A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?
I do sometimes wonder if you could technically still run a working government off printing money, just recognizing that doing so didnt create more value, but instead acted as a form of taxation. Imagine a government that currently holds no significant fraction of its currency. It then prints an amount equal to what is currently in circulation, doubling the money supply and in doing so presumably halving the value of a given unit of that currency. Once it has done so, no new value is created, but that government has gone from having no significant fraction of the money in circulation, to having half of it, which it can now spend.
Suppose you did this predictably, you let everyone know that you will be increasing the money supply by x percent every year, and will be re-denominating it to avoid difficult to work with numbers at set intervals. Wouldnt you technically have a functioning system for extracting value from the economy to pay for government functions?
It might not be a very good system, since all it would effectively tax is people's savings of currency and not stuff like property, and you would have to set up things like employment contracts or debts to compensate for constant high inflation rates, but Im not sure I see a reason why it technically couldn't be done.
I suspect that we might not use the term "dwarf planet", were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.
Tankies aren't even leftists, they just think they are because someone decades ago got the idea to dress yet another heirarchy in a red flag and claim that it was temporary.
The dems have no coherent message and strategy because they are an attempt to unify basically everything that isn't the far right under one banner. That means that different politicians under it, and different voters that vote for them, want fundamentally different things. Taking a firm, party-wide stance that satisfies the left wing of the party would risk driving off the segment that is just "conservatives that dont feel comfortable with how openly bigoted the republicans are", and vice versa. But trying to please everyone by committing to nothing and running on good vibes eventually results in people getting frustrated with voting for a party that doesn't advance what they want.
What if that is true though? What if it's even virtually guaranteed to be true, given the effort and time required to reasonably prove something like that combined with the limited resources given (and which we can afford to give) to the justice system to do so, and the sheer number of crimes to deal with?
Honestly, the more I hear about the number of cases of people being convicted falsely, or where it's hard to tell if they truly were guilty, due to evidence being poor, or misconstrued, or based on faulty foresic science or known unreliable sources like eyewitness testimony, the more I worry that if called to serve on a jury I'd be effectively unable to do so, because I have come to doubt if the justice system is even capable of proving something beyond what I would consider to be a reasonable doubt.
If they get to the point of being able to just ignore something like that, they have no reason to amend the constitution anyway because they can just toss it out
the sprouts are a similar size and shape to those chocolates, and theyre hidden under the gold wrappers, meaning the actual chocolate isnt visible from the outside. So, they can remove the chocolate, wrap the wrappers back over the sprouts, and put those back in the package so as to make whoever it is given to think theyre getting chocolate, until they unwrap one.
Something that occurred to me this morning is that its a bit worse than just them sucking up to Trump with that to get unbanned; to my understanding, he's just stated he wont enforce the ban law, so if he was to change his mind, he wouldnt need congress to pass another I dont think? He'd just need to start enforcing the existing one. That means that TikTok has a strong incentive to continue sucking up to him throughout his whole term, to stay on his good side. But it goes further, because it also creates an incentive for other corporate social medias that compete with TikTok to do the same (though admittedly, their owners seem to want to anyway), in the hopes that they can convince him to enforce the ban again and remove some of their competition.
to be fair (not that Trump really deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point), the clip doesnt really make it clear if he's saying they rigged the 2024 election in his favor, or if he's referring again to his conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against him (with the implication being that he was "supposed" to win the 2020 one and therefore would have been ineligible to run for the 2024-2028 term)
CarbonIceDragon @ CarbonIceDragon @pawb.social Posts 2Comments 1,286Joined 2 yr. ago
Before bed I've heard, but right after waking? I thought light was good then for getting you more alert?