i like how most usernames on discord are already taken so you end up having to put numbers at the end of your name anyway. if only there was already a system in place that allowed people to have the same name but there was something to differentiate them like number discriminators
this is because it was not actually about the discriminators. discord lied about how many people struggled with the previous system because, in actuality, it was some higher-up types that didn’t get it. there was some theorising somewhere that the change is ti facilitate datamining, which would make sense as there’s no other reason to try to make people this perfectly identifiable.
btw as it stands they’re not allowing ppl to ever change their users again so DO NOT pick a bullshit name hoping you’ll get your preferred name later. once it’s in use, it’s not fucking available.
so far, the main thing to do is to reach out thru discord’s support page to tell them how bad a fucking idea is, stop paying for nitro, and have a look at this support thread, which has insanely comprehensive information sources. there’s a change.org petition somewhere in there, too.
but yeah. tl;dr the “nobody understands discriminators <:(” is a distraction.
id really recommend people read the support thread linked here if you have the time. if you think this username thing is just people being upset over nothing then the support thread will inform you of the concerns people have
I think one of the funniest things I've heard about the Supreme Court is that they almost always rule in favor of defendants accused of corruption, and it's entirely because "Well... this can't be corruption, people do nice things for us like this all the time, and we're certainly not corrupt!"
If it was really just a sort of self-obliviousness, it'd be funny. But no, they have decided that they're Constitutionally Special God-Kings.
Indeed, in his 2011 report, Roberts strongly implied that any attempt by Congress to ethically constrain the justices would be unconstitutional. The fact that the Code of Conduct applies exclusively to lower court judges, Roberts claimed, “reflects a fundamental difference between the Supreme Court and the other federal courts.”
The Constitution gives Congress the power to create lower federal courts, Roberts argued, and that empowers Congress to help oversee them. The Supreme Court, by contrast, is created by the Constitution itself, and that suggests that Congress has less power to constrain the justices.
Though Roberts wrote that the justices do voluntarily comply with some rules that apply to lower court judges, such as a federal law imposing “financial reporting requirements” on all federal judges, he rather ominously warned that the Supreme Court “has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court” — leaving the clear impression that his Court might start striking down ethical statutes if Congress insisted that the justices must comply with them.
once again it's baffling how… ok you know how with some institutions there's, like, the polite society characterisation which the institution prefers, and then there's the cynical characterisation which may be closer to the truth? e.g. "harvard is for the best and brightest with the greatest teachers" vs "harvard is so the kids of senators and billionaires can get to know each other and anyone whom they might want to let join them in the future". or job interview questions and their face meanings vs what they are actually looking for you to say. anyway some institutions are better than others at selling the more flattering story, and for some it may even be closer to the truth. harvard's doing a decent job, academia as a whole has been pretty succesful at selling itself as, like, the heirs descartes and newton and darwin, not underpaid grad students and postdocs wrangling data for p < 0.05 and asst profs slaving away to boost their metrics for the next grant.
but the cynical characterisation of SCOTUS is it's a lifetime council control of which more or less lets you make law unchecked without accountability, and since appointment goes through the two-party senate obviously Justices will be chosen on ideological merits. the polite version would be that it checks and balances the other branches of government by interpreting the constitution. now the former is sufficiently close to the truth that it's basically impossible for SCOTUS reporting to not talk about the liberal and conservative factions of the court. and it's plainly obvious that's how votes split in the high-profile cases.
I can't remember a time when I believed the polite story. there was no, like, red-pilling moment of scales falling from eyes. just. you get explained to you the basic mechanics of it, and that its most politically significant decision is Roe v. Wade, and that Republicans explicitly want to overturn this decision even though the law as written by Congress has not changed. how do you not from there see the cynical story as obviously the correct description?
and yet! SCOTUS maintains legitimacy and I don't think you could actually tell the cynical story outright on TV news, it's not the kind of thing you say in polite society, you would never get invited back. it's like, imagine you open the sports section and there's an article about an event, and it has to concede that half the people on the court (pun not intended) wore red and half wore blue and that correlated with what basket they were trying to put the ball in. but it won't say the event was a basketball game, it'll try to maintain it was, I don't know, an inventory management exercise for sports equipment. it's the most X is not about Y I can think of.
there's a whole book by a law professor about roughly this and part of the abstract is
This book explores some of the most glaring misunderstandings about the U.S. Supreme Court—and makes a strong case for why our Supreme Court
Eric Segall, professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law for two decades, explains why this third branch of the national government is an institution that makes important judgments about fundamental questions based on the Justices' ideological preferences, not the law.
and when I came across it, I remember thinking, like, you wrote a whole book about this? wasn't it obvious to everyone? real emperor is naked moment.
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