Oh don’t worry, Trump will put a 1000% tariff on the Chinese stuff to protect any remaining US production, or just to make sure nobody can afford solar panels.

The US has a law to limit the liability of gun manufacturers.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a U.S law, passed in 2005, that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. Both arms manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible. However, they may be held liable for negligent entrustment if it is found that they had reason to believe a firearm was intended for use in a crime.

I’m pretty sure this supreme court would rule that people don’t have a right to electricity, or even water. They’ll probably be totally ok with people losing internet access as punishment for crossing media owners.

Didn’t take them 60 votes to ignore the parliamentarian and revoke the waivers that let California set its own emissions standards.

The Senate has overruled the guidance of the parliamentarian, a nonpartisan staffer who interprets the Senate’s rules, and voted 51 to 44 to overturn a waiver allowing California to set its own air pollution standards for cars that are stricter than national regulations. The Senate has only overruled its parliamentarian a handful of times in the 90-year history of the role.

The link goes to the comments instead of the body of the post.

Anyway, the decision comes with a huge catch:

While the ruling means that coverage of preventive health care is no longer under threat, the ruling clarifies that the health secretary has direct authority over the USPSTF. The clarification raises concern that the current secretary, Kennedy, could remove task force members and/or undo recommendations to suit his personal ideology, as he is now doing with the vaccine advisory board at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Preventative care is covered, but RFK Jr. has control over the group that recommends which preventative care should be covered.

“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.

You shouldn’t be “paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago” regardless of anything an executive has done. Be less lazy and cancel subscriptions to shitty services.

Also, if a CEO doing a bad thing is a dealbreaker for them, why the fuck are they on twitter?.

Can the consideration be “this person makes poor financial decisions”?

Mother Jones has a full-text RSS feed. No pictures, but no ads either.

“Many respected constitutional experts argue that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional. I’m persuaded by that argument.”

I don’t think he was persuaded by the argument, I think he was hoping such an argument existed. Anything for daddy Trump.

Look, when a guy regularly tweets with caps lock you’ve got to lower your expectations.

Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.

Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.

The Navy’s is coming up in October and then the Marine Corps’ in November. Somebody better get it right!

The second problematic provision — found within Section 43201© of the House reconciliation bill — would impose a 10-year ban on the enforcement of all state and local laws that regulate artificial intelligence (AI), including rules for AI’s use in political campaigns and elections.

From what I’ve read about reconciliation bills, provisons need to be mainly about the budget rather than policy. What does banning AI regulation at lower levels of government have to do with the federal budget?

If you attack them the law is on their side even if they don’t identify themselves:

[18 U.S. Code] Section 111 makes it a crime to “forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with” federal officials engaged in their duties. But here’s the problem: You don’t even need to know they’re federal officials. You can be convicted for shoving someone you think is just someone yelling in your face, even just placing them in “reasonable fear of harm” without physical contact—if they turn out to be a plainclothes agent. That’s not hypothetical. That’s precedent, courtesy of the Supreme Court over 50 years ago.

Which means this: An undercover agent embedded in a protest, a public meeting, even a constituent town hall could claim to have been “impeded,” and the federal government can treat that moment as a federal crime. Under the current administration’s appetite for authoritarianism, that’s not a loophole, it’s a feature.

The music labels have responded by trying to make artists wait much longer before they can try something similar:

It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.

“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said. “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”

In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”

It would be funny if Skydance tried to renegotiate the deal or back out entirely, based on how all this nonsense has affected Paramount’s value.

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.

Australia has never contemplated imposing a similar tax. New Zealand tried but backed down last week after the United States threatened to impose higher tariffs on New Zealand goods.

What happened in New Zealand is almost certainly what will happen in Australia. This will go nowhere.

Well the AI companies and investors should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don’t always work out.

When President Donald Trump and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred met at the White House last month, they discussed one of the president’s passion projects — reinstating baseball star Pete Rose to make him eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This week, that’s exactly what Manfred did.

When I heard Pete Rose was going to be eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame my immediate reaction was to joke that “Somehow this is Donald Trump’s fault”. I didn’t think I’d be right.