Yes, from the title and first few comments I thought it was about getting customer support and having to talk to a chatbot first. For anyone else who didn't read, this article is about how mindlessly copy-pasting LLM output is comparable to "making me talk to your chatbot".
Honestly I pretty much never actually read the articles and I don't see anything wrong with that. HN is more like discussion club, and the article is just a starting point for the discussion. If the discussion stays on topic that's great, if it moves onto better topics that's even better.
Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, knew this would happen. His sons, at their firm Cantor Fitzgerald, have been offering a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund, and if (as they did today) they get struck down, they pocket the 100% refund.
Meanwhile Pam Bondi's brother is a lawyer who's firm represents clients with cases against the justice department, and those cases keep getting dropped.
Yeah this is basically a thing everywhere. I was criminally charged in a certain mid-sized town, all I did was search through the court records to find the lawyer who always gets the charges dropped, hired them, and they went away for me too. Unfortunately that's the way the just us system works.
Maybe Brad Bondi is the most skilled lawyer in town. It's certainly not in the interest of the clients to have any material knowledge otherwise, nor for it to be revealed to them.
It is, however, in the interest of the American public not to have a corrupt justice system. Thus, we should not rely on far fetched assumptions instead of investigating corruption where it appears.
It likely is nepotism (and maybe bribery depending on your definition, but very unlikely to meet the legal bar of bribery), but I'm not sure what about the GP's comment makes it so obviously clear to you that it is both of those things.
is it doesn't meet the legal bar for bribery, it's only because the supreme Court has made most forms of bribary legal (presumably to prevent Thomas from being arrested for taking lots of bribes)
Ahh, Brad Bondi, who it is widely rumored to be attempting to join the Bar in DC for the convenient benefit of being able to wield influence in the event of anyone trying to push for disbarrment against Pam...
I wouldn’t put anything past them, but my impression is that they were just acting as a middleman for this transaction and taking a fee, rather than making a directional bet one way or another. Hedge funds have certainly been buying a lot of tariff claims, giving businesses guaranteed money upfront and betting on this outcome. But for an investment bank like Cantor Fitzgerald that would be atypical.
It’s not really excusing anything, just pointing out that Cantor Fitzgerald would be making money whether this Supreme Court ruling went for or against the Trump tariffs. So it’s not like they had to have any inside knowledge to be making money.
It's true that a volatile environment in general is good for certain types of investment banking business, including facilitating this trade. I nevertheless think it's unlikely - honestly, a galaxy brain take - that Cantor Fitzgerald or other investment banks with influence in the Trump administration would push for policies like unconstitutional tariffs just to drive trading revenue. Maybe the strongest reason is that other, frankly more lucrative investment banking activities, like fundraising and M&A, benefit from a growing economy and a stable economic and regulatory environment.
It stretches your imagination to conceive of a financier chasing short term gains over the long term stability of the investment bank they are part of? I seem to recall an event back in the late '00s that you may want to look into.
Ah yes, instead of applying the normal legal standard of “not even having the appearance of impropriety” we instead apply the monkey’s paw standard of waiting until they “no longer even have the appearance of propriety”.
Remember when a conflict of interest was so important that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, because heaven forbid, he accidentally made some money while president.
Like his peanut farm would unduly sway government peanut policy.
An even more interesting one is that Ford was the first president to go on paid speaking tours after office. It's not like the 37 other presidents couldn't have also cashed in on the office in a similar fashion, but it was felt that such a thing would impugn the integrity of the office and also undermine the perception of somebody working as a genuine servant of the state.
There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.
Curious if part of this was the overall decline in government compensation relative to the private sector. The president makes roughly what the typical SV engineer makes after 5 years in big tech or as a fresh grad from a top PhD program. Meanwhile the people the president deals with have become unfathomably wealthy.
In 1909, the US president made 75k - roughly 2.76 Million in today's dollars. This is in comparison to the current 400k dollar salary of the president. As the president is the highest paid government employee by law/custom - this applies downward pressure on the rest of the governments payroll.
I see no reason why the president shouldn't be modestly wealthy given the requirements or the role and the skill required to do it well. Cutting the payscale to less than some new grads seems like a recipe for corruption.
Since 1958 with the Former Presidents Act [1] the Presidency guarantees you'll live very comfortably for the rest of your life with a lifetime pension (and even a small pension for your wife), funding for an office/staff, lifetime secret service protection, funded travel, and more. It was passed precisely because of the scenario you describe playing out with Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.
Your source does not seem aware of the history of tax brackets. In Truman's era the top rate started at $100k income and was 90%. Even at $60k it was 80%. Those are figures from 1953, when Truman left office. [1]
This wasn't that big of a deal for the average person at a time when the median salary was somewhere around $3k, but for a person with significant overhead and large, but not enormous, income -- in other words, exactly like Truman -- it was devastating.
> Your source does not seem aware of the history of tax brackets.
"Beginning in 1949, the president was also granted a $50,000 (equivalent to $677,000 in 2025) expense allowance, which was initially tax-free, and did not have to be accounted for."[0] That's 4 years of $677,000 tax-free which I make to be about $2.7M which lines up with "Truman embezzled about two and half million dollars, in 2025 money, from the White House expense account"[1] - "tax-free", "did not have to be accounted for" -> tax brackets are meaningless.
But, you say, "the allowance became taxable later in his presidency"[0], and I reply "Truman never reported it on his tax return"[0], "and also didn’t pay the taxes he owned on the money."[1] which also somewhat scuppers the "history of tax brackets" angle, no?
Further, "In February 1953, Truman signed a book deal for his memoirs, and in a draft will dated December of that year listed land worth $250,000 (equivalent to $3,008,000 in 2025), savings bonds of the same amount, and cash of $150,000 (equivalent to $1,805,000 in 2025)"[0] which I reckon comes to about $8M which, again, lines up with "Truman had a net worth of about $8 million in 2025 dollars when he left the White House"[1].
Further, further, "In January 1959, Truman calculated his net worth as $1,046,788.86 (equivalent to $11,561,000 in 2025)"[0] which, to be fair, is slightly lower than the "$14 million in 2025 dollars when he was successfully shaking his tin cup to Sam Rayburn and John McCormack in 1958"[1] but in the same "NOT AT ALL POOR GTFO" ballpark.
In summary - he embezzled $2.5M, got $8M for your memoirs, and ending up being worth $11-14M within 6 years of leaving the White House and thus I rate the claim "Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office" as 100 Pinocchios.
Wikipedia is not a source. All of the dirt on that page is exclusively relying on one article [1] from a self-citing author, the same author you again cited in your post here, from 'lawyersgunmoney.' I don't find it compelling. It may indeed ultimately turn out to be accurate, but I find it generally unwise to rewrite history on the words of a single person, who seems to have a strong bias towards a certain narrative.
That bias could indeed just be because he believes he's discovered a truth which most people don't know, completely contrary to the 'official narrative', which is indeed quite a frustrating place to find oneself. But it can also cause one to be blind in some ways. For instance assuming everything as written is accurate, the author simply then jumps to malice (like tax evasion), seemingly without consideration of issues such as inconsistent or flawed record keeping which I imagine was extremely common in the days prior to computers.
Are most fresh grads from a top PhD program really making $400k/year? Sure, the ones hired by OpenAI are making at least that much, but the vast majority are not. However the broader point remains, that the president’s (and the rest of government’s) pay structure has not kept up with the private sector.
>There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.
Are you sure that people in the past viewed wealth as less important? If anything, the 1960s hippie movement would represent a shift away from a cultural emphasis on wealth, no?
I would suggest that internet commenter nihilism and politician nihilism form a self-reinforcing spiral. If commenters will take a nihilistic view of your actions no matter what you do, you might as well secure the bag. And if politicians are always securing the bag, you might as well write nihilistic internet comments about them.
Remember when the late President Carter was being laid to rest?
There was a tremendous outpouring of grief and honor, and so much heartfelt condolences. From all over America and the whole world. Deep respect as fitting as can be for such a great human being, for the type of honest & compassionate leadership you could only get in the USA, and only from the cream that rises to the top.
Every single minute it invoked the feeling that Trump deserves nothing like this ever.
There will be a wild party across the globe when that man passes. Flags burning, fireworks, nude parades, more alcohol consumed than the day prohibition was lifted.
Red Hats will be crying in the street while sane and normal happy people dance like it's the rapture and kiss like they're falling in love for the first time all over again.
I wish everyone a nice party, but the problem isn't Trump. Its what behind him: the ideologues, the power brokers and their networks, the 0.001%. Plus the masses having been bathing in culture wars for years.
Trump is just good for circus, I would say the GOP can call themselves really lucky with him. His job is to successfully capture media attention, keeping what enables him out of the spotlight. He lacks all qualities, except that one ability to grab the mass media by their pussy. New craziness every day makes good headlines.
Problem is that his enablers are not aligned on all core issues. Yes, you have got the Heritage Foundation which mainly wants to go back to the gilded age with a vast christian lower class. But you also have a circle of people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want. Its a weird coalition of billionaires predating on the millionaires, grifters, christian nationalists, Neo-nazi's like Miller, tech-accelerationists etc.
You should fear the day when Trump isn't needed anymore. MAGA is Trump. GOP will have to shift up ideological gear after him, and it won't be as nice as Trump. Even if internal war breaks out in the GOP, it is too early for a party.
> people who believe that crashing the US, including the dollar, enables them to build a US like they want
Yes, it's strange how dumb some rich/succesful people are. As I understand it, no civilization ever has done such a thing. If a civilization and its institutions crash, it remains failed/dysfunctional for a very long time. The only way to improve society is in small steps.
I hope the people who finance this all will wake up to the reality that it may well cost them everything, too.
It's not strange; they can just afford to weed out the people who say "no" from their lives. Everyone around them is either in the same situation, or depends on them for their cushy livelihood.
Not having to hear "no" for decades breaks brains.
