u/Akerlof

I'm hoping he had access to accurate polling data and it's showing terrible results for the republicans. But I don't think Trump is that data driven, and since he said he ordered the justice department to file suit, my guess is that it was probably just the shiny thing that caught his attention last week.

Nah, they'll just stop paying the judgments.

Before he posted it on Steam with a rebrand, he was talking about it here as a fan game that he made with AI.

Start with legislation, or a Constitutional Amendment, removing immunity for government agents. Replace it with a "benefit of the doubt" or some such standard that protects them from being criminalized for honest mistakes (but also indemnifies the victims of those mistakes), but don't give them effective carte blanche to do whatever they want when acting as an agent of the state. Make this true for all government agents, from the President and the Supreme Court through the local dog catcher.

Leave the Speech and Debate clause alone, it's narrowly tailored enough and has appropriate exceptions, but add a requirement that all speech and actions covered by the clause be made publicly available.

It's like Kermit the Snek =)

I think this idea started with the problem of the welfare cliff: Government benefits are tied to income, and once you start making a certain amount of income (often well below the value of the benefits), you lose those benefits. So the result is that people are stuck on welfare because the only jobs they can get (often limited by time availability) don't pay sufficiently to replace all their benefits at once.

That puts people in a negative feedback loop: They can't support their family so they receive government support. While on government support, they can't improve their skills and work history to get better paying jobs because a.) whatever situation that required them to get support in the first place and/or b.) they can't improve their skills or work history because any effectively non-trivial work would knock them off government support well before they're earning enough to replace it, much less sure that they'll be able to keep that job, because of a.)

The welfare cliff has been an acknowledged problem for quite a while now, and there have been attempts (in the US at least, I'm not up on the rest of the world), but it still exists to a greater or lesser extent across different policies.

What I think happened was that "welfare cliff" got talking point-ified to "welfare disincentivises people from working," which is not wrong for specific policies. From there, not only were context and nuance stripped from it, but the actual definition of the problem was also lost, and the bullet point became the whole idea. To the extent that some of the proposed "fixes" exacerbate the original problem, like strict work requirements to receive some benefits combined with stricter income limitations for other benefits.

No, just that the police should not be able to use "I thought I was in danger of death or grievous bodily harm" as a pretext to murder people. Also, police should not be free to escalate a non-threatening situation such as misdemeanor shoplifting to the point where they can use the reaction they incited as a pretext to murder people. If you are holding random people on the street to a standard where they need to remain calm when a person is pointing a gun at their face and screaming threats, we need to hold trained law enforcement officersto that same standard.

The police have less restrictive rules of engagement for using lethal force than our soldiers did while we were at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is not making anyone safer.

Or, they could go with the traditional response to nazi demands: Nuts!

Yeah, you're right: We need to emphasize that she was removed from her home by the courts due to the rape and abuse she suffered there, so that the voters Ramswamy is trying to court don't empathize with her abuser.

"We detailed these concerns to Wedgewood and, they publicly responded indicating that their polls were indeed fake."

Well, that was anticlimactic.

Yeah, that's why we shouldn't be talking about it as her "estranged" mother. Her children were removed from her by the courts. That needs to be empathized. This wasn't a choice the kids made, the abuse was so bad that the government stepped in and took her children.

Do not call her "estranged." That's adog whistle, fog horn more likely, to the growing ranks of aggrieved parents and grand parents who think they are entitled to their children's affection and grand children's attention regardless of how they have treated them. That's calling out to the people who want a law forcing parents to give grand parents time with their grand children. That's calling out to the antivaxxers who refuse to get a TDAP and are then devastated by "selfish, unappreciative mothers" who don't let them hold the newborn and kiss them on the lips.

"Estranged" in this add is calling out to these atrocious people and saying "Acton is one of those people, she's going to take your kids and grandbabies away from you."

CPS removed her from her deadbeat mother for rape and abuse. That's not estrangement, that's not going no contact because a therapist suggested it, Child Protection Services removed her from an abusive home. I really think the wording matters here because of who the ad is targeted at. The ad is trying to get middle aged, middle class women to put themselves in her shoes and think about they would feel if their kids went no contact, and "estranged" is key to that emotional connection. Any discussion of this should empathize that Acton was removed from an abusive household, that minimizes the empathy with the abuser.

I'm conjecturing about Trump's perception of himself, in order to understand why he's so hung up on the reflecting pool, not making factual claims.

My theory is that he micromanage the project. Trump's a resort guy, after all, he knows pools, right? So my money is that he called his pool guy and said "put this pool coating on the reflecting pool at this time..." because Trump knows what looks good in pools, right?

It had to be sabotage because it went wrong. And since Trump is the smartest guy in the room, it couldn't be his fault or the result of decisions he made, so the only possible explanation is sabotage.

And that's why Trump is so fixated on prosecuting someone for sabotaging his reflecting pool improvements.

Well, you know the fundamental principle our legal system is built upon: Better 100 innocent men go to jail than 1 guilty man go free.

The three letter agencies have tortured the guys left in Guantanamo so much, and all the information related to what they did is so tainted by that, there no way they could convict them of so much as jay walking. But there no way they can set them free, and no country will take them, the only real legal solution was plea deals. Buy the victims' families want convictions, so plea deals are politically unacceptable.

This should become the textbook case for why it's especially important to follow the rules when the stakes are high. The torture didn't provide any actionable information, but it made it impossible to get justice under American laws.

Discovery should be fun.

You would have double shadows if stadium lights we on: From the sun and from the lights. Stadium lighting wouldn't have that warm afternoon sun glow, so it's not the predominate light source and therefore it's not going to cast the primary shadow. The lighting is definitely brighter in the background and darker in the foreground, like it's from the sun and not from stadium lights to the right.

Non-camera related: Have you ever seen lanes 1 and 5 adjacent to each other on a track? And this is a track around an American football field, see the scoreboard and the lines and numbers painted on the grass? But no goal post. Also, football fields are almost always aligned north-south because the sun at this angle blinds the players.

You can do a lot of weird shit in camera, but you can't change where the light comes from. (And of they're doing that much, the people paying for the work would have seen that he was doing a lot of weird, intrusive stuff over a very long period of time.) If the photographer manipulated the image that much in photoshop, it's an AI generated image anyway, just using Adobe's AI to create the image instead of Anthropic's.

Look at where the sun is. Look at the direction of the shadow. There are no tricks you can do with the camera and flash to end up with that.

Even before the Ukraine war, there were riots over attempted pension cuts. When you're operating with no safety margin, the specific stiff breeze that knocks you over the edge isn't the problem, there's always going to be a stiff breeze. The problem is that you put yourself in a position where a stiff breeze could cause you to fall.

C-bills? Oh hell yes. Years? Pass.

Run it through an AI checker, guaranteed it shows up as 100% AI.

You can check out Effects of Austerity: Expenditure- and Tax-Based Approaches in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, it's an article by working economists about research in their area of specialization written to be understood by non-econonists.

I'm thinking this is likely the pretext for sending ICE or FBI loyalists to disrupt polling places. Though, typically for Trump, California is a terrible target. The swing states and red states with close races like Texas would probably have a higher strategic value. Especially if this is the last contested election you think you're going to have.

Can we start calling it a Hush Piggy motion?