There are a lot of instances where the Enterprise crew wanted to do the ethical thing, and Picard stops it or tries to. For example, when Dr. Crusher wanted to help when that planet population was addicted to drugs, and Picard wouldn’t let her do that or communicate anything to them.

Also, Data once found humans frozen in space, and when he helped them, Picard was annoyed; it wasn’t even a Prime Directive issue!

Haha yes it’s overall very long, but the section on this specific question isn’t too long, just 3 pages.

Brookings did a long but very readable analysis about why this won’t work: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11122022_GA_Investigation_Report_SecondEdition.pdf

I saw an argument that the “necessary and proper” clause in Article I, Section 8 lays out the authority quite nicely:

Congress has the power “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or any Department or Officer thereof”.

This is unconstitutional and based on incorrect comprehension of the 14th amendment. Gaetz is specifically leaning on the “and subject to” part in "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

However, this is clearly referring to exclude children born to diplomats who are not subject to jurisdiction because of diplomatic immunity. The exclusion does not apply to children born to undocumented immigrants.

Warrants are required for U.S. Mail. Likewise, the government should not have warrantless access to all electronic communication. It’s an outrageous position.

I really don’t even think the votes table would need to itself be federated; it could just be on the user’s instance. Upvote/downvote would be a call, but it should really only require the post or comment ID and voter instance. If an instance spams votes, those upvotes/downvotes could be deleted and the instance defederated

There might be possible technical solutions to this using hashing. Hashing is like encryption in that the original cannot be extracted, but the hashed result is unique.

For example, a solution would be to have a VOTES table with an indexed column that is a hash of a combination of the user ID, post ID, (and perhaps another “salt”, not sure). When a vote is made, the VOTES table is checked that the record (vote) does not already exist, gets an insert, and then a COUNTER is triggered for the actual vote count. (COUNTER is a db command that simply updates a counter). The hash would prevent multiple votes from the same user (as the salted hash is unique), and it would also prevent identifying who the user is from the table.

Since Toyota is way ahead with hybrids but behind with EVs, this would be a way to tell the public, “wait, don’t buy a competitor’s EV, because we’ll have something 100x better in a year or so.”

I hope I’m just being cynical, because solid state batteries do sound awesome. I wonder was the weight difference would be