You're right. Trump does an excellent Zaphod Beeblebrox. He distracts from power, and I get that, but he's still a piece of crap, and a lot of people have died from his fumbling, bumbling, inept, failing upwards solely due to the fact that people associate him with having money and power, even though he's an tryannical, ineffectual, foppish, childraping manboy.
The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something.
But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.
"Vote better next time I suppose" is the message to the electorate, because it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.
The best you could do is perhaps model the additional per household cost (which has been done) and issue them checks from the Treasury (stimulus check style), but who is going to pay for it? The taxpayer! There is no way to incur this economic cost on the people who incurred the harm (this administration). You could potentially get the funds back from companies through higher corp taxes. Is Congress going to pass that? Certainly not. Them the breaks of electing Tariff Man. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
> ....I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN
9:03 AM · Dec 4, 2018
Historical lesson in governance failure. Can't change history, the outcome is regrettable, we can only try to do better in the future. Onward. Let the lesson not be for naught.
> it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.
It's very much possible if money isn't (or only partially) returned to the companies and used for targeted investment benefiting the public. Of course this won't help much if government spending priories and legislative objectives aren't revised, but that's unlikely because there's nobody in government or academia with anything close to a good idea about it.
Without these tariffs Trump and his advisors' already legislated and approved agenda adds 2 trillion dollars to our national debt. Step one is the Republican Congress rolling back the big beautiful bill that is no longer funded, if they truly are the fiscally responsible political party.
But we all know they are actually the party of unsustainable debt (with the political agenda of it blowing up the country as they lay out in their 40+ years of starve the beast policy). They then come to threads like this and talk about...the unsustainable debt that their 40+ years of policymaking has created and how government doesn't work (because of their 40+ years of policy making) and we need to get rid of it. 40+ years of destroying the country via starve the beast policy and placing the country in unsustainable financial peril all for a political agenda they can't reach any other way.
> Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.
The SCOTUS didn't say that in their decision. No matter how you call it, the tariffs were found in breach with simple law passed by Congress - that is, the undoing of tariffs can be legislated by Congress and it can take any shape they like - it will be legal. Anyway, fine-tuning this is a waste of time, the big problems are elsewhere.
They don't have to say it in their decision. Their only remit was to determine whether the tax was legal or not. It is not. Lower courts will then hear cases about disbursement of the illegitimate takings; those cases will almost certainly not make it up to the Supreme Court.
The money is getting "returned", at least in some fashion. The parent commenter is right.
If there was a functioning DOJ, they could bring RICO charges against the whole administration, their business associates and involved family members, all of whom are co-conspirators to corruption of government and bribery. But that would never happen, of course, because Americans don't riot en masse and demand accountability for corrupt government officials.
It's the job of the Congress to hold the executive branch accountable, with the ultimate endpoint being impeachment and removal if necessary. Unfortunately, the Senate republicans are completely sold out to the cult of Trump so there will be no relief from that quarter.
There must be a mind boggling amount of profit going to these importers to get basically all of the tariff proceeds back on already completed transaction with zero expectation that it be paid back to the people bearing the cost.
I can't imagine their margins are usually very high, the tariff rates are astronomical compared to their usual margins. Hopefully someone here has more information than me because to my naive mind this basically absolutely explodes the free cash reserves of importers from high volume high tariff countries creating a lottery winnings for a business sector of epic proportions rarely seen.
> the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along
This story is often repeated, especially by businesses advocating against taxes, but transparently false if you think about it: Taxes and tariffs are costs for a business, no different than an increase in the cost of hops for Budweizer, or an increase wholesale cost of M&M's for the corner store.
When hops' cost increases, Budweizer doesn't just pass it along to consumers; the corner store also doesn't just raise the price of M&Ms. Everyone knows that if you raise the price, fewer people buy your beer/candy and your profits may drop overall, while your scarce assets (money) will be sunk in products sitting on the shelves when you need those assets elsewhere. They can't just raise prices arbitrarily: if Budweizer charged $20/can they'd have zero profit.
As we know well, some companies even sell products at a loss because that is the best outcome for their profits - e.g., car manufacturers, rather than have a hundred million in assets 'lost' indefinitely to unsold cars, and having no pricing that is more profitable, will sell at a loss to get what they can out of it. The clothing store puts last season's unsold clothes on sale around now.
In economics the tradeoff between price and quantity sold is called the demand curve. There's a theoretical point on the curve, hard to identify precisely in reality, which maximizes your profit.
So when costs increase, businesses still want to maximize profits: They decide how much of extra cost to pay directly out of their profits, and how much to raise the price and have consumers 'pay' for it. The consumers don't always go along with the plan: For products that are easy to forgo, such as M&Ms, consumers won't pay much more and businesses tend to eat cost increases. For products that are more unavoidable, such as gas for your car, consumers are compelled to pay more (until they buy more fuel efficient cars, or take a bus or ride a bicycle).
The CBO estimates [1] that foreign exporters bear 5% of the burden of the tariffs, with American consumers bearing the remaining 95%:
> [T]he net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)
This is a serious document written by a bunch of serious economists. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the page. That you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false" should give you pause.
> you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false"
I didn't say that. I said that the common argument that tax/tariff increases are always passed along 100% to consumers is transparently false. And contrary to your criticism, the cited paper agrees with my claim (in this case, while my claim is general):
"In CBO’s assessment, foreign exporters will absorb 5 percent of the cost of the tariffs, slightly offsetting the import price increases faced by U.S. importers. In the near term, CBO anticipates, U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices."
It goes on to say that other businesses, whose costs haven't increased, will raise prices - which is not at all 'passing along costs to consumers' but a different dynamic - and that the combined two dynamics yield the overall consumer impact equal to 95% of tariff costs:
"In addition, U.S. businesses that produce goods that compete with foreign imports will, in CBO’s assessment, increase their prices because of the decline in competition from abroad and the increased demand for tariff-free domestic goods. Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."
I think the tariffs are a big mistake but the argument I was addressing - if you tax businesses then consumers effectively pay the tax - is widespread disinformation.
The final quoted portion doesn't seem to agree with your final statement though?
> Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."
The idea expressed previously in your excerpts is that domestically-produced US goods do increase their revenues by the amount that their produced-abroad competitors. So things are okay from that perspective.
But what that final quotation says is that those increased revenues are 95% paid for by US consumers. In other words, they "effectively pay the tax."
I ordered a soccer team jersey from UK which cost $100. I had to shell out $75 in tariffs. So yes while what you are saying might apply to businesses, there is a real cost paid by consumers as well.
Both can be true. On competitive environments it's harder to pass along costs to consumers, but when a supply pressure is unilaterally applied the competitive pressure to eat the increased costs goes away and is more easily passed along to consumers.
There's a bit of truth to what you say, but also truth in the fact ultimately the consumer pays for everything. You're right that in effect the business might absorb the loss to profit, but ultimately ~100% of the revenue is from receipts from customers in the business model you proposes of things like selling a simple business of merely producing and selling M&Ms.
Thus both of you are really right. The tariff is paid 100% by consumer receipts if you track the flow of money, but this might also still be reflected in reduced profits. The actual flow of money might be $X revenue from customers, out of the $X paid from customers $Y is taken out for tariffs. $Y comes from the dollars received from customers but still reflects lowered potential profit if $X rose by less than $Y after tariffs started.
That's theoretical (and wrong: businesses' assets come from many places besides consumers, especially from investors) but meaningless to the question in this thread:
Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.
>(and wrong: businesses' assets come from many places besides consumers, especially from investors)
You were the one that presented the dichotomy of receipts from customers and diversions of profits. Then when I used your own framing, by using the exact same two variables, you switched the game and object to not including the investors. This is absolutely hilarious, as you're objecting to the very foundation you outlaid.
>Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.
The 'question' was twofold. Whether consumers pay it. And whether tariffs increase price for consumers. It can be true that the consumer pays ~100% of the tariff, yet the price doesn't rise as much as tariffs. It's still the consumers paying, they're just paying more to tariffs and less to profit. So you're both right, and your failure to acknowledge that is why your comment got grayed out. Had you acknowledged that, it would have been a very easy 'win' for you and close out of a decent argument.
Prices will keep increasing, as US consumer spending was resilient in 2025 and kept going up irrespective of tariffs. Consumers can be charged even more than previously assumed.
But I was certain that now that the tariffs were overturned the merchants would voluntarily lower their prices to pre-tariff level and not just hope the consumer doesn't notice that the only direction prices go is up.
There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs.
For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China.
The stated intention was to replace income taxes with tariffs; and it came with a bonus feature of handing the President a cudgel with which to grant him personal powers and personal rewards.
There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.
One that goes through all three branches of government, the way it's been since we decided "no taxation without representation" is how such things should be collectively implemented.
If a citizen's stance is there is no such thing as a legitimate tax, perhaps there should be a legal process for banishing them from all public services, including roads, electricity, telephone, fire and rescue services, etc. and make consuming them a crime. But I guess even that would be a problem because we need to pay for the justice system that would prosecute such a sovereign citizen that breaks the rules...
Basically an "opt-out" of modern life almost in its entirety. I think most people that subscribe to "no legitimate taxes" might be surprised how isolating that would be if they actually think it through.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea, it's simply a thought exercise.
from another comment you made> The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.
Nah.
Does it feel good to say the people that disagree with you have lost the ability to reason? I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.
> I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.
So, that line was snarky. But my last few comments have been far from flaming, and I'm not going for a cheap putdown. You made some very harsh judgements about people based on a tiny interaction. That's bad for discussion in a whole bunch of ways.
And I guess that's about all I can say, and as clear as I can make it.
Often comments are sufficiently poorly reasoned or defecient that it makes more sense to downvote than reply.
For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in.
As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently?
Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition.
Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.
I've been on this site since 2009. The level of discourse has dropped dramatically in recent times, yet I still love it here. The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.
As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click.
Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.
