Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 176 posts

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#131

Post by unethical_ban »

philistine wrote: post #118
unethical_ban wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of checks and balances is not obstruction for the sake of obstruction. It is that no branch should be subservient or overly deferential to the other branches. For example, Congress should not do everything the president wants just because he's the president as is happening now. Congresspeople have said out loud that the job of Congress is to ask "how high" when the president says "jump". Congress last year…

What you're describing is the least of your problems with Trump. In a Westminster system, the leader of the party in power is basically the head of government, the head of state, and the leader of the legislature all rolled into one. And it works without destroying democracy . I genuinely believe that good can come out of American political parties becoming single leader parties. The democrats should do the same, hon…

Well, we don't have a parliamentary system, and our executive has more power than a UK prime Minister, I believe. What you're advocating for is a vestigial legislature to do the will of the king (in the US system).

Between a two party system, a gerrymandered House and a useless Senate, the last thing we need is an absolute ruler.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#132

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #72
unethical_ban wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bait post. Make a point. edit for clarity: My point is that faux-witty slights at communities to suggest nothing is wrong with a government is intellectually shallow and appeals to authority without making any point itself.

These are questions of governance, not debate club. Appeals to authority are the only valid arguments.

You misunderstand what an argument from authority is if this is your justification for it. It's not "authority" meaning they can tell you what to do but instead meaning they are an expert on the subject matter. It is valid when a consensus of experts all say the same thing but if there is not an expert consensus then it starts to become more questionable.

In this context, if many independent legal experts and scholars are looking at the decisions being made by the three branches of government and saying there could be bad ramifications, the argument from authority falls flat; there is another authority saying the first authority is wrong.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#133

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

compiler-guy wrote: post #129
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you assert, without providing even a single example.

I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development and doesn't even normally use text-files would be able to make a better case than this. You don't provide a single example either. But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to conform to Linus's idea of a good product.

>I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development

Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two or more different branches. Lots of strike-throughs and other such crap.

Many of the defects in legislation and the legislative process itself stem from how they try (so desperately) to keep it from being like code. Trying to hide who edited what and when. Fuck, Congress has this big long drawn out process for reconciling two slightly different versions of the same piece of code... with every single act. You've simply never considered this.

>But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to

I wasn't changing any workflows. I was just going to dump existing legislation into a repo so I could see what it would look like. Not sure what you're reading into this. You're stomping on an experiment that someone was going to run for free in a way that didn't interfere with you and ridiculing the idea in casual conversation.

>and doesn't even normally use text-files

It's text. On a "file" (which is what we called bundles of associated paper back before computer filesystems, they'd put them in a filing cabinet).

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#134

Post by AlecSchueler »

philistine wrote: post #118
unethical_ban wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of checks and balances is not obstruction for the sake of obstruction. It is that no branch should be subservient or overly deferential to the other branches. For example, Congress should not do everything the president wants just because he's the president as is happening now. Congresspeople have said out loud that the job of Congress is to ask "how high" when the president says "jump". Congress last year…

What you're describing is the least of your problems with Trump. In a Westminster system, the leader of the party in power is basically the head of government, the head of state, and the leader of the legislature all rolled into one. And it works without destroying democracy . I genuinely believe that good can come out of American political parties becoming single leader parties. The democrats should do the same, hon…

The British PM isn't "basically" or in any way the head of state or of the legislature. The monarch and the House of Lords still exist and the latter should and very much do assert their power.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#135

Post by HaZeust »

dragonwriter wrote: post #115
netsharc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the Supreme Court declare anything the administration does, legal..? Or was that just for the president?

> Didn't the Supreme Court declare anything the administration does, legal..? No. > Or was that just for the president? Also no. It established a three-branch approach to whether the President is immune to criminal prosecution for acts that, ignoring any immunity he might have due to being President at the time of the act, would be within the domain of potential criminal prosecution, in which (loosely): (1) Acts rela…

The distinction is irrelevant, and if you read the ruling - any evidence that proves difference between the three is inadmissible in court. It is impossible to challenge grounds of the Executive saying that any and ALL actions he takes is within the capacity of an "official duty". The ruling makes clear that we simply HAVE to take their word for it.

