It’s part of the common law tradition though. Could it not be brought back?

Doomscrolling will doom us all. Fatalism is fatal. Rage against the dying of the light. Start building community, or start building bombs. Those are your choices.

The president is also openly corrupt, by orders of magnitude more. That crypto scheme for one is just a blatantly obvious bribery mechanism. Sure, the justices serve for life. But if a president is willing to directly violate explicit court orders, he could easily decide not to leave office as well. He could issue an executive order saying, "in my opinion, the two-term limit doesn’t apply because <bullshit reasons.> And then when the court rules against him, just ignore their ruling. A lawless president is a president for life.

Ultimately, philosophically, I don’t see why a president that openly defies the law should enjoy the protections of the law. Want to be lawless? Then you can be an outlaw. Those who live by the sword should die by the sword.

Maybe not in terms of criminal accountability. But again, the court has ruled against Trump numerous times. The idea they blindly support everything he does is pure fiction. In his first term, they ruled against him many times.

They would have checks and balances. They could still be removed by impeachment. Members of the court would still have to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Couldn’t the same be said for impeachment and conviction in the Senate? If Congress can simply remove a president they don’t like, how does this not end up making kingmakers like the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome?

The court has ruled against Trump on numerous occasions. The idea they blindly support everything he does is simply not backed up by reality.

Did they rule that he has broad immunity? Yes. But ultimately they ruled it in a way that puts them as the arbiter of which acts have said immunity.

Exactly. Their ONLY virtue is convenience. Either you’re there for a prescription and buy something because you’re already there, or you’re just looking to do a quick stop. They’re basically a glorified convenience store that happens to have a pharmacy attached. Their prices are high, but they do have convenience on their side. You don’t have to walk across half a mile of parking before getting to the front door. You don’t have to walk into a giant warehouse store that corrals you into shopping in a giant counterclockwise loop. Walgreens does have the convenience option over shopping at a big grocery store.

And this is what is so bone-headed about these locking cases. Again, their ONLY advantage is convenience. If they’re going to slow things down by putting a bunch of barriers between me and the things I want, I might as well just spend the same amount of time, go to the full-sized grocery store, and save some money.

That might be usable. But still, well within the range of reversible transactions and court litigation.

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I suggest a microfiche printer.

It would be fascinating to see how the richest humans alive try to give away as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.

It’s called Brewster’s Millions.

Unfortunately you need to keep in mind that transfers and donations can be reversed posthumously. If a gunman walks up to a billionaire, forces him to transfer millions to his bank account, and then shoots him dead, the killer doesn’t just get to keep the money after getting caught. Any transfer can be reversed after the fact. And you only have a few minutes of controlling the person before they die, so you can’t have them work for years to do good with their money.

If just one billionaire died this way, the transfers would likely stand. It can be written off as one man deciding to gain a conscience before taking his own life. But if hundreds of billionaires start doing this all at once? People are reasonably going to conclude that something or someone is controlling these billionaires. Maybe people actually accept the fantastical notion of a Death Note in play. Or maybe they conclude its something strange but more scientific, like some sort of infectious electronic meme that can instantly brainwash people into carrying out some action. Maybe there’s a hereto undiscovered arrangement of pixels on a screen that can hack the human mind and gain control of it temporarily. The sort of thing that, while implausible, is at least within the realm of scientific possibility.

Regardless of the exact cause, the heirs to these billionaires will go to court and argue that their deceased relatives were clearly not of sound mind at the time they transferred all their holdings. There’s already plenty of legal precedent for this, primarily for elderly people who lose their faculties and are taken advantage of by manipulative caretakers. Even if you can convince some 90 year old woman with Alzheimer’s to sign away her fortune to you, that transfer has a good chance of being reversed in court.

Really, the most effective way to provide extreme encouragement for the heirs to give away money is by having the billionaire write, in their own blood on the wall, “my heirs should give away my money. Any that don’t will share my fate.”

This way there are no transfers to fight in court. The legitimate heirs of the billionaire do inherit the money. But after they have it, there’s nothing preventing them from donating it themselves. And the money will be like a curse. They’ll be desperate to get rid of it.

