TeknOShEeP
12d ago
Cutting the Department of Education != cutting federal funding for education. The US had federal funding for schools before 1979, and will after.
The author of the OP article somehow thinks that bragging about charging higher percentages overhead that most hedge funds (3.4% apparently) while obtaining far worse results is a winning formula. I think it rather nicely highlights the issue.
TeknOShEeP
12d ago
This is totally false. There is no path to immigration for the vast majority of people. If you support enforcing current immigration law, you support denying millions the chance to live and work in the U.S. for no other reason than they were born outside of it, condemning them to a much worse quality of life in countries full of poverty and violence, and you need to own that.
Yes. The average condition of humanity is indeed full of poverty and violence in an economically disadvantaged country. The fallacy in the pro-immigration-for-all argument is thinking that geographic change (transplanting people from poor countries to rich ones) will solve what is fundamentally a social problem (poor countries are poor and remain so because they have poor-quality people). One only need look at Sweden, Germany, or France to see what happens when you allow in high numbers of low potential immigrants. Current US immigration law as written (very different from what is actually enforced) recognizes this and is designed to filter for only the best, brightest (or at least richest), and highest potential immigrants who will add value to the nation. This is a wise policy that reflects the fundamental instincts of nations through the millenia. It is only recently that society has become peaceful enough for suicidal empathy not to be exterminated by Darwinistic processes, though the jury is perhaps still out on that in the long term.
I firmly believe that if you advocate for less restrictive immigration rules, you should be legally obligated to support those immigrants at your own expense, in your own house. If you cannot put your money and life where your mouth is, you have no business telling the rest of us to do so.
TeknOShEeP
13d ago
Sigh, thats probably the correct explanation, given the universe so often defaults to maximize boredom.
TeknOShEeP
13d ago
Nothing? Trump is not invalidating anything, because if the allegations are true, the pardons were never valid legal instruments to begin with. If the allegations are true, the President did not issue any such pardons, and since the President is the only person who can issue pardons per the Constitution then no such pardons exist (and also some staffer is guilty of fraud, forgery, and a large number of other crimes).
Trump has talked extensively about his pardons, and is on camera signing (and posing with!) the relevant documents.
TeknOShEeP
14d ago
That is my understanding of the issue as well. As usual, Trump is using some highly "gotcha" wording that the media will pounce on (calling it now- "autopen" will word of the year 2025) and dissect the many reaspns why he's technically wrong, only to miss the larger point entirely- namely Biden was not the person issuing the orders/pardons, ergo none of them have any legal basis.
TeknOShEeP
14d ago
What could possibly go in the blank such that a court would permit the prosecution to move forward? I am confident that a court is not going to permit an investigation into a President's state of mind to try and determine a pardon's validity.
The question is more basic than that- Presidential powers are only valid if they are excercised by the President. The claim at this point is straight up fraud and forgery- someone (the NY Post and a few other outlets claim to know exactly who this "senior staffer" is) in the Biden whitehouse is alleged to have issued Executive Orders, using Biden's autopen signature without any discussion of the matter with Biden exploiting his diminished capacity. So the claim has nothing to do with Biden's state of mind in signing the pardons, its that Biden did not in any legally relevant way actually sign the pardons. Given that a) it is indisputablely an autopen signature on the orders in question, and b) Biden's mental decline was such that he either didnt remember or was completely ignorant of his LNG export EO when discussing it weeks later with the Speaker of the House, there is perhaps more merit to the claim than appears on first glance.
TeknOShEeP
14d ago
Fourth possibility:
The files implicate one or more politically powerful figures who are not Trump or member of his administration, and negotiations (aka blackmail) are currently underway to see how much mileage can be wrung out of the files.
TeknOShEeP
21d ago
Why? This is a symptom of outside thinking- Zelenskyy != Ukraine, and its perfectly possible to be Ukranian, cheer on their military, want no peace deal, and hate Zelenskyy's guts for the way he has conducted the war and turned Ukraine from a somewhat shaky democracy to a military dictatorship. This is in fact the attitude shared by several of my Ukranian friends.
But since a) elections are suspended indefinitely, b) opposition parties are banned, and c) only state-run media is allowed to officially exist, we will never have reliable poll numbers.
I agree 4% is probably low, but I think the 53% number some sources have floated is laughably high as well.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Eh, my opinion on the Fed softened a lot when I realized they are actually just a (significant) part of the national security apparatus. Like, at least 50% of what keeps the CCPs bullshit in check is the Fed holding a big club labeled "monetary policy" and grinning. Sure, a lot of what they do sucks for the common person, but thats the nature of Great Power struggles.
The DoEd just appears to be a transfer station for money that congress already allocated and could arguably be replaced by a spreadsheet. Oh, and sending "dear colleague" memos that replaced due process in colleges and universities with unaccountable kangaroo courts. What little they do I feel should be Purged With Fire.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
At first I was horrified, but then I read up on what the department of education actually does (allocate funding per the whims of beurecrats and congress critters, in that order) and now I am horrified it existed at all.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
For the record, the plane was a Bombardier CRJ700, developed and built in Canada, so no Boeing connection there.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Mmm, he has different mannerisms from politicians and most CEOs, but they remind me a lot of a professor who truely loves the material they are teaching. A professor is just as much, if not more of a public speaker than a politician, but their objective is to educate and inspire rather than persuade, so the body language will be different.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
You can produce terrible photos of any public figure these days. Given how fast modern digital cameras shoot, even the normal act of speaking will produce awkward frames with eyes closed, moth open, or seemingly in a grimace. Musk has pissed off the majority of the journalist class, so they will do him no favors with regards to photos. These photos are just more evidence that no, you do not in fact hate journalists enough, and they are still really, really pissed at him for spoiling their little clubhouse on twatter.
