I play guitar, watch USMLR and NHL, occasionally brew beer, enjoy live music and travel, and practice sarcasm.

Mastodon - @baronvonj@mas.to
Pixelfed - @baronvonj@pixelfed.social

  • 3 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ve traveled a bit and so appreciate the culture of haggling. One time while in Panamá I needed an SD card. The Baroness is from there, so we were out with a few cousins going to the mall and big box stores. Of course everywhere was charging like 3x what it would cost in the US. So at the last shop I just laid it out that I could get the $45 card for $15 in the US so asked if they’d take like $25 or something. She was a little confused as haggling isn’t super common, at least in the modern shops. So she went to go check with the manager. He came out from the back. Indian guy. He just looked at me, the only white guy around, and was just like “yeah we can do that.” Had a look to him like he appreciated the encounter. On the way out one of the cousins was gobsmacked that it worked, like he had just witnessed real life magic.




  • You have three tools in your instance settings at https://lemmy.world/settings: the Show/Blur NSFW Content options in , and blocking users/communities/instances, setting your feed to only view Subscribed communities and just don’t subscribe to any NSFW ones. The first is dependent on posters ticking the box to mark their post as NSFW. If you see a NSFW post that is not marked as such, report it. Admins on their instance should address the matter. The second option isn’t NSFW-focused in any way but you’re in control of it. You could block instances that are primarily intended for NSFW content, such as lemmynsfw.com, and then block any individual communities on other instances, and lastly if there are specific users who just seem to refuse to stop posting unmarked NSFW content and their instance admins won’t do anything about them you block those users.

    You probably can’t expect to fully pre-emptively block all NSFW content, because someone might post something without marking it correctly. Could be by accident, could be they just don’t care. But reporting them gives a chance to fix it rather than blocking an otherwise safe community or user.









  • Congress writes laws, the president signs them. What’s confusing about that?

    Nothing. What’s confusing to you about Congress overriding a presidential veto of an unconstitutional law? What’s confusing to you about a president enforcing a constitutional law in an unconstitutional way? Or maybe Congress impeaching and removing a president who refuses to enforce an unconstitutional law. Maybe Texas law enforcement should still be looking up marriage licenses between gay couples, breaking into their private homes (“by mistake, wrong address on the warrant”), and arrest them for sodomy because Lawrence vs Texas was only an advisory ruling? In any legal disagreement between two parties (congress vs the president, the people vs the government) there needs to be a 3rd party to arbitrate. That’s what the court system exists to do. Why should we make some special exception to that for whether or not the laws or actions of our government are within their constitutional restrictions?

    Constitutional review is a farce.

    If reviewing laws for their adherence to the constitution is a farce, then having a constitution at all is a farce. What would you have us replace it with as the foundation of our legal system?

    Look how often they flip flop,

    Of course they flip flop, every reasonable person forms an opinion based on the information available at the time, and that can change.

    The supreme court is an ideological institution

    So is pretty much every human on earth. That’s why we need should have a non-partisan group, to find consensus. Just because the current makeup of that group is overtly partisan doesn’t mean the very notion of courts reviewing laws is automatically evil. We have mechanisms in congress to address it and put in better guardrails for the future.

    Constitutional review can end tomorrow with a simple declaration by the president. If we had a young, healthy, 8-1 liberal supreme court, marbury would be overturned by the first republican president.

    I’m not going to debate if a president can do that, as my position is that it’s just as naive a position that congress and the president will keep each other’s constitutionality in check as is the Libertarian position that corporations will do what’s morally best in pursuit of profit without government regulations, so I don’t think any president should do that (or even should be able to).


  • You still haven’t said how you think it will work. I think it’s naive to believe that a legislature would self-correct on a law they had already passed, or for the executive to stop infringing rights by enforcing an unconstitutional law, if the courts could not bindingly rule laws to be unconstitutional. What happens when an advisory-only court says “no this is unconstitutional” and the other two branches just say “fuck off we’re doing it anyway?”


  • How is that supposed to work that the courts can’t strike down unconstitutional laws? Forget about any specific decisions we disagree with. There has to be a branch of government separate from the authors and the enforcers of the laws that can, with authority, strike down unconstitutional laws. Otherwise the constitutional restrictions on the government are themselves meaningless.