Done on a large scale, this would encourage most billionaires to give up their wealth voluntarily. You could have each of them write, “I am being killed for the crime of being a billionaire. Any other billionaire will share my fate.” If a few dozen such killings happened, and the police proved utterly unable to prevent it, then the vast majority of billionaires would give up their wealth voluntarily out of pure fear.

It depends on how small you write, I suppose.

I see I’m gonna need to buy a microfiche printer…

Historically, in the US at least, violent movements are a precursor to peaceful social change. People protest and protest peaceful for decades, and little to nothing actually changes.

I mean think about it, do you think for example that an insurance company that is run by people freely willing to kill tens of thousands of people have any problem just ignoring any number of protesters? No one ever got any rights by asking nicely. Every social change we’ve experienced has had both peaceful and violent components.

This doesn’t morally justify violence, but it does show that violence doesn’t just keep escalating until we go full on civil war. Whenever inequality or injustice gets to critical levels, some desperate people decide that nonviolence doesn’t work and that more extreme actions are needed. Suffragettes were involved in many arson campaigns. Slavery didn’t end until the Union army forced it to end. Unions got their rights to organize through armed battles and by torching factories with their bosses locked inside. The black civil rights movement required both non-violent resistance, but also violent groups like the Black Panthers waiting in the wings, offering a more violent solution if a peaceful one wasn’t found. Stonewall was a riot.

America tends to go through periods of increasing wealth and social inequality. Things build up until some people feel so pressured, either by personal circumstance or ideology, that they believe violence is the only option. This doesn’t make this violence right or just, but it is simply part of human nature. It happens again and again and again. When the elite push the masses far enough, eventually they start killing elites and setting their property on fire. And there’s not a whole lot that can be done to prevent it, as these tend to be random crimes by detached individuals acting on their own. The elites will always overreach and respond with harsher criminal penalties. But when someone is willing to throw their life away for something, there’s really no penalties that will make a difference.

And ultimately, that kind of violence, or threat of it, is usually what breaks the dam that previously prevented peaceful social change. Elites rarely give a single iota about the common man. In order to acquire that level of wealth and power, you pretty much have to be a sociopath in some form or another. That is as true now as it was in the age of hereditary nobility. But eventually the elite learn that something they actually care about - their own wealth or their own lives, are at risk. And even if the elite can hide themselves behind private armies, they inevitably find that their vast holdings of property aren’t so easily protected. Arson has historically played a huge role in these types of social inflection points.

So pressure will continue to build, but society isn’t going to break. Rather, crimes against life and, especially property, will continue. I sadly expect to see a lot of arson carried out by incendiary drones in the near future. And these acts of violence will continue to grow ever more common until the sociopaths at the top realize, “wait, it’s actually costing me more money NOT to improve things for the common man, let’s throw the people some bones.”

That’s pretty much how every right or liberty you enjoy today was achieved. Rarely does outright revolution completely overthrow the old order and bring out the literal guillotines. The French Revolution was the exception, not the rule. What we are seeing now is just the normal and inevitable course of history, that has happened time and time again. The people get pushed and exploited past a critical level, and the more unhinged among the population start taking violent action. This violence builds and builds, and eventually the elite realize it’s more profitable to accept some of those quite reasonable reforms that the non-violent folks have been politely asking for for decades.

Take heart. This has all happened before. It is happening now. And in the future, it will happen again.

Ea-nāṣir shops at Safeway.

I would make the money’s paw consequences similar, but slightly different.

A bad microsoft update somehow manages to permanently brick every windows computer on the planet overnight. Linux is now the dominant operating system, but mass societal chaos results from 90% of computers being permanently bricked.

I’m pursuing a PhD in structural engineering and wood science. Here’s my perspective on manufactured homes, and why they lack the long-term durability of stick built homes.

The problem with manufactured homes is that they’re value-engineered to the point of fragility. A stick built home is built by hand on site. They’re built from whatever generic lumber is available from local lumber yards. They’re built by imperfect human beings using their own imperfect hands. To compensate for imperfect materials and imperfect human labor, they have a lot of redundancy built in to them. The structure of stick-built homes vary more between each home, so every piece of wood hasn’t been optimized down to the absolute minimum. Standardized lumber sizes (2x4, 2x6, 2x8) are used, instead of using custom-milled lumber to produce the absolute minimum cross section for every piece in a home.