But its a good sign, as my new favorite phrase goes "you only take flak when you're over the target."
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Agreed. I think this war becomes a lot easier to understand when you take the frame that there are no good guys, and this is just the latest iteration of same 3000+ year old conflict that has infested Judea since Old Testament times.
I don't see any peaceful resolution that will be permanent, and in the final calculus, I'd prefer the genocidal IDF to a genocidal Hamas.
The opinion is monumentally dumb, departing from the three prior rulings which wisely declined not to tread in this shaky ground and "going boldly where no man has gone before" to absolutely violate the fuck out of federal labor law. The judge flat out admits this rescission leaves Musk uncompensated for five years of labor, cloaking it in the fig leave of "well he made a bunch of money on the stock he already owned." That's not how employment law works- employees, including CEOs, must be compensated for their labor, this is a bedrock principle of America, we even have a fucking constitutional ammendment about it.
The judge can rule it was an unfair agreement, but to abrogate responsibility to determine fairness (with a piss-poor cite to another case about bonus claw backs where employees were still paid salaries) and simply say "nope, actually slavery is fine" because she didn't like how Tesla argued the case is gross misconduct.
I get that Musk is not a sympathetic plaintiff, and I get that Tesla didnt take this seriously, but the fact that a judge can rescind a mutually agreed upon contract and leave an employee with zero dollars for five years of work and no one is making a bigger deal of it is fucking mind blowing to me. This is the kind of precedent that kills democracy. At the very least, Deleware suddenly became a very unattractive state to incorporate in.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Lol, I think No_one already made the point, but everything you just listed was literally part of Clinton's re-election platform. People keep saying it because it is very true- if you shut out the TDS-spawned commentary, you have to search very hard to find much difference between the policies espoused by Clinton and those favored by Trump. The parties are flipping again, 90s Dems are todays MAGA, early 2000s NeoCons are todays Dems.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Or he's multi-tasking, as in that wonderful leaked SpaceX call where we learned the Starship was one second from abort on the tower catch, while Musk was streaming his diablo run the whole time.
SBF also famously did this with league of legends, but was also notoriously bad at LoL, whereas Musk appears to be actually good at Diablo. Maybe we should start judging business leaders by their gaming chops.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Ahaha, hooo man, I forgot about that one. Has there ever been a less appropriate exclamation point?
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Hmm, now that you point it out i didnt realize how bad the macros are on black bean burgers specifically, like you say its majority carbohydrates. Well, good to know.
My usual choice of veggie burgers includes lots of nuts in the make-up, so its a pretty much even 33% carbs/fat/protein calorie distribution, for about 125 calories total, im pretty happy with that mix for my normal eating habits. Add 1 tablespoon of hummus, maybe twice that in feta with some chopped veggies in a whole wheat or spinnach tortilla overall works quite well, dont have the exact macros to hand but i did calculate them and was very satisfied with the results.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Veggie burgers, and the slightly more specific black bean burger, are fantastic little bites that give you protein without making you feel as heavy or full as a normal burger. Im not even a vegetarian and i love the things. Take a frozen veggie or black bean patty- throw it in the microwave for two minutes, then into a tortilla with some hummus, feta, and your choice of chopped veggies and you have a healthy high protein big snack or light meal that wont bloat you up. My go-to for busy evenings.
I think they succeed because they're not trying to be a meat substitute, they're something else delicious.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?
Virtually all presidential candidates are referred to by their last name (Gore v Bush, McCain/Romney v Obama, Biden v Trump). The outliers recently have been the two female democratic nominies, and while I have seen sexism suggested as a motive, as far as I am aware the first-name designation came from the campaigns themselves. "Hillary" was the obvious one, becuae "Clinton" would be associated with a former president who might have pissed off the sorts of demographics Democrats needed to win- ie NAFTA and the unions, that sort of thing. "Kamala" seems to be more of an affectionate branding designed to emphasize her non-whiteness, but most of her campaign signs that I've seen do read Harris/Walz.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
I find it annoying when people just cite LLM output, but the alternative is they still post LLM blather and lie about it being their own writing, so i will take the minor annoyance instead of the large integrity violation.
TeknOShEeP
4mo ago
Well, speaking from personal experience, the management at Boeing spans quite a wide social demographic. And yes, they do have a history of solving difficult problems, but the current management is a different set of people than those problem solvers, being made up mostly of SoCal Defense industry or Jack Welch era GE castoffs who's primary competancy is spreadsheet optimization. The hard charging problem solvers were mostly made up of people like Musk or tech industry types- move fast and break things used to be a very valid approach to aerospace, as long as your breakage was confined to flight test only.
TeknOShEeP
5mo ago
Reagan did some great things, and genuinely had a vision for the future. He also left office more than a third of a century ago. Bush Sr. is notable pretty much only for beating up on a couple of tinpot dictators and largely failing on the domestic front. Bush Jr is notable for being completely eclipsed by his VP, embracing the idiot wing of the GOP, finishing up his daddies work in the most expensive fashion possible, and entangling the nation in a festering quagmire of a war that wouldnt succeed in its objective of killing one guy until the next president and genrally being an enormous suck of lives and treasure; domestically he passed a terrible education bill and a few minor tax cuts while overseeing the regulatory idiocy that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
None of this is worth celebrating- good riddance to it.
... its not this one. All of those IRS agents are now looking to pump up their numbers in order to keep their jobs. Busting Average Joe for some transparently obvious evasion is an easy win for them.
Next year, when the turnover is settled however...
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