onfocus

Congress has authority to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 that says that the appellate jurisdiction of the court shall be subject to “such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

...to paraphrase former justice Potter Stewart, you know the corruption when you see it. And we see the out-of-control corruption in the increasing willingness and brazenness with which the Court reaches down into judicial process to find notional bases upon which to make policy for the country which it simply desires to make, frequently ignoring the appellate process, the fact-finding of trials, basic issues of standing. The corruption runs so deep there is simply little effort any more to hide it.

There are many theories swirling around for why they have increasingly chosen to abandon their basic duty to legal transparency. And the likeliest one is also the simplest: They’re cowards.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark civil rights law that restricted racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting for sixty years.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

“I think this is a creative and ambitious bill,” he said. “It tries to get around Citizens United by arguing that corporations only have the powers the state chooses to grant them, and that Hawaiʻi can decline to grant the power to spend money on elections. That’s a genuinely innovative idea.”

The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg has done this measurement for more than a decade, establishing a consistent metric that allows for comparisons between and within nations and determinations of how democracy has changed over time.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.