booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

People generally aren't sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it's not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.

You're still too narrowly focused.

The courts can and still do order the executive branch to follow the law, and undo unlawful actions, and order them to follow the law into the future. That's the whole reason why at any given time there are thousands of lawsuits against the government under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the type of lawsuit being brought against Trump's new policies.

If he ignores court orders, that's a constitutional crisis, but it also really fucks up his chain of command. Elon Musk can't fire thousands of people or freeze thousands of contracts, he has to direct the thousands of people who actually control those things to do the paperwork to do that, and those individual civil servants won't violate court orders.

The lawsuits are important, and people need to not roll over and just accept Trump's illegal actions.

This is a misconception that should stop.

The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can't bring criminal charges against someone for acts that were done as President.

Here's what that doesn't stop:

• Criminal cases against the former president for non-official acts.
• Civil cases against the former president for acts, whether official or non-official.
• Criminal charges against anyone else who wasn't literally the president
• Civil cases against the government, its agencies, its officers, or its employees.

The Supreme Court fucked up when it said prosecutors can't use official acts as evidence relating to unofficial acts, which basically made it impossible to prosecute a whole bunch of types of crimes.

But what it doesn't do is stop people from suing the government, here and now, for breaking the law, or stop the courts from ordering the government to comply with the law.

And the scope of immunity covers only the President personally. Any other adviser, employee, or officer can still be prosecuted for breaking the law, including following the President's illegal orders.

Part of the Trump strategy right now is to demoralize the opposition and make us believe that he actually has all the power. He doesn't, at least not yet. We shouldn't make it easy for him by assuming that he can break the law with impunity, and instead we should make sure we continue to do everything in our power to hold him and everyone who helps implement his agenda accountable.

Well, I wouldn't assume that the local vendors and farmers are less likely to be supporting Trump.

That's why it's our responsibility as consumers to align their shareholder interests to doing the right fucking thing. Boycotts and other consumer action are part of their calculations on what the shareholder interests are, so a large population of informed consumers who vote their conscience with their wallet will provide pressure to do the right thing.

You can buy a house for cheap when a fire is threatening it, and hope to put out the fire before it gets destroyed. That's how you can profit from a fire.

But if it's just buying the ashes, that's not actually a good investment strategy. The price has dropped because the thing truly did become less valuable.

Too many people can't seem to see the difference between the first category and the second.

His own class is going to betray him because he is the dumbest motherfucker alive.

The billionaires will regret giving him power, because they're subtly giving up their own levers of influence over him.

When you could buy a politician or an election, you held some sway over those politicians in those seats. When you pay lobbyists who will do the work of writing specific regulations that help you, and then have them try to get those regulations actually enacted, you had influence over how the government could wield power over you.

But the Trump movement has been about consolidation of power in one man, who doesn't feel constrained by laws, or by other politicians. The billionaires are down to a single tool: trying to pay off one man, who doesn't keep his word.

The question becomes, at what point does it go from money buying power, versus power buying money? It's a subtle distinction, but an important one for those who currently have money and who want to derive power from that.

Trump and Elon want to make it so that they can singlehandedly destroy any business that doesn't bend the knee. At the same time, they want to be able to shape the rules in an arbitrary way to only help those they like, and hurt those they don't. They're not quite there yet, and I'd say that the rich still have some power independent of the government. But the plan for those in charge is to consolidate power as quickly as they can, to where that's no longer true.

There's a substantial chance that this goes down the same way that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where the financial backers who enabled Bane's movement insist that they should still have influence over that movement, once it takes power.

Or if you actually want a historical parallel, the oligarchs who funded the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, only to find themselves in concentration camps themselves.

You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

Don't mistake malice for incompetence, or vice versa.

I'd also add not to mistake inadvertence for planned action, or vice versa.

Let's not forget, this was the administration that named the wrong official as acting FBI director and, rather than fixing their mistake, just went with it and let that guy run things for a few weeks.

It could be that they want to tank the markets so that their people can buy things for cheap. But I also wouldn't trust their competence or planning to do it in a way that the cheap thing recovers in value.

People make the comparison to Crassus's fire brigade, where he'd buy homes on the cheap that were already on fire, then use the brigade to put the fire out. But imagine someone who tries to do this with an incompetent fire brigade, where they buy houses on fire and then fail to contain the fires, so that they end up losing even more. That analogy might be more on point with this administration.

Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone's poor they won't pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don't have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.

It's low key in the sense that Trump seems to have been prepared to disobey the order, but it never took effect. The order was "pay people what you owe them by Wednesday at 11:59pm," and the Trump admin got an order from the Supreme Court pausing that requirement until further notice.

What's notable is that Trump's lawyer said "yes we know we have to comply with court orders but this one is literally impossible to comply with in time," which is the type of position that makes a token gesture towards complying, while also showing that they weren't going to comply in time.

