It’s pretty clear that rule making and adjudication are in the preview of the executive branch. Congress and courts can’t possibly make laws and hold trials for every possible minor situation.
> In cases where a regulator's action was deemed at least "reasonable", the judiciary was obligated to simply defer to the regulator's interpretation.
That is the way it _should_ be. Judges are not subject matter experts in all of human endeavors, but they are expected to make rulings over that domain. Relying on experts and career civil servants advice is generally good, unless they’re being unreasonable.
The role of a judge is not to give his own personal opinion on a topic. It's to listen to arguments between two different sides, who each may call upon experts, witnesses, present evidence, and so on. And they will then also argue how the other side's take is invalid or misleading. The role of the judge is to work to objectively determine which side has the law and evidence most on their side.
In cases where a judge is a domain expert, he may well end up even needing to recuse himself as that would generally entail opining on debatable topics one way or the other, which makes him unlikely to be able to effectively perform his role.
unfortunately civil servants are not perfect and not elected. If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court. The judge should defer to them only after finding their decision was good in the first place.
They don't overtly take bribes. It's a mixture of two things. The first is a corporate revolving door. Look at the head of a regulatory agency and he's often a corporate insider - regulatory capture. For instance many regulations that greatly expanded the reach and reduced requirements for GMOs passed under Michael R Taylor [1] as the head of the FDA.
He was a Vice President at Monsanto (and worked as part of their contracted legal team for 7 years prior) and some of his most well known publications involved arguing for an interpretation of a 1958 law, that forbid companies using carcinogens in products, to mean that they could only knowingly allow a 'small amount' of carcinogens. His Wiki page looks like it's been hit by a PR firm. Here [1] is an older version.
So you essentially have Monsanto, by proxy, in charge of the FDA. And this sort of stuff is much more the rule than the exception. Taylor was appointed by Obama. That's not to be partisan and suggest Obama was particularly bad here, but on the contrary I think many people have a positive view of him relative to more recent presidents, yet he continued on with these practices just like literally every other administration in modern history.
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The second thing is indirect payoffs. Massive companies like Monsanto have their tentacles in just about everything in any way remotely related to their domain. If you play ball with them, you're going to find doors and opportunities open for you everywhere. On the other hand if you turn against them they will similarly use all their resources to destroy you so much as possible.
A recent article on here discussed how key research published regarding the safety of Monsanto products was ghostwritten by Monsanto themselves and then handed off to some other 'scientists' to sign their name to it and publish. [2] Once that was indisputably revealed in court (only thanks to the really smart guys doing this literally talking about it, verbatim, in emails), it took some 8 years for the article to be retracted. People just don't want to go against Monsanto.
> If they 'take bribes' I don't want a judge to accept their word. They should have to justify their ruling before the court.
If they're taking bribes they should be tried under corruption laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 201
Meanwhile our SC justices can accept all kinds of gifts from industry and make whatever ruling they want without any repercussions. They're in charge of determining their own conflicts of interests and their own ethics violations. Which surprise, they never seem to have any!
Its far easier to remove a regulator, even one of a supposedly independent agency (we'll see how that goes), for doing something obviously corrupt than a Supreme Court judge, as evidenced by the current court.
If I were to go out on a limb, those companies spend more on tech companies than you and they have larger legal teams than you. That is a carrot and a stick for AI companies to follow the contract.
With off the shelf options, preferring FOSS if possible, I still enjoy using and contributing to open source.
Some of the substitutions wound up being a step down in features, or required rethinking parts of workflows, but the time savings is such a benefit.
Custom notetaking tool with p2p sync-> Google keep
Custom batteries included Linux distro for SD protection, Kiosk browsers, offline docs, creative commons content packs -> a few scripts built into my control server on vanilla RasPi OS
Rsync-> Borg -> Kopia(to avoid fussing with Borg's community NAS package)
I once heard it said that Trump governs like a dictator because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is extremely unpopular and his party holds one of the smallest house majorities ever.
GOP is a party captured by the very wealthy. It’s minority rule because of certain elites’ trillion dollar plans to control all three branches of government and the courts have come to fruition after decades in the works.
After Nixon a lot of lessons were learned, on how to handle scandals and how to ram unpopular policy down America’s throat.
There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.
> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]
> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]
> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.
Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.
And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.
> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.
This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.
Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.
Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.
Every rule has exceptions. Usually its because of some quirk of the market. The most obvious example is adtech, which is able to sustain massive margins because the consumers get the product for free so see no reason to switch and the advertisers are forced to follow the consumers. Tech in general has high margins but I expect them to fall as the offerings mature. Companies will always try to lock in their users like aws/oracle do but thats just a sign of an uncompetitive market imo.
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