If you define legitimacy like that, excise taxes look like the only truly legitimate taxes. In my province, that’s things like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. Provincially owned casinos could even be considered a legitimate form of tax though they’re not really a tax.
ALL citizens, or informed / educated citizens? There's a whole network of agitators in the US whose entire job / goal is to make sure there are people unhappy with any tax, no matter how great the benefits.
One key feature I didn't emphasize was the requirement for the tax rate to never rise to a significant enough level to be a burden on the wage-earning taxpayer.
Otherwise it's just a sinkhole which brings down the prosperity ceiling with it.
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution makes it the job of Congress, not the President, to levee taxes.
When Donald Trump didn't run his tariffs through Congress he blatantly violated separation of powers. In normal times this would be 9-0 ruling from the Supreme Court for being so open and shut and it would not have taken over a year for the decision, but those times have passed.
It's a tax. The administration can pretend it isn't, but it is.
I'm actually impressed. Trump's allies figured out how to raise taxes on the working class without the George H. W. Bush backlash. And now they're going to get enormous refunds that will not be passed on back to the consumers. It's yet another wealth transfer from the poor to the rich and their voting base is standing up and delivering thunderous applause.
I don't know if your comment was intentionally ambiguous or not but it makes sense to either extreme, plus anything in between.
Really one of the things that can (has) stimulate ideas from many directions.
Too bad when you end up as a punching bag from the fraction of partisans just because some of them are so extreme, usually it's only the ones that harbor a lot of hate more than anything else, where negative outlook emanates in all directions.
So you get put down from all directions :(
When the message stands alone as completely neutral and it ends up as a target of the "non-nattering nabobs of negativity" it is still kind of disappointing. So much better responses could be made. I still haven't found any reason to downvote anybody, ever.
Hope it wasn't my mischaracterizing your comment that dismayed anybody worse.
Now with more meat on the bone, infrastructure and real public utility are table stakes which somebody has to pay for, and I'm perfectly willing. Cheerful only if the rate is not exorbitant, which is the real problem.
I'd like to be more cheerful but the corruption sunk in so long ago that it's not pretty. One of the reasons that things dedicated to the public are always more expensive than they could be.
I happily pay my taxes in order to feel like a productive citizen in society. I'm very glad and lucky that I am in a position where I can pay my taxes. I drive on roads, I should absolutely contribute to the building and maintenance of said roads. It is a no brainer.
But I also don't agree with the taxes I pay because I feel like too much goes to waste and that I don't get the value back from what I'm putting in. Most of the roads I drive on today, are very poorly maintained. Where did the money go?
I pay the taxes that employ local lifeguards at my beach. They save people's lives. Good. But they also get angry at me when I'm not holding my dogs leash, even if there are no other dogs around. I don't think that overlapping ocean safety with a nanny state around dogs, is a good use of my taxes. Especially when there are people living in RVs at the beach who are breaking the laws stated on posted signs and they do nothing about it.
The original question about legitimacy was more philosophical. If you are a believer in government and laws, then legitimate is that a group has made up a rule (or law) in order to make it legitimate. I don't agree with that defining legitimacy, it is something else. It isn't law, it is a social contract. We should contribute to society by definition, not by law
So at the end of the day, it is a lot of give and take. Some better or worse. It is what it is. I just try to live my best life and ignore the rest.
Yeah, he's gotta finance the payments to whoever the kiddie peddler du jour is somehow. Especially now that he can't just walk next door or steer his yacht towards a conveniently located island.
A witness also reported to the FBI that Lutnick and CF are engaged in massive fraud: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492...
Oh and he bought his house from Epstein for $10. Nothing to see here just a criminal admin fleecing you without even shame enough to try to hide it well.
And took his wife, kids, and their nannies to have lunch with Epstein. Years after he'd said he wouldn't associate with Epstein anymore, and years after Epstein's conviction.
If that was me, I would have used my substantial wealth to have lunch literally anywhere else in the world, with anyone else in the world.
> a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund
For what it’s worth, I’ve personally been doing this. Not in meaningful dollar amounts. And largely to help regional businesses stay afloat. But I paid their tariffs and bought, in return, a limited power of attorney and claim to any refunds.
Totally with you on the corruption angle. I was just pointing out that loaning businesses money isn’t inherently evil. I’m also unconvinced anyone I lent to actually wants to go through the trouble and political risk of fighting for a refund.
If you read the opinions, it's even less clear. The majority does not make it at all clear whether or not refunds are due, and Kavanaugh's dissent specifically calls out this weakness in the majority opinion.
Even if the executive branch's actions stop here, there's still a lot of arguing in court to do over refunds.
All rulings can be better, but Kavanaugh contributed to making the mess in the first place, as he and conservative members of the court spent 2025 voiding lower-court injunctions against similar radical policies, essentially telling lower-courts to "let Trump move fast and break things."
In other words, Kavanaugh is lying: He doesn't actually care about legal clarity or mess-prevention. If he did we wouldn't even be in this situation in the first place.
I agree with your first point (and I wasn't trying to defend Kavanaugh, just pointing out that the dissent calls something out), but I disagree with your second. Kavanaugh isn't lying - this ruling causes some chaos and uncertainty and I think that one of the reasons Kavanaugh doesn't like it is because it causes some chaos and uncertainty - but, to your first point, he doesn't appear to be acting in good faith.
The Supreme Court absolutely could have handled this much better, and is part of the reason there's so much to undo.
Anybody who has worked a service/retail job can tell you that the person literally shitting on the floor rarely is the one to clean it up.
And unfortunately that extends to the metaphor as well. Society would like to see those responsible for the mess to also be responsible for the cleanup. However society expects that everybody but the mess maker will be left cleaning up.
Meh, Kavanaugh indirectly caused the whole mess, and directly caused many related and similar ones. It's a bad-faith complaint, Kavanaugh's actual track record is "always let Trump move fast and if he breaks things then whatever."
Basically we have a legal processes for courts going "this is weird and unlikely to stand and hard/impossible to fix afterwards, so do nothing until you get a green light", using temporary restraining orders and injunctions.
Yet Kavanaugh et al spent the last year repeatedly overriding lower-courts which did that, signaling that if someone said "let's figure this out first" to radical and irreparable Republican policies, the Supreme Court would not have their backs.
______________
> In case after case, dissenting justices have argued that the Court has “botched” this analysis and made rulings that are “as incomprehensible as [they are] inexcusable,” halting lower court injunctions without any showing that the government is facing harm and with grave consequences, including in some cases in which the plaintiffs are at risk of torture or death. The majority’s response to these serious claims? Silence.
> President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.
> Judge Provinzino, who spent years as a federal prosecutor, had ordered the government to release Mr. Soto Jimenez “from custody in Minnesota” by Feb. 13. An order she issued on Tuesday indicates that the government failed not only to return his documents, but also to release him in Minnesota as she had initially specified.
> On April 10 [2025], the Supreme Court released an unsigned order with no public dissents. In reciting the facts of the case the court stated: "The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal." It ruled that the District Court "properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."
> During the [April 14 2025] meeting, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to El Salvador, not the American government, whether Abrego Garcia would be released.
All of those are deportation cases, the NYTimes one for example is a $500/day fine on a government lawyer because they haven't returned a man's ID documents a week after he got bail.
There's been lots of coverage of how government lawyers are overwhelmed because they have thousands of immigration cases being appealed and government lawyers keep quitting due to workload. So they have a giant backlog causing lots of administrative issues on following through with court orders.
> Sorry, is there a "you can ignore the courts if it's deportation" clause I missed somewhere?
No, but you are arguing in a very annoying style.
Nobody is claiming it's good or okay that this is happening. What people are discussing is whether it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case. This is just a question of predicting probabilities, not morality.
And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases. You can't really use one as evidence for the other. This is what people were pointing out to you.
But you took them pointing out this factual distinction as somehow defending Trump, which it is not.
Imagine you said of a known thief: "that guy will surely murder someone, look at his long criminal record!" and someone responded "but all his crimes are petty theft, none involve violence". It'd be illogical for you to then get indignant that the other person was defending theft or claiming it's not bad.
> And, indeed, the administration has been dropping the ball on following rulings in low-level deportation cases, but hasn't really ignored, or ordered people to ignore, major big-ticket Supreme Court cases.
They did exactly that in the Garcia case, which was a "big-ticket SCOTUS case". It became politically untenable and they eventually backed down, but the post-ruling response was initially "nuh uh!"
They didn’t ignore it, at most they bullshitted for a while about how they couldn’t bring Garcia back because he was in the hands of the El Salvador and then ultimately did bring him back.
>it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case.
He sure is confirming his contempt for the court right now on live TV.
Trying to drum up support for his hate against anything sesible in his sight.
Edit: This just in . . . he is peeved, his face just turned so red it bled plum through the orange layer. People should review this on Youtube later if nothing else for this alone. The most meaningful thing in the rant :)
Edit2: And . . . he's announcing additional tarriffs in real time. You can't make this up.
I get it, nuance isn't popular in political discussions. But the reality is these are all large flawed human systems with complex and competing motivations that rarely fit neatly into a box.
That’s an insane conflict of interest. His sons took over the firm? It was already bad that Lutnick took over in the first place. As I recall he sued the widow of Cantor to steal control of the company after Cantor died.
But I guess this is not very surprising. I am sure every friend and family member of Trump administration people made trades leading all those tariff announcements over the last year, while the rest of us got rocked by the chaos in the stock market.
“LUTNICK was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN (EPSTEIN) in the adjoining
property at 11 E 71st Street, New York, New York. LUTNICK bought the
property for $10 through a trust. LES WEXNER (WEXNER) and EPSTEIN owned the building. LUTNICK bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.”
The responsibility is on the parent; the parent should recuse themselves from decisions or discussions where there could be a conflict of interest involving their family members.
Or better yet, the parent should not be appointed to the position in the first place. If members of your immediate family occupy important positions in the industry you'd be involved with, then you don't get the job. Very easy solution, if the people in power were willing to do it.
