IHeartBadCode

You’ll have to speak up. He can’t hear you over the leopards.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Goddamn this hits the exact thing that Democrats really need to learn.

There’s a ton of emotion in this nation. Given:

• The opioid crisis where the people responsible are in perpetual litigation.
• The wars we fought that costed us deaths of young people who had lives ahead of them, and scarred millions more. All so that a few rich asshats could profit.
• The corruption of large companies as they swindle the working class, only to watch legislators continue to profit off of insider trading.

And that’s just to name a few. There’s a ton of emotion in this nation. And Trump, for better or worse, taps into that emotion. The cut and dry democrats, they keep telling us, “The system will work, this time” and you have a public that just screams “well how soon is now then?”

Democrats cannot just keep tapping on the system as it currently stands when the system so obviously doesn’t deliver. There are hungry democrats looking for change to the system to form a more better system that will serve them, and the party just keeps dressing the bones of the long gone bird from days long pass.

Sanders fucking sinks the nail in a single stroke of the hammer on this. And Republicans are using that emotion, that pent up distrust of the system as it is, to move people in their direction. The entire point of this living government is to have a government, to have a system, that matches the people who are alive and having to deal with it. Sanders sees that and cut and dry Democrats keep going “but Trump will ruin the system that doesn’t work for you!!”

Goddamn, one day, they will learn. Democrats will pick up on what Sanders is saying one day. But holy shit, they are going to clearly take an incredibly long and winding road to get there. I don’t agree with where Republicans want to take us. I don’t agree with how Republicans want to get there. But goddamn, we’ve got to hand it to them that they’re actively pointing out the exact same thing the Sanders is pointing out. “Status Quo ain’t going to fucking work anymore.” The sooner the traditional Democrats learn that, the faster they can come back to being relevant.

Remember 4 years of Russia-gate, everyone

That whole thing was about Russia using social media to spend disinformation. The entire thing wasn’t that, Russia hacked into the ballot boxes and changed votes, it was that Russia was using social media as a means to give false information to the public.

Underpinning the whole Russia-gate episode is the fact that human beings still physically pushed the buttons they pushed and that the vote they cast was indeed the vote they wished to cast. So we still accept the results as, technically speaking, the people have spoken.

But c’mon, you’ve seen the increase in AI slop. You know the Russia-gate stuff is true. In fact, I would dare say this election cycle they’ve gotten worse at doing it as they’re still pretty new at the whole AI stuff. Now where I, myself, and other Democrats likely disagree is the how to solve it. Lots of Democrats want to ban AI and regulate social media, but my opinion is you can’t fight fire by banning the match. You have to teach fire safety and hope the public is smart enough to not set themselves on fire.

But the important aspect is in all of this, the ballots that were cast, we still respect the final tally. That’s the fundamental difference between the Russia-gate and Trump’s legal challenges. The Russia-gate stuff is basically people are being misled. Trump’s stuff was that people were literally altering the ballot computer.

I think people are still being misled… BUT, Trump won this one fair and square. The law doesn’t say a person being misled shouldn’t have their vote count, and such a law would be insanely stupid/incredibly dangerous, even if it favored my particular team. We fix being misled by educating people and so losing this election just means that the educating folks game needs to up the ante. Best anyone can do is put the sources out there, show where the misinformation is wrong, and leave it up to the voter to read all of that come to the conclusion that matches reality. But if they don’t, we’ve got to accept that and work on better messaging.

That’s how one makes a point. They present the view, present the evidence, and use a persuasive argument. The rest is up to the voter to put together.

“They’re not hurting the people they need to be hurting”

We are so going to be hearing this again.

state proceedings will be paused until after his term

Yes, I full expect the 34 counts sentencing by Merchan to be placed on hold until Jan. 21st, 2029. I’m surprised anyone is confused on this.

Trump won, he gets to get off scot-free from all the charges and investigation. That was literally the reason Trump ran.

