When this country was founded, tariff revenue was enough to fund the entire federal government. Those days are long gone, and they're not coming back.
Nowadays, there are basically two reasons to play the tariff game. 1. Extract tariff concessions from your trading partners, and 2. Encourage domestic production. The problem is, if you're going for #1, you have to be willing to drop your tariffs at the drop off a hat to make a deal. If you're playing #2, the people that build factories and whatnot want assurances that the tariff supports will be in place for years and years.
So you can see that there's an inherent trade-off between #1 and #2. To some extent, you cannot serve both masters. But Trump has been playing both strategies at the same time without a care in the world. There are... consequences... to doing that, which I am sure we will all get to experience.
Edit: okay, okay. This Bolsonaro thing is a brand new strategy #3 which I'm calling.... Oh geez... I gotta go buy some more beer.
In the previous opinion, SCOTUS didn't say that nationwide class actions or APA suits are legal. They just declined to rule on those, and I believe a justice said class actions might be viable substitutes in a concurring opinion.
My guess is we're going to find out what they think about this class action pretty fast.
Encrypted data channels can still be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. Like when you connect to an unknown host with SSH, and the client pops up a big warning.
In this case, ICE or whomever sets up a "valid" cell tower that your phone connects to, and they (law enforcement) route your packets onto the rest of the Internet. They can decrypt the 5G data, and see all of the IP headers. They can't necessarily read the TLS traffic, such as https. But most important of all, they can log all of the IMEIs that connect, which effectively gives them a database of all of the protestors.
The use of Stingray by US law enforcement has been challenged on grounds that the law enforcement agencies have no spectrum license. Those challenges seem not to have found success.
On the other hand, prisons in the US have been stopped from operating cell phone jammers on prison grounds, on the same complaint of no spectrum license.
Exactly. This is completely insane. The DoD has the negotiating leverage to write these right to repair requirements into their RFPs, specifications, and contracts. The idea that their procurement offices simply failed to do this boggles my mind.
Back in the war, if you had a winning design, you were required to license it, full drawings included, to many different manufacturers at fair prices. The Defense Production Act is still on the books, and it contains a lot of power to control the economy. Why is DoD handcuffing themselves?
Richard Reid is serving three consecutive life sentences, plus 110 years on top, for the original shoe bombing plot. The shoes contained 10 ounces of C4. He resides at ADX Florence.
A while back, people in Florida built an absolutely massive airport in the middle of the Everglades. They wanted to build the next big regional hub covering all of South Florida, but that never happened. So there's a massive gigantic 12,000 ft runway, huge amounts of concrete apron, and space for a big passenger terminal that was never built. The runway remains open as a general aviation airport, and was until now mostly visited by students to practice touch and go landings.
My points:
The article summary saying it's an airport used for training is true, but slightly misleading.
There's a lot of things about this place that make logistical sense for the type of operation they want to do: cheap rent or land, lots of available concrete, not actually new build (easier environmental impact statement), easy on site access to a massive airport that can support jets of any size, low amounts of air traffic, and secluded from public view.
It's not actually in Everglades National Park, and they aren't filling in wetlands, like I've seen some say.
Several years ago at this point, Congress passed a bill, and that bill was signed into law by the President. What that law says, is that TikTok cannot continue under Chinese ownership. Byte Dance either have to sell the American video app business so that it is controlled by Americans, or they have to shutdown Tiktok.
Byte Dance did not sell the business, so under the law TikTok has to shutdown. This law was lawyered all the way to the supreme court, and the court said it's a valid law, and must be followed.
Despite all of these facts, the law is not actually being followed. And Tiktok is still operating in the United States. There is no legally valid reason for it to do so. President Trump has issued extension after extension, even though he has no legal authority to do so.
The latest here is the top law enforcement officer in the US telling the app stores, "yes we know it's illegal to keep Tiktok in your app store, but I am pinky promising we won't go after you."
Sadly most of the great maritime powers have signed onto the 1856 Declaration of Paris where they agreed to give up privateering as a weapon of war. The United States has not signed on, but has also not issued a letter of marque since that period. During the civil war, the confederates experimented briefly with privateering, but the Union declared that it would not.
In 2025, The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 was introduced in Congress. This bill would authorize privateering against "cartels" (apparently any cartel, like OPEC or the American Medical Association).
Non-Euclidean geometry was developed by pure mathematicians who were trying to prove the parallel line postulate as a theorem. They realized that all of the classic geometry theorems are all different if you start changing that postulate.
This led to Riemannian geometry in 1854, which back then was a pure math exercise.
Some 60 years later, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the theory of general relativity, of which the core mathematics is all Riemannian geometry.
They're definitely throwing the whole book at her. But there's also a small nugget of a case here. Having been through customs a few times, I think it's clear that biological materials should be declared. In a normal situation, the infraction would lead to a long wait in the back room, a stern warning, and maybe confiscated embryos. Not felony charges.
I have a relative that was in Nam and wears that hat, but he claims he was POG. I have another relative who lied about his age to get into Nam, who definitely was in the shit, and he doesn't wear the hat.
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