“You’re either going to take a massive tax increase or you’re going to decrease taxes. So for conservatives like myself, that’s a no-brainer,” Chaffetz said.

Ah! “No-brainer” makes a lot of sense to me. That should really be the GOP’s tagline.

But the bottom line is that Mike Lee and all the other Republicans aren’t responding because this will be out of the news cycle in 3 days so they’ll never have to answer for it if they can just avoid making further headlines.

That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.

Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?

The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?

They say he was arrested for the “assault,” but yep, they intentionally phrased it to conflate “verbal harassment” with actual (if true) criminal conduct. It’s a meaningless phrase.

If anything, they put it there because to the right wing base, it justifies police violence or could support disorderly conduct, or one of the other catch-all pretextual “crimes” used when police want to arrest someone for no real reason.

The DHS views the situation differently. In a statement to NBC, a department spokesperson said that “Garcia assaulted and verbally harassed a federal agent and that he was subdued and arrested for the alleged assault”.

They say this every time, whether or not there is footage obviously proving otherwise.

Apart from being so insulting and pathetic that this is the government’s generic response to unconstitutional arrests (though he is suing under a tort law due presumptively due to qualified immunity), it’s also outright defamatory to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime and assaulted ICE.

The story doesn’t provide evidence either way, but if this just is their typical Baghdad Bob propaganda, I hope the victims of ICE start to sue for defamation as well - drain the new bill’s obscene funding with a wave of court-ordered compensation to ICE’s victims.

Yes, but it’s legitimately different when you are a huge company versus a struggling artist. A company like Nintendo has the capital and staying power already to reap generational rewards from embedding their IP into a culture.

We’ve seen the exact same playbook with universities. Pull federal funding if they don’t start toeing the line.

So it’s not even six months in and Trump is already starting a youth brainwashing program?

I think a general strike would be effective, but dangerous when people are kept so close to poverty.

Remember the pandemic, we “all” stopped going into work? Except the grocery store workers, and the food processor workers, and those that distribute the food, and water treatment plant staff, and the power plant, and hospital staff, and taxis, and drug store workers, and so on and on. Do those people stop working? How many people can’t obtain the things they need beyond their next paycheck? What if in addition, the store shelves are empty?

I agree, it’s the most feasible way to fight back, so don’t get me wrong. But just like union dues and preparation enable a local strike, accounting for food, water, amenities…a general strike would need to do that or else we would be fighting a war of attrition not just against billionaires with multi-year bunkers but also against ourselves.

Well, Jan. 6th was that too. Every boundary push is a practice run to push further.

The things that happened earlier - arresting US citizens before grudgingly detaining them, deporting them and legal residents - was a trial run for today. Today - planning denaturalization based only on Trump’s mood at the time - is a trial run for tomorrow. And we can guess what that is.

At least there are no official death camps in this bill.

Sorry to be a downer, but ICE’s funding is now high enough that one of the few plausible explanations for it is that they plan to create concentration camps of immigrants (and, hey, well we have all this money and space, maybe just all other undesirables too…?)

I deduce that the one nerbal has now become a priceless commodity since the last person using currency now has cornered the nerbal market.

I’m in the same boat. The only reason I’m considering getting a Switch 2 now is because the first gen consoles always end up the easiest to hack.

They’ll ride in, but it won’t be to save us. It’ll be only exactly to the extent they can buy up the bankrupt economy. It’s the post-Soviet Russian collapse wealth privatisation scenario.

That’s what the Constitution says, and Trump now has nothing that can legally stop him from doing it.

Which means the Constitution is dead letter.

It’s going to be awhile before folks recognize just how damaging this is, if it plays out as I expect.

Trump’s entire life policy is to ignore norms, contracts, laws, and opposition until he’s stopped. It’s still dumbfounding he’s gotten this far, because he’s not some strange unknown entity - he’s a typical sociopath, pushing boundaries as far as they’ll go in his favor until he’s actually prevented from doing so.

His “litigate to delay” strategy is right in line with this. And now the norm is that his administration doesn’t just get to act unlawfully until a court enjoins him from it (if even that, and if even he follows the order). It’s now that his administration gets to act unlawfully to any individual who hasn’t, on their own, challenged it and won in court.

That’s basically game over for the rule of law.

Probably the idea was that people aren’t familiar with it and wouldn’t have approved a general election ballot measure when RCV was voted on, so they did the “lower stakes” elections to get everyone comfortable with it first.

My understanding is ranked choice only applies to NYC primary and special elections. General elections are not ranked choice, which I believe the final mayoral to be.

So choosing the “I didn’t get control of the city so I’m going to be a spoiler candidate” option, I see. Real leader material.

Adams presumably is still serving Trump, and is hoping to split votes for democrats who are voting on pure incumbent name recognition.

You raise a good idea - replace this as Trump’s official portrait wherever possible.