Yet he’s taking DoD money for Starlink in Ukraine. At what point do his antics turn from the craziness of a billionaire to espionage and being deemed a Russian asset?
Nationalizing the satellites that we paid for as a national security asset sure seems reasonable here, seeing as he likely broke a contract when he disabled them.
Imagine if Lockheed disabled an allied F16’s targeting computer during a mission; there would be hell to pay.
Musk openly stated that he spoke directly with Putin after the Ukraine invasion had started. The super wealthy have no loyalties and will sell anyone and anything to the highest bidder. I’ve said it before, every penny after $1 billion needs to be taxed at 100%. Time to reign in the oligarchs.
Suggestions have tried and failed numerous times. An easy example is closing loopholes in taxes. Another is reforming estate taxes and capital gains taxes.
The problem is we have solutions already they’re not being done. Get off lemmy. Find representatives that fit your worldview and vote vote vote.
The alternative which I feel is more likely is continue the slide to fascism everywhere until it reaches a head then on comes the bloodshed.
We really need to do better teaching history in school because Jesus Christ online forums are full of people trying to reinvent the wheel and detached from the real world.
Your reasoning here is irrational, and frequently repeated by many.
“They will find another way, why even try! Gosh!”
Okay, then we’ll block that way, and the next, and the next, and the next.
This is iterative development and is how the whole world works. I cannot grasp why so many people have this defeatist attitude toward resolving problems.
Because people are lazy and want a singular solution every time and if they don’t get it most quit.
Laziness is honestly our largest inspirational force and it should be celebrated to let us do more interesting and fulfilling work but instead instant gratification has ruined us and made people lazy and shitty.
Yeah any system that involves humans will require maintenance and adjustments by humans. Because humans always find a way to fuck things up. There’s this weird compulsion to demand a system that can’t be fucked up by humans. But it’s not possible. Also it’s not necessary… if a system involves humans it means there’s humans around to do the necessary maintenance and adjustments to that system.
We really need to rethink how ownership itself works. All assets should be in a public registry, and no country’s laws should recognize any claim of ownership not backed by the registry. For the sake of privacy, I’d make an exception for up to like $1 million in personal assets owned by an individual, but never for business assets and never for ownership of a company or shares of a company.
Comments like these are not only unhelpful, they hurt progress moving forward. Do you also apply this logic to domestic abusers (wouldn’t wife beaters just beat places you can’t see or use sexual assault? ), or speeders (won’t people just speed when no law enforcement are around?), or regular joe tax evaders? I’m going to assume not. It would be absurd to just thow up our hands and say “you know what? We’re never going to stop pedophilia, so lets put no laws or regulations in place to punish pedophiles.”
I’m not going to claim that the original commenter’s solution is perfect or even very effective, but if we do nothing (and comments like yours are encouraging doing nothing) then the percieved problem will gwt worse. We reward the bad behavior and the bad behavior continues and gets worse. Something needs to be done whether it’s perfect or not. If you’ve ever created anything, especially something to be used or enjoyed by others, you know your first draft of it is shit. There are so many things that you couldn’t see until you put the work into it or release it to others and that’s okay. You learn, you revise, you plug the holes, you scrap and implement something new, you continue the process. The “rule of thumb” didn’t stop abuse, but it was a step. We still haven’t stopped abuse, but a lot of us keep plugging along, trying to stop it in our own ways (at individual, local, national, and international levels).
If you do care about this and want to contribute, but don’t like the presented solution, offer up your own or maybe point to resources of those advancing a cause from a different angle. If you’re here to shit on ideas because you don’t care or are trolling and want to actively hinder discussion, you can fuck right off. If you are trolling I’m okay with the offchance the overall message is recieved by someone else who needs it.
I provide no solutions that haven’t already been tried and continue to be tried. Have you tried actions outside of lemmy like actually voting and promoting people who want to fix this? I love that a glib comment on lemmy has drawn a novel of a response when everything we say here means jack shit. I’m in the real world doing what I can to change it for the better.
