> If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise.
Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.
> Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.
Why not?
Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."
We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.
What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.
>Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws.
Nothing in the Constitution requires vague laws either.
In the interests of curbing inevitable abuse of executive power, laws should only be as vague as absolutely required. In the interests of wider public comprehension, laws should be as precise as absolutely possible.
If a law is so vague that there are questions if the executive is overstepping its authority, it's the duty of the judiciary to stop that and of the legislature to rewrite the law more precisely.
>The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.
And the Judicial Branch has the power to interpret the law, judge the Constitutionality of the law, and check the powers of the Legislature and the Executive.
The judiciary is doing its duty here. Put aside your personal biases and desires, because none of that matters here. Banning non-competes should be enacted by Congress and then executed by the White House withstanding challenges in the Courts.
The Executive Branch does not have the power to interpret the law.
Incidentally, the Executive Branch does not have the power to spend money either; it must spend money according exactly to budgets passed by Congress.
> People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.
And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.
From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.
(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)
Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).
Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:
If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.
If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.
People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.
People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.
Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.
It's also not a government web site. It's a private company who, for some reason, my own government outsources identity verification to. Meanwhile, the authorization system the US government has built (login.gov) is deemed "insecure" by the IRS and Social Security for some inexplicable reason. (But it's fine for Trusted Traveler Programs.)
Most credit unions participate in the credit union shared branching network, so I recommend joining your local credit union of choice. You can then go into the branches of several other credit unions to do most banking needs.
The caveat is if there's a major problem, like here, then you'd need to deal directly with your home credit union.
Oh wow, I had never heard of that. I already have a CU on the other side of the country that I still use for loans because they've always had the lowest rates. I'll have to see if they participate.
It's for a few reasons, let's see if I remember them all from the run-up to the Sound Transit 2 vote in 2008:
Mercer Island exists and has political clout (even though they tried to use that clout to force Sound Transit to not use the express lanes on I-90) and would demand a station no matter what.
Running across a floating bridge is hard enough and the Governor Albert Rosellini Bridge (SR 520 Floating Bridge to the Yanks) is the longest in the world. Going across the dual-named bridge that carries I-90 would be shorter and was seen as easier back then.
You don't have to turn around to serve Bellevue and then Redmond. Coming up from I-90 you hit the big part of Bellevue then you turn right and keep going northeast to Redmond. Coming from SR 520 you'd go south into Bellevue then have to U-turn to go back to meet BelRed and Overlake.
At the time, we didn't know when, if ever, the SR 520 bridge would be replaced. The previous span was a nightmare. It had a movable bit in the middle, the road deck sat at roughly water level, and would routinely sway so hard in strong winds that the bridge would have to be blocked off so the midspan section could be opened to relieve stress and prevent the thing from sinking. The I-90 bridges have no such issue (considering the damn thing had already sunk once in the 90s). There was no way to use the previous SR 520 bridge for light rail, though the new one is built to support it.
You also catch a lot more potential riders in station areas around I-90 and South Bellevue. The Points cities are basically HOAs with delusions of grandeur. There's no hope they'll gain more people in any of our lifetimes, meanwhile the areas the 2 Line passes through are already fairly populated by Eastside standards and have room to grow (also by Eastside standards).
Meanwhile, the 542 and 545 are comparatively very fast.
Wow I didn’t know the old bridge was such a nightmare. This also makes me wonder why this line only opened now, if it was voted on all the way back in 2008.
I do usually take the 542 now, and it works well-enough, but it only comes every 30 minutes which is annoying.
ST put priority to going north through Cap hill and up to Northgate (where there used to be a mall). Prepping the I90 bridge took a long time (8 years ago they shut down the express lanes, after adding an HOV to the main bridge) so far from my recall.
It was scheduled to open a few months ago but early this year they found a fault with the rail supports on the bridge that was missed as they were put in during early COVID and didn't have the ability to get them inspected as well as normal. So for the next year you've got Redmond to Bellevue with a missing link across the lake.
On the other side. I think that this month the main line from Northgate to Lynhood is going to open with several more stops so the system is expanding in a couple directions.
