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[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah so I think I should clarify my stance. What I want is effectively a universal labor union, not these piecemeal industry- and geography-specific unions.  Ostensibly that is what the labor laws in the US did for a while, and was partly why the unions got weak - the workers had their protections in law, and they were paying for it with taxes, so didn't really want to double-pay by also paying union dues.

There are universal labor unions in Spain. I was (still am, though I should really sign off now that I've not worked there in 4 years) a member of one back in Spain.  In Ireland I'm a member of a trade-specific one (the IHCA).

Both approaches have their pros and cons. Obviously 'universal'unions are bigger, which gives them more theoretical strenght. Trade specific ones might cater to needs that are more specific to yourself.


I think its important to know how to use unions. I think its important to join one, but its also important to understand that they are another burocracy you'll have to navigate, not an instant 'sort out my problems'card

My other concerns are the unions are targeting the employers - which are the entities that generally are actually creating wealth - instead of targeting the industries that are charging people lots of money.  You don't get a functional economy by stressing the entities that actually create wealth.

I dont know what you mean by this. Obviously unions target the employers not the workers. Thats how collective bargaining works.

I almost think we don't need labor unions, but we need consumer unions.  Collective bargaining for housing, for instance.  I dunno how you'd swing that, to be honest, but it's an interesting thought.  Make a resident-owned real-estate conglomerate, with the goal not of making money, but of keeping prices down.

Consumer associations also exist. But what you're proposing is actually  in effect a state bureau for housing. I dont disapprove mind you, but I never took you for a communist

I don't have much of an understanding enough to say which would be better, but my immediate worry about universal labour unions is that they scope would mean the particular interests of smaller, specific groups would fall by the table when larger groups dominate the discussion.

Yes, that's one  problem that can arise.
For instance: keeping doctors and nurses in the same union means a strike can fade once a bargain is struck with one or the other (and it really can go either way). Or conversely, that one of the groups involved might have a grievance but it wont gather enough steam by itself.
This is a bona fide concern and I've seen it happen. Nowadays I'm inclined to think more focused unions are better as long as they have a modicum of strenght. This is specially true for doctors because the public perception of 'priviledge' (mostly fake nowadays, depending on the country utterly ludicrous) can hurt in collective bargaining otherwise.

 In Ireland there are even separate unions for Consultants/Attendings and Jr docs (which makes A LOT of sense).

[anewaname]

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/marc-elias-makes-millions-off-democratic-gerrymandering-efforts/

For this article, I'd point out that the previous district map was found by the courts to have been gerrymandered, which is why it was being redrawn. Your news source didn't seem to point that out. And didn't the opposing lawyers get paid? Did they get paid more or less?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Due process was followed in Colorado. The case was an attempt to remove him from the ballot and the defense failed to prove that Trump had not "engaged in an insurrection" and or that the sitting president is not an officer of the US. So, the 14th, which protects against abuses by state-level government against individuals, isn't an issue. In no way did Colorado need to wait for a federal charge and conviction against Trump to complete. The state has the right to adjudicate its own laws and their own constitution, just as the loser in the case has the right to appeal to the federal courts in an attempt to overturn the state courts.

I'm sorry, what's this about proving innocence in court? Does reasonable doubt not exist from "Peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard"? (I also can't find anything about who the defense was here. I don't think Trump was personally in a Colorado court. Was it ruled by the partisan Jan 6th committee issuing an opinion? You don't get the same legal rights in a congressional hearing as a courtroom, FYI.)

Trump didn't bother showing up. His lawyers provided no evidence and a lot of nothing for defense. The Colorado court videos are on c-span, the first is here, and you can find all of them by copying into a google search bar the following line, with different day or part numbers as needed (6 days worth!):

site:c-span.org "Former President Trump 14th Amendment Hearing in Colorado, Day 1, Part 1"

Put your "proving innocence" and " reasonable doubt" aside and watch enough of the court proceedings to form an opinion based on what you see and not what the "news" repeats. I'll debate you about the videos, not about what the "news" said... I didn't see the defense bring up anything worthy to defend Trump and I didn't see partisan behavior by the court. Besides my uneducated opinion, plenty of esteemed conservative lawyers agreed with the court findings. See for yourself what happened...