Yes. It's being formally told that they're not welcome back anymore, (even though it's a place that is normally open to the public), so that if the person comes back they would be subject to the law on trespassing.

Andrew Jackson's statement that he would have refused to have the executive branch enforce the Supreme Court's ruling was dangerous, but it ended up not mattering in practice. The losing party in that case was the State of Georgia, and Georgia ended up complying with the court orders.

If Trump starts ordering the executive branch to disobey court orders, it may set up a crisis, and it might be one that he doesn't win. His own loyalists appointed to the heads of the departments and agencies might listen to him, but the actual rank and file of who needs to implement the orders could end up in open revolt. After all, even the military has it ingrained that one only needs to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones.

I think you're missing the point of this criticism.

People buy stuff, and then they use it. If they don't use less, they won't buy less, even if there's a specific day where they choose not to buy anything. That day's avoided purchases just get moved to another day, and the seller doesn't feel any effect.

A real boycott takes money that would've been spent on a specific seller and takes it away forever. It's a shift in purchase behavior to a competitor, or a shift in consumption behavior to not need to purchase that thing anymore.

As an extreme example, someone who boycotts Tesla every day for 5 years but still buys a Tesla once every 5 years is not effectively boycotting Tesla, even if that boycott covers 1825 days in a row.

Same with people who normally grocery shop on Friday, who shift their purchases to Saturday.

I would advocate for boycotting specific companies instead, and steering that money you would've spent to someone else (even a charity, so as to reduce one's own consumption). The boycotts need to shift recipients of the money, not dates of when that money changes hands.

To expand further on what you're saying, the problem with the linked article's mathematical/statistical analysis is that it uses a slightly more sophisticated version of misleadingly using "average"/mean in a context where median would be more appropriate.

Specifically, they talk about the spending of the top 10% in the aggregate, and point to the threshold of when a household tips into that top decile. Well, that aggregated number is itself heavily skewed towards the higher end of that spectrum, where the people in the 99th percentile are contributing a lot more weight than those in the 90th.

Here are the cutoffs for income thresholds to hit each percentile at or above 90:

90: $235k
91: $246k
92: $260k
93: $275k
94: $295k
95: $316k
96: $348k
97: $391k
98: $461k
99: $632k

Note that this doesn't even get into the 0.5% or 0.1%, which skew things even further. Even without that level of granularity, you can see that the median in this group is about $305k while the mean is closer to $350k.

When you include the billionaires, the difference skews even further.

That's the math error at the center of this thesis. The facts reported might be true, but in a way that groups things together misleadingly.

Exactly. Some of the fears that people have are about factors that affect all flights, not just the risk of a single pilot operating a single aircraft.

Flying is still safe and has a strong safety culture built into the industry independent of government regulation, that wouldn't change overnight even if the government regulators change. But removing a slice of Swiss cheese is still bad, and cause for concern.

You're mostly right, but your comment also assumes independent probabilities rather than correlated probabilities of danger. Sometimes multiple crashes can trace back to the same cause: one particular manufacturing defect on a model of aircraft sold thousands of times, one bad practice on air traffic control procedure, one bad actor targeting multiple aircraft, etc.

Purely hypothetically, as an example, if it turned out that there was a terrorist group targeting aircraft via anti aircraft missiles, then that group's success at bringing down an airliner would actually worsen the odds of passengers on other aircraft, at least until we receive external information that the threat has passed.

These were his loyalists. He purged the career staff from leadership/management positions in these offices, and replaced them with people like these 6 prosecutors (conservative credentials like clerking for Scalia). The leadership in the Public Integrity Section got forced out (either resigned or got reassigned to an immigration task force), so the leaders who remained were specifically appointed by Trump.

The US Attorneys generally all resign upon a change of administration, unless asked to stay, and this Danielle Sassoon was appointed acting US Attorney by Trump. She's a conservative Republican.

Oil is just in a precarious position with supply and demand.

High prices will accelerate demand destruction, as people and businesses move to cheaper energy sources, like solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear, plus spur the continued development of grid scale storage and demand management technologies. Sustained high prices could cause lifestyle and consumption habits to change, too: fewer gas guzzlers, fewer supercommuters, improved shipping efficiency, etc.

Low prices would put strain on the finances of producers, whether for profit corporations in the West or state owned (or closely affiliated) producers in places like Saudi Arabia or Russia, and would weaken those countries' influence on geopolitical issues.

There's a reason they want a strong cartel, which is what OPEC tries to be, but that cartel has been weakened considerably by non-OPEC Plus nations becoming huge producers. OPEC cut supply to try to hurt Biden, but it ended up being a handout to American, Canadian, and Norwegian companies, by propping up prices while losing market share. Meanwhile, sanctions on Russia (and Iran and Venezuela) add a bunch of friction (and some cost) to their exports, so that they need higher prices to break even.

For the first time in modern history, societies have access to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in competitive volume and price, to where an oil oligopoly can't push around consumers. Trump can't put that back in the bottle.