Having the truck paid off is not really an argument - if you sold your truck you could probably fund bus tickets for the rest of your life.
Really? A monthly pass for my city costs $90, assume a sale price of $2000 and you get a little under 2 years of bus rides.
Also, what about insurance? I'd guess that's in the same order of magnitude as the bus fare.
I think I pay ~40 a month but my memory might be wildly off. Either way I think that extends the bus pass payoff to about 3.5 years.
I am driving a car to work every day even though it only saves me only about 20min - simply because public transport stresses me out while driving a car is relaxing for me. But money is usually not a good argument for doing that, at least for people living in urban areas with good public transport.
Transit fare costs more than just the fare, the hastle of finding, carrying around, and worrying about the change for the fare is pretty significant. There's quite a number of times I would have hopped on a bus if it wasn't for the fact I didn't want to mess with the cost. Generally it would only displace walks but I could see if helping with people drinking on weekends, in fact I could see a strong argument for free Friday-Sunday transit.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
Expensive road systems and maintenance, massive time losses in traffic congestion, huge subsidies in the form of parking requirements for businesses, and various costs associated with air pollution.
The fact you pay a lot for your car personally doesn't mean we aren't also paying for your car.
Isn't the problem the exact opposite? That we struggle to find cures when treatments are so much more profitable? That medicine is viewed as a profit generator rather than an utterly essential aspect of a modern society? This article reads like it was written by a spokesperson, and turns a blind eye to every disease that once had no cure - but now does.
I'm cynical about the health care industry too but you're missing the key variable here.
We can essentially cure two classes of illness, infection and physical defects.
With infection we can kill the parasite and you're cured, and with physical defects we can do surgery and you're cured, but otherwise we're kinda helpless.
Cystic fibrosis is a problem in the patient's genome, we can't cure them unless we fix the genome. Type 1 diabetes is the body either not producing insulin, we can't cure that without getting the body to produce more insulin.
You can treat symptoms to varying degrees of success but the body is a complex system and it's hard to do properly, ie you can produce insulin but getting it to the right places at the right times in the right concentrations is very non-trivial.
I thought bumblebees are everywhere except maybe the desert?
From what I can tell Bumblebee is a genus, so there are about 250+ individual species, each with its own habitat and temperature range it's adapted too.
What seems to be happening is these habitats are getting too warm and the bees, instead of migrating towards cooler temperatures, are dying instead.
I'm extremely sceptical that they can achieve their roadmap or anything close to it, do you share this scepticism? If so do you think they're mostly finished at this point (ie the project will fade into obscurity) or do you think the Mars One group will achieve something significant in the future?
Regulation's backers say that "this is an industry that has failed to police itself,"
Would you expect liquor stores to self-regulate and decide the drinking age is too low?
Self-regulation might work for some cheap and easy things, but no industry is going to refuse to sell to a massive portion of the market voluntarily. If you want to stop them you need legal enforcement.
I can tell you that as just an office worker, I get PISSED when my co-worker comes in with a cough, I know I will end up getting it.
People will still feel guilty calling in sick when capable of working.
I think this is one aspect of poor management., Management sets the tone - do they complain etc. when you call in sick? If they don't, then people take off when they are sick.
It is truly a shame that hospital management is so penny-wise/pound foolish as not to insist on generous sick time.
I think it's more than complaining, management needs to actively encourage people who are mildly sick to take the day off and to actively sell it as being good for the company. Otherwise people will feel like they're shirking their duty.
I think my current organization is particularly bad in this regard as they pay only 50% for sick days, so if people are remotely capable of working they'll come in so they don't take the hit.
From your comments, it's obvious that you don't understand what money is.
Money is an IOU.
The backing of a currency is not a physical resource, it's a measure of trust in the provider of said currency.
This holds equally true for Bitcoin, which is why Bitcoin is going to be a quaint footnote in computing history in a few years. Nothing backs it. Math is discoverable and essentially worthless as a backing. It's like collecting tree leaves and calling them money. You can grab them from just about anywhere, and there's technically a finite number of them. But nobody's going to give you anything in trade for them. (Except maybe a damned good kicking, which you'll deserve.)
I don't think it necessarily follows that Bitcoin has no future as a currency. Instead trust coming from a government backing the value of the currency the trust comes from assurance in the number of Bitcoins in existence and the number of people using Bitcoins. That being said Greece is a perfect example of the problem with a Bitcoin backed economy as you can't devalue your Bitcoins if you run into debt trouble anymore than Greece can devalue the Euro.