One must understand that the more safeguards we have to enact retribution in these cases, the better. You're not supposed to point to one after loss of another - you're supposed to point towards as many as possible. Before last July, the courts were the one we pointed to the most, and they are no longer nearly as much at our disposal as they were before then.

It doesn't invoke sovereign immunity through a loud roar, but from an understood nod.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#136

Post by compiler-guy »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #133
compiler-guy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development and doesn't even normally use text-files would be able to make a better case than this. You don't provide a single example either. But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to conform to Linus's idea of a good product.

>I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two o…

All of this is an argument for version control--which I wholly support, and did from the first message. But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from. Yes, yes, you can use "-C -C -C" if you really want to know and have time to wait, but that is terrible compared to systems that track moves as first class happenings.

And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see. You were proposing a law. If you are proposing a free experiment, great! more power to you. Now convince the government to actually adopt it.

And yes, the product is text, but the current workflow is not text-file based at all.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#137

Post by unethical_ban »

compiler-guy wrote: post #64
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort). It would be nice if Congress and legislatures actually used git as a matter of law, having names attached to every co…

Version control in some form? Yes, absolutely. Git? No way. The needs and customs of a lawmaking body are vastly different than the needs of engineers.

git specifically, maybe not, but something like source code control is reasonable.

Passing new legislation adds, removes or modifies text from an entity's legal documents (US or State code, for example). You see this in bills that say things like "This modifies Section 47, subsection 3, paragraph 2 to say 'people' instead of 'persons'".

So a bill can be thought of as the commit message, and implementation of the bill are the changes to the text. The executive is the "merge approver".

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#138

Post by unethical_ban »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #85
netsharc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the Supreme Court declare anything the administration does, legal..? Or was that just for the president?

It declared the president to be immune from prosecution for actions falling within the scope of his office. It did not declare that the president cannot be impeached. It did not declare that the president cannot be criminally charged for what he does that exceeds the scope of his office (though it's a high bar to prove it). And most of all, it did not declare that whatever he does is automatically constitutional .

It declared that he is literally above the law for anything that the most devoted loyalist court can consider part of the job.

He could order the assassination of rival politicians for national security purposes and we would get a 6-3 ruling that nothing can stop him except the GOP congress.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#139

Post by HaZeust »

93po wrote: post #123
emchammer wrote: post #71

How could discussion of such a grave matter be flagged?

Because really basic consideration of the situation gives us the very likely explanation. The idea that Trump was sitting at his desk and randomly pissed about the bottom 1/6th of Section 1 and was like "take that off congress's website!" is basically zero. 1. It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's 2. It's clearly a sort of crappy development approach - the website uses jquery and fontawesome and adobe analyti…

You must be developing scoliosis with this level of backwards-bending to explain the misdeeds of an administration and Congress that doesn't care about thwarting your civil liberties!

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#140

Post by unethical_ban »

AlexandrB wrote: post #30
frogperson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are waaayyy passed that line. We are, for just about every definition, living in an authoritarian state. Trump has immunity, from the Supreme Court, support in the house and senate, support of the media, and enough support from the military. Freaadom isnt free. I think americans forget that. They are waiting for someone else to come save them, which will NEVER happen.

[flagged]

He is held to a much different, lower standard than other politicians. I respect the NYT but we had articles near-daily about (Biden's ) age and capacity for office, because decent people (Democrats) care about that sort of thing. Donald Trump daily shows he is mentally unfit for office and a terrible, lawbreaking citizen - but because it's expected of him and his party, it gets said and then we read about a cute cottage in Nantucket as if it's all citizens should be doing.

We should be organizing general strikes, shutting down cities and more. January 6 wasn't wrong for being violent, it was wrong because it was done for fictional pretenses.

Post reply on HN