The Dutch absolutely should NOT follow suit. You guys stole our (Romanian) golden helmet when we sent it to a museum in the Netherlands[1] because you don't have any armed guards at museums.
Maybe send your gold to a country that actually protects priceless things, like the UK.
The UK under Gordon Brown foolishly sold off most of its gold reserves. If they had kept thrm, they would be worth £40B more today, or 10 times what it was sold for.
There is already arbitrary tariff. At this point, it is better to trade with other countries instead of chasing the US. Let the American citizen pay their tariff, their loss.
I wouldn’t worry too much about those threats. This administration is so erratic that you may see those same threats made against you for any other reason down the line even if you keep it put.
It is. The MAGA subset of the right suddenly doesn’t care about the second amendment. I guess that should be expected after they’ve shown they don’t care about the first (people recording ICE) or fourth (warrantless raids) amendments too.
Yeah, and--assuming Pretti was carrying at all--he did everything perfectly, never brandishing or even touching it.
FFS, I'd wager the ICE thugs didn't even think Alex had a weapon at all, not until they had already (A) shoved him (B) pepper-sprayed his face and (C) yanked him from the other disabled protester he was trying to shield and (D) threw the blinded Alex to the ground on his knees with both hands down on the pavement.
____________
To be more specific, since there are different angles out there, I'm referring to these [0][1], where one of the ICE agents can be seen removing something from Alex's belt.
Then, almost immediately, the adjacent ICE agent draws and shoots the blinded, restrained, and unarmed Alex Pretti, putting ~4 bullets into his back from behind.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/witness-videos-cbp-kill... -- At 1:01, grey-hat-jacket pulls something from Alex's exposed waist with his right hand. He swings his his arm away towards the road (see other footage) while black-hat-green-sleeves pulls his own sidearm and shoots.
Yep, Pretti was a citizen. As was the Hmong person they detained in his underwear. Most of the people they detain aren’t criminals.
> People are obstructing armed immigration enforcement and expecting to come away unscathed.
It’s scary that people actually think like this. These types of unprincipled excuses for lawlessness and murder are how authoritarians get into power. It might have been more excusable in the past but not today when the videos show the murder for the whole world to see.
i just replied and then saw the comment was flagged LOL. For those that missed it the flagged comment said something stupid like “don’t obstruct ICE and you’ll be fine.”
I'd like them to explain, step by step, how holding a camera to document what ice is doing, can be considered obstruction. Are they doing illegal things that are obstructed by publicly available documentation?
A lot of people voted for him but not necessarily this. I think that’s the problem when you vote for wildcards. Especially ones with his history, he has no reason to do anything but cause chaos. It’s his entire personality type too.
I still don’t think a lot of people expected gestapo tactics that spill out onto the streets to ensue. I think people want better border protection but not necessarily this
Don’t get me wrong, I know just as many (or more) people are loving these tactics but there is not homogeneity amongst his voters.
1/3rd voted for this, 1/3rd voted against, and 1/3rd are complicit.
The fact that the US did this twice beggar belief. For those of us in the rest of the world who have no say but are bombarded by this shit daily, we hold you all responsible (no matter what 1/3rd you're in).
Practically it is the same. And this is not a US exclusive situation. We see the AfD and other far right parties gaining popularity. People can vote for bad things.
People can also vote against a consequence decoupled elite that rule by virtual signaling to each other which was okay in a resource binge, ignoring the results their previous choices had for the lower echelons.
To hit the captain with a shovel may look like mutineer madness on any boat, but maybe a sign of necessary changes and reality grounding on a ship called "titanic" where the captain yells "right on, right on" into a pipe that does gurgling sounds.
Choosing not to vote is implicitly voting for the status quo, whatever it happens to be. It's accepting fate.
If voters saw the first Trump term and knew about Project 2025 (which was public and publicly discussed) and didn't care enough to vote against the implementation of what was happening right under their noses then that isn't much different than voting for him.
If anything it's worse. At least the right is actively evil. At least voting third party, futile as it is, is making a statement. Seeing Trump's movement gain and consolidate power, listening to their beliefs, seeing the preparation of political infrastructure, January 6th, stacking the Supreme Court, the normalization of white supremacy, and knowing fascism could be a vote away and not giving a damn shows a depth of poisonous cynicism and cowardice that should brand a person for life. That will brand our entire society for a generation.
