“The President, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the State. Congress may decide amiss without destroying the Union, because the electoral body in which Congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members. But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent men or bad citizens, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war.” - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1831
As co-organizers of Local-First Conf 2024 in Berlin, Adam Wiggins (@adamwiggins) and Johannes Schickling (@schickling) reflect on the event and share their learnings.
🇬🇧 🚆🔧 #StopKillingTrains! Not only computer games but entire trains are being arbitrarily disabled by their manufacturers. EU Commissioner Breton now admits that EU law doesn‘t protect us.
I think it's fair that the European Commission is challenging Meta's "pay or okay" plan under the Digital Markets Act. But what I don't find so great is that the Commission is using DMA investigations to shroud lobby meetings with Meta under the mantle of market investigations. This means that, in effect, Big Tech meetings will be hidden under a cloak of secrecy as more and more of their business falls under DMA or DSA investigations. See this FOI refusal I recently got: https://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/metas_subscription_no_ads_plan
The NeXTlevel was NeXT Software's first handheld device, eagerly awaited but canned just two weeks from release when Apple purchased NeXT and chose not to pursue gaming. All 250,000 release devices were pulled from channels and unceremoniously rolled into landfill out northwest of Dubbo.
The vision of a President above the law, transformed to a king, was introduced by the Federalist Society and conservative academics from way back. Bill Barr began the effort to make it so. I wrote about this in 2019 (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/nancy-pelosi-trump-barr-executive-privilege-abuse-power.html). Today’s decree from John Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett is what the Federalist-Society-controlled Republican crime syndicate has been promising for a long time. 1/
The arrogation of power to the Supreme Court and the President, and away from Congress, is as much an assault on U.S. democracy as the Republican crime syndicate’s efforts to deny ballot access and voting rights and to gerrymander as many districts as possible. 2/
A stat I found interesting is that meat consumption / person is falling steadily in Germany, down 15% in the last 5 years while the meat replacement industry is booming. Sadly much of the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction.
(sorry for the Hungarian text, but the graphs should be pretty self explanatory)
@Techaltar the same trend has been happening in the Netherlands. And I've noticed since we moved here that the meat-free section of the grocery store is over twice as big and is also more prominently displayed.
I barely eat meat anymore because I genuinely prefer the alternatives. Like Beyond Meat burgers are way less greasy and they're even available at fast food joints.
I have to assume the worldwide trend is from people being lifted out of poverty who can finally eat meat more often.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) continues to be the member of Congress who best demonstrates the qualities of leadership so badly needed by her party. She will not succeed in impeaching these Supreme Court justices, but she will shine a light on their corruption and lay down a marker for voters.
@JamesGleick This can’t be ignored. There is a fast approaching showdown that MUST take place if you care about what we are to become.
BRAVO, more power to her, and to the members of Congress, who understand what an outrageously unconstitutional ruling that SOTUS spit out in their disregard for our nation.
Checks and balances no longer work when corruption has infested the body, which means that although I’m a pessimist, this action, some action must be taken before the next phase. 🧐
@JamesGleick@futurebird In #Minnesota ; we currently have Ilhan Omar, who has called for impeaching the illegitimate extremists who form the current SCOTUS majority, and Tina Smith, who has long been advocating expanding the court and appointing new justices who respect the Constitution & human rights.
May everyone represented by other members of Congress encourage them to do likewise.
Ladybird browser goes serious: GitHub billionaire co-founder now involved
Well, it seems we've got a better understanding now of why Andreas Kling decided to leave the SerenityOS project to focus entirely on Ladybird, the web browser that grew out of his hobby operating system. They've got some big plans for where to take Ladybird, and I'm saying "they" because i