I've said it before and I will probably say it again, this is digital assault and should be thought of and treated that way. Companies, and their officers, should be treated criminally for things like this. Most people do not know/understand this is happening and that is by design. Is this view a little hyperbolic? Possibly, but the privacy scales are so far tipped against the average person right now that we need more extreme views and actions to start fixing things.
A core concept here is that of ownership. People think they own their accounts and data. Stories like these, and unfortunately the law, make it clear that they don't own anything. I personally think it is false advertising of companies to even hint at ownership. Words like 'buy' shouldn't be allowed since it implies owning. They should only be allowed to say 'rent' or 'grant a limited license'.
When you sign up for an Apple account, you aren't "buying" anything. In fact there is a set of terms & conditions you agree to when signing up which most likely includes language stating that your account can be closed with the discretion of the platform owner. What we need isn't a shift from "buying" to "renting", but instead something akin to a Consumer Bill of Rights that states that you are entitled to appeal account closure if you are in good standing and can prove as much.
This is really the consumer's fault for not reading a 5-billion word terms and conditions contract before they sign up for one of the two nearly-identical phone brands they need to operate in the modern economy.
I would rather the law make it such that you really are buying, than codify that you own nothing. The ambiguity isn't great, on that we agree, but why would you weaken the citizen's standing to remove it?
I want a tech shift to allow this concept. Ownership will require me to physically maintain my own data, or at least have the ability to do so. I really want personal cloud capabilities so that services like iTunes and others are required to be able to use my own personal, and completely independently maintained, storage. That way I could either self host or contract out but then Apple would loose their vendor lock-in and services like iTunes would be forced to play nicer. The core problem is the iCloud lock-in/bundling. If I were looking at anti-trust breakup I would start with this idea, forcing alternative cloud storage options.
Should people really not have the option to not-buy if they see other advantages in it? Should the idea of ownership being valuable be imposed upon citizens? (And if we all accept that it has value, could that not simply reflect in a price differential?)
The law can’t change that you own nothing. What do you own if the company closes, if the shutdown their servers.
Law can’t enforce that the servers keep running.
At this point I think we can clearly see that the interpretation of our laws is extremely partisan at the moment, to the point that what exact text says is basically irrelevant. The broader issue here is a massive, completely unchecked, power grab that is -deeply- troubling. Our checks and balances, are failing us and this is another sign of their deterioration.
> I think we can clearly see that the interpretation of our laws is extremely partisan at the moment, to the point that what exact text says is basically irrelevant
By “at the moment,” you mean “in the 1930s when the Supreme Court bent over backward to uphold FDD’s administrative state, right?” When they effectively overruled the Supreme Court’s 1926 decision in Myers v. United States, right?
Because the text of the constitution says this: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Show me how you get from that to executive agencies exercising executive power independent of the President.
Hamilton thought it was superfluous. Federalist 74 says:
> “The President may require the opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” This I consider as a mere redundancy in the plan; as the right for which it provides would result of itself from the office.
Note that this provision must be redundant even without a unitary executive. Because otherwise, the implication is the only thing the President can do with principal officers is to ask them for an opinion.
Some modern scholars think the provision, though functionally redundant, is there to address a dispute that arose during the debates about executive councils: https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/reconciling-the-unitary-executiv... (“Unsurprisingly, the issue of an executive council arose at the Philadelphia Convention. Several proposals to create a council of state or a privy council were offered. Some of the proposed councils would have provided advice to the President but would not have required that he follow it, whereas others might have required that he secure the consent of the council. But each of the proposals was rejected. Instead, the Convention took language from part of one of the executive council proposals – ‘he may require the written opinions of any one or more members” of the council – as a model for the Opinions Clause.’”).
So the clause is there not to describe what the principal officers must do, but what the President need not do. The President may but does not need to consult his principal officers before taking action.
> otherwise, the implication is the only thing the President can do with principal officers is to ask them for an opinion.
That's not at all the implication... how do you even reach that conclusion? The obvious implication is that the president can only do what he is legally permitted, which means he could do whatever Congress provides for in law, in addition to what's in the constitution. Because, you know, his job is to execute the law. And Congress and the constitution are the ones establishing the legal framework for agencies.
> This I consider as a mere redundancy in the plan; as the right for which it provides would result of itself from the office.
It's nice that Hamilton thought that, but what did those who wrote it think? It seems safe to assume they wrote it for a reason, not as fluff. Which brings us to...
> Some modern scholars think the provision, though functionally redundant, is there to address a dispute that arose during the debates about executive councils [...] the clause is there not to describe what the principal officers must do, but what the President need not do. The President may but does not need to consult his principal officers before taking action.
It's great some modern scholars think this, but this also isn't compelling. If that's what they wanted... they could and should have just said that directly, not left it as a historical puzzle for people to speculate about.
> That's not at all the implication... how do you even reach that conclusion? The obvious implication is that the president can only do what he is legally permitted, which means he could do whatever Congress provides for in law, in addition to what's in the constitution
The constitution doesn’t list any other supervisory powers the president has over officers. So if the Opinions Clause isn’t redundant, Congress needs to spell out all other supervisory authority, down to something as little as asking for opinions.