Civil lawsuits

Well maybe. Depends with the new SCOTUS presumed immunity. Official acts wasn’t well defined and while no one is thinking rape is an official act, the manner by which the evidence was collected can be questioned.

At this rate, the civil stuff might continue, but there’s going to be so much resistance to the proceedings that they will effectively look as not even happening. The President can delay court motions because “I’m doing President stuff rn” and the Court has to presume that’s true. Rise and repeat until his second term is over.

what long term storage would be the best option for storing digital information

The biggest factor with passive storage, something that’s not refreshed. Optical media that’s made to last. M-DISC comes to mind, but there’s no proof that worse case 100 years is a valid claim. Chemically speaking, a well kept disc should keep 100 years, but that’s chemical composition in an ideal case. Nothing in manufacturing is perfect, so impurities are always going to be there robbing the lifespan of these discs.

Magnetic tape ideally lasts decades if not close to a century, but these are tapes that are kept in incredibly controlled conditions. If you’ve ever worked in the server world you’ll know that any plain Jane LTO magnetic tape can’t be trusted after collecting dust for anywhere close to five years.

We have scrolls, we have books, and we have stone tablets that have endured centuries, but the key in all of those is how well they were kept. The construction matters, but the bigger aspect is the environment they were kept in. For digital media, we don’t know any real way to keep digital data in a passive state for centuries because, well, we haven’t had digital data for that long. We’ve got really old punch cards that are close to that age, but even then, some of the oldest stacks are now sitting in hermetically sealed cases and are actively upkept to prevent UV damage by clear coating those cases on a regular basis.

And that’s the thing with digital media, keeping it in an active storage rather than passive may be the key for centuries of longevity. USB sticks are fine so long as someone remembers to plug them in and allow them to refresh every some many years. Most USB sticks use ceramic capacitors, so leakage there isn’t too much an issue. The bigger thing might be corrosion of the various traces and pins, but if well kept, that might take decades to eventually make an impact.

Sometimes, I like to parallel digital long term storage as the Ship of Theseus. If you keep moving the data from one device to another, it’s still the same data. And in that sense, the data can live forever. Even if there’s a gap of say two decades, if you can still get to the data and convert it into something modern, the data lives on. It’s not the original medium, but with digital data, it doesn’t have to be, that’s the neat thing about digital data.

I think people still are working on trying to wrap their heads around digital data versus the way we used to do it. You know, someone might have the family bible and we’ve got to keep it nice and tidy and careful with it, because with analog data the medium and the information are one in the same. And I think sometimes people look at family digital photo collections like that. Like it’s the family bible and that we’ve got to keep it safe. But if it’s a USB stick that you pull out every so often, look over it, and call it day. Maybe move the photos from the Walmart USB stick that you got in 2016 to the new 800TB USB-F stick you just got from neo-Amazon in 2073, those photos can live forever. You don’t have to be careful with them anymore.

I think that’s one of the reasons that open formats matter so much. If you stored all your family videos in Windows Media Format, what happens when Microsoft dies in the Second US Civil War of 2038? That’s not helping you in 2073 to open those files on a format you can never figure out. But say you stored it in some open format. Now all you need is an implementation of that format and a compiler. And poof, now you have a modern codec to read the files of the before times.

It’s one of those fun maybe slightly existential kinds of things. Nothing lasts, no matter how hard we try, nothing will last. All things forgotten decay, we can only slow that decay down, but we can’t prevent it. But things that live, things that pass through the hands of the living, those things endure because there are people who put time, one of the most precious resources we have, into them. Our reward for that investment of time is something that continues beyond the decay.

I like to think of it as the balance of the universe. You get to keep this, but only if you give a bit of time to pay for keeping it. And sometimes it’s crazy to think of how much that applies to. Also I likely shouldn’t reply after having a few drinks. Wooooo!!

Environment makes all the difference for passive storage, sorry I really went out there on the reply.