I completely agree that the 542 needs more frequency. Sound Transit likely saw the dip from Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing work-from-home and figured they could reuse the service hours. Remember that Metro has been suffering from a bad shortage of workers (drivers, maintenance, and operations) that they've only just started to recover from. This is important because Sound Transit contracts out operation of most of its transit service to the local agencies so Metro operates the 542, 545, 550, and others.
Hopefully now that Metro hiring and training is on the upswing Sound Transit will be able to get more bus service hours.
I suppose because a bunch of the automated solvers use the audio as a workaround, the audio ones have become borderline (or even over the line) unlistenable.
The most recent few I've done have sounded like someone whispering "they threw their hair through the chair there" next to a propeller plane in a heavy thunderstorm.
> The Internet is full of these micro-tyrants and I never see anyone complaining about them.
I'll complain about them. They're, at best, poorly-informed people who don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing as it winds up as abuse, or worst they're malicious actors who I hope are condemned to a life of a 300 baud modem over a rural telephone line in a lightning storm.
The hiccup is, these are two different problems. I'm not the service administrator; I'm the user who has to put up with the absolutely onerous "bot prevention service." Frankly, if you're a private entity, I'm mostly of the mind of do what you like. If I encounter a CAPTCHA, I will probably just bounce off the page. Except, of course, that Google penalizes me for doing that, too, because I Might Be A Bot That Got Stymied(tm).
Where my hackles are truly raised is when the government requires me to work through these moronic puzzles. I shouldn't have to do a CAPTCHA to log in to my transit pass or look up county records!
Finally, it's everyone who will handwave away "well, it's inaccessible but whachagondo" without the acknowledgement that we are all on varying levels of "abled" and that level changes throughout our lives, and not just as it relates to age.
I've worked on implementing captcha in a few situations. In every case it was with great reluctance, and we tried to limit it to places that were absolutely necessary.
But the alternative was to go down, or spend an order of magnitude more on abusive requests than legitimate ones, or allow spammers to use our commenting system to send emails.
I don't like the situation any more than you do, but that transit site might have captcha to protect it from getting DDoSed and becoming unavailable. That county records site might have captcha to protect personal information from getting scraped for usage in phishing attacks and other unsavory activities.
Sometimes there might be other ways to provide protection from bots, but those can have their own inconveniences for users. Or they could be prohibitively expensive.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find better solutions, or that captchas are always necessary. But in many cases, they are there for a reason.
The problem with the government is that the internet breaks assumptions that the government really doesn't want to break.
Let's take court cases as an example. Imagine your jurisdiction always let people look up cases that they had a case number for, but didn't let them search for all cases involving a specific person to protect the innocent. This worked fine when looking up a case involved taking a trip to the court, scheduling an appointment, giving the case number to an employee and waiting the for the documents to be brought into the reading room.
Then, somebody got the bright idea to move all that to the internet, making life easier for both the people who needed access to cases and the employees who used to provide it. There's one problem, however, a computer system won't stop an unsavory company from the Maldives from querying all the case numbers and building an index of all the cases and their participants, letting people search for all cases involving a specific person, something which the government specifically wanted to avoid. Captchas are the only real way to stop this.
> without the acknowledgement that we are all on varying levels of "abled"
I get this argument, and I even use it myself (it's great for getting through to people who find empathy hard), but shouldn't this be irrelevant? Even if 5% of people were born disabled, and the remaining 95% were abled for their entire lives, shouldn't disabled people still matter?
One of the many reasons I pay for Carrot is to get the other, more expensive, data sources. If you do stump up, you get access to the Apple Weather API--what once was Dark Sky--as well as Foreca. I've found both of them to be very accurate based on what Carrot reports.
(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)
> ...a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.
Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us.
All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service.
Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps.
0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.
I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd expect we should agree on this, right?
While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered sequentially following one direction of the private street, then the other. So the house nearest the entrance of the subdivision would be "100 Maple Street" and across the street would be "143 Maple Street".
Because they'd grown up mainly going to other friends' houses in the private subdivisions, my house address was the odd one and theirs were normal to them.
Even in the US with named/number streets "as normal" I know of at least three cases where the "front door moved" on a house on two streets, so the address number stayed the same but the street name changed, making it completely out of order.
Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.
> Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.
Why not?
Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."
We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.
What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.