This is kind of an absurd rule. The kids of the people who are seen as so good at their jobs to be appointed to public office are all the more likely to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
So? Is there nobody who would be good at the job who wouldn't have a gigantic conflict of interest due to family? What's so absurd about saying you can't have massive conflicts of interest if you're going to be an important government official?
If the court establishes that this was a tax, how would they administer the refund considering it's impossible to disentangle absorbed tariffs by firms and those passed along to consumers?
If whoever runs in 2028 does not have a concrete plan for investigating & prosecuting every single person who worked under this admin from top to bottom, they are wasting everyone's time. We need to see hundreds of life-in-prison sentences by the end of 2029.
If a dem wins in 2028, the big push will be one of reconciliation and acceptance. Let bygones be bygones. And it'll happen. And then for the next 4 years conservative media will absolutely pound that person's backside over made up and/or exaggerated corruption claims. Then in 2032 the GOP candidate will claim they're going to look into these claims.
Yep. Remember when people were expecting Obama to prosecute Bush for war crimes? He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.
> He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.
With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan.
It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist.
To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.
To be fair, it was nice to have a president that could speak in complete sentences. But yes, I agree that people go way too easy on Obama and present fake controversies as his worst. It should be possible to simultaneously recognize a president's strengths while also being critical of his flaws, but unfortunately American culture seems to have a growing personality cult problem, and it's generally just assumed that if you're not glazing a politician, you're an extremist from the other side doing false flag rhetoric or something inane like that.
Your scepticism is well warranted. That's exactly the playbook Biden chose to follow, and I agree the most likely outcome is the next admin will follow it again.
However, I am unfortunately an incurable optimist, and sometimes we Americans really do pull off amazing feats. I live in the Twin Cities and we actually defeated DHS/CBP/ICE here. It was an amazing thing to witness, and maybe there is enough outrage at this admin's looting of the US that we can build the support nationally to do that kind of thing again.
"Defeated" is an interesting way to look at it. My perception is that the administration was just using the Twin Cities as a distraction, like they do for basically everything. In the mean time, the higher ups get their business deals done while the commoners are busy wasting energy cleaning up the mess. In which case, they succeeded. Now, onto the next distraction, and then the next one, and so on and so forth.
Minnesota has a very high probability of sending 2 Democrat senators and all their electoral votes to the Democrat presidential candidate. Minnesota and the Twin Cities are of zero consequence to this administration, so why not use them as a distraction?
The primary goal of the administration, sweeping tax cuts, was already accomplished in Jul 2025, so even Congress is of limited value now until after the next presidential election.
They certainly liked the distraction, but the invasion of MN allowed them to 1) catch some illegal immigrants, 2) intimidate legal immigrants, encouraging them to "self deport", 3) flex their power and demonstrate the ability to cause pain and harm to political enemies, and 4) give agents practice and training for the next city they invade. So far they have had these "surges" in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis. There are plenty more cities in blue states and plenty of money left in their budget, and almost 3 years left in this administration.
I blame Garland for much of the mess we are in. If the DOJ had done their job regarding the Jan 6 insurrection we wouldn't be here talking about stupid tarrifs that caused a year of turbulence for US businesses and contributed to inflation, for no good reason (and this might be the least of the problems caused by the Trump admin).
It seemed like the Democrats selected Garland just so they could poke the Republicans in the eye. "You blocked him from SCOTUS so now we're going to make him Attorney General, how you like them apples?" Without really considering whether he'd actually do a good job.
I agree; but different times called for different measures. There was also too much of a feeling of "whew, that was close, but now we can get back to normal" instead of "let's make sure that never happens again".
If you care to read a bit more about it [0], then the Garland pick looks a lot more sinister.
That's Sarah Kendzior, one of the few journalists who was talking about Epstein long before all that started to became well known.
'Fun' fact: The Attorney General is able to unseal court documents at will. And for four years Garland didn't do that with the Epstein files. It was beyond clear that the SC were slow rolling Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal, and still nothing even leaked.
We’ll be dependent on New York for that, as potus will pardon everyone save for a few suckers at the end, assuming he leaves office in an orderly manner.
The purge of DOJ (They can’t even find confirmable US Attorneys at this point.) and the military officer corps makes that not a certainty.
He didn't pardon anyone involved with January 6th until he was re-elected. There is a documentary where Roger Stone acts psychotic with anger because Trump refused to issue a pardon for him or anyone else after Jan. 6. Trump is a selfish person, and if he thinks he is going to be vulnerable, he isn't going to protect anyone else for no other than reason than he thinks they should go down with him.
Nationalize the entire trump family fortune with RICO. Impoverishment is the perfect moral hazard to reign in hubristic and corrupt business practices.
Whoever takes over DOJ has to come in with a ready-to-go team they already know; a state AG who can draft their whole staff or something. They'll be entering a deliberately fucked, hollowed-out, booby-trapped organization they have to rebuild from the ground up. Speed will matter enormously.
Presidential pardon immunity is unreversable. There could potentially be a constitutional amendment on this, which is a super high bar, but even then the prohibition on ex post facto laws would only affect pardons going forward. It will be up to the states.
Well, no, it’s in the US Constitution. So I suppose congress could add a constitutional amendment to remove the prohibition on ex post facto laws. But that’s so unthinkable it might as well be a fantasy. Far from “plainly wrong,” which seems unnecessarily aggressive verbiage.
Why couldn't the amendment just say, "The presidential power pardon is revoked, and all prior pardons are null and void"? You have to amend the Constitution to remove the pardon power regardless, why would it be so difficult to put in a clause saying that it's retroactive?
But presidents are also immune against prosecution for official acts. Could a president just disregard pardons from a prior administration? Immovable object, irresistible force kinda situation right?
It’s racist to call out the anti-white hatred that is prevalent with leftists who claim to be patriots (while they generally claim that the US is illegitimate)?
All the internet brigading in the world won’t absolve you from what you’re part of.
Again, the left are not patriots by any stretch of the word. MAGA is a patriotic movement. You can’t hate nationalism and be a patriot.
We've let criminal administrations get away with too much for too long. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump 1 were all allowed to disregard the law and it got worse every time. We cannot move forward without purging crime and corruption from our system. Everyone from the top down to Billy-Bod ICE agent.
No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.
I feel very strongly that's what should happen, and equally strongly that there's zero chance a democratic president will actually do that in a meaningful way. Dems sometimes talk a big game when they're out of power but when they're in power they actually quite enjoy the expanded powers and reduced accountability that's come about. That plus their usual ineffectual bumbling will combine to mean they basically doing nothing.
At this point I think I'm most scared of the next fascist president. Trump has opened up a lot of avenues for blatant corruption and tyranny. His greed and stupidity have so far saved us from the worst outcomes but someone with his psychopathy but more savviness will mean the true end of our freedoms.
The last time Dems had power was before Jan 2015. And even then it was tenuous, because the Dems have had a few Senators that do not vote lockstep with the Dems (Manchin, Lieberman, Sinema, etc), but the Repubs maybe have had 1 defector (McCain?).
Maybe Dems only don't have power because they don't want too much of it. It fucks with the plausible deniability.
Like, they could easily have taken down Trump, either over Jan 6th or the Epstein files. They didn't.
They could have easily gained _millions_ of votes in the 2024 election just by promising not to keep helping murder tens of thousands of children. They didn't. They could have kicked up a fuss about some rather obvious election fraud; they didn't.
They could have fought harder for SC picks on multiple occasions. They could have leaked choice Epstein files at key times. They could have held proper primaries, instead of ramming a demented roomba warmonger and then his wildly unpopular warmonger sidekick down our throats (for like the third election in a row). They didn't.
At some point you need to realize that Dems have lots of power; and they choose to use it in very curious ways. Arming genocide and protecting billionaire blackmail pedo-rings aren't things that I'm willing to look past. Yes the Republicans are even worse, but at every point where Dems had all the power needed to hold them accountable they've gone to rather extreme lengths not to do that. For decades.
Unfortunately, we have a two party system, and neither side is going to do anything about it. One side is complicit and actively participating in the fraud and grift. The other side is all talk and no action. If they win, they'll spend four years making excuses about why they can't actually do anything. They had four years to prosecute and imprison Trump 1.0 and just... talked and sat on their hands doing performance art.
I 100% agree. I will never forgive Biden for not putting these traitors behind bars in his first 6 months. He failed at one of his most important sworn duties, protecting the US from its enemies.
But, sometimes a groundswell movement really can build momentum and drive the conversation regardless of what the leaders think about it. Write to your state & national representatives demanding that they publicly support prosecution for the incredible crimes we're seeing committed by this admin. Try to make it a policy platform for your state party. Maybe we can build enough support from the bottom up to get popular momentum behind it. Holding criminals accountable for their crimes is not really a controversial position, we have to demand that they actually do it.
Yep. Biden's "well I bet he will just go away naturally" approach to Trump's crimes will be a historic error. It remains to be seen if this is quite at the level of walking back Reconstruction, but if the US descends further into fascism then it will be up there.
Biden is gone, but Schumer and Jeffries aren't exactly looking any different.
I'm currently livid at the dem leadership that doesn't have the guts to do anything hard. Dem leadership needs to go and we need a serious response here. South Korea just jailed their criminal president for life. Just imagine.
"The Biden Pardon immunizes everyone from future prosecution"
He pardoned specific individuals that had already been targeted and attacked by Trump and conservative media, who were extremely likely to be persecuted by a potential (and now realized) 2nd Trump term. There's a big difference between investigating January 6th and, you know, doing January 6th.
You're making an argument for why its use is defensible. I find it not unconvincing, especially since it's pretty much just Analects 13:18. But Trump can use the Biden Pardon (shorthand for broad large-period pre-emptive pardon) too, and he's pioneered the use of the Trump Pardon (shorthand for plausibly deniable pay-to-pardon). The combination of the two pardon techniques signals the end of Rule of Law for sufficiently well-connected individuals in the US. Plausibly Jeffrey Epstein was just caught a decade early. He wouldn't be in trouble today.