Best bet is long term optical discs or long term magnetic tape. USB keys are not good for long term storage. USB keys use NAND memory that is a series of floating gate metal oxide semiconductors (FGMOS). These operate by using Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, in where a charge is carried along a regular style fin field-effect transistor (FINFET) and a charge above the transistor’s channel causes some electrons to quantum tunnel into floating gates that are isolated by oxides.

While these floating gates are sealed off from everything, so the charge should stay “indefinitely”, quantum effects cause some of the electrons to “leak” out of the floating gate, causing a degradation of the stored signal. Typically there’s a refresh circuit within the USB key’s integrated circuit that takes care of that and USB data can last seemingly forever. However, that refresh circuit requires a small amount of power, which if you store the USB stick somewhere for years on end, will never get powered.

This is the reason why flash memory only assures data can be retained for about ten years without power. Eventually the electrons “trapped” in floating gate have enough time to tunnel out of the floating gate completely obliterating the signal. The tunnel events aren’t many per second, but give enough time, and all of those events add up. Paired with the whole thing that USB sticks mostly no longer use binary logic levels. Most are now using something like four or eight logic levels. So instead of there just being on and off, there is 0V-0.7V = 00, 1V-1.7V = 01, 2V-2.7V = 10, 3V-3.7V = 11 logic levels. So a small amount of charge loss can create a different bit pattern.

One thing to look at for long term storage is something like M-DISC. The matter by which the burned data onto the optical media is made is via a process that takes about 10,000 years (estimated) to break down. However, the disc itself is in a polycarbonate thermoplastic that has an average breakdown of only about 1,000 years in extremely dry environments and about a tenth of that in your average sealed lock box environments.

Your average spinning disk hard drive can store information for some time, but the storage requirements are pretty intense and even then hard drives loose about 1% of the magnetic strength per year without power. And about 70 years is the max before the various magnetic bits that form the low level format of the disk have degraded without power to the point that the disk has too many bad sectors to be called usable. But outside of that, the biggest fault is mechanical failure. No matter how well you think you’ve stored a drive, it’s never good enough and the spinny bits always fail from becoming too fragile from pervasive oxidation. Basically the drive will spin up only to tear itself apart as some weaken part of the armature flies into the spinning platters.

But USB sticks will only give you about a decade before the stored information fades away into the quantum ether.

Kamala is going to win comfortably. Mark it.

Popular vote? Oh yeah, not even a question. Harris is going to absolutely dominate in the popular vote.

Electoral vote? Oh see, that’s a different story. Shit is close, like uncomfortably close.

Biden pulled Michigan in 2020 by about 150k votes. A 2.8% margin. And he was up in the polls by 10% going into it. Right now Harris is showing only a 1.7% lead in the polls in Michigan. Harris has to absolutely take Michigan, there’s not a path to winning without Michigan without pulling something like Ohio or Georgia, which she’s 6% under in Ohio and 2% under in Georgia. So the GA surprise, nobody should be counting on that. Georgia by the numbers is going Trump this election. Ohio is solid Trump territory. Thinking Florida or Texas might sway is foolish thinking. So without those four, Harris has to pick up the Rust belt if she wants to win, and she’s not polling well there. Like she’s ahead, but Biden was double digits leading the Rust belt in 2020 and that turned into single digit percentage leads in votes. Harris has single digit leads in the Rust Belt polls (in aggregate).

If Harris wins this, in the electoral college, it’s going to be by the thinnest margins we’ve seen before. Not even joking, Trump on the Electoral college has a collection of states that he’s made incredibly safe that puts only a handful of battlegrounds he needs. Harris has nothing but uphill from where we are currently at.

The lead is larger than the one Hillary Clinton had over Donald Trump in the 2016 election as the Democratic nominee woos swing states

From the article. And Clinton lost by some of the thinnest margins in key states. In Michigan, she lost by 0.1% of the vote. That was a massive loss that costed Clinton incredibly. Literally 10,000 votes were the difference. The Libertarian candidate received twelve times the number of votes that Clinton lost by. WI, MI, and PA, Clinton lost those three states by less than 100,000 votes. And it was those losses that gave Trump the win. Less than 100,000 votes is was made the 2016 election.