Though even if it doesn't succeed as a currency it sounds like Bitcoin might stick around as a payment system.
My proposal: have the Fed fund a basic income at zero cost to taxpayers. The Fed could structure it under Section 13 (13) of the Federal Reserve Act, as loans to individuals with negative interest. Thus, people would be paid to borrow.
Inflation is how taxpayers would pay for this "zero cost" proposal and it wouldn't be zero cost in reality.
True, it would be a wealth transfer to poor people.
My true worry with a basic income is it will help out a lot of people but it doesn't give people financial management skills and they can still get into debt trouble.
Instead I'd be tempted to look at a rental voucher, everyone gets $X annually towards renting/owning their own home, ideally reducing homelessness and introducing a stable asset that they can't leverage or loose when they get into other trouble. There's a bit of trouble making sure it's used for housing and keeping out corruption but I think it could improve things.
You didnt answer his question. The thing is that you refuse to answer because the answer is an embarrassment to your argument. Maybe if you worked on internal consistency, you would be able to face questions that can be proudly answered.
The fact that your argument is not internally consistent makes you wrong. I know that it doesnt feel right to think another way, but feelings dont make your argument right. Internal consistency would.
Or rather I did answer but you're so desperate to win the argument that you refuse to see it.
The state didn't promise to never cancel or modify the medallion system, but there was an obvious understanding that they would maintain it as much as possible as is the standard for programs such as that.
Part of that understanding is that of regulatory stability, even without an explicit promise there's an understanding the state will try to maintain regulations or change them only minimally to keep a stable environment for markets to operate in.
What you're claiming is at odds with the real situation.
The people who are most against systemd are the serious, professional, often long-time Linux system administrators who have to provision and maintain production Linux systems.
Maybe it's okay if systemd and PulseAudio fuck up your single Ubuntu workstation. That's not a luxury that these admins have. They need their Linux systems to work reliably all of the time.
This level of stability was very achievable in the past, before a distro like Debian adopted systemd. But now that it has, its quality has dropped off precipitously. Yes, this completely unnecessary drop in quality will make responsible people very angry!
There is no conspiracy, like you've convinced yourself that there is. There are just many experienced sysadmins who need Linux distros that work. With all of the major Linux distros switching to systemd lately, and the many problems this has caused, these sysadmins are left in a bad position.
They can't wait a decade for the problems to be sorted out. They need to act now. Many are doing something they probably should have done years ago, and are moving to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Some are even moving to Windows, as unfortunate as that is.
The robustness and reliability of Linux systems aren't "pet needs". They're the very factors that will, if ignored, result in Linux losing its current position. A robust and reliable Linux kernel is useless if the init system and userland stack running on top of it is full of problems. The entire package just won't be useful.
I'm not sure it's precisely that, developers want systems to improve so they can add new features and capabilities, but if I'm an admin then fundamentally all I really care about is reliability and uptime. For them a perfect OS never changes at all outside of bug fixes.
Init might be a massive PITA but it's a PITA they've already got working and trust. Their hatred of systemd might be based on very legitimate stability concerns, but it also might be a very rational response to a change which brings a minimal but costly risk, and an almost non-existent benefit.
However, current Linux admins are not the only people affected. Linux users, developers, and future admins will benefit from an improved init system.
Btw, I'm skeptical that those admins will actually switch OS's for precisely the same reliability concerns that make them oppose systemd. This is probably the same reason Redhat is able to push systemd on their own customer base.
Seriously, if you have enough cash and connections to even think about starting a company, or even doing one of these new-fangled "startups", then you're better off than 95% of the country and better of than 99% of the world.
By your comment I take it that you care about nothing but money?
You miss the point, the state is the one guaranteeing the limited monopoly.
When did the State ever guarantee that they would maintain the medallion program and/or refrain from issuing new medallions? Scarcity of medallions is hardly a natural right, and laws instituting artificial scarcity are subject to change. If anyone over-payed for a medallion under the false assumption that the current state of artificial scarcity was guaranteed to last they have no one but themselves to blame. The only compensation owed here is to those who were unjustly prohibited from operating taxis due to the State's medallion requirements.
So you're arguing against regulatory stability?
I'm not claiming they shouldn't leave the medallion system, but I don't think they should simply wipe out the medallions as an asset.
Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
..and I bought stock in oil reserves with the understanding that I was buying into a limited monopoly. Then Saudi Arabia started dumping oil on the market. Should the government make me whole again, too?
No one ever pledged that OPEC would keep withholding stock.
It seems that you are the victim of a common misconception: That the State is the one selling the medallions that cost so much. Wrong, ignorant fuck.
You miss the point, the state is the one guaranteeing the limited monopoly. One of the things that makes free markets work is that when you give your word you generally keep it (or do your best). That's what gives people the stability to do think like invest in assets like medallions.
Why do you seem to think governments should abandon their obligation to the Taxi drivers without any attempt at recourse?
It's their own fucking faults. They lobby to make sure this is the system that's in place to prevent competition from companies like Uber. They got the laws they paid for, it's the people who bought the first wave of licenses/medallions whatever that made bank, now everyone else has to deal with it.
An upstart breaking that system is exactly what real business needs.
Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
I'm not opposed to changing this agreement, in fact I encourage it, but if you're going to do so you need to compensate who bought the medallions.
But we know the actual intent of the lawmakers. They said so themselves before it became an issue: Their intent was to only subsidize state exchanges, not the federal exchange.
Seems to me that you are in a deep bit of stretch to both defend the lawmakers AND the courts in order to preserve a bullshit law. Dont move the goalpost again.
Really? Show me a single instance of one of the legislators stating the intent was only to subsidize state exchanges.
Recently, SCOTUS handed down an opinion on the ACA that basically said "the actual words in the legislation don't matter... it's all about the intent." The Court's official opinion was authored by Chief Justice Roberts. (Read Scalia's dissent starting at p.21... it's spot-on.)
Which is correct. When the words in the legislation are ambiguous then what matters is the intent of the legislators. And there's no reason to believe the legislators believed states on the federal exchange shouldn't get the subsidies (note to the obvious response, even if Gruber wrote that section and had that intent he was not a legislator).
A ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional because a ban serves no good purpose, hence the fake studies on the welfare of children and the doom & gloom scenarios about the collapse of the family trying to invent a purpose so they could justify a ban.
But polygamous marriages are very widely one man with multiple women. They create a destabilizing gender imbalance in those communities leading to young unmarried men being excluded and they create domestic situations where women have very little power and are subject to abuse.
While there are some rare instances where polygamous marriages would be fine there are plenty of good reasons for the government to ban the practice and that makes it constitutional.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this. (via NB
So to answer your question: Yes.
As opposed to everyone else, drafters and non-drafters, who for several years thought the law did what the government was doing and the court prescribed?
Gruber was important, but he didn't single handedly determine the intent for the law, he might not have even been involved with writing that specific section. It could just be he noticed the wording at some later date and attached what he thought to be a politically convenient interpretation and backstory. If anyone determined the intent it would be the POTUS and Congress and they were never ambiguous about its intent.
availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result
In other words, the majority's decision was based not on the law itself, but on its effects and/or would-be effects.
that Congress plainly meant to avoid
Not one Congressman has read the law in full — not before it was passed, not after. It is too long and too complicated.
Though it is acceptable for courts to turn to legislative intent sometimes, that's specifically reserved to cases, where the laws language is unclear.
That was not the case here — as written, the law clearly only allows subsidies for residents of those states, that have set up "health exchanges" of their own. Whether that was the intent of the law-makers or not is irrelevant. The court's decision is wrong.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
Add to it the fact that it will probably not work - to those using it as "medicine" it's only the real deal or nothing. Unless you are able to flood the market entirely and use "an offer you can't refuse" deals with so much fake stuff that it's impossible for the poachers to sell their stuff.
The people smuggling the horns aren't exactly the most ethical businessmen. If you can sell them a fake horn for half the price they'll keep the profit, pass it on as real to the consumer, and the poachers might not be able to compete.
There will still be a few "legitimate" supply chains making sure they're getting the real deal, but it could put a lot of poachers out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to believe that Obama and Kerry are dumb enough to actually trust the Iranians to stick to a "deal" but .... the facts speak for themselves.
So why DO they want a "deal" at all costs? Do they think it will win political capital? Is this to be another of Obama's great "accomplishments"?
What's your alternative suggestion?
Having the truck paid off is not really an argument - if you sold your truck you could probably fund bus tickets for the rest of your life.
Really? A monthly pass for my city costs $90, assume a sale price of $2000 and you get a little under 2 years of bus rides.