This is what I want popcorn for.... In order for SCOTUS to rule against the Colorado court findings, they need to go against the Jan 6th committee's evidence that the prosecution used in that case and the lack of evidence used by the defense, or they need to refute the Colorado SC's ruling that "POTUS is an officer", which was based on...:

We do not place the same weight the district court did on the fact that the Presidency is not specifically mentioned in Section Three. It seems most likely that the Presidency is not specifically included because it is so evidently an “office.” In fact, no specific office is listed in Section Three; instead, the Section refers to “any office, civil or military.” True, senators, representatives, and presidential electors are listed, but none of these positions is considered an “office” in the Constitution. Instead, senators and representatives are referred to as “members” of their respective bodies.

That is razor-sharp... showing that the 14th didn't exclude the president because the POTUS isn't an officer, but that the 14th included the senators, congressmen, and electors because they were not officers.

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Trump hasn't been charged with 18 USC 2383: Rebellion or insurrection. Nor did he swear any oath to overthrow the US government (which he was currently a part of and didn't want to leave,) that one could point to. This isn't a (dis)qualification you can find on a birth certificate, so it needs to be very carefully applied for risk of misuse. Generally that means a trial by jury with all legal protections since you're taking away a right. (Also, POTUS involves a national election, just to point out that difference.)

Yep, 14A section 3 says that... but because the federal offices failed to exercise that power to vote yeah or nay on it, Colorado has the right to vote yeah or nay on it. This is why Congress and the other federal offices did not shut down that Colorado case, they didn't have the right because they did not rule on the question of 14A s3. Had they ruled yeah on 14A s3, they could have charged him with 18 USC 2383 and had they ruled nay on 14A s3, they would have given Trump's lawyer the immediate right to shut down Colorado's case. See how that works? Now Colorado is forcing them to do what they should have done already, rule on 14A s3.

No oath to overthrow the government. Really? Wanted to stay in it. Really? Not like a birth certificate. Really? Must be carefully applied and possible misuse. Really? Watch the Colorado state hearings and you'll see the prosecution and the judge weigh in on those when the defense brings them up.

Huh... that article doesn't have anything to do with Biden and Harris, and those riots probably didn't either, though I suspect both vocally supported the non-violent aspects of the protests. And any state that wants to take Biden/Harris off the ticket will need to follow due process, meaning they need to prosecute a case in court and supply evidence to support their case.

Hardly matters when you're stretching legal terms and engaging in judicial activism, does it? States will determine what their due process is.

"States will determine what their due process is." Yes they will, and the steps for due process are written in law, so that due process will receive intense scrutiny in a high profile case. So when someone tries to get Biden off the ballot in a "red" state, everyone will be watching; and then it goes up to the federal level because it would effect all states, where they will say yeah or nay.

Please be specific about which legal terms I am stretching.

I came to my conclusions, and I do have a particularly strong distaste for the act of creating slates of fake electors and of negotiating with election officials with a bag of money in one hand and a weapon in the other. Perhaps that makes me a judicial activist, or maybe I'm just someone who took a loyalty pledge to a constitution rather than an individual. Did you notice how many conservatives agree with the Colorado ruling?

Remember the 62 election fraud cases which had no evidence and were lost?

Since you brought it up:

Judges tossed out nearly all of the roughly 60 suits filed by the Trump campaign and its backers for a variety of reasons and, in many instances, individual cases were dismissed on many different grounds. Some judges said the Trump campaign lacked legal standing to challenge voting procedures. Others said Trump electors or individual voters lacked standing.

Many cases were thrown out for laches — a legal principle barring untimely suits. Others were declared to be moot or precluded by ongoing litigation at the state level. At least two suits were deemed to violate the Eleventh Amendment — the constitutional provision limiting federal-court litigation against states and state officials.