I find the notion that Trump would have used discretion if not for Biden’s pardons pretty curious. At no point has precedence or decorum stopped Trump. Biden’s actions had zero effect on how Trump uses his pardon power.
He had the same ability the first time and didn’t do it. But certainly one cannot live the counterfactual. Perhaps this technique had already struck him and he just hadn’t used it yet. Hard to tell.
I don’t see him or his administration as all knowing even if I think they have great disregard for the law.
Internet brigading is all the fascistic left has atp, so I’m not surprised. All my comments that push back against the dwindling and irrational far left movement are always mass flagged. It’s expected but I don’t really mind.
> A plurality vote (in North American English) or relative majority (in British English) describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive a majority or more than half of all votes cast.
Hunter Biden and the Biden family were investigated for years by Congress. They came up with tax and gun form charges. Why would that stop Dems from prosecuting all the corruption and treason happening under this administration?
I'm not following the reasoning in your comment. So because fishing expeditions are possible we shouldn't ever go after political opponents for actual crimes?
Maybe you have to say "everything is corrupt" in order to not be morally required to condemn the current administration.
Yes, other administrations were corrupt, going back at least to Andrew Jackson. No, from what I can tell, they weren't this corrupt (with the possible exception of Grant).
What was Hunter Bidens official job and what corrupt official acts did he commit?
Some private third party hires some washed up relative of someone in power is looking decidedly quaint if you look at the brazenness and dimensions of the current administration.
I'm completely lost on what your position is here. You think the fishing expedition against the Bidens was actually kinda good but the Republicans were secretly positioning to only charge him with a gun-form thing that almost no one gets charged for standalone and for taxes that he paid back?
What crime did you want him found guilty of exactly?
The DNC had nothing to do with it. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts--that was the justice system working. He was then gifted complete freedom from consequences--that was the justice system not working.
There are other falsehoods in your comment as well.
There's no scam too big or too small, from Trumpcoin's open bribery, to Secret Service paying 5x the GSA per diem rate to stay at Trump properties on duty.
Remember that first they ran a walking corpse who couldn't reliably form sentences!
Harris wasn't the worst possible replacement, sure. But the Democrats have several very competent governors who could have done a lot better, but that was not considered.
The whole process was botched, and there were better candidates they could have run, certainly. But their choice was OK, just not enough to overcome the ridiculous pull of Trump and Democrats' unreasonably high standards.
Right. So on one hand we have a gang of undisputable thieves (GOP), on the other hand we have honest but "not half decent" politicians (Dems). Tough choices all around!
Sort of a meta-observation, but consistently folks on the left have that take and then are confused when they lose.
“If only all those idiots on the right and in the center could see they should vote for the bumbling but well-intentioned candidate over the obvious liars and thieves” is an explanation that feels good to tell yourself, but also incredibly patronizing and prevents actually understanding why people vote the way they do.
I find the arrogance of the left pretty abhorrent. I also despise aspects of the right, but boy does the left rub me the wrong way.
If you find the arrogance abhorrent, I wonder how you characterize some of the actually bad stuff that politicians get up to.
Personally, I don't expect people on the right to come around. I am mystified by people on the center who looked at Trump and Harris and decided Trump was the way to go, or even just didn't care. If you'd like to enlighten me why they did that, I'd be interested.
My real confusion is people on the left who did this. They decided that Harris didn't say the right things about Israel, or they were upset at not having a primary, or they were still upset about Bernie, and decided to stay home. That is baffling.
> already was president for 4 years, which - aside from a lot of crazy talk - was a pretty stable and prosperous time.
you did NOT just write this seriously???! :) I hope you are being as sarcastic as one can be or did you sleep through it. just check how much of the total national debt comes from his first term… it is arguably the least “stable and prosperous” 4 years any American who is alive has ever seen
I think people forget when in the year the election is held and associate 2020 with Biden. Certainly much of that year's craziness was not Trump's fault, but his absolute uselessness was on full display, and he was the guy in charge.
we want Presidents who step up when the shit hits the fan, not take our kids out of schools and lock everyone up in their homes and then add trillions of dollars of debt they will eventually have to pay up.
It is easy to be the President when shit's easy. I don't follow politics at all anymore, stopped right around the time someone like Donald was able to get a nomination for a political party in the United States so this isn't a liberal bashing Donald, these are just facts that he was about as worse of a President in his first four years as we've ever had. The jury is still out for these 4, we'll analyze that in 2029 :)
I would characterize a lot of the behavior of politicians as despicable, antisocial, and un-American.
The short answer to your question is that the Democratic establishment in general and Harris in particular repeatedly lied throughout the Biden administration, culminating in the bald-faced lie that Joe Biden was completely competent. This was done with the attitude of “well what are you going to do? Vote for the other team? Don’t be ridiculous.” There were so, so many other things throughout the Biden administration, it felt (feels) like a race to the bottom.
So Trump, who is notorious for lying, won. To be fair to Republicans, Trumps lies are more like crazy exaggerations sprinkled with outright bullshit which somehow is more palatable than being gaslit.
If the defense of the Democrats is “Well look at how bad Trump is!” it should at least be acknowledged that is one of the worst defenses possible. And in general, if my options are to be stabbed by person A twice, or by person B once but person B expects me to be grateful, I might just go with person A.
The end result is we will keep toggling between the two parties until one of them decides to run using sane people. I sincerely hope that will be the Democrats this year.
Befuddlement at the choices of the American voters is not a defense of Democrats. They could do so much better. But even with the choices we have, I don't understand how people come to the conclusions they do.
We are sick of it, but despite being somewhat of a democracy, we have no real power in this two party, first past the post system when both parties always run establishment candidates, aka, billionaire thieves gang members.
There are more offices than just the president. Third parties often win in local elections (I don't know numbers, I doubt more than 5%). They win in state elections from time to time as well. If you get involved you can build a third party until it cannot be ignored.
The irony is that Trump won on a message of "drain the swamp" which was supposed to address this issue. Instead it seems like it's more of just "replace the swamp" with his own guys.
For me, when someone promises to "drain the swamp", they reveal their ignorance and selfishness with their shallow anti-swamp ideology.
Swamps are rich ecosystems with incredible natural beauty and diversity. Draining a swamp is extraordinarily bad in general, even if good for wealthy property developers.
Ironically, it seems that "drain the swamp" turns out to be an apt metaphor for what Trump and that gang have been doing, as promised.
It’s not even ironic. Trump never genuinely intended to do so, and anybody with a brain never trusted them to do so either. Just another case of “every accusation an admission” in the case of the leaders, and “it’s only bad when it’s not our guy doing it” in the case of the followers.
No offense, and you're not entirely wrong, but this is one of the big reasons we are in this situation politically. Millions of voters stayed home because they thought this way. The result: America is the embarrassment of the world, no longer to be trusted. We all must vote, even if we must hold our noses while doing it. We can't allow known thugs to be in command. (I was a life long GOP voter, to my shame, until 2004. How the American public didn't see the puke of a DJT presidency coming is beyond the pale.)
Technically, no, they did not come up with this thought on their own. It's been heavily propagandized that 'voting does no good, so just stay home". I just want to point that out as it's an active attack on American voters.
It doesn't help that most Democrat politicians are happy to maintain status quo. Or they're completely feckless, like Chuck Schumer, who is the absolute King of bringing a strongly-worded letter to a gun fight.
People that are actually leftist don't vote because there's nobody that represents them. Most Democrat politicians are centrist.
And this is my point, sometimes you won't have the candidate you need/want. But you don't bury your head in some kind of moral sand and allow a monster to be voted in office. You bite the bullet and vote for what's best at the time.
Most of the grooming came from Limbaugh, Rove and Gingrich. Then the entertainment "news" Fox network finished the job. At the core, though, was a large segment of the voting population that gave up on knowledge and reason.
Yep the hate-talk show hosts started so early that really is like the initial grooming period.
By the time Trump's face was on TV every day it was already full-blown abuse.
Also, I think a big element was the rallys.
Once Trump was confirmed as the big loser in 2020, he immediately started his comeback, live and in person.
Constant rallys for 4 years, real slim attendance at first but eventually getting a baseline crowd who would make gatherings seem more popular than they were. Traveling from one rally to another like many Taylor Swift fans do, but all Trump rallied about was hate.
That's the crowd that he grew by testing different targets of hate, running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.
By the time Biden started campaigning in earnest, Trump already had four solid years behind him and his pitch was tested and honed well enough to draw a much more loving and obedient crowd. Of haters. Nothing less would be appropriate.
Giving thousands of disgruntled voters a full "live concert" or "game day" experience like they never had before, making a strong impression that lasted and put him over the top. Across the country.
And the Democrats did nothing like this. Biden was already moving slow and was never an emotion-driven attention-getter, plus he was busy doing the job he was elected to do and nobody dreamed of putting him on the road full-time like Trump.
It might have taken more than 4 years of Democrat rallys to compensate also, so starting early makes a big difference.
By now there's not 4 years remaining and they're still not doing squat.
Success at the midterms is more critical than ever and that's much less than a year away too.
Dems need to bring forward a new personality now that they can rally behind all the way to the top. Get the show on the road and pack those stadiums constantly, similar to "modern" Trump voters, an actual platform is not necessary.
None of the strategists who dropped the ball for Biden and Harris seem to be doing anything different yet.
Why continue with the same failed machine that is proven not to work against built-up MAGA hate?
If Democrats aren't going to hate back they're surely going to need to express their dissatisfaction a lot more strongly.
Every false move that Trump makes would be plenty of new fodder, an unending well of new topics to rouse the crowds' congealment around when they come up. If a nationwide tour were constantly underway, these could be added to the pitch while taken in stride, and the momentum could be made to increase each time Trump makes a new foible which the opposition can focus on to gauge the popularity impact.
