A step farther: there is no thriving computer science at all.

Note that, in 1870, people were also waking up to the very bad SCOTUS decisions that led up to the Civil War. Many justices at the time were staying when they were incapacitated and unable to serve properly - like RBG and Rehnquist did. Here's the same graph from 1789 - note that we're still worse.

Why 1870, you ask? Prior to 1870, justices didn't get a pension, so more of them stayed on forever. So, a little known fact about the "second American revolution" of the 1860s is that they also thought justices were staying too long!

We've moved pretty far from what the framers intended. We're appointing people as young as possible, and having them stay on the court for generations to lock in our points of view.

Here's a graph of the point. For a hundred years the median tenure for a justice was around 7 or 8 years. SCOTUS became a political football in the 1970s. The median tenure has doubled since then.

The ball, as they say, is in John Roberts’s court. Let’s see if he can play by his own rules. 7/7

This, of course, is nonsense. Trump found a tiny loophole in the law and drove a bulldozer through it. If the SCOTUS takes their own doctrine seriously - and not just as a way of killing Obama / Biden policies they don’t like - there is no way they could let his tariffs stand. 6/7

Trump has the power to issue tariffs in emergencies, in the name of national security. He’s issued tariffs against everyone. Apparently, there’s an emergency so important that it requires tariffs against every coffee producer in the world and islands mostly populated by penguins. 5/7

(Note that this means that the definition of “major question” is left to the court, which is an unelected body. I’m not a fan of this reading, but the Roberts Court has pushed it hard.) 4/7

They called this the “major questions doctrine” - the idea was that if you are doing something of real significance, you need explicit permission from Congress. 3/7

Context: In the Obama and Biden administrations, SCOTUS ruled that major action on climate change, health care expansion, and student loan forgiveness were illegal because they went beyond what Congress had in mind when they passed laws on the environment, health care, and student loans. 2/7

I bet it's because people don't have enough opportunities to screw up shell quotes or accidentally inject the wrong code in bash.

Time for a Bloodlines hall of fame?

IMO, the independently viable businesses that you can break off of Google are Search + AI; Ads; YouTube; Cloud; Workspace; Android; Nest; Maps. We may see a spin of parts of Ads because of the ads trial, but I'm not sure breaking off any of the other businesses would help the monopoly situation.

I think that was a very long time ago, and it was mostly because their patent revenue was pure profit. A bunch of big companies committed to a big patent non-aggression pact 5 or 6 years ago, and Goog has gotten better at monetizing Android, so I suspect that's no longer true.

Android is viable, just not as a pure open source play. The Play Store brings in $50B a year. Agreed that Chrome is non-viable, though.