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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The wording is specifically that you need to be qualified to hold the office of the president, not to run for the office.

    But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

    With qualifications to hold the office being:

    No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

    So the phrasing of the 22nd created an issue:

    No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once

    Elsewhere it talks about eligibility to hold office, but the 22nd only refers to election.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-22/overview-of-twenty-second-amendment-presidential-term-limits

    There’s also a similar issue with the speaker of the house, where eligibility isn’t as clearly defined as one might expect.

    While the intent of the law was clearly to codify the previous pattern of capping it at two terms (and being spiteful to FDR) it’s phrased with enough ambiguity that it’s clear how they’ll argue it.



  • More that it normalizes a return to military expansion of national borders.
    Russia is trying to grow their territory by annexing neighbors.
    China would plainly like to.
    The US didn’t, which made the scales tilt towards Russia acting badly and unusually badly.

    With the shift, Russia is just the only one acting on a policy item that all the major powers have.

    And like clockwork: https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-arctic-trump-greenland-2dbd00625c2c0c3bd94a2c96c7015b69

    “Putin says US push for Greenland rooted in history, vows to uphold Russian interest in the Arctic”

    Speaking at a policy forum in the Artic port of Murmansk, Putin noted that the United States first considered plans to win control over Greenland in the 19th century, and then offered to buy it from Denmark after World War II.

    “It can look surprising only at first glance and it would be wrong to believe that this is some sort of extravagant talk by the current U.S. administration,” Putin said. “It’s obvious that the United States will continue to systematically advance its geostrategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic.”

    The US and Greenland; Russia and Ukraine: it only matters that it’s rooted in history, right?




  • I think you’re confusing me with someone else, because I’ve been perfectly chil, and I haven’t jumped to any conclusions.

    Person I replied to said they shouldn’t publish because it’s classified. We have case law that says freedom of the press outweighs that with a very high bar for exceptions. We shouldn’t censor ourselves just because the news, which is currently the focus of a lot of talk, is “boring”. Make them actually ask at least.


  • Have you read the messages? According to the person who decided not to publish them there was stuff potentially more significant.
    War plans being accidentally sent to a journalist is intrinsically in the public interest.

    I was unaware the classified information being “boring” was a good reason for a news outlet to self censor.

    Also… The Pentagon papers were literally just “boring war plans”. War plans often contain motivation and desired outcomes, which are sometimes big news.




  • It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

    The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
    The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

    Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
    We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

    Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

    As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.



  • No, the supreme Court ruled that the individual who is the president has immunity for actions taken in a presidential capacity. Absolute immunity for exercising presidential powers, and and presumptive for actions taken as the president, pending the prosecutions ability to argue that holding the individual personally liable couldn’t possibly infringe of their exercise of constitutional powers, and they have to make that case without referring to intent.

    The specific case was about when trump, as president, contacted Governors and law enforcement to try to convince them to overturn the election for him. Under their ruling, since he was acting as the president, they decided you can’t consider his intent. So the prosecution would need to argue that there’s no possible infringement on constitutional power if the president can be prosecuted for discussing an election, election security, and election interference with Governors and law enforcement.


  • There was a time when I was a student that I spent a lot of time near a particular coffee shop, and more than you would typically expect for just studying and the like, since it turned into the place where my friend group basically hung out most of the time.
    In any case, it was a decently high traffic area and since I was there a lot I found two wallets and a cellphone over the time I was there a lot.

    One wallet had an emergency contact I was able to call, think it was their mother, and that I’d be at the coffee shop for a bit. They brought me cookies, and I was thrilled.
    Next person just had their phone number, and they acted like I was a creep for saying I had their wallet and would like to give it back to them, so I told them I was leaving it with the cashier and left it at that and was a bit sad, since being told off for trying to be nice is a bummer.
    Cellphone was the worst. I called their most recent number and told them what was up (this was clearly before ubiquitous lock screens). Owner called me back in the same number and threatened to call the cops on me so I hung up, powered off the phone and put it back where I found it. Felt sad.

    Given how it seems like everyone has lost their minds now, I’m not sure I would risk letting someone know I found their stuff. I’d still try to return it because that’s the right thing to do, but I’m not sure if I’d be willing to use my own phone number or anything.
    If people will shoot you for using their driveway to turn around I can only imagine what they’d do for a bus pass, student ID and a loyalty punch card for a bakery.


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pancakes

    Seems very relevant. Found it while trying to find the etymology of “flapjack”, since I thought about it and that’s not a normal word.

    I also found out that some countries have a pancake day, where they eat pancakes. Seems to be a different method of celebrating what we call Mardi gras or Fat Tuesday, depending on your proximity to France/Louisiana. We often have something like a donut.
    Seems the intent is the same: eat all your animal fat before lent so it doesn’t go to waste.

    Your cooking looks delicious! I would call it a crepe, but whatever it’s called I would eat it. :)


  • The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

    It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
    Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

    Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.


  • I’ve never understood the people who seem to not get that some people actually don’t mind scanning their stuff and putting it in bags, and insist that that’s the line between what the customer does and the employee. They also used to carry your groceries to the car for you, and you can also get them to pick everything up, bag it and bring it to your car or house. It’s not like the checkout process is the special part that can’t change.

    Yeah, they want to save money by having fewer people get more customers checked out faster. I don’t really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.