Also, what about insurance? I'd guess that's in the same order of magnitude as the bus fare.
I think I pay ~40 a month but my memory might be wildly off. Either way I think that extends the bus pass payoff to about 3.5 years.
I am driving a car to work every day even though it only saves me only about 20min - simply because public transport stresses me out while driving a car is relaxing for me. But money is usually not a good argument for doing that, at least for people living in urban areas with good public transport.
Transit fare costs more than just the fare, the hastle of finding, carrying around, and worrying about the change for the fare is pretty significant. There's quite a number of times I would have hopped on a bus if it wasn't for the fact I didn't want to mess with the cost. Generally it would only displace walks but I could see if helping with people drinking on weekends, in fact I could see a strong argument for free Friday-Sunday transit.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
Expensive road systems and maintenance, massive time losses in traffic congestion, huge subsidies in the form of parking requirements for businesses, and various costs associated with air pollution.
The fact you pay a lot for your car personally doesn't mean we aren't also paying for your car.
Isn't the problem the exact opposite? That we struggle to find cures when treatments are so much more profitable? That medicine is viewed as a profit generator rather than an utterly essential aspect of a modern society? This article reads like it was written by a spokesperson, and turns a blind eye to every disease that once had no cure - but now does.
I'm cynical about the health care industry too but you're missing the key variable here.
We can essentially cure two classes of illness, infection and physical defects.
With infection we can kill the parasite and you're cured, and with physical defects we can do surgery and you're cured, but otherwise we're kinda helpless.
Cystic fibrosis is a problem in the patient's genome, we can't cure them unless we fix the genome. Type 1 diabetes is the body either not producing insulin, we can't cure that without getting the body to produce more insulin.
You can treat symptoms to varying degrees of success but the body is a complex system and it's hard to do properly, ie you can produce insulin but getting it to the right places at the right times in the right concentrations is very non-trivial.
I thought bumblebees are everywhere except maybe the desert?
From what I can tell Bumblebee is a genus, so there are about 250+ individual species, each with its own habitat and temperature range it's adapted too.
What seems to be happening is these habitats are getting too warm and the bees, instead of migrating towards cooler temperatures, are dying instead.
What's your opinion on Mars One?
I'm extremely sceptical that they can achieve their roadmap or anything close to it, do you share this scepticism? If so do you think they're mostly finished at this point (ie the project will fade into obscurity) or do you think the Mars One group will achieve something significant in the future?
Regulation's backers say that "this is an industry that has failed to police itself,"
Would you expect liquor stores to self-regulate and decide the drinking age is too low?
Self-regulation might work for some cheap and easy things, but no industry is going to refuse to sell to a massive portion of the market voluntarily. If you want to stop them you need legal enforcement.
I can tell you that as just an office worker, I get PISSED when my co-worker comes in with a cough, I know I will end up getting it.
People will still feel guilty calling in sick when capable of working.
I think this is one aspect of poor management., Management sets the tone - do they complain etc. when you call in sick? If they don't, then people take off when they are sick.
It is truly a shame that hospital management is so penny-wise/pound foolish as not to insist on generous sick time.
I think it's more than complaining, management needs to actively encourage people who are mildly sick to take the day off and to actively sell it as being good for the company. Otherwise people will feel like they're shirking their duty.
I think my current organization is particularly bad in this regard as they pay only 50% for sick days, so if people are remotely capable of working they'll come in so they don't take the hit.
From your comments, it's obvious that you don't understand what money is.
Money is an IOU.
The backing of a currency is not a physical resource, it's a measure of trust in the provider of said currency.
This holds equally true for Bitcoin, which is why Bitcoin is going to be a quaint footnote in computing history in a few years. Nothing backs it. Math is discoverable and essentially worthless as a backing. It's like collecting tree leaves and calling them money. You can grab them from just about anywhere, and there's technically a finite number of them. But nobody's going to give you anything in trade for them. (Except maybe a damned good kicking, which you'll deserve.)
I don't think it necessarily follows that Bitcoin has no future as a currency. Instead trust coming from a government backing the value of the currency the trust comes from assurance in the number of Bitcoins in existence and the number of people using Bitcoins. That being said Greece is a perfect example of the problem with a Bitcoin backed economy as you can't devalue your Bitcoins if you run into debt trouble anymore than Greece can devalue the Euro.
Though even if it doesn't succeed as a currency it sounds like Bitcoin might stick around as a payment system.
