Civil asset forfeiture should not be considered constitutional, and some day a test case will make it to the SCOTUS. As for this case though... the pardon does not make Ulbritch innocent! On the contrary, accepting the pardon implies guilt. So the pardon need not and might not extend to forfeitures. Though it's also possible that the presidential pardon could extend to the forfeitures, but I suspect that's a constitutional grey area.
Cases have made it to the Supreme Court --- recently! --- and it held up just fine. This is another message board fixation. I'm sure it's abused all over the place. It wasn't in this case.
What part of this makes you thing CAF is on shaky constitutional ground? This is a CAF case with reach-y fact patterns for the government and they won it handily. We didn't even get close to the question of whether CAF is itself constitutional; the court simply presumed it.
This was about the timing of a hearing about forfeiture, not about whether forfeiture is ok. Though I've not read this case yet, but now that I'm aware of it I'm keen to read it. I'll comment again later.
“A pardon is an expression of the president's forgiveness and ordinarily is granted in recognition of the applicant's acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or completion of sentence. It does not signify innocence.”
Pardons are forgiveness. They don’t roll back the clock, although the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that acceptance of a pardon is not an assumption of guilt.
Was acceptance of a pardon an "assumption" by the court? Is it not "admission* of guilt", which I believe itself was never the case as this was based on a judge's aside that people didn't accept pardons because it was *percieved* as "an admission of guilt", i.e. the "percieved" part was not actually articulated in court but rather the judge was completing a thought before it was fully articulated.
What I find interesting is that the 5th amendment no longer applies after a pardon. The pardoned can no longer claim that protection for the crime he was convicted of.
My apologies I made a mistake. The Burdick SCOTUS case from 1915 said “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it”
In 2021, an appeals court opined that: “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.”
I thought the 2021 case was a Supreme Court case, and I was incorrect. I think in the public eye the pardon is viewed differently based on however the story is told.
That would arguably create some of the worst perverse incentives, as far as financial crimes go.
Any two-bit governor could team up with some criminal, and make enough money to be set up for life against a pardon. Even worse if it's a president, as they could likely get off scot-free.
Trump could literally scam everyone and everyone, step down, receive a pardon from the VP, and happy days.
That’s exactly what it’s doing. As long as you misbehave in Washington DC or commit a crime not chargeable in a state or too complex to prosecute, you’re good.
For example, you could defraud suckers into buying a pump and dump memecoin. Elon has repeatedly demonstrated that nobody will prosecute, and POTUS is above the law for as long as he decides to stay in office.
For the record, it mostly comes across as you only recently learning what a straw man argument is, which, in the context of a message board argument, is a rough thing to have to admit, so you have my sympathies.
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically
Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
> 2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
I got the impression from the Dorsey interview that this was his commitment, and that he left because they weren't interested in that. They're just trying to be a twitter clone that picks up angry twitter users who hate Musk.
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> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.
I tried out Bluesky last week in hope of finding a social network which ticked this box, but my feed was full of anti Elon Musk / Trump messages. So it was very political from my initial experience.
This was after the setup wizard process where I selected tech/science/entertainment preferences.
Perhaps I did something wrong or didn't give it enough chance?
It's still political but the armies of anonymous blue checks that dominate every reply section on Twitter with regurgitated memes and low-effort insults are missing.
are they really missing, or is the shoe just on the other foot? i've been trying Bluesky for a month or so and it indeed seems to just be regurgitated memes and low-effort insults. the only difference is it's from a liberal/Democrat POV. the place comes off as an echo chamber sorely lacking in diversity of opinion tbh. if you go against the grain you'll be added to blocklists, which people seem giddy to use as to curate their echo chamber. hell, for daring to criticize the Democratic party from the left i've found myself on numerous MAGA and far-right blocklists. maybe this will change in due time? that'd be swell.
Well I can understand where they're coming from. The discussions have become so polarised and so nasty.
What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-right crowd are constantly spamming topics about totally unrelated issues with stuff like "There are only 2 genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants that they can't talk about anything else.
So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like Xitter.
Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky.
I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.
There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
It works though?! I've got all that US political nonsense added as mute/block words and follow a couple of notorious block lists and I rarely if ever see any of that content in my feed.
That's always going to be hard work using a US-based platform. Whatever its downsides, Mastodon is noticeably less US-centric and it shows in the content.
True, avoiding all posts with "Trump" or "Elon" would be amazing. I don't live in the US either and it's just too much drama for me.
It was the same with Brexit. Those 2 years I got so fed up with that constantly repeating discussion about separating goods & services which they knew was impossible from the start.
My site (Pinboard) is also getting hammered by what I presume are AI crawlers. It started out this summer with Chinese and Singapore IPs, but now I can't even block by IP range, and have to resort to captchas. The level of traffic is enough to immediately crash the site, and I don't even have any interesting text for them to train on, just link.
I'm curious how OP figured out it's Amazon's crawler to blame. I would love to point the finger of blame.
No, it's much smaller (though still a huge rocket). It appears to rise slowly because it accelerates more slowly than Starship (~1.2g vs ~1.5g when clearing the launch tower).
People are saying things about Starship not yet being an orbital rocket because of technicalities. The reality is we have two huge rockets, made by American companies, that can now reach orbit, and that's pretty amazing.
Starship is an orbital rocket, and will achieve actual orbit in few months, but I don’t think they are ready for a customer anytime soon, particularly an external one.
That is entirely by choice, they want to focus their attention on iteration now, which is sensible as falcon 9 and heavy are more than enough to compete today.
For a buyer in next two years it is either falcon heavy or new glen if they want heavy lift today.
No, that's not true. Back of the envelope estimates for New Glenn's launch tonight give a thrust to weight ratio of 1.2.
For the Space Shuttle, t/w at launch was 1.5, the same is true for Falcon and Starship. Delta Heavy was around 1.3. Saturn V was 1.2. None of this has anything to do with optimizing the trajectory.
Historic rockets around 1.2, including Shuttle, check your numbers. Starship is not a "historic rocket". It and Falcon 9 fly a trajectory that is optimized for something else, not max payload for a set first stage thrust.
That is incorrect. Shuttle liftoff thrust was 5.7 million pounds, giving a ratio of 1.25.
At liftoff, each SRB produces 2.65 million pounds thrust [1]. Using Wikipedia numbers instead (2.8 million pounds for SRB thrust at liftoff [2]) gives a liftoff thrust to weight ratio of 1.33. The 3xSME produce 0.4 million pounds thrust at liftoff. The SRB thrust did increase as the burn progressed, then ramped down for max Q.
People are accustomed to SpaceX rockets rapid acceleration, since they conduct most launches these days, but historic rockets (and New Glenn) accelerated more slowly off the pad.
Your math is wrong (you left out two of the main engines):
1) SSME thrust is 418k lbf. The shuttle has three engines, so 1.25M lbf
2) SRB is 2.65 M lbf. Two boosters give 5.3M lbf.
3) That sums up to 6.6M lbf
4) Shuttle weighs 4.4 million lbs.
5) That works out to a 1.5 thrust-to-weight ratio at sea level launch.
If you still don't believe, watch a Shuttle launch and time how long it takes to clear the tower. You'll get the same answer (vertical acceleration at about 1.5g)
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