[...]

Some judges also used another basis to throw out the Trump lawsuits — finding that the claims were too speculative to proceed. Those kinds of dismissals trouble many left-leaning lawyers because they deny court-ordered discovery like subpoenas and depositions in cases where litigants lack details about how they were defrauded or injured.

I didn't spend time looking at the 62 cases, and I don't trust any one "news" article on them. People who deal with the law and the elections would have reviewed the actual filings for the 62 cases, specifically to find what evidence the prosecution was offering. If evidence was there, as the GOP people publicly and repeatedly said they had, it would have come out into the open. What "we the people" have instead, is GOP text messages ordering people to say the elections were rigged: before the elections started, while the counting was being done, and after the counting was done. That, plus the words of a crowd of bi-partisan and esteemed lawyers who said "no evidence there..."

And lack of standing is exactly what a citizen with no evidence has when making a challenge. Try it sometime... get evidence of a town official doing dirty deeds and file the court accusation, and you will have standing. Do the same without evidence, and you will not.

[Maximum™]

This guy makes a pretty good point that the weakness of the dissents makes the case for his disqualification better than the actual arguments did: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/dont-read-the-colorado-ruling-read-the-dissents/676920/

[Starver]

For instance: keeping doctors and nurses in the same union means a strike can fade once a bargain is struck with one or the other (and it really can go either way). Or conversely, that one of the groups involved might have a grievance but it wont gather enough steam by itself.

In the case of the UK, the government (and/or Unions, depending upon who you think is the one to blame) had it both coming and going with healthcare/transport 'split' unions. If there's coordinated strike action it is being described as a cross-the-board shutdown (consultants can't fill in for junior doctors, etc). If they're scheduled in different periods then it means longer effective disruption (a day or two of certain train drivers, a few more days of one of other company's bus drivers, then transport support staff or another related union's members, rumbling along to completely disrupt only a few people at a time but for a long stretch).

That the requirements to strike have been raised well above the requirements for democracy (ballots must be returned from >50% of members, as well as (super-)majority support) is a fudge that the lawmakers probably thought would prevent the various unions from striking (in at least one case, it did where it was still a degree of membership support that would have been almost unknown in national or local political elections/referenda). And the latest trick is to impose "minimum service level" rules (on top of those professions who cannot strike, like the police, so had to work-to-rule as their protest action) which is being set such that 'there might as well not be a strike at all' ("for 75% of pupils to be taught, 90% of teaching staff need to be present").

Depending upon your POV, this is either the government trying to outlaw the symptoms instead of dealing with the illnesses causing them or it's typical activist 'lefties' efficiently gaming the system (even one heavily weighted against them) to their own nefarious and troublemaking ends...



(My recollection of union mergers seems to end back in the '80s (NAS/UWT era comes to mind? Are they now UNITE, or was that yet another merger?), possibly in direct response to the Thatcherite anti-union regime. But that might also be because (most?) unions get a say in (an entire third of?) votes in Labour's NEC. Or somesuch. Better not to utterly amalgamate but to informally agree on important points and add weight that a super-representative 'single' organisation cannot. Or allow for nuanced dissent (NUM + NACODS + UDM for the last miners' strike, etc).)

edited for grievous typo and ambiguous choice of word

[ChairmanPoo]

And the latest trick is to impose "minimum service level" rules (on top of those professions who cannot strike, like the police, so had to work-to-rule as their protest action) which is being set such that 'there might as well not be a strike at all' ("for 75% of pupils to he taught, 90% of teaching staff need to be present").

In Spain thats the case as well. It basically destroyed medical striking because the goverment sets minimum services that are usually greater than the regular staffing of a given department (lately some unions have been trying to weaponize that as proof that departments are understaffed). They've been largely been successful, at that, in that people just take it as a given, and thus Spain has some of the lowest wages and worst working conditions of Europe.
In the end joke has been on them. Doctor numbers are dropping, and the migration flux has been persistently outward, because if you speak ANY second language fluently odds are you'll be able to work somewhere with a better deal.