That may still not be enough and it may take longer than it should so you've got to start earlier rather than too late.
Ideally a new attractive personality will bypass the failed old Dem machine, and with nothing but positive aspirations from the podium, trigger a natural gut response from the crowd, whatever stadium the tour takes them to.
Could anything be more appropriate than thousands of more patriotic ralliers than ever cheering for the Democrats in unison, spontaneously repeating the rallying call "Lock him up !" ?
What I never understood is this binary system in the US - why wouldn’t you allow some other parties or reform the system in a way that allows more diversity.
pousada, I've simmered on your response for several days now. As a person in their late sixties, I've seen our political system, at least in my existence, at most of it's worst. Nixon taught us, in modern times, what evil looks like behind closed doors, because of the tapes. Reagan taught us what smiley faced racism looked like by using slogans. W taught us that lying to everyone on camera was no big deal as long as it seemed patriotic. And now here we are with a president who openly breaks the law because of however he feels on any given day.
On the seemingly rare occasions that a democrat gets into the oval office, they spend most of their time on social/environmental issues that extend to all voters, but are fought at every turn. We desperately need a reformed political system. The only way that will happen is if the American voting public will get off their cans and put forth the effort to learn civics and then realize that their opinions must be tempered with reason.
For the Fox News crowd, which is most of his supporters, they are likely not even aware of these transgressions, as they are not reported there. Or, if they are aware, they are happy to see Trump enriching himself, because, own the libs or something?
I swear, if the dems aren't running on "here is all of the shit that Trump and his cronies stole from you" every single day for the next two years they are the dumbest political strategists alive.
He is also surely happy the Trump administration no longer sees fit to investigate or pursue anyone with connections to Epstein. Previously Lutnick had lied about the extent of their relationship, yet even after the recent relevations he can simply wave them off.
What a profitable time for the Lutnicks, who are of course already fabulously wealthy. Our system really does reward the best people.
He had access to the entire legal team for one side of the case. He also had access to internal legal discussions when the tariffs were put in place, when the president was almost certainly advised that they were illegal and would likely be struck down.
"The conservative activist Ginni Thomas has “no memory” of what she discussed with her husband, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, during the heat of the battle to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to congressional testimony released on Friday."
"Thomas also claimed the justice was unaware of texts she exchanged with [White House Chief of Staff] Meadows and took a swipe at the committee for having “leaked them to the press while my husband was in a hospital bed fighting an infection”."
I look forward to the day we pull our heads out of the sand and stop excusing blatant corruption. It takes a naive view of the world to assume the Secretary of Commerce has access to the same limited information as you or I.
Let’s call all of this what it is: parasites leveraging their insider positions for profit. The ruling class is ripping the copper out of our walls and selling it for scrap while we all choose to look the other way.
The justices and all of their clerks don't live in a bubble. They regularly hang out and discuss god knows what with other political operatives. Thomas is particularly noteworthy for essentially taking bribes from a conservative billionaire. The idea that zero information on potential rulings would leak out to certain people is highly implausible.
I've wondered from the beginning if the whole tariff thing wasn't basically an insider operation for import/export insiders to profit off of rate arbitrage, if not outright black market operations.
That's more sadistic than I had guessed.
------ re: below due to throttling ----------
Lutnicks profit requires some 2nd order thinking. How Trump et al might profit off of import/export insider operations also requires some 2nd order thinking. My apologies for not spelling it out, although it should not take much imagination.
Not import/export insiders, the Trump family... always just follow the money, maybe along the way some "import/export" people get some crumbs but most of it ends up a Mar a Largo :-)
You really believe that the incidence of taxation falls 100% on the buyer and never the seller? And you think those who have a more accurate view are "lying"?
Please avoid simplistic beliefs and moral outrage for things as complex as trade policy. The people who say that the incidence of taxation falls heavily on sellers may just be better informed, particularly when listening to wall street earnings calls while simultaneously looking at the consumer price data.
LOL. Have you read that paper? And do you believe the BLS is lying about inflation data?
Let's take a look at the latest EU-consensus reinforcing pamphlet pushed out by Kiehl, because when Mahlkow wrote about tarrifs in 2022, he was all for them. At that time the EU was debating imposing tariffs on Russia, and here Mahlkov insisted that there would be massive economic long term contraction for Russia - which did not happen -- yet simultaneously, Mahlkow predict no meaningful effect of the EU's tariffs on the EU itself. You see, at that time, Mahlkov insisted that because the EU GDP was larger, there would be no impact on the EU itself as a result of tariffs.
Now let's dig into the crazy assumptions of Mahlkow's model. Does he use sophisticated econometric analysis? No, what he does is look at shipping containers and published tariff rates. What he assumes is that if, before the tariffs, there were 100 units shipped, but after the tariffs, there were also 100 units shipped, then it must be that 100% of the cost was passed onto the consumer.
You see, some tariffs (which the EU bureaucracy and it's various patronage organizations like Kiehl) support don't cause any harm to the nation levying the tariff, but other tariffs are deadly, and fortunately Mahlkov will pick the right model to reach the right conclusion. No looking at pallet data in 2022!
Now what is wrong with looking at pallet data for a brief period of time. It never occurs to Mahlkov that the corporations importing the goods have to absorb some of the cost. Mahlkov just assumes 100% is passed through to consumers and the importers pay nothing.
This must mean the BLS is committing some kind of fraud as this has not been showing up in CPI data.
I'll leave you to decide whether this is warranted or not, but let's just say there is a reason this remains a "brief" available to download and is not a published paper.
Meanwhile, real economists, even though the profession is politicized, nevertheless understand that they missed the boat on estimating tariff effects, and that the models need updating. To a real researcher, it's actually a great opportunity. But to someone like Mahlkov, who is trotted out whenever there needs to be economic support for or against the same policy, he will gladly write a paper. And then others will cite it.
To me this suggests that the problem is not cost, but lack of competition, either in production or in pricing. My understanding is that there are sufficient laws to ensure competition, but they are not widely enforced.
> My understanding is that there are sufficient laws to ensure competition, but they are not widely enforced.
That's correct, the laws exist but it's up to the executive to enforce them. The US has not meaningfully enforced any anti-trust laws since the Microsoft web browser bundling case in the 90s. There was a brief glimmer of anti-trust being resuscitated by FTC during the Biden admin, but the tech company monopolies got so spooked by that that they brought all their resources to bear in 2024 to ensure their guy won, and he did. Anti-trust remains dead in the US for at least another generation.
Crazy how anti-capitalist the US has become. The deep capitalist thinkers believed capitalism needs government oversight to keep markets healthy, but for some reason we stopped following that belief.
Plenty of supply-driven inflated prices did go back down after covid, or after the post-covid inflation shock. Gasoline is one example.
At the same time, USD M2 supply increased an unusual 40% from Jan 2020 to Jan 2022. It only fell a little after. So prices that were inflated for that reason, I wouldn't have expected to fall back down.
I do feel like some local businesses just price according to costs but keep that ratched up if costs fall, like you said.
Prices drop all the time. But no, they don't drop "automatically" as some kind of rules thing when regulations change. Prices drop when someone has extra inventory and needs to liquidate, or run a sale, or whatever.
Anthropomorphizing markets as evil cartels is 100% just as bad as the efficient market fetishization you see in libertarian circles. Markets are what markets do, and what they do is compete trying to sell you junk.
> We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.
But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.
And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.
How much time and energy does it take to hit the like button on a post? How much time and energy does it take to physically protest? The magnitude of dissent is legible in the mode of dissent. How ticked off must a guy be to go protest in negative 20 degree weather?
"Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her."
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
In India we have been going through this the last 14 years or so.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
This government brought sham charges against the Fed president, what are they going to do to a run of the mill federal employee?
> It’s frequently not illegal to talk to a reporter. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about classified material it’s about loyalty, so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
It is not illegal to talk to a reporter, it is illegal to share classified intel with someone who doesn't have a clearance and a need-to-know.
Do I think they should have raided this persons house? Absolutely not. Is it illegal to share classified information, absolutely.
"For my friends everything, for everyone else, the law" or whatever the saying is, applies here. In this case, the reporter did nothing wrong, but the raid on the home of the reporter can be justified according to the law, so it isn't illegal. Should it be? Probably.
Legislation is good, rules are good, the classified rules seems to make sense if you subscribe to Hanlons Razor at the least. Sometimes though, laws just don't make sense and shouldn't be codified.
For example:
MCL 750.335 - "Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00."
You've misunderstood the parent. They're saying watch out what happens to anyone in the Journalist's book who did not share classified information.
You seriously think this administration is going to get a list of 1,200 government employees who are (legally) informing reporters of the goings-on and just... Let it go? Those people are about to get punished.
And since we're at the point of an unaccountable, unidentifiable Gestapo going door-to-door and arresting / murdering citizens openly in the streets...
You are responding to a thread with the exact quotes:
> But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well.
...
> so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.
So we, in this thread, are talking about what happens to the majority of her sources that are NOT sharing confidential information or committing any crime.
Aren't you arguing against a straw man here? It seems that you can't address the concerns of the comment and are instead saying obvious truths as if that is somehow counter to the person you replied to.
I didn't intend to. When he said "But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well." I read this as "the government is breaking the law"
I think instead what that poster meant is was "people who didn't share classified information will be targeted and prosecuted as well."
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
i keep tabs on posts roughly along the lines of "maybe we need guns after all."
imo they're usually too late, as guns without training and a group aren't very useful. but i can tell you the number has went up about 4x the baseline in the holiday season. and thats after its doubling after November's elections.
this country is a powderkeg and what's worse is i think these provocations are international. the admin seems to want to start a civil war.
Yes, this is my problem with references to the ammo box. That exact rhetoric has been with us for decades now, and has in fact helped to get us to the point we're at.
