He’s not being self aware at all, he’s just whining. It’s a justification for a decision he’s already made.

“We have to do it because nobody else will”. That’s probably the same logic he used to put his name on the Kennedy Center, or his picture on all of his buildings. Doesn’t he want to put his face on a quarter? And Mt Rushmore? Seems to me we’re being forced to memorialize him everywhere.

No, that’s not quite how it works.

Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.

But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.

The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.

Bitcoin was extremely successful at making what it set out to do in the first place: make a fully distributed, peer-to-peer, trustless currency. Anyone who has ever been forced to pay bogus transaction fees ought to be able to appreciate paying for things without needing a bank, or any intermediary at all. It’s like cash you can e-mail.

But, most people into crypto now don’t care about this utility, they just want Number Go Up. So they don’t transact with it anymore, they just hold it (or actively trade with it). Which makes the whole ecosystem not useful for anything except feeding itself.

I still think that, in theory, there are areas where cryptocutrency can be used for real innovative purposes. But these will never actually be done, because the people in a position to do those things would rather make quick money selling shit tokens to unsuspecting people.

Do you want to learn how it all works? Feel free to do so, it’s all Open Source. But if your goal is to invest… Well… You still need to learn about and understand it first. This will help you differentiate the good ideas from the scams. (And there are a lot of scams!)

RGB should have stepped down early in Obama’s second term, when Democrats still held a majority in the Senate…

Congress? That body currently run by Mike Johnson and John Thune?

We’ll get a special prosecutor, all right, and it will be Matt Gaetz.

I look forward to the “Donald J. Trump Memorial” anything.

Not just any Republican, she was Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador, until that got withdrawn because the Republicans were losing too many House seats to Presidential appointments.

So, she decided to run for Governor, until a better connected male candidate decided to run instead, so she backed out of that.

It seems like her entire year can be summed up by getting screwed over by other Republicans. No wonder she wants out.

When the President does it, it’s not illegal…

“illegitimate” is different than “illegal”. In some context they are the same, but “illegitimate” can also mean “against rules” or “against custom”.

The President nominates these officials, but they take office “with the advice and consent of the Senate”. I take that to mean that after the President consults with the Senate, he makes an appointment, and the Senate is obligated to give an up-or-down vote on it.

I remember that time well, and Merrick Garland (yes, that guy) was the compromise candidate that Obama picked because he had the respect, of a lot of Republican Senators. The Senate had a constitutional duty to put it to an up or down vote, which Mitch ignored, because he would not like the outcome. (If Garland didn’t have any Republican support, after all, they could have just held the vote, and voted it down. But that would have given Obama another chance to nominate someone else.)

There is no law that says “the Senate must act within this period of time”. We can’t haul McConnell to the brig because of it. Yet, it is clear to me that he flat out ignorea something the Constitution obligated him to do. It can be clearly seen as illegitimate, especially when he changed those rules a few years later.

It’s illegitimate because Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Obama’s last SC pick, because he knew it would pass if that vote was held. So he left the SC one member short until Trump won, and they confirmed his pick instead. Basically, he (and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee) exercised a two-person veto on the pick.

He claimed it was too close to an election to act, but then when RBG passed away with even less time before an election, he pressed ahead with Trump’s pick anyway.

He made up a new rule, then abandoned it when it was expedient to do so. If rules mattered, one of those picks would have been different.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/article-v.html

But it’s so small I can quote it here

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

While this seems to be written as only being for amendments, there is nothing keeping them from saying “we’re starting over from scratch” as an amendment. Literally the only thing they put off limits in this process is the composition of the Senate.

Oh no, our Conservatives have been prepping for a new Constitutional Convention, and already have a playbook planned to ratfuck that.

The process for that is that 2/3 of states need to call for a constitutional convention to start it. When in session, everything is fair game to be amended. The rules for that are not codified in advance and created by the members themselves. And whatever comes out of that must be approved by 3/4 of the states (currently 38) in order to be binding on everyone.

But , by my calculations, 182 million people live in the 12 most populous states. Since the US population in all states is 339 million, that means that a new constitution can be ratified by states with only 43% of the population, then bind everyone to it.

There is no doubt in my mind that this will result in those states who did not vote for the new constitution seceding.

Plot twist: the Trump Presidential library is built in place of the East Wing

A boy can dream, can’t he?

That’s why you need to add 4 young, Liberal justices in thir 40s (who would serve for 40+ years with a lifetime appointment) before starting to work with Republicans. Make it so that the alternative to not working together is much worse for them.

I bet they can’t get any contractor to work on that, because the Administration has already stiffed the demolition crew and nobody wants to touch a job they will never get paid for.

The real problem is the lifetime tenure of the justices. The Founders did that for good reason, to insulate the Court from the immediate politics of the time. But people are simply living longer now, and Republicans figured out how to ratfuck the Court to stack it in their favor. (Helped in no small part by RBG, who could not be convinced to retire at the right time). Openings on the Court are so rare that it is worth expending significant political effort to get them to go your way.

If Democrats ever get control of the Presidency and Congress again, they should immediately move to blow up the Court to 13 members. They can do it by immediately turning it up to 11, and then making it 13 two years later, in order to stagger the changes. But this is important enough that they should blow up the filibuster to do it.

(13 is a magic number because it matches the number of Federal district courts.)

And then, after the bill is passed, they should work with Republicans on a framework to add term limits to the Constitution. Each of the 13 justices gets a 13 year term, each justice could serve up to two terms, consecutive or not, and would have to be re-appointed and re-confirmed for their second term. They can even tie the number of justices directly to the number of Federal circuits, so that it is harder to ratfuck on the future. 26 years is long enough to insulate a justice from politics. And out of our 116 justices to date, only 28 have served more than 26 years.

But by giving every President the right to nominate one justice per year, it makes the process more regular, and the political payoff for engineering a single appointment becomes less attractive. Supreme Court turnover becomes a predictable thing.

At this point, Republicans may be willing to support that amendment, because the alternative would be for President Newsom to appoint 4 Liberals to the court for Life in quick succession, and wait for their own full control to ratfuck it again. That might take a while.

No, Gavin has a key asset that the last two Democratic losing candidates (who were also the Next Ones Up) lacked…

A penis.

Republicans complain that government is ineffective and corrupt, then they get elected and prove it.

AOC isnt running for President, they already promised her Schumer’s seat if she backs off for President. Gavin is the Next One Up!