[Maximum™]

So uh, xitter (pronounced shitter) is still good for some hilarious nonsense now and then.

Apparently #TrumpSmells was the top trending tag yesterday and the orange turd is livid.

[Loud Whispers]

Jingle bells
Donald smells

[martinuzz]

Maine followed Colorado's example. Trump will not be electable in Maine.

[Maximum Spin]

Maine followed Colorado's example. Trump will not be electable in Maine.

Not exactly. He's been removed from the primary ballot, which, assuming the decision stands by the time of the primary, doesn't actually prevent anyone from voting him, doesn't prevent him from winning the Maine primary, and doesn't prevent the party from running him in the general, including on the ballot in Maine.

[anewaname]

So, back on Jan 6th, 2020, about 2 pm EST when rioters in the US were breaking the first windows to enter the buildings, it was 10 pm in Moscow. It happens that Jan 7th is the Russian Christmas Day... so did Putin stay up late to watch his Christmas present unfold, or did he get some smug sleep and watch it on Christmas Day?

[Maximum™]

2021*

[Duuvian]

I found this in between clickbait titled (but often otherwise quite interesting) articles on The Debrief:

https://thedebrief.org/the-national-security-implications-of-space-militarization-a-new-frontier-for-conflict-prevention/

Here was a neat link I found there:

https://www.nti.org/education-center/treaties-and-regimes/proposed-prevention-arms-race-space-paros-treaty/

I was wondering what the positives and flaws of this may be, due to my having not read much about this. One thing I remember about the old space treaties is that space mining is pretty much forbidden, and I think we are reaching a point where that should be re-evaluated into permission but exclusive claims being forbidden or something reasonable along those lines, because as much as the millenial in me likes the idea of becoming a space pirate those daydreams feature a motley crew and space vices, not highly regimented uniformed co-workers who aren't (usually) allowed to grow a pirate beard or dreadlocks, with all due respect.

I figure there may be a concern about space gold cratering terrestrial gold prices, but there is some sort of science that can be done to determine origin of gold that was in news articles within the past year or two as a new invention to track gold origins. If space gold and terrestrial gold were considered different commodities and if it were illegal to possess terrestrial origin gold mixed with space gold that might be a way to help protect the terrestrial gold market from cratering, if origin testing isn't remarkably expensive. If a way to then seperate the space gold from terrestrial once smelted together that would also help nullify this but I don't know how feasible that is since I don't know much about it.

[Lord Shonus]

One thing I remember about the old space treaties is that space mining is pretty much forbidden

This is not the case. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits any terrestrial state from claiming ownership of any non-terrestrial territory - the US can't fly out to 16 Psyche, plant a flag, and declare it to be American soil. The purpose of this is to prevent any possibility that the nations of the 1960s would treat the Solar System in the same way that the European powers of the 1500s treated the Americas or the European powers of the 1800s treated Africa - even without considering the effects on the native population (not a factor in space), the landgrab in the New World led to two centuries of fighting  and the landgrabs in Africa eventually resulted in a small conflict now known as the First World War. We now know that this result was highly unlikely for reasons I'll get into in a minute, but in 1966 that wasn't so obvious.

It is legally unclear if a nation attempting resource extraction into the global market without claiming sovereignty would violate the OST. It is nearly certain, however, that private corporations doing so would not. The fundamental problem with either, which also would have prevented a space-landgrab, is that there's enormous technical obstacles that lie in the way of doing so, as well as incredible expense. Dispatching crews or even automated equipment to 16 Psyche would cost tens of billions of dollars, and the costs of returning the resultant ore to Earth for use would also be quite extensive. The latter cost could be mitigated by extensively processing the ore in space (and theoretically using the "waste" silicates as a container and building material) but the up front cost of that would be even higher.