Wealth taxes are fantastic in theory, but in practice have never worked. They’re too hard to implement. I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I just don’t think a wealth tax is the answer.
I mean, the truth is that we’ve never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.
There’s more good people than bad people. The only way the bad people win is by convincing the good people to give up.
Yes shitty people will always be fucking up things for everyone else. But that doesn’t mean working to stop that is pointless. It’s more the opposite, it means we have to be continually working to stop the assholes from fucking things up for everyone.
It’s a seriously hard problem. The IRS already can’t keep up. In order to implement a wealth tax they would not only have to do what they do now, but also assess the value of every estate of every wealthy person. They would need experts in all sorts of things to even attempt to pull that off. Experts in fashion, jewelry, cars, planes, boats, art, etc… as soon as you let even one of those things slip through, that’s what becomes the new wealth sync. Previously it’s been attempted by they excluded art because that’s notoriously hard to assess the value of. So the wealthy bought and traded a bunch of art to hide their wealth.
I got down voted for my previous comment, but it’s the truth. The concept is simple and if it worked I would be all on board. It’s the process for implementing it that is the hard part and has historically always caused a wealth tax to fail. It’s not a new concept, but there is a reason it isn’t used. I’m not saying we should do nothing, but that we should do something different. We could start with adding back some income tax brackets.
Maybe but we were doing better at it before Reagan came along.
But it isn’t a silver bullet. If we want to deal with the root of today’s problems we need to focus on a number of solutions around anti-trust, pro-labor, wealth tax, lobbying, campaign finance, etc.
You can definitely tax the hell out of dividends and sales. They are free to hold as many imaginary value tokens as they like, but the second they try to convert those tokens into actual currency, that should be heavily taxed. This goes for stock as well as cryptocurrency/NFTs.
There are lots of ways to sell assets in specific scenarios to reduce tax burden or eliminate the tax rate to 0%. For example, a billionaire can take a loan and pay the interest only for years. Then in a year with losses on investments then can sell some assets to pay off the loan and pay no taxes.
Except if the money they are using to pay the interest and the money received from the sale of those assets is taxed appropriately. Interest on business loans should not be deductible, nor should investment losses. The government is not responsible for their poor business decisions. Of course, there can be delineations for investment loss write-offs based on total gross income from all sources. A small business owner or an individual that holds an investment account with an AGI under $1million or so would reasonably still have access to such write-offs or deductions, but anything over that $1million per year is free game, losses or not.
Honestly I don’t know. It’s really more the sentiment that I’m expressing. I’m aware that the wealthy are very good at playing shell games. No measures would catch everything.
He’s my fun little conspiracy theory. If I could send the CIA to do my bidding, I would have punished him by manipulating him into buying twitter. You can’t nationalize SpaceX because it would signal the failure of privatized space exploration, but you can’t have that idiot out there as a walking national security disaster looking for a place to happen. The only option if he can’t be controlled is to get him out of the way until he retires or another private competitor can become the favorite. Twitter cost him a ton of money and his reputation, exposed him as a fool, and keeps him busy with unimportant bullshit. Everyone just shrugs it off as Elon being Elon. It’s really perfect.
“Republicans need to look at all of these numbers, and really think about what’s more important. Yes, most people that are Republicans are probably pro-life,” she stated. “And we love our babies. And I love being a mother. But what’s most important? Republicans taking over. And Republicans being able to keep our country!”
Their problem is that they’ve been making abortion a wedge issue for so long, that it’s now impossible for them to back down. They’ve been catering to the religious right, pushing a message that life begins at conception and any form of abortion (and some birth control) is literally the same as murdering babies. And their base ate that shit up.
Now they’re trying to backtrack, which leads to their hilarious message of basically “look, we’re going to have to kill a few babies to get into power, because power is more important.” Good luck trying to sell that.