But if you’re making ten thousand of the same identical manufactured home, you can optimize the hell out of them to make construction as efficient as possible. Instead of imperfect human hands, you use robots to place every piece precisely, and install every fastener perfectly. Instead of using industry-standard lumber sizes, you get lumber mills to custom mill you oddball sizes for particular columns, beams, etc. Instead of buying 2x6s, you get the mill or mill up your own custom “2x5.358.” You also do a lot more structural engineering. When you’re building ten thousand copies of the same building, it’s worth putting in more engineer hours to wring every last pound out of a building’s frame. On a normal residential home, it’s not worth spending an extra hundred engineering hours just to save a few hundred pounds of wood. But if you’re making 10,000 of the same home, those hours can be worth it.

Manufactured homes are, from an engineering point of view, far more efficient than a stick built home. Like airplanes, they have every extra ounce of material optimized out of their design. But as we saw in supply chains during the pandemic, efficiency and resiliency are often inversely correlated. The problem with over-optimization is that it’s only ideal as long as the building will never face circumstances beyond what the structural engineer initially estimated. Let’s say you design your building to survive a 70 mph wind undamaged. If you have a lot of redundancy, that structure may also be able to withstand an 80 or 90 mph wind undamaged. The over-optimized structure will be a lot more efficient at surviving the 70 mph wind, but if the building ever has to face worse conditions than were assumed during its design…well then you’re in trouble.

Finally, stick-built homes will inevitably be far more repairable and upgradeable than factory built homes. Stick build homes are built by actual human hands on site. Factory built homes may be constructed in ways that, while cost effective, are only possible in a factory environment. That which is built on site can be repaired on site. That which is built from mass market generic components can be repaired with mass market generic components. Stick built homes cost more up front, but they inevitably have long-term advantages in terms of resiliency and repairability.

The state of New York is about to get a firsthand lesson in the Streisand Effect. They should have just charged him the same charge any normal killer would get - Second Degree Murder, which is the normal charge for premeditated murder in NY. First degree requires rare special circumstances, and the prosecutor chose to use a dubious “terrorism” modifier to up the charge to Murder 1. They just couldn’t help themselves, and they shot themselves in the foot.

The advantage to the prosecution to a simple Murder 2 charge is that motive really doesn’t matter much. They just have to prove that Luigi pulled the trigger. But with the terrorism modifier, the trial will no devolve into lengthy discussions about his motives and message. Not only have they now given him the world’s largest soapbox, but this will also give the defense an opportunity to make him much more sympathetic to the jury. With only a Murder 2 charge, the defense lawyer would have had to fight hard to sneak subtle hints into trial about Luigi’s motives. Now his motives will be a core part of the prosecution’s case.

With a simple Murder 2 trial, even jurors who thought Thompson got what he deserved could vote to convict based simply on the letter of the law. Luigi killed an evil man, but he still has to face the consequences like any other criminal. Now the jury will clearly see that the system isn’t treating him like any other criminal. The prosecutors, through their own actions, are making Luigi’s case for him - the justice system is completely rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, and the only way they can ever be held accountable is through violence.

All it takes is one juror of twelve to look around at the situation and say, “this is bullshit. I’m not going to convict.” Sure, they can try him again with a new jury if he’s not found unanimously not-guilty, but that jury will have an even greater risk of jury nullification. The longer this goes on, the more likely the prosecutor just has to offer him some sweetheart plea deal just to get him convicted of something. And each trial just elevates Mangione that much closer to literal Sainthood in the popular imagination.

The feds also indicted him. There’s zero chance a Trump AG isn’t going to be pushing for the death penalty. What they cannot seem to understand is that this will only make him a martyr. They should have just given him the standard NY Murder II conviction any other killer would get, but they just couldn’t help themselves. They had to really send a message to the proles.

All they will succeed in doing is elevating him to outright sainthood.