The costs aren't the only factor, either. Shipping space-based resources to Earth would require a steady stream of very heavy spacecraft entering the atmosphere, and landing those packages without lithobraking isn't a non-zero technical problem. A single cubic meter of gold masses over 19 tons. The Chelabynsk meteor, massing only 9 tons, released something like 500 kilotons of kinetic energy as it broke up in the atmosphere - it also came in at a fairly shallow angle and not a huge velocity as these things go. A shipment of minerals packaged for reentry would probably not break up (and thus release that kinetic energy far faster) and enter at a more direct angle because it was intended to hit the Earth in the first place. Which means that even a rather small shipment of materials, if whatever braking system you're using were to fail, could potentially destroy New York or London or Moscow. That's not a trivial problem.

[Starver]

Isotopic analysis (of the gold, and/or* the impurities remaining in the gold at anything other than 'pure') would be the way to go. But knowing that this testing is to be applied, there'd then be an incentive to filter-and-dope your off-Earth gold supplies to resemble on-Earth ones. (If you're actually processing sufficient gold/etc from out there, you could probably centrifuge some of your supply and redope it on demand to establish a 'legit' product that escapes too much scrutiny. It'd certainly be an arms-race of "revenue man" vs "space-smuggler" to try to devise/dodge the better forms of analysis. And the rogue operation will simultaneously be doing quite well off the unregulated space-market for its product, with manufacturing for off-world facilities not really caring if their chips use the 'waste' centrifuged gold that is nudgingly over-high in non-terrestrial isotopes, for the most part. Though space-markets will probably desire water and carboniferous materials proportionately more than the terrestrial commodity exchanges. Certainly to top up manned-resources with 'selr-contained' life-support systems.)

edit: * probably not the gold, actually, given that it has just the one (observationally) stable isotope, you probably wouldn't expect amounts of non-¹⁹⁷Au without having (say) significant amounts of (e.g.) ¹⁹⁵Pt instead within a fairly short time just sitting there. Though some might even consider that a bonus product!

Until and unless a 'golden asteroid' is found and agressively exploited, though, the initial impact of mining off-world resources will be of not having to send more 'mundane' materials up into space every time you want to construct/expand a resource out there. And perhaps the advantages of zero-G (convectionless) and no-atmosphere (better gaseous solute control) casting of precision components like structural beams of pure Al/Ti/watever, except for at particular stress points where useful alloying can be fine-tuned within the monolothic and arbitrarily-sized casting...

(There's no real reason to assume that any particular metal-rich asteroid would be "more gold" than another. Concentrated gold resources on Earth are due to geological processes, which don't really occur between such bodies. Most likely, if they exist, it is because ores were presorted within protoplanetary bodies that later shattered to become asteroids, but the prospect of getting a clear 'strike' on a particular material, rather than finding your target to be rich in something or other only once you've properly scratched the surface on a general "metal hunt".)

[Duuvian]

That makes sense, thanks Shonus. Are there limits on splaceplane design that would preclude a heavy lifter using a more gradual descent at a slower speed while loaded? Or perhaps that's crazy for reasons I'm not familiar with yet, and a depot could allow lighter ships to do the Earth phase. I'd guess that would make sense to have in 0-g outside of Earth orbit, since having it on the moon would have some of the same bad stuff potential.

What's your opinion, Shonus? Is the payoff worth the up-front expense of laying the groundwork? There are also some new engine designs being looked at, one of which supposedly shortens the trip to Mars significantly.

I used gold as an example because I'm not sure if other commodities than rare metals would raise as much as an uproar, and that's the most famous one. Also pirates love the stuff.

I read that through spectography that at least the outer surface of an asteroid is able to be, somewhat at least, determined, I don't know how much certainty is involved. As Shonus mentioned, that is likely part of a reason why Psyche was chosen as an initial flyby location for whatever treasure seeking gizmos that it's no doubt carrying. You could be correct though about it maybe being a big ball of dirt covered in precious stuff.