They're being really blatant about it all of a sudden. Is this sort of statement effective on Republicans voters? Do they not have any sort of cognitive dissonance when hearing one of their beloved Fox and Friends anchors saying this?
No, they don’t. Because they feel the same way. Beyond all of the minutiae the ultimate driving force behind the ideology of fascism is taking power for the sake of power
Remember this when any future conservative (I don’t care what party flag they’re flying) tries to claim they are about any policy. If they ever attempt to come up with a policy again.
They’ve been getting vauger for decades intentionally.
Anti-abortion is going to become “childs rights” and they’ll swear they’d never dream of outlawing abortion until they think they can get away with it.
The “Vote NO on 1” signs littering the chuds’ yards in my neighborhood were subtitled with bullshit slogans like “protect children”, “protect parents’ rights” and, most egregiously, “protect them both” (complete with an illustration of a pregnant woman who is ostensibly in danger of being forced at gunpoint into an abortion?). [edit to add] I just read this morning that there were people putting out rumors that the amendment would allow minors to get gender reassignment surgery without parental consent, when all anyone needs to do is read the goddamn ballot, publicly available, to see that there is nothing there at all saying that. They’re craven liars.
Nothing is off the table for these psychopaths; for fuck’s sake, when they tried to block the measure from the ballot back in August, some of these jamokes had the gall to put up signs that said “protect the 2nd amendment”… but idiots will lap it up.
“Children’s Rights” can absolutely be their next tactic, because as long as they act in bad faith and say all kinds of shit with zero meaning behind it, why the hell not?
Don’t disagree with your point, just want to note it’s vaguer. The u is after the g to keep the g hard despite the e, and the e which is silent in vague is there to make the a long. Without the e it would be be vag, which ironically is pronounced with a soft g because of the i in vagina, even though it’s been shortened.
When I was little, before kindygarten even, I would read books with my mom. One had the word “vague” in it, and I would pronounce it “vagh-you” because I didn’t know yet how to pronounce it. My mom would correct me, but I thought she meant that I was mispronouncing the vowel in the first syllable, and we’d go back and forth until I melted down because I was 4. It wasn’t until later on when I was actually in school that I got it because she never explained the concept of silent letters. Almost 40 years later, I’m still miffed about that.
Mark my words - if the GOP manages to gain a 2/3 majority in the house and Senate through any form of shenanigans they will pass an amendment to relegalize slavery.
My god. Are we seriously at a point the US government isn’t able to get one washed up old traitorous racist to obey the rules in court? This is just sad. He should have been locked up so long ago it isn’t even funny anymore.
An ex president has faced a corporate death sentence before? I feel like we’re in uncharted waters here. His tricks really don’t seem to hold up in court, other than delay, delay, delay, and that tactic seems to be running out of steam.
An ex president has faced a corporate death sentence before?
An ex president shouldn’t have had a corporation to dissolve in the first place because he should’ve been forced to divest due to the Emoluments Clause.
I’m not sure that’s relevant since we’re talking about laws he’s broke, not laws we wish were in place. As far as I know, divestment is not a requirement.
We need to be vigilant as we enter the presidential elections next year. Keep a close eye on secretaries of state or whomever certifies election results.
2020 was a test run for the Alt-right and they have learned where the weaknesses are in the democratic process. They will most certainly attempt to steal the 2024 election by any means necessary, up to and including violence.
Four county elections offices in Washington state were evacuated Wednesday after they received envelopes containing suspicious powders — including two that field-tested positive for fentanyl — while workers were processing ballots from Tuesday’s election. The elections offices were located in King County — home of Seattle — as well as Skagit, Spokane and Pierce counties, the Secretary of State’s Office said in emailed news release. Source
And because of the day Election day falls on next year:
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November, The facist’s treason and plot; for there is a reason why facists and treason should never be forgot”
(Someone better with words can probably improve this)
Plan to take election day off next year. Take a vacation day, if you’re able, and if not, just plan not to show up to work. Stand in line. Get a camelbak or a big water bottle. But vote, because I’d rather start steering the right direction than crash into a wall.