My proposal: have the Fed fund a basic income at zero cost to taxpayers. The Fed could structure it under Section 13 (13) of the Federal Reserve Act, as loans to individuals with negative interest. Thus, people would be paid to borrow.
Inflation is how taxpayers would pay for this "zero cost" proposal and it wouldn't be zero cost in reality.
True, it would be a wealth transfer to poor people.
My true worry with a basic income is it will help out a lot of people but it doesn't give people financial management skills and they can still get into debt trouble.
Instead I'd be tempted to look at a rental voucher, everyone gets $X annually towards renting/owning their own home, ideally reducing homelessness and introducing a stable asset that they can't leverage or loose when they get into other trouble. There's a bit of trouble making sure it's used for housing and keeping out corruption but I think it could improve things.
So you're arguing against regulatory stability?
You didnt answer his question. The thing is that you refuse to answer because the answer is an embarrassment to your argument. Maybe if you worked on internal consistency, you would be able to face questions that can be proudly answered.
The fact that your argument is not internally consistent makes you wrong. I know that it doesnt feel right to think another way, but feelings dont make your argument right. Internal consistency would.
Or rather I did answer but you're so desperate to win the argument that you refuse to see it.
The state didn't promise to never cancel or modify the medallion system, but there was an obvious understanding that they would maintain it as much as possible as is the standard for programs such as that.
Part of that understanding is that of regulatory stability, even without an explicit promise there's an understanding the state will try to maintain regulations or change them only minimally to keep a stable environment for markets to operate in.
What you're claiming is at odds with the real situation.
The people who are most against systemd are the serious, professional, often long-time Linux system administrators who have to provision and maintain production Linux systems.
Maybe it's okay if systemd and PulseAudio fuck up your single Ubuntu workstation. That's not a luxury that these admins have. They need their Linux systems to work reliably all of the time.
This level of stability was very achievable in the past, before a distro like Debian adopted systemd. But now that it has, its quality has dropped off precipitously. Yes, this completely unnecessary drop in quality will make responsible people very angry!
There is no conspiracy, like you've convinced yourself that there is. There are just many experienced sysadmins who need Linux distros that work. With all of the major Linux distros switching to systemd lately, and the many problems this has caused, these sysadmins are left in a bad position.
They can't wait a decade for the problems to be sorted out. They need to act now. Many are doing something they probably should have done years ago, and are moving to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Some are even moving to Windows, as unfortunate as that is.
The robustness and reliability of Linux systems aren't "pet needs". They're the very factors that will, if ignored, result in Linux losing its current position. A robust and reliable Linux kernel is useless if the init system and userland stack running on top of it is full of problems. The entire package just won't be useful.
I'm not sure it's precisely that, developers want systems to improve so they can add new features and capabilities, but if I'm an admin then fundamentally all I really care about is reliability and uptime. For them a perfect OS never changes at all outside of bug fixes.
Init might be a massive PITA but it's a PITA they've already got working and trust. Their hatred of systemd might be based on very legitimate stability concerns, but it also might be a very rational response to a change which brings a minimal but costly risk, and an almost non-existent benefit.
However, current Linux admins are not the only people affected. Linux users, developers, and future admins will benefit from an improved init system.
Btw, I'm skeptical that those admins will actually switch OS's for precisely the same reliability concerns that make them oppose systemd. This is probably the same reason Redhat is able to push systemd on their own customer base.
Seriously, if you have enough cash and connections to even think about starting a company, or even doing one of these new-fangled "startups", then you're better off than 95% of the country and better of than 99% of the world.
By your comment I take it that you care about nothing but money?
Shame they didn't cut this AC's cable...
There was really only one proper link for that post.
I'm glad you used it.
Not only that, but no artificial limit to g. No pilot to keep conscious.
You now need to write a drone AI that you trust with lethal weaponry or a remote control system that's unjammable.
You miss the point, the state is the one guaranteeing the limited monopoly.
When did the State ever guarantee that they would maintain the medallion program and/or refrain from issuing new medallions? Scarcity of medallions is hardly a natural right, and laws instituting artificial scarcity are subject to change. If anyone over-payed for a medallion under the false assumption that the current state of artificial scarcity was guaranteed to last they have no one but themselves to blame. The only compensation owed here is to those who were unjustly prohibited from operating taxis due to the State's medallion requirements.
So you're arguing against regulatory stability?