That reading isn’t just inconsistent with the unitary executive view, it’s inconsistent with every other common view of how the executive works. It would not only mean that Congress can create independent agencies, but that all cabinet officers are independent by default. Nobody seriously thinks that’s true, but that’s the implication of the non-redundant reading of the Opinions Clause.
It’s true that the framers probably didn’t put a redundant power in there just for funsies. But it’s also true that drafters don’t hide elephants in molehills. Article II only mentions executive officers in passing. It would be very odd if the drafters meant to invest them with tremendous independent power only by implication.
> It would not only mean that Congress can create independent agencies, but that all cabinet officers are independent by default. Nobody seriously thinks that’s true, but that’s the implication of the non-redundant reading of the Opinions Clause.
No. "By default"? That's a really weird way to make this sound crazy when it simply isn't. Congress is the branch that creates the departments and creates the legal framework around them in the first place. The president faithfully executes the law. That's not unserious, that's literally the point of the whole system.
A realistic Congress is, generally, not going to pass an act establishing an entire department and somehow neglect to prescribe how the heads are appointed and removed. (!) If it did that for some reason, then yeah, the heads would "by default" be independent, until/unless Congress prescribed otherwise in the future. And... so what? Either that'd be deliberate -- in which case it's equivalent to explicitly prescribing their independence, so it makes no difference unless your real belief is that Congress can't even prescribe this explicitly -- or it would be the result of hundreds of people simultaneously goofing, in which case they can just... fix it by passing another act. Or they deliberately wanted to sow chaos or play games by leaving this unclear, in which case... what else do you expect. In that case it's up to the voters to vote them out, or for courts to rule something if this silly hypothetical ever happens.
All of which is to say: "by default" basically means nothing here. It feels like a pointless argument with an agenda. The idea that the "by default" scenario somehow means some clause was superfluous and deliberately added for funsies is the unserious take here.
It does exercise executive power, otherwise it wouldn’t be constitutional. Only congress can make laws. When Congress delegates rulemaking authority to an agency, the agency makes rules pursuant to the executive power to execute the laws.
For example, Congress can ban “unfair competition.” But it can leave it to the executive agency charged with enforcing the law to define rules for exactly what constitutes unfair competition. That’s permissible because deciding exactly what’s unfair reasonably falls within the scope of enforcement discretion.
You may be right, but it may be more accurate to say checks and balances are shifting, not failing wholesale.
Judicial review of executive actions is stronger and more frequent than its ever been. Congressional power of the purse is secure. And the REINS Act (not yet passed) would require Congress to approve major agency rules before they take effect
In my reality, POTUS is doing everything he can to grind down Congress's power of the purse.
He's actively pressuring Fed policy, which at its most extreme gives the executive a blank check as it can force the Fed to purchase treasuries, filling the executive's coffers directly.
At the same time, they're arguing that pocket rescissions give them the right to avoid spending any individual dollar they do not wish to spend, even if Congress has allocated it.
Tell me what gives you confidence that the power of the purse is secure?
>In my reality, POTUS is doing everything he can to grind down Congress's power of the purse.
And it hasn't been working well. DOGE failed, SCOTUS has not yet issued a final determination on pocket rescissions, and the Fed can only buy treasuries on the secondary market, meaning the bond market is in control. There is also the debt ceiling which requires Congress to raise it.
DOGE didn't "fail" to maim the power of the purse. It actually achieved that goal. It failed to produce savings for taxpayers. Totally different.
SCOTUS "hasn't issued a final determination" on almost any issue put in front of it in Trump 2. Yet they consistently land on "the administration can do what it wants while we delay actually ruling, even if several lower courts have ruled against this outcome after actually hearing the case at length."
The Fed's prohibition from buying Treasuries directly is only relevant if the FOMC is actually independent. If it's not, nothing prevents POTUS from saying "the Fed will buy $x in treasuries at $y," directing them to do so, and creating a clear arb opportunity for all the intermediary banks to buy and re-sell their slice.
Sure, that'd trigger a financial crisis, but that's kind of the whole problem with idiot demagogues: they trigger such crises as a matter of course.
If a Democrat gets the presidency in 2028 do you think they'll restore the FCC's independence? I'd be willing to bet not, because no matter which party is in power, they are going to want to continue to concentrate that power.
Exactly why this is a terrible thing. It isn't liberal or conservative to say 'power accumulation in one person is bad'. We need to be actively stripping the executive, and any entrenched position, of power. Democracy needs decentralized power.
Not really. Within the Court, the divide is primarily between originalists and pragmatists. This has been a fight going back a long time in legal theory. It had been dominated by pragmatists since the 1920s and the tide started to turn in the late 1980s. The current Court is dominated by originalists.
It has little to do with political parties even though originalist thought is more aligned with conservative social and political thinking and pragmatists are more aligned with progressive thinking.
Yes, it seems as though a politically-aligned congress is ceding lots of its authority to the executive, while the SCOTUS is restraining the rest of the judiciary from checking the executive.
