Saying your quoted words is a request for someone to read and respond; it's still pressure and a burden.

This is significant semantic drift from the original meaning of yak shaving.

Building your own is great, but it's not yak shaving.

Yak shaving is fixing fractal brokenness that you notice while punching through layers of existing systems to finally fix the root cause of the original thing you cared about.

See, e.g. Hal replacing a lightbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0

More commonly, edit them.

General Relativity was published in 1916.

You don't want the people that run the engineering firms, no. You might want some of the people that work there.

I knew that about the feds, but does it also apply to the states?

I think most states don't consider it public domain.

Even though you would think that'd be a taking for public use.

Perhaps it should be, but the courts have not agreed. See Pena v. Los Angeles for an example of an appellate case that rejected this argument. It found that a "police power" exception to the takings clause applies in such cases.

Because those are far more general than what he is asking for, and what he is asking for will usually not be seen as covered by your generalization.

To be clear, "Apple" is a group, not a unified thing with one will.

That doesn't mean that the engineeers will necessarily ship something more flexible than what the PMs asked for. Often not.

But sometimes they will.

The commissioners?

Take Magnus Brunner, responsible for Internal Affairs and Migration. The Austrian Government, headed by Karl Nehammer at the time I believe, provided him.

The head of the EU, who was nominated by the Austrian Government (and the other 26 governments) and elected by the MEPs in parliament (who were directly elected) decided on his portfolio.

Compare this to the US system, where the head of the US executive is elected by electors who themselves are directly elected. That head then appoints whoever they want.

If you were to make the US reflect the EU, you would have

1) Senate nominates the president (one vote per state)

2) Congress votes for the president

3) Senate provides the people to be secretaries

4) President selects from that list and chooses which person gets head of State, head of Treasury, etc

This would give more power to the states and less to the federal level, which itself is something many in the US want. Doesn't make it undemocratic.