> It was the second highest voter turnout in US history.
My dude, you have seized upon a statistic that, while technically true, is also utterly-effing-meaningless.
To illustrate, I've calculated the headlines for other Presidential elections:
1936 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1940 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1944 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1948 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1952 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1956 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1960 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1964 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1968 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1972 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1976 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1980 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1984 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1988 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1992 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
1996 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2000 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2004 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2008 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2012 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2016 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2020 FIRST HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
2024 SECOND HIGHEST TURNOUT IN HISTORY!!!
VAP = counts everyone of voting age including people on visas who aren't allowed to vote.
We moved to VEP because the % of total population who aren't citizens started to grow rapidly. eg. see 2020 vs 2024. The eligible VAP count increased by 12M but actual VEP count only increased by 2M.
> They just murdered a guy who was not obstructing them.
They shouldn't have shot him since he was not being violent. But he did obstruct: he was standing in middle of the street, acting like a traffic cop. When border patrol tried to arrest a woman, he got between them and the woman. That is obstruction!
You were there? No? You watched the taped proceedings then?
I don't think you appreciate the way justice becomes irrelevant in fascist and tyrannical countries.
The 'show' of fair justice, dispensed with care and deliberation, is something you seem to take for granted.
In most countries you get put up against a wall, and shot, for saying the wrong things about the right people.
I find your argument uniquely cowardly: Power without justice is a recipe for tyranny. And the position that tyranny should be the norm is something an evil or cowardly person espouses.
Yes, there is plenty of atrocity. Pretending the allied behavior is as atrocious as Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or Hitler, is pretentious relativism.
In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem
>You were there? No? You watched the taped proceedings then?
That's not how history works.
There's no end of historical accounts, transcripts of the proceedings, etc to learn about it. Neither being there, nor taped proceedings are needed.
And neither being in the court or watching taped proceedings will give you what that show meant in the larger historical context, and in the context of the geopolitics of the time. The books, actual knowledge of the before and after, and more, might.
>I find your argument uniquely cowardly: Power without justice is a recipe for tyranny.
That's exactly what the goverments who run those trials had for themselves, before, during, and after.
>Yes, there is plenty of atrocity. Pretending the allied behavior is as atrocious as Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or Hitler, is pretentious relativism.
Only because it was mostly done to brown people in Africa, or to Asia, or Latin America, so you don't care.
Most Asian cultures with suicide problems acknowledge and try very hard to bring those rates down. It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population.
Here's [1] the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's page on preventing suicides. The motto is 誰も自殺に追い込まれることのない社会の実現を目指して or "Aiming for a world where nobody must deal with suicide"
That's a straw man; There are many cultures that have a strong emphasis on honor/shame mechanics, which in turn drive suicides in those cultures. And which match cultural expectations in a grim kind of way.
The fact that people want to change their culture is possibly an early indication of a shift, which could take decades or centuries to actually occur. And such a cultural shift can also lose momentum and be still-born.
---
I find counting suicides innovative. But if you do it in a global context without looking at the cultures as confounding factor: It's wrong.
There are many other confounding factors, such as a forgiving national (personal) bankruptcy regime. The USA has a pretty forgiving regime compared to other countries. But that doesn't mean you can say it correlates with how happy people are. Because - like suicides - the number of people that go bankrupt might not significantly correlate to the average happiness rate. Because a (small) minority of people go bankrupt / commit suicide.
It's in fact perfectly reasonable and possible to suppose that a country with higher average suicides and harsher penalties for bankruptcy still ends up higher on the happiness index. Because perhaps health and social-contact / family factors impact the rating more, on average.
Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.
> A monopoly is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.
Personally my approach has been to start with big-ints and add a GUID code field if it becomes necessary. And then provide imports where you can match objects based on their code, if you ever need to import/export between tenants, with complex object relationships.
- If you use uuids as foreign keys to another table, it’s obvious when you screw up a join condition by specifying the wrong indices. With int indices you can easily get plausible looking results because your join will still return a bunch of data
- if you’re debugging and need to search logs, having a simple uuid string is nice for searching
The fed is being dismantled in front of our eyes.
Militia's shoot US citizens for documenting their illegal behavior.
Insane