itself and its operators and so what should we expect children to do?

As for millennials being bad parents … I’m not a parent … but as a millennial I tend to be critical of my generation, not in a blameworthiness sense but in terms of there not being too much to celebrate … IMO we’re the “we just did what we were supposed to” generation and we’re sad because we want a world better than what we understand how to make. So, whether it’s true or not, that such a generation would raise children that are directionless and dumb wouldn’t surprise me.

my two cents anyway.

It doesn’t snow though, and despite the stereotype, actually doesn’t have much rain (vancouver has much more AFAICT) … and melbourne actually has sunshine in winter.

We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities;

That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option. Plenty of people want their social media to have options for being relatively closed or relatively open, and I think it’s healthy to provide those options.

I hear you though on the lemmy-world community closing possibility (and similar) … that would easily be an abuse IMO and it’s not entirely clear what would or could happen.

To be fair though, the whole lemmy-world instance (or any other for that matter) could simply turn federation off at any point to the same effect you fear, so it’s arguably just part of the federation flexibility. In this case, any community mod has their hand on the switch for their community, which means we’ll probably see it get used in controversial circumstances at least once. But for any given community, going either private or local-only is sure to drop user engagement or be a PITA regarding managing the “approved users” list, so I can’t see it being a popular action TBH.

All good … the whole post was started by me misreading in the first place I think!

I think it’s a good option to have. Most who start communities want reach and engagement. But for those situations where you want a more in-group vibe, something like this is essential.

It’s sorely missing in the fediverse and a rather good form of social media TBH that the fediverse, until now, has ignored (while it has kinda taken off on discord etc).

Private communities though are intended to federate, just with gated membership. And they could be useful for particularly niche communities that don’t want to be disturbed by those who mainly use the All feed.

It will be interesting to see how it interacts with federation/defederation dynamics though. Lemmy-world for instance, could easily start going local only because they kinda already think they’re the whole of the threadiverse and are certainly big enough to sustain themselves.

Ha … it seems like it at least.

I think I was being dumb in asking the question actually.

It’s really just about the circle of users to whom the community is visible.

Local-only … visible only to users of the instance. I’d presumed that it could be writable only to users of the instance such that only users of the instance could post/comment there. But double checking, no, it’s only visible if you’re logged on with an account on that instance … so pretty private in the end actually.

private communities … which are apparently coming … are visible only to approved users, whether on the local instance or not.

And presumably, these will be stackable, so that a local-only + private community will be visible only to approved users from the local instance. So getting pretty closed.

OMFG … it’s beautiful!

You need to see it to believe it I think. I was generally on the side of “too complex” but then came across instances perfect for it and used it right away and found it pleasant.

I’m still generally on the side of “too complex” though, and think there are probably better things for PSF to work on (cough packaging cough).

Really nice snapshot of how much Einstein’s line (apocryphal?) was accurate:

A perfection of means and a confusion of ends seems to characterise our age

so much clever/technical stuff being done while missing the big picture

Maybe the better analogy is that with vim and nano, we see many text editors and IDEs with GUIs.

Interesting. I’m not so sure about the divide you draw between vim/nano and GUI IDEs. Historically vim and nano were basically the GUIs of their time. Preceding vim was ex and ed, which were basically CLI text editing tools build for the actually printed on paper typewriter interfaces computers like PDPs used to run. If you’re not familiar, and you think vim can be obscure … try running ed MYFILE! It’s basically a sort of grep and sed REPL for editing text (where, interestingly, historically tools like grep actually came out of ed not the other way round). Vim can be used in a sort of ed mode with vim -e (AFAIU it’s actually ex mode, which is a more advanced version of ed).

So I’d say vim is more like any sort of GUI/TUI or text editor plugin for git and git is like the old ancient CLI equivalent ed that no one knows about or uses anymore because having a visual mode just makes too much sense.

And this is basically where I fall … I think a vgit should exist, that provides a terminal TUI of some sort, and that as with vim and ed it should totally supplant git while also having a CLI mode too. That this hasn’t happened, back to my original point, is a problem and honestly a little strange.