I'm not claiming they shouldn't leave the medallion system, but I don't think they should simply wipe out the medallions as an asset.
Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
No one ever pledged that OPEC would keep withholding stock.
It seems that you are the victim of a common misconception: That the State is the one selling the medallions that cost so much. Wrong, ignorant fuck.
You miss the point, the state is the one guaranteeing the limited monopoly. One of the things that makes free markets work is that when you give your word you generally keep it (or do your best). That's what gives people the stability to do think like invest in assets like medallions.
Why do you seem to think governments should abandon their obligation to the Taxi drivers without any attempt at recourse?
It's their own fucking faults. They lobby to make sure this is the system that's in place to prevent competition from companies like Uber. They got the laws they paid for, it's the people who bought the first wave of licenses/medallions whatever that made bank, now everyone else has to deal with it.
An upstart breaking that system is exactly what real business needs.
Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
I'm not opposed to changing this agreement, in fact I encourage it, but if you're going to do so you need to compensate who bought the medallions.
But we know the actual intent of the lawmakers. They said so themselves before it became an issue: Their intent was to only subsidize state exchanges, not the federal exchange.
Seems to me that you are in a deep bit of stretch to both defend the lawmakers AND the courts in order to preserve a bullshit law. Dont move the goalpost again.
Really? Show me a single instance of one of the legislators stating the intent was only to subsidize state exchanges.
Recently, SCOTUS handed down an opinion on the ACA that basically said "the actual words in the legislation don't matter ... it's all about the intent." The Court's official opinion was authored by Chief Justice Roberts. (Read Scalia's dissent starting at p.21... it's spot-on.)
Which is correct. When the words in the legislation are ambiguous then what matters is the intent of the legislators. And there's no reason to believe the legislators believed states on the federal exchange shouldn't get the subsidies (note to the obvious response, even if Gruber wrote that section and had that intent he was not a legislator).
In their opinion on gay marriage, Roberts issues a dissenting opinion with the following quote:
The internal inconsistencies of the SCOTUS are appalling.
And they have the power to say what it is when the current form violates the constitution, as does the ban on gay marriage.
You're also talking about two very different aspects of what the supreme court does.
In the ACA ruling the court was interpreting the implementation of a law that was passed.
In the Gay Marriage ruling they were deciding if a law was constitutional.
Explain the continued ban on polygamous marriage.
A ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional because a ban serves no good purpose, hence the fake studies on the welfare of children and the doom & gloom scenarios about the collapse of the family trying to invent a purpose so they could justify a ban.
But polygamous marriages are very widely one man with multiple women. They create a destabilizing gender imbalance in those communities leading to young unmarried men being excluded and they create domestic situations where women have very little power and are subject to abuse.
While there are some rare instances where polygamous marriages would be fine there are plenty of good reasons for the government to ban the practice and that makes it constitutional.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
Well, according to one of the law's architects, it was a Feature, not a Bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34rttqLh12U&feature=youtu.be
So to answer your question: Yes.
As opposed to everyone else, drafters and non-drafters, who for several years thought the law did what the government was doing and the court prescribed?
Gruber was important, but he didn't single handedly determine the intent for the law, he might not have even been involved with writing that specific section. It could just be he noticed the wording at some later date and attached what he thought to be a politically convenient interpretation and backstory. If anyone determined the intent it would be the POTUS and Congress and they were never ambiguous about its intent.
In other words, the majority's decision was based not on the law itself, but on its effects and/or would-be effects.
Not one Congressman has read the law in full — not before it was passed, not after. It is too long and too complicated.
Though it is acceptable for courts to turn to legislative intent sometimes, that's specifically reserved to cases, where the laws language is unclear.
That was not the case here — as written, the law clearly only allows subsidies for residents of those states, that have set up "health exchanges" of their own. Whether that was the intent of the law-makers or not is irrelevant. The court's decision is wrong.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
Add to it the fact that it will probably not work - to those using it as "medicine" it's only the real deal or nothing. Unless you are able to flood the market entirely and use "an offer you can't refuse" deals with so much fake stuff that it's impossible for the poachers to sell their stuff.
The people smuggling the horns aren't exactly the most ethical businessmen. If you can sell them a fake horn for half the price they'll keep the profit, pass it on as real to the consumer, and the poachers might not be able to compete.
There will still be a few "legitimate" supply chains making sure they're getting the real deal, but it could put a lot of poachers out of business.