Sure, maybe some ICE home invaders will be shot in self-defense while committing their crimes, but we already know how that plays out legally and even in the court of public opinion sadly (Walker/Taylor). So instances of self-defense won't change the big picture, regardless of such self defense options perhaps being pragmatic for those who are likely to be attacked right now or in the near future.
So that brings us back to the question of the large scale situation, which IME rests entirely on there being so many people Hell-bent on using the ammo box to "save" the country with the net effect of trashing it. We've essentially got flash mobs of brownshirts, understandably frustrated at how they've been disenfranchised and their liberties taken away, but having their frustration channeled into being part of the problem. Which I'd say comes back to filter bubbles, social media, pervasive and personalized propaganda, etc.
Of course freeing people from those filter bubbles is much harder than if we had managed to avoid the corporate consumer surveillance industry from taking hold and strongly facilitating them in the first place.
I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
I certainly don't agree that quantity of firepower determines what laws do or don't stand. Ask the federal agents who tried, and failed, to convict a guy for throwing a sandwich at them (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/dc-sandw...).
> The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders…
The American military at the time cared - at least somewhat - about the international reputation of the United States. That may not always be a thing. It may not be a thing now.
The American military is designed to operate away from its shores. One hunting rifle round into the transformer outside of the bases and they're trucking in fuel for generators, a few rounds into the fuel trucks and they have no power. They would have to mobilize massive resources to secure Lockheed and Raytheon facilities from sabotage...
Keep thinking along these lines and you realize the situation for them is actually quite dire.
Yeah, but... the quoted phrase should not be taken literally as a statement about battlefield capability.
It was a political struggle for legitimacy, not just territory, and the enemy did not have to win any battles, just avoid losing until the political will collapsed.
The thing is, military power does not automatically translate to political success, and guerrilla fighters do not need to defeat tanks and jets, they just need to survive, persist, undermine legitimacy, and exhaust the opponent's political will.
So, in this sense, the US was not beaten by farmers, it was beaten by a strategy that made military superiority irrelevant.
Absolutely, and I think the domestic opposition strategy here makes military superiority irrelevant. The US government doesn't want to, and would collapse if they tried to, shoot everyone who says that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president and any prosecution he wants to succeed should fail.
>The American military couldn't handle rice farmers or goat herders
Eh, they killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and were not even trying to genocide them. If the current regime decided to actually just exterminate people our level of technology would make what the Nazis did look like babies playtime.
>The question is how many people will side with them vs reality
At least 40% of the population given what we've seen so far.
I hope Washington Post does a better job of training their reporters than my friend’s former employer did.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
> Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS
It was the mid 2010s yes.
And they’re not going to abduct and torture and American citizen out of the blue. The more “intensive” methods are higher cost, the intention is just to increase the friction involved with engaging in the routine and scalable, ordinary forms of snooping.
That doesn't obviate the practical reality that "nobody trains them on it". Someone can be available to train them but, if that resource is not utilized, then the fact remains that they weren't trained.
There’s a subreddit dedicated to fed employee opinions so I assume they already identified all active posters by now and the direct contacts are being correlated.
> The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?".
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech
You are severely misreading why people flag posts about that discuss the administration (whether for or against): they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
IE Flock being a ycombinator startup, Ring cameras giving free access to police and others[1], AI systems being used for targeting dissent, ad-services and the data they vacuum up being bought by agencies to build up profiles for dissenting citizens[2]. We've watched this type of technology even be used to target the families of people in warzones to explicitly perform war crimes[3].
This is a forum of people who have effectively built the panopticon but don't enjoy hearing about how the panopticon is being used. Politics is now interwoven into our careers whether we like it or not. There is no pure technology, everything we work on effects the world for better or worse. Pulling the wool over our eyes to pretend there's a pure non-political form of talking about these topics is childish and naive.
> There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
Possibly true. Just irrelevant.
I already have far too much exposure to Trump, and I'm not even American. I'd like it not to come up here. You may disagree, and that's fine, but the original question was - why are stories about him flagged. I maintain that the answer, for many people if not nearly all, is simple: ugh, not again.
I understand the instinct to remove "politics" from HN but it's fuzzier than that. There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc. There was a fascinating discussion about COBOL and what DOGE didn't understand and it immediately got flagged off the front page. Same thing recently with Grok and non-consensual adult content. Folks on HN are well placed to speak knowledgeably about it yet it is instantly voted off the front page.
Difficult not to see it as folks plugging their fingers in their ears. And there are folks on here that are flagging things because they paint the administration in a bad light. There are DOGE folks here, there are Palantir folks, etc. etc., I don't think you can dismiss those motivations even if they aren't true for you personally. I think the core problem is that flagging system is too powerful and too anonymous.
The no politics rule on HN is the equivalent of "the suspect smelled like marijuana so I had probable cause to search his car." -- it gives the moderators a plausible reason to remove content they don't want on here while maintaining an air of legitimacy around the removable because thems the rules.
Donald Trump has threatened to annex my country. Are posts about that political? Sure doesn't seem like it to me. From my persective this subject seems more like an existential threat then a discussion about policy. But I suppose to Americans it is just a matter of policy and politcs.
The incessent posts about Bay Area housing regulations -- political or not? Seems pretty political to me but apparently it isn't?
Sorry, your country potentially being annexed just doesn't spark curious discussion. We've seen this with the other 5 countries that were annexed: just a lot of tiresome complaints and people flagging each other in the comments.
When I'm hiding in my basement from the Patriot Press Gangs, I want to read about the difference between TCP Reno and TCP Tahoe, not about some boring politics.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve
Were there? I just saw people blindly advocating and excusing their incompetence. The discussions were very polarized, not well thought out or supported with evidence, and not remotely productive. At least from what I saw.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc
I have a very different impression of those discussions, with more or less half of the comments being flagged and downvoted into oblivion, and the overall mood being very heavy in negativity and hostility.
I would like to see great HN-related conversations. Maybe if they disabled donwvotes and flagging, and did some heavy handed moderation against negativity and hostility. A great conversation depend on a safe environment where people feel free to express their genuine views and opinions.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I sympathize, relate, and I'm not about to lecture you like some corners of the internet about "the privilege" to try and ignore stuff like this, but it is important to keep stuff like this at the forefront. We continue to experience unprecedented life events.
On the contrary, there's no need whatsoever to even deal with this since it already happens everywhere else, it's not some niche, subtle matter, it's probably the most talked about subject in the last decade.
That doesn't really resonate with me because you could make that argument about anything, _especially since_ most of the items that are posted here are links to other websites. There's no need to talk about it here - you could just talk about it at the relevant site(s) comment section.
No. I'm not saying "There's is some other place", I'm saying "This is everywhere already", and for that reason there is no need for it to be explicitly here. There is by no means whatsoever any shortage of places in which those discussions could take place.
The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
> The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
The argument is that it should be here, and that is a very reasonable stance. There is no shortage of places where anything can be discussed; that's not the point. "Here", there is a certain expectation around how to comment which makes this place a more interesting discussion forum, no matter the topic. That some topics bring out the worst in some people is not a good reason to make the topic verboten, but instead a reason to be more critical of the commentary under those topics.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
That doesn't say "no divisive topics" for a reason. The topics are not what make this place interesting, but instead the rules of engagement are.
I find the political discussions on here interesting and generally of decent+ caliber. Plus so much of what’s happening is tech related / enabled.
There’s 30 posts on the front page. If someone doesn’t care about politics why can’t they just ignore that 1 post instead of flagging it into oblivion?
I agree that HN tends to have better discussion, but I'd argue it tends to have better discussion precisely because it's not the norm, so there's input from the type of people that loathe the current state of Reddit on the matter, and also the type of people that do like yapping about it 24/7 are absent from it.
Second, that justification doesn't make sense because you could just not read the post. There's even a feature to hide it for yourself.
Third, that's not what flagging is for. Per the HN guidelines, posts should be flagged if they're spam or off topic, not if you personally find them tiresome.
There are many topics discussed on HN that I find tiresome to read about. For example, diet and fitness topics. You could swap the comments from one article to another and not even notice.
That's why I stopped reading them.
It's never once occurred to me that I should rather open them up, dive into the comments section, and tell the participants that I'm trying to get away from boring discussions about diet and fitness.
Flagging off news about current events (whether you support the regime or not) is counterproductive to a forum nominally for the startup community. Startup founders need to be aware of the environment they are operating in, so if the current environment is a corrupt fascist authoritarian one then you need to be prepared to operate in that type of business environment. If you now need to bribe certain officials in the regime in order for your startup to succeed, for example, flagging posts about how that's necessary is counterproductive.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
Whilst I sympathise, it's a bit hard to avoid politics on here, when the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are actively supporting a corrupt administration to line their own pockets.
A statement of fact that will no doubt earn the ire of many tech-bro's.
> they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I don't agree. Crypto scams get discussed at length here for days, but when it's a Trump crypto scam, it gets flagged and disappears.
Is this thread not about the administration? The FBI currently acts at the will of the White House / GOP / Trump. Stick your head in the sand all you want, but don't betray the people who are standing up against oppression.
It's pretty shocking how many people on HN are ok with government officials killing citizens in the streets, but writing diversity statements is just too far.
It's flagged because its historically not Hacker News. Many of the newer accounts seem to bias towards using this forum as a "reddit" to discuss how much they hate the current administration or their mental issues. The technical "hacker" content is getting less and less -- thank God for https://lobste.rs/.
So that's all fine and maybe hackers should just change be a reddit forum, but don't take it personally or be surprised if 15 old accounts are flagging your posts. I say this noting that the account you posted from is only 9 months old.
We historically haven't had an administration like this either. People need to get over politics creeping into their every day life because that's what it's actually doing. We're at the point where the government is using tech to police and surveil the public and many of the CEOs of tech companies are openly coordinating with the President. Tech is politics at this point.