The spin at the end is just fluffy bullshit. Starlink, from the get go, has had bandwidth reserved for military operations albeit US military operation but military operations nonetheless. The real question here is how and why did he know that operation was happening and what other operations has he known about/thwarted/or knowingly or unknowingly passed along information about.
Maybe the same FSB agents that were driving his paranoia. Assuming they knew about the attack, they could get a bigger win by stopping it and removing Starlink from the equation at the same time, than by stopping the attack with military means.
Definitely. He used terms such as “Lenin’s mistake” when talking about Ukraine which is rather specific to Russian nationalist ideology. You don’t stumble across such a thing by accident.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
It's a clickbaity title in a sense that Trusty already quit from his team in the documents case. It's not another lawyer quitting, but the same lawyer, it's just that this time he's quitting altogether from all other cases and any cooperation too.
This is exactly what Sonic does with drinks. They used to have a half price afternoon window, but now I believe you have to use the app to get it (not 100% sure, their food is garbage)
there’s an old not-chain drive-in diner near here that’s a thousand times better. (and I mean, like it’s been around long enough to have been one of the OG’s.) IIRC, the only thing I really liked was their ice.
It will be the anti surge. Just charge prices 3x higher but if you own the app and come in between 1pm and 5pm you can get 50% off. I hate this “own the app for discounts” but this is 100% what will happen. Id be willing to wager my sons entire life on this.
The CEO should be fired. Thousands of restaurants already have variable, demand based pricing, but no one cares because those restaurants call it “happy hour”.
I think all CEOs think their clientele are dumb. It’s literally the only real requirement to be a CEO, besides already being rich and knowing the right people.
I mean in the CEOs defense most people are fucking dumb. I mean just look what happened to jcpenney, their CEO decided let’s stop with the bullshit no more fake sales no more fake prices everything is the real price on the sticker and it almost bankrupted them.
People were so stupid that they would go to the store across the mall to buy the exact same pair of pants that JCPenney was selling for $20 normal price at $40 “half off” because brain stupid likes the shiny discount sign
it doesn’t help that they have an entire army of Doctorates specialized in the psychology of marketing just to bypass your reasoning for emotion.
our brains are designed to process emotion before reason on account of evolution so it’s not as simple as to say “people are dumb”… even if… people are dumb.
an app which invades your phone and gives them shitloads of data
Their app isn’t too bad (at least for now). It has enough data collection that I wouldn’t want to download it, but it isn’t just strait spyware like some fast food apps cough McDonald’s.
Speaking of things that the McDonald’s app has access to, I just double checked mine on Android and it has permissions to access your pictures and files by default, I’m sure it was part of that thing that you just select through in order to access the app but that’s kind of concerning can understand location, files is a little weird
The earlier version required access to all your files to even start. They did update it to not need that anymore. But if you already had it installed with access to files, it kept that access.
But, yes, that’s completely unacceptable they required that at all.
edit to clarify: is it a useful feature? I guess. but, I very much doubt that people are using that feature more than the first time they find a location. or needing to.
I have set it as “Ask me everytime” and only used it when I needed to locate a nearby McD. Recently the “Deals” stopped showing up as it required location data with precision setting turned on. So, if I need to use the Deals I need to share my location which shows that they are mining your data for the deals. I kill the app after I order as they don’t need to track me from my home to the restaurant.
My favorite Trump story. He lucked into a chance to make the Manhattan elites love and respect him, and threw it away because of his own greed, arrogance, and stupidity.
Back in the late '80s and early '90s Trump always made the top 10 of Spy magazine’s “100 worst people, places or things” feature. In 1987 (when he was #3 on the list), his only mitigating factors were “didn’t run for office” and “offered to pay for the funeral of child killed by bear”. I’m willing to bet he never actually paid for the funeral.