The shame of this is, it is in defiance of the design of the Founders, and will take a LONG time to correct, if we don't descent into authoritarianism before it is corrected.
I'm all about monitoring privacy related things, but I think the bigger piece here is the monitoring of city counsels for this kind of data. Wow! I just hadn't thought about doing that before. This is a massive trove of information and building a strong, more generic platform around it could yield huge insights to enable fast action as municipalities start implementing things. I have actually built some code to review local city counsel meetings by transcribing them and downloading meeting packets but opening this up at a larger scale could be a massive thing.
Fundamentally we need safety valves for labor supply that always creates a net advantage for workers, but how? My take has always been that advances in productivity that reduce the need for labor should be given back to the workforce via incentives like:
- sabbaticals/funded retraining opportunities: People leave to train creating a need for labor and at the same time increasing the value of labor. This would also create liquidity in the labor market since people would have opportunity to leave their current field and go to a different one.
- strong encouragement to retire earlier: Fewer people in the workforce and more people spending retirement means more demand for jobs and more demand for goods and services.
- limit the workweek more: Same argument as retirement
All of these have positives and negatives, but unless we start thinking about things like this we will get a world where labor is at a massive disadvantage and all the issues that leads to.
Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time.
With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it
The original report by Ember [1] is decent but clearly biased.
They assume each battery cycles entirely EVERY day - even in winter. They also assume PV is never curtailed - not even in summer. They of course ignore multi-day weather anomalies. Like wise for weekend/holiday demand variations. etc.
The best part of the report are real world bids of 2025 ESS projects.
I do look forward to local storage getting that cheap. If Standard Thermal (here I am hawking them again) succeeds, we could see local PV-generated seasonally stored 600 C heat at as little as $3/GJ -- competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.
I think there is a calculation that makes the point a little clearer. There is some distance, x, where it is cheaper to transport the electrons mechanically than it is to push them over a wire. Every month that distance gets shorter as battery prices drop. This gets even more advantageous for batteries when you start talking about variable use and generation since it is easier to change the destination or source of a battery container than it is to change the destination or source of transmission lines. My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly. Imagine a small city getting a local electricity provider. I actually think the way it is likely to go is that energy consumers (cities, factories, etc) will start installing backup power via battery shipment and then slowly start disconnecting from the larger grid as the cost of the battery container delivered power dips below the cost for transmission line delivered. The infrastructure is just so much more efficient for most use cases because we already have that infrastructure for shipping other goods.
> My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly.
That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.
This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.
Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
You probably don’t want to use regular batteries for that. I’d go with shipping energy as aluminum or something like that and use aluminum-air batteries. But regular hvdc seems really hard to beat with shipping of any kind.
> Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible.
Not at current power densities.
The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.
Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.
Surely batteries will be used in conjunction with solar, and as solar is already distributed (except for high latitudes), the need for power distribution will diminish as once you're setup with solar and batteries, you only really need the transmission lines to sell any excess power. Presumably, once solar is rolled out at scale, there will be little demand for purchasing excess power.
Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon *or* a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.
Or a different renewable, or nuclear, my point here isn't any particular answer just that there's cases where you might go for something other than PV+battery, and my point before is just about yeeting batteries around.
That said, re-reading the comment I was originally responding too, I may have inferred too much from:
> Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
And the previously quoted words "remote generation".
> Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon or a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.
I can imagine that they might go several months without usable sunlight, so yes, they'll likely need some form of energy distribution unless they plan on burning blubber for their energy needs.
Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
It's a modest ARM CPU, I wouldn't rely on it for a router but it can run Rpi Hole! Also Home Assistant integration, I use the TV remote to control LEDs/lights around the apartment
I totally forgot about the remote. That really opens up possibilities for home assistant type stuff. I hadn't looked at this space a lot before. I see some articles on how to jailbreak various devices but nothing about standardized distros to put on things out there. Something like dd wrt but for TVs could be pretty amazing. A project that is designed to give you a good interface, is privacy aware and hacker friendly (things that aren't just entertainment like home assistant stuff) would get a lot of interest. There has to be a reason this isn't a thing. I am guessing it is 99% a hardware reason. Maybe that is changing though? Modern devices have to have more capability so I bet the hardware on newer tvs is getting pretty strong.
These are exactly my thoughts as well, both the positives (it doesn't need to be air-tight) and the negatives (providing documentation). I don't know that there is a great system here. The best I can think of is having independent third parties that people can register with and that can provide a 'proof of eligibility' token tied to an e-mail address or something similar with the explicit, backed by law, understanding that sharing more than that proof of eligibility with a third party is a criminal offense. The money side of things would be that FB and the like would pay the proof company a service fee so they make money and FB gets the proof without getting access to your documents. Just a thought.
We need to force change to encourage growth and exploration. "Science advances one funeral at a time" acknowledge this but that doesn't mean actual death is needed. We need to create strong systems that encourage forcing people, and processes, out in everything we do. Term limits, retirement, etc etc. Nothing should have a 'forever' clause to it because nothing is forever.
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