Anybody who thinks this election is a done deal is talking out their ass. You run the numbers for who will win which State, Trump is inches from victory. This is going to be a insanely close race. Everyone HAS TO GET OUT THERE and vote. This is going to get decided by single digit percents in key states if not even closer than that.

Typically you warn someone of something that they were not originally expecting. When it is expected, that is usually referred to as reminding. Like a reminder that this Sunday is the end of daylight savings time in the United States.

Literally stealing the vote.

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can absolutely withhold weapons see leahy

He can’t legally, and Republicans in the House would absolutely jump at the chance to impeach Biden and have it carry over into the next session as Democrats did with Trump’s second impeachment. It would literally be the train they ride till midterms.

Gosh you are really bad at this.

You clearly confuse words on paper with real world consequences

I don’t think you’ve ever worked for the Government. You are insanely bad at this.

I’ve given you plenty of opportunity and you’re just spewing “nothing means anything anymore!!!” Gosh, it’s not like I haven’t met countless numbers of you types.

Not once have you managed to identify how the judicial branch can hold a president accountable\

Enjoined. You clearly aren’t reading anything, I’m not typing any more. Consider yourself blocked, you are a waste of time.

Really I’m just disappointed in the lack of blackjack here.

You know I commented, but you aren’t even worth that reply.

But here’s that link just in case you missed it.

https://www.fec.gov/updates/fec-declares-stein-eligible-to-receive-2024-matching-funds/

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Ugh. This is why I hate summary because there’s always someone who is like “you didn’t explain EvErYtHiNg so you’re wrong!” While you’re trying to flesh things out you always miss a ton of things too that neither one of us touched on, and I didn’t because it increases what needs to be talked about when what I originally said was correct.

entire wall of text

I hate this term because it shows that people are trying to oversimplify something that is in itself complex. Additionally, you’re trying to point out things but you didn’t cover everything either. Which is why especially here, this annoying. You’re basically trying to make an argument of “you explain too much” and “you didn’t explain enough”. It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t argument that you’re trying to make. I’m calling you out on it because you are attempting a no correct way to answer line of questioning. I’ll give you this reply, but you keep going on this thread like this, I’ll just block you. I don’t have the time for childish game. If you have a point make it, if you don’t stop beating around the bush. That’s all there is to it.

a position that is easily filled without congressional confirmed

That’s not correct. I’ll point to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 5 USC § 3345. You seem smart enough, you can figure out why Sec. of State quitting and the deputy becoming acting would trigger such a response.

someone didn’t pay attention to trumps presidency at all

Again, I’ll point to the many failures on exclusive authority during that term. Namely you can see the multiple failures along the regulation of coal that failed exclusive authority. Acting has only nonexclusive duties for the 210 day period and the extended period of 300 days on inauguration. Hence the failures on rule making.

what you’re missing is that during that time the president can just not due what the law says and these things can take years.

Yes, this is why enjoining an EO exists as a measure for the courts. Immediate relief is something the claimants can seek when bringing the issue up to the courts. That’s why you hear emergency relief often with controversial orders.

Secondly even if a judge blocks an EO the president can still do it the judge has no enforcement mechanism.

The enforcement is via Congress at that point. If a just rules something as violation of the Court order, that’s easily handled by Congress.

worcester v georgia

Just so we’re clear the Nullification scandal, Jackson indicated he was ready to march troops into South Carolina and shooting the government if need be. That was with eye to Georgia daring them the exact same thing. We’d revisit that willingness to march troops into the State and start shooting State Government members about thirty years later.