They seem to be rather missing the point. It wouldn’t matter if they switch to a caucus, he’s banned from running in the state so all they would do is exclude Republicans from having a candidate for president in the general election. This is very much in the “don’t threaten me with a good time” territory.
I think the point is that a caucus is overseen by the party, not the state. I still don’t know the legality of doing it at this late stage after the primary has been agreed to and will be set on Jan 5, but that’s their thinking.
This is my favorite part though:
Nevertheless, Williams told NBC News that the Colorado Republican Party would look to kick off the process of putting together a caucus in “the next week or two,” requesting a waiver to convert the system from the Republican National Committee. … “We’re figuring it out as we go,” Williams said.
You’re not understanding. They’re complaining about the primary so their solution is essentially to hold their own primary outside of state control, but he wouldn’t be able to run in the general election even if he wins their primary so it doesn’t matter. As things currently stand there’s only two possibilities, Trump loses the primary to someone else in which case things continue as normal, or Trump wins the primary in which case the GOP wouldn’t be able to run a presidential candidate in Colorado. Biden (assuming he’s the DNC candidate for the general election) would run unopposed in Colorado.
Probably not earth shattering since he would likely win there even if Trump could run there, but if Trump isn’t on the ballot a certain percentage of GOP voters won’t bother going to the polls which will hurt the GOP in senate and congress races as well as on state votes.
Oh man your last point is important. I’m so low on confidence in the system that I’m nervous to rely on the government a tuallly excluding him from the ballot, but if he really is banned it’d be so awesome to watch gop officials freaking the fuck out as their turn out numbers drop like a meteor
I haven’t seen a law stating that the secretary can keep a candidate legally nominated by the party off of the ballot. There may be such a law, but I haven’t seen it mentioned. The only law I’ve seen is the one allowing them to design the primary ballot based on their own determination of eligibility. I’d be happy to read anything you have about the same type of law applying to the general.
The argument would be that he’s ineligible due to the 14th amendment and therefore they’re just enforcing the constitution which would supercede state law anyway. That would of course be a very interesting legal question as the crux of it is is a state allowed to enforce a provision of the constitution that the federal government isn’t (which is itself a state of affairs that raises all kinds of questions).
Yes exactly. That’s the argument that has already been discarded in this case. Were Trump to be found guilty of insurrection, he would be legally ineligible under the constitution. What team Trump is hoping to do is to win on the insurrection case or to delay trial until after he wins the presidency, after which he has any number of ways to escape prosecution.
However, if he is found guilty before the general ballots are set (or after, I suppose - I really don’t know that part) he would be ineligible but that would be based on a federal court ruling and not on the judgement of the secretary, I believe.
Technically the 14th amendment doesn’t require him to be found guilty at trial, although it would be a much stronger argument if he was. That argument also hasn’t been discarded, it’s still being argued in court right now. This was just an attempt to use an alternative approach to accomplish the same thing.
Ultimately with the way things are going it’s looking increasingly likely Trump won’t make it to the general election. He’s either going to fail to secure the primary, going to lose an insurrection case and become ineligible under the 14th amendment, or lose one of his many other criminal cases and wind up in jail. It’s always possible he could campaign from a jail cell, but his already shaky chances of winning in that case go down drastically.
His strategy right now is around delaying tactics because he’s frantically trying to prevent any of his court cases from wrapping up before the general election in the hope that he wins and can effectively become immune from criminal prosecution. The biggest danger to him right now though is actually his own party. On the one hand they know what kind of monster he is and would rather he just disappeared. On the other hand they’re absolutely terrified of his fanatic cult members and know that Trump could easily turn them on anyone who too obviously moves against him. If they can find a way to bury Trump that can’t be tied back to them they’ll absolutely jump at that chance, all while decrying how terrible the situation is, and how unfortunate it is this happened to Trump.
That’s assuming that such a nomination would be legal. I’m pretty sure most places have laws that say “you must be eligible for the office in order to stand as a candidate for it.” Colorado Republicans could nominate Justin Bieber, but that wouldn’t make him eligible to be President.
