Not a nice timing by the treasury to post this at the same time that many companies fire employees, war is going on, and fuel is running out. Everything is piling up it seems
The good news is that a currency issuer cannot become insolvent. This is literally just semantic libertarian scare propaganda. I strongly urge you to watch Stephanie Kelton's interview on The Daily Show a few years back to calm your mind a bit.
Meanwhile, let's step back a bit... if we pretend that the US is insolvent - a repo man is going to come take it away with a big truck - do you really think that the US treasury is structured in a way that allows them to hold back something that significant because the national mood is anxious and they don't want to make people feel extra sad on a Monday? Seriously: wth.
Getting yourself installed as president while knowing you are incompetent (I mean, look at all those bankrupt businesses, he should know) is nefarious in itself. His entourage is nefarious for supporting the incompetency for their own gain.
Competent enough to receive money, not competent enough to run a country well. But now we're getting into very subjective stuff, I'm sure his handlers are quite OK with what he's doing. It doesn't matter it all looks super suspicious, they are confident they won't face any consequences.
If you're incompetent maybe you don't know you're incompetent? I think probably a lot of people told him, but he's also very stubborn, so. He's been rocking that god fucking awful spray tan for decades now.
I mean, Christ, we have good spray tans, I know we do.
One of the few conspiracy theories I kinda believe is that Trump's 2016 presidential run was a grift and he expected to lose.
Everything since has just been an inability to admit he was in over his head, plus trying to get out of trouble for all the crimes he did. He (and Clinton) just underestimated how susceptible the US was to a demagogue. If you look at his face after the win was announced on election night, and after the first meeting with Obama for the transition, I think it shows plainly on his face.
I don’t care about his income level. I just look at the negative effects of Facebook on society, his lying in interviews, the poor care about privacy, and things like that.
I mean, he did sue a bunch of poor people to remove any possibility that they might make ancestral claims on or around his super abundance of land. It is in really bad taste and a testament to his lack of character.
There's a long history of rich assholes moving in and using their property rights in bizarre ways that gain them basically nothing while fucking everyone else.
Oprah bought a huge estate in Maui, then used it to block the back road from Kihei to upcountry, forcing a much longer drive around. It doesn't go through anything of interest to Oprah or gain her anything, just a big fuck you to everyone else because she can.
Sometimes I see a silver lining to this behavior but it comes down to personal taste. A number of people likely appreciate that nice buffer between them and Kihei.
Gross mischaracterization. He filed an action in court to buy the land, because each parcel had dozens of owners that nobody even knew who they were, including the owners, until the court discovery happened.
"
The land is made up of a few properties. In each case, we worked with the majority owners of each property and reached a deal they thought was fair and wanted to make on their own.
As with most transactions, the majority owners have the right to sell their land if they want, but we need to make sure smaller partial owners get paid for their fair share too.
In Hawaii, this is where it gets more complicated. As part of Hawaiian history, in the mid-1800s, small parcels were granted to families, which after generations might now be split among hundreds of descendants. There aren’t always clear records, and in many cases descendants who own 1/4% or 1% of a property don’t even know they are entitled to anything.
To find all these partial owners so we can pay them their fair share, we filed what is called a “quiet title” action. For most of these folks, they will now receive money for something they never even knew they had. No one will be forced off the land."
- AT&T “unlimited” mobile plans
- Purdue Pharma's OxyContin push
- Juul marketing vaping products as a "safer alternative" to smoking
- Facebook's sale of user data to Cambridge Analytica
- Wells Fargo opening fake accounts for people
- ...
How many Sacklers are in jail for what they did to people? None. Purdue pleaded guilty, but no Sackler family member went to jail. The settlement totals about $7.4 billion, with roughly $6.5–$7 billion coming from the Sacklers and about $900 million from Purdue. Earlier estimates put the family's wealth around $11 billion, so they remain enormously wealthy. Hundreds of thousands have died in the opioid crisis, ruined families got no real justice, and no Sackler went to prison... great punishment.
Perhaps none of them personally engaged in conduct that merits a prison sentence? Which of the Sacklers do you believe should have been charged, and for what conduct?
> Earlier estimates put the family's wealth around $11 billion, so they remain enormously wealthy
Why wouldn't they? The company had been around for a hundred years
Now I understand your point. I narrowed my thinking process to the music industry. You're right that companies usually never "go to jail" just "kindly" pay the fee eventually. I remember there's movie "Corporation" which tries to prove that if company is a person (legal person), this person has a personality disorder
I print books myself at home and have a lot of Amazon books lying around. What usually is the problem with Amazon printed books is that the author didn’t put in the extra time to get everything right. Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper. Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans. Furthermore, many Amazon books are just poorly formatted. Text too big, margins too wide, cover misaligned with spine, text not justified properly, and things like that.
> Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters
This is simply an artefact of offset printing.
> Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans.
Text printed by an industrial laser printer on cream (or Natural Shade as it's called in the industry) paper looks discernibly crisper than what an offset printer produces.
I was reading your comment and thought you were a bit too extreme, but then I thought about it and was like "Hmmm. Yes. Sounds pretty accurate actually." So yes I agree.
> Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic
Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking that ads are "natural" search results. To include an extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for your own exact company and product names so competitors don't get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would have been all over them for this many years ago, besides which they'd long ago have been broken up into several separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions they've performed.
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