So just, so we’re clear the Worcester you cite, we got ready to have a preemptive war over the matter. I’m not sure the argument you’re providing holds a lot of water here in that “they can do what they want to do with no ramifications”. Clearly getting shot at by the Army is a ramification that at the time neither party wanted to try out. But we did give it a go a bit later.

abraham lincoln did it w/ habeus corpus

Yeah. Thing called the Civil War.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Was kicked to Congress, like I said it would be. Was mulled and Congress decided to take a pass. But that’s not free from consequences. Additionally, Congress had indicated to FDR to wrap that shit up with the alphabet groups. You’ll note how many of them didn’t last. CCC still a thing?

biden can easily deal with blinken, its called firing and assigning a temporary individual to the role

Again see FVRA.

not like he has a lot of time left there’d be no time to confirm a new individual anyways

Again see FVRA, carry over has a lot more impact in the first 300 day period than having an acting position.

Now Harris is, she’s the one who has committed to genocide at this point thats causing the issue not blinken

That is just plainly incorrect.

You’re entire ‘civics’ lesson ignores the historical realities of the presidency and EOs

And you covered zero of them either. I’ve provided more context to the examples that you gave. But the reality is that “the historical realities of EOs” is a complex issue. But apparently you don’t like walls of text.

especially in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential powers which expanded this ability by conferring it judicial backing

I take it that you are referring to Trump v US. None of that has any bearing on the matter of what Bliken does or doesn’t do. If Biden simply just withheld funds and gave everyone the finger, he’d still be subject to Congressional review of his actions and possible impeachment. That is not being free of ramifications.

If you want to keep up with daily events in the Executive, the Federal Register (Fed. Reg. or FR) cannot be beat. It contains all of the FOIA request, every public inspection requirement, CFR proposals, Executive Orders, Presidential Proclamations, and so forth.

If you want something more specific to rule making, you can find that here. Rule making makes a bit more sense when you think about it. Say Congress passes a law that says “build me a road between Texas and South Dakota”. The law will usually say who (department) is in charge of that and then that department will take the money and begin rule making. Rule making is basically laying out the path the road will take, what kind of materials will be used, what companies are allowed to bid, environmental guidelines, etc, etc ,etc… Once those rules have been made the who is going to do it is determined. Like Highways in this case, the Federal Government provides the money and the States are the ones who select the labor and make minor course corrections to the highway (like if it’s about to pass through a cemetery or something).

Rule making is also sometimes called regulation. Because the agency put in charge is regulating the action being done to ensure compliance with what they think the law is asking for, because Congress is very NOT detail oriented until they really want to be. Also with rule making, Congress can “ask” a department to come in and meet with them if Congress thinks some of the rules don’t mesh with what they were thinking.

There’s also override laws, which Congress passes like a normal law. These laws, remember the Constitution requires laws to be applied equally if they involve the public so these override laws are written as such so that they only apply to a executive department, specifically smack the department over the head and “corrects” where the rule making went wrong. These don’t happen often, but we did have one back in Trump days over the FCC. The FCC had made a new rule that required ISPs to get permission to sell customer data, and Congress plus then President Trump overrode the FCC, explicitly banning them from ever creating such a rule. It’s still open if the FTC could make such a rule. But that’s an example of an override of regulation.

Oh also my whole comment didn’t even touch on the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, which is what would happen if a Secretary quits. Very, very, very long story short. The Deputy Secretary automatically gets to become the “acting” Secretary BUT they cannot do any “exclusive actions”, which that Leahy rule is indeed an exclusive action. The “acting” Secretary can only maintain “status quo” until the Senate Confirms that the acting secretary is indeed the actual secretary. But an “acting” position can only last for 210 days, after which the office is then considered “vacant”, but none of that matters anymore because Congress uses “pro forma” sessions to prevent recessed appointments. But typically, if a position is “vacant” and Congress is not in Session, the President can make a recess appointment.