Not quite. The law is that the secretary cannot allow someone onto the primary ballot who is, in their opinion, disqualified. The ruling is that CO has the right to use that law to keep Trump off of the primary ballot.
I don’t know whether that law also applies to the general election ballot, but the fact that the republicans think that they can pull it out of the state’s hands and do a run around with a caucus makes me think it’s about the primaries. I don’t think they can legally switch to a caucus mid race for other reasons, but if they do they think it’s a path.
That’s the dispute right now. The argument is that the Constitution commands something, and all government officers and courts are sworn to follow it. It’s the same as the exclusionary rule. In the Constitution the 4th Amendment says “no unreasonable search and seizure.” Doesn’t say anything about the legal remedy or what to do when it happens.
The Supreme Court held that the command implies the remedy, and the command must be followed by all officers and courts.
The argument here is whether it’s like that, or whether the right is only vitiated if Congress passes a statutory framework to provide a remedy. It’s a dumb take and such a rule would effectively makes the Constitution meaningless.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the primary or general. The secretary of State creates and distributes the ballots, she cannot put Trump’s name on it any more than a prosecutor could offer illegally obtained evidence. It is the prosecutor’s duty to follow the command of the Fourth Amendment, same as it is the secretary’s duty to follow the commands of the Constitution; she could not list someone on the ballot under 35 years of age, she cannot list an insurrectionist.
Especially because lauren boebert is in a very competitive down ballot primary race that trump not getting out the voters for will hurt. Her opponents are more centrist, standard Coloradan republicans
They wouldn’t win the state anyway so being removed from the ballot is good for them - it makes challenging the nationwide legitimacy of the election easier.
If Trump loses, it will help him to have Fox News (truthfully!) say that millions of people who wanted to vote for him were prevented from doing so.
So what. They don’t play by the rules. They will lie, cheat, steal, and incite insurrection no matter what rules are or aren’t followed.
Trying to pander to these psychos is like trying to play a friendly game of chess with a chimp. You follow the rules, even let the chimp win but no matter what you do the chimp is just gonna throw the board across the room, throw shit at you, and then bite your face off.
Anyway, the court ruled. Just like they did in FL during the Bush v Gore election. Let’s let SCOTUS do whatever they’re gonna do and go from there.
If the GOP doesn’t like it, they can get fucked. Or let them start their CivIL WaR and let’s see how it turns out for 'em.
Wish Democratic leadership had your backbone. The GOP went ape-shit crazy in 2006 when Obama took office. Downhill since then.
Democrats have been too fucking dumb to realize they’re in a fight, getting their asses kicked and the rules are out the window. Fight back. Lie, cheat and steal. Why don’t they have their own propaganda arm like Fox?!
FFS, win for once. Taking the high ground isn’t working, and won’t when the other side doesn’t recognize the rules.
I bet if Trump isn’t on the ballot in CO, there is a significant subset of his voters who would just not vote, with serious implications for down ballot races, especially in the House of Representatives. Think about how that would affect Lauren Boebert
The greater concern to Republicans is that there are other issues people vote on when casting their ballot, not the just President. If their voters stay home, they could lose more than just the Presidency.
One of the scariest things about parenting is how little control you really have over outcomes for your kids. I have watched my kid make bad decisions and there's just fuck all I can do but hope she learns from the experience and isn't too badly hurt by it while giving her all the love I can.
I'm not talking about falling down the stairs of course; certainly nothing safety related. But decisions with friends, academics .... you can model good behavior, your can inform, you can supply incentives, and consequences, but end of day, it's their life.
I mean my mom is a raging Qanon, Trump loving, anti-vax (recently), evangelical and I'd happily vote for Bernie and got my last round of boosters a few days ago, so it goes both ways I guess.
A Walton Family Foundation spokesperson provided a statement explaining that its grant “supports work to highlight initiatives connecting young people to careers and jobs earlier in their K-12 schooling experience.”
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