On Friday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case(s) of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose the tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting (though there are some concurrences, as well). //

Mike Ford
3 hours ago
Roberts speaks out of both sides of his mouth...Under ObamaCare, his "reasoning" was that the mandate was a "tax" although not specifically stated so in the legislation.

Yet, here the "reasoning is that Trump cannot act because "tariffs" are not specifically mentioned in the appropriate legislation.

And people wonder why we door kickers hate lawyers (my good buddy Susie Moore being one of the few exceptions). //

Scholar
3 hours ago edited
The court erred on this as it lacks the competency to determine emergency, upon determining which the president has broad authorities under IEEPA to:

investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest[.].

Roberts and Barrett took a totally subjective view on the the lack of explicity in mentioning tariffs in the text of the law. Since when Common Law has become a totally explicit system?

There are two ways to extend your reach beyond your own body. (I mentally bucket people into these when I meet them. It's quite useful.)

The King makes one decision and an army moves. His reach is amplified through social structure. A pharaoh didn't lift stones; he commanded people who commanded people who lifted stones. A CEO doesn't write code; she allocates capital to engineers who allocate compute to compilers. The king's power is delegation all the way down.

The Wizard speaks one word and fire erupts. His reach is amplified through technology. The engineer with a steam engine can move mountains. The programmer with a datacenter can simulate worlds. The wizard's power is leverage through tools.

Humans have been both. We started as neither: reach ≈ 1x, your muscles do your work. Then we became wizards: fire, wheels, steam, electricity. Some of us became kings: chiefs, pharaohs, executives. The history of civilization is the history of reach growing. //

The Old World
For the entire history of computing, machines were pure tools. Wizards without will.

You spin up a server. You pay for GPU hours. You click "train." The machine does what you asked, using exactly the resources you allocated. When it's done, it stops.

In this world, AI had no agency over compute. It consumed what it was given. The wizard extended human reach but never decided to reach. The amount of energy commissioned by AI was zero.

Then we made a wizard that could make its own wizards.

“The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware.”

NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure. //

The letter and a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon were remarkable for the amount of accountability taken by NASA. Moreover, at Isaacman’s direction, the space agency released an internal report, comprising 311 pages, that details findings from the Program Investigation Team that looked into the Starliner flight.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Isaacman said there would be “leadership accountability” as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken. //

The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.

Essentially, Wilmore could not fully control Starliner any longer. But simply abandoning the docking attempt was not a palatable solution.

"Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." //

I collected five real metrics of AI progress, fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently, and found the one with genuine curvature toward a pole. The date has millisecond precision. There is a countdown.

(I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway.) //

The Singularity Will Occur On
Tuesday, July 18, 2034
at 02:52:52.170 UTC

Yui Smack-Fu Master, in training
5m
81
The most astonishing part of Jared's letter is that while Butch and Suni were on station they were advocating for NASA to show leadership, and yet disagreements on the ground had "deteriorated into unprofessional conduct".

Yikes. //

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
15y
39,338
dangle said:
Yeah, but we remember that at the time, after we were still blinking in disbelief at our screens after formal coverage of the test flight finished, and after an hour delay to the presser in order to get their stories straight, that when the feed returned, Jim Bridenstine stared into the camera and confidently announced that "Today, a lot of things went right."
I will react today exactly as I did in the comments of that the article that covered that: Taht was Bridenstine being a good politician and saving as much face for a valued contractor as he could. His words didn't matter. What would matter was his (and NASA's) actions. And as it turns out, the actions were spot-on. NASA forced Boeing to refly OFT-1.

Unfortunately, Ballast Bill Nelson was the Administrator after the OFT-1 repeat and he has a long history with Boeing and Old Space in general. And it was under his watch that the OFT-1 repeat was accepted as sufficient even though there were thruster issues again.

NASA owned up to not monitoring Boeing closely enough prior to the OFT-1 launch. However, they at least did the right thing and made Boeing repeat the test. NASA performed far more poorly when human life was on the line for OFT-2. //

https://planet4589.org/space/misc/starliner26.ji.pdf
https://planet4589.org/space/misc/starliner26.pdf