Hating the current administration is one of the top technical issues on my mind. There is a substantial chance that all US-EU software collaboration is going to get blown up in the next few months if Trump makes good on his threats to invade Greenland, just as international trade has been reoriented around his illegal tariffs and responses to them.
When Trump decides to destroy your life, as he's destroyed so many others, I hope you'll find supporters who aren't so determined to ignore the inconvenience as you.
Wow, thanks for this! I normally don't login to HN and comment anymore due to all the reddit-style comments - especially the constant hate for the US and the President. Thanks for giving me another outlet to review tech-related stuff.
They also lie to local police. There was a case here where they drove erratically to try and make it look like a legal observer rammed their vehicle. They hit him twice, called the local police, lied to the police and then said observer provided his dash cam footage and was released. Will ICE face any repercussions? Nope.
That only works if they aren't U.S citizens... Which if they're working for the gov means they are. This administration is creative they will find other more 'legal' ways for retribution so the punishment sticks.
But as an outsider, its really not normal for agents of the state to detain people without legal basis. much less deliberatly make sure they can't be found. (citizen or not.)
You as a US citizen are not required to carry ID, so being arrested on the spot for not having proof of citizenship is grossly authoritarian.
There are quite a few examples where they did detain US citizens, even claiming that the papers they had weren't good enough.
The president has also multiple times said that he will strip people of citizenship. Yes, it's not exactly legal but they're doing illegal shit all the time and nobody's stopping them.
Nah, ICE is snatching and robbing US citizens too, even when they have ID on them. My (US citizen) friend got taken last month and driven hundreds of miles to another state simply for speaking spanish in public.
This clearly struck a nerve. What I was trying to say is I doubt they will use ICE for retribution here... My bet is they will use the FBI and simply arrest the sources. I'm aware ICE has detained U.S citizens and also killed citizens on the street.
This would only be true if ICE cared to obey the law, which they do not. They are not observing even the most basic facsimile of due process or probable cause. Protesting them is being treated as grounds for brutalization or arrest. They are actively flaunting their contempt for the Constitution while "conservatives" cheer from the sidelines.
Nonsense. You are seriously mistaken if you think mere legality will stop them.
This regime has already illegally stopped, assaulted, arested, jailed, and/or deported multiple US citizens. They now stop people and demand they show citizenship papers, and the AsstDirFBI has said people must carry proof of citizenship at all times, and if not, ICE are free to abuse you under the presumption you are an illegal.
We are already under a "May I see your papers, please?" Nazi-like system.
Except without the superficial politeness of the "May..." and "...Please" and seeing the face of your accusers who hide behind masks.
Quite an interesting phenomena though, how affiliations color some unarguable facts. Many clearly believe that ICE agents are doing the right thing, they got what they voted for.
His policy is very consistent and clear. He does not care about the form of government, how they treat the population etc, only that they show deference to him (personally).
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.
It actually proves that they _don't_ (or didn't) have that kind of access because they first publicly asked for the access and then rescinded that request when they, not officially but widely accepted, acquired access through some kind of hack/bug/exploit given to them by, probably, the IDF or an Israeli private company.
The same reason federal agents wear GoPros. Security theater, and to send the message that journalists should not pursue stories like this that put the federal government in a less-than-favorable light.
Appeasing a moron with a shiny, valuable object is low effort. Covering up and adding a backdoor to Apple's widely used iOS is not in the same ballpark.
> They literally went to the king with gold in hands.
Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.
I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.
IDK, the FIFA world peace prize was completely unsurprising to me. It’s a massively corrupt institution and has been for decades. It’s out of the norm in a US context, for sure, but that kind of thing is penny ante for an organization whose Wikipedia article has multiple subsections on corruption
What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.
"End to end" protection/encryption has lost all functional meaning when the masses accepted corporations as the arbiters of "ends". No one can even respond to the argument based on technical merit, because all that remains is hollow marketing bullshit.
I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.
Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, actually. I’m glad that Benn Jordan and others are giving this the airtime it needs, but they’re focusing the messaging on security vulnerabilities and not state surveillance. Thus Flock can go “ok we will do better about security” and the bureaucrats, average suburbanites, and law enforcement agencies will go “ok good they fixed the vulnerabilities I’m happy now”
Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations).
I'm sure the 40 percent of cops who are domestic abusers and the white supremacists militias recruited wholesale into ICE will use this power responsibly.
You can go onto the ICE subreddit and see a ton of posts that ask if their previous domestic abuse/gross misconduct/ejection from police academy/etc will effect their ICE application.
These aren't people who should hold any kind of intel. It's an actual danger to the population to give these people this much power.
They aren’t people that should be walking free, if we are being honest. Lock them up until we can get enough prison reform to genuinely try to rehabilitate them. The damage they are doing to our country is too high to hedge on this issue.
>“That’s so extreme, they just shouldn’t have power, freedom is paramount, return to normal” etc.
Sorry, too late for this. I advocated for more gentle measures 10 years ago when they were possible/plausibly effective. Just like any other infection, if you wait too long to address the problem you are forced towards extreme action. Or death. No third option.
When you give access to any system that collects the personal information including location data for people in the US to the police, a percentage of the police will always use those systems for stalking their exes.
Don't forget we even saw that in the Snowden leaks.
Those were people with much higher scrutiny and background checking than your average cop. Those were people that themselves were more closely monitored. And yet... we want to give that to an average cop? People who have a higher than average rate of domestic abuse?
Cops do have some unique tendencies but I think the real issue is the cops are able to leverage the power of the government in ways other large groups cannot.
The problem with police is a) that police have to deal with bad people and it is very hard to stay untainted when you constantly deal with bad people, and b) being a cop is no longer a desirable or rewarding job which not only causes applicant pool issues but also polarises the job and police force itself. Then the nature of polarisation is that it is self reinforcing. So if your job isn't rewarding financially or socially, the "perks" must come from somewhere and so it attracts people who seek to abuse power etc
I don't know where you are, but some of the highest paid public employees in my state are police. In fact, median salaries for cops are higher than those of software engineers.
Add the fact that they get generous pensions + benefits, and can retire at 45 and draw from that pension until they die, they have it better than most of the people they police.
It's one of the only professions where you can make north of $250k+ a year doing overtime by sitting in your car playing Candy Crush all night.
I believe strongly that people have zero problem paying their knuckle dragging police fuckwad of the day $150k if they would actually do the job they signed up for. It’s the fact that 99% of them can’t handle it that pisses people off
I don’t agree that police isn’t attractive or rewarding, the salaries have gone up and requirements reduced (college degree requirements in places for example)
Come with a pension and active lifestyle with a club(FoP) and a union in some positions, its ostensibly public service and you get to much more than peek behind the curtain.
Personally, I feel both ways about cops writ large. I feel like we could do a lot better really easily(mandatory body cam recordings please? Our guys literally just take them off.), and on the other hand I get it, they’re doing important work often enough.
I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public.
What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
So now with Flock and data brokers we have authorities having access to information that was originally held behind a judge's signature. Often with little oversight, and frequently for unofficial, abusive purposes.
This reality also ties back to the discussion about providing the "good guys" encryption backdoors. The reality is that there are no "good guys", everyone exists in shades of grey, and I dare say there are people in forces whom are attracted to the power the role provides, rather than any desire for public service.
In conclusion it's a fundamental design flaw to rely on the operator being a "good guy", and that's before we get into the problem of leaks, bugs, and flaws in the security model, or in this case: complete open access to the public web - laughable, farcical, and horrifying.
And my guess is we only ever find out about some probably very small percentage of the abuses by police, at least in theory having rules and oversight of their use of these systems.
What are the chances that nobody at Flock has ever abused their access?
Cynical-me assumes that if you're the sort of person who'd take a job at a company like Flock, which I and evidently a lot of other people consider morally bankrupt, then you are at least as likely as a typical cop to think that stalking your exes or random attractive people you see - is just a perk of your job, not something that should come with jail time.
> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.
Maybe with these systems we should require them TO be open for anyone to query against. Maybe then people would care more about how they impact their privacy.
Flock’s objective is to hope people don’t care long enough to reach IPO. Will enough people care to dis enable this corporate dragnet surveillance apparatus? Remains to be seen. I don’t much care about the grift of dumping this pig onto the public markets (caveat emptor), but we should care about its continued use as a weapon against domestic citizens without effective governance and due process.
Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and thankfully he wasn't there for very long after that.
> Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves.
I propose that it become mandatory for all senior managment, board members, and investors in Flock - to have these Condor camears and their ALPR cameras installed out the front of their houses, along their routes to work, along the route to nearby entertainment precincts, outside their children's school and their spouses workplace (or places they regularly visit if they don't work) - all of which must be unsecured and publicly available at all times.
(Yes I know, I'm dreaming. I reckon every Meta employee's children should be required to have un-parental-controlled access to Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger/et al...)
As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
‘You can turn it off!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’
I know right. It is like we all forgot that cops were literally sharing pictures of Kobe Bryant’s mutilated body in bars for a laugh. A lot of people in law enforcement are totally screwed up in the head.
I’m glad Benn has gone into the YouTube space. He has demonstrated a great balanced view on how to sell your soul for advertisement money in YouTube land.
I’ve known of him a long time simply because of his extremely progressive views towards releasing his own music. In other words, I would not care about Benn Jordan but for the fact that he was releasing his own torrented music on WCD 15 years ago
Fair point but there's a crucial nuance: state surveillance used to be limited by human resources. You couldn't assign an agent to every citizen - there aren't enough people. Flock with their AI tracking has effectively removed this scalability constraint. This vulnerability just highlighted how powerful a tool they've built. If these were just dumb cameras, the state would have to hire an army of operators. As it stands, the technology allows for total surveillance with essentially zero marginal cost. And when they fix the security, that terrifying potential for infinite scale isn't going anywhere; it just goes back under the client's control
I think more importantly people need to recognize that cops are people, flawed and fallible as is the flock system in general. It should never be the whole solution and be used as evidence alone.
reply