If you ask me, what we really need is an Amendment to the Constitution that provides the President a way to declare Congress as absent and if some threshold of Congress doesn’t become present, then the President can then call Congress not in Session. The whole “pro forma” sessions of Congress really needs to stop, like in a really bad way. Sort of like how Filibuster should return to requiring a person physically speak for the entire duration of the filibuster and must remain on topic.

Congress has gotten really soft on everything and that’s allowed them to permit a lot of bad faith actions in Congress to happen. It used to be that it was “gentleman’s agreement” that Congress would behave and act in good faith, but boy have we really fallen down on that since the 1980s.

Anyway, I’m rambling.

Oh man, this is a doozy. You aren’t wrong but I’ve got to get some sleep. To explain this is A LOT.

The thing is the Leahy Law doesn’t put the power directly in the President’s hands. It grants the vetting process to the Secretary of State. Which is a member of the cabinet of the President. Which I don’t know how familiar you are with how the Executive Office works or not. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken is the one who wields the power to deny Israel’s aid.

There’s Executive Orders (EO) that the President can give but there’s the whole “what if” Blinken quits given an EO and then we have to get the Senate involved which is currently 50-50 on Republicans and Democrats. Which that turns it even more complex and Senators can delay confirmation until after the election or if they’re really bitter, until next year. Which means that everything that requires a Secretary of State would get put on pause.

I get that everyone thinks the President gets to have the final say, but the President orders people around on EOs, which the various Secretaries can just quit if they don’t want to follow them, and then that kicks everything to the Senate. That’s kind of a built in protection in our system of Government to prevent a President becoming a dictator. If a President wants XYZ done and the Secretary thinks that’s bad, they quit and the Senate becomes involved potentially delaying the President forever.

There’s way more background on why Blinken has only stopped two aids and also because of classification reasons, not every stopping of aid can be published, unless the President does so since the President has unilateral authority on classification markings (except for anything related to the name of spies and nuclear bomb designs, that is one of the few things that requires both the President and Congress to sign off on, there’s a few other exceptions as well but I won’t go into them).

But anyways, Blinken is the one who can stop aid. The President could order him, but he could also quit, which means the Senate would get involved, and I can explain why all of that would be messy if you need me to.

why can’t he veto the military aid

The President only has veto power on bills that have passed both the House and the Senate. Once something becomes law, the President “has” to carry it out. There’s a ton of background on “Executive Discretion” and any time the President wants to exercise discretion, Congress can sue, which then brings the matter into the other branch, the Judicial. Plenty of States that would sign on, to a Congressional suit (which that’s a requirement for Congress to sue the President, at least one State has to join in).

So Biden could use Discretion to delay funding, and he’s done that quite a few times, but he can’t just outright NOT pay when the law requires him to do so. That discretion comes from a kind of EO called a “Reviewing Executive Order” and it requires a department to “review” ((insert whatever the topic is)). That’s a delay, but it isn’t a halt. The President has to follow the law as well. So if we have a law that says, “we provide $xxx to Israel’s Iron Dome”, we have to send that money to them at some point.

A lot of the funds that Israel is getting, is funding they secured before the Gaza invasion. There’s been recent upping of that funding that Congress has passed, but that’s been on things called Continuing Resolutions (CR). Republicans in the House (who are the ones who control what the US Budget is) have been using CRs to get choice things enacted. That’s because Republicans in the House have passed rules on how a budget may be formed in the House that are impossible to comply with (which that’s a whole long story). So if Democrats in the House refuse to accept the CRs the Republicans offer, the Government shuts down.

Anyways, that’s been a lot already. If you need me to clear anything up, let me know. But Harris likely wouldn’t have Blinken as Secretary of State, which would fix A WHOLE LOT. But I don’t know, because if the election isn’t kind to Democrats in the Senate and Republicans have a majority in the Senate, they could block Harris’ Sec. of State unless they specifically pledged to support Israel. Now they could absolutely lie about that, but then Congress could also impeach them, but that would cut off aid to Israel for some time as that’s not an easy process to impeach a secretary of state.