I’d be really surprised if that’s the last such assessment.

I figure that emoji is already banned on government computers. They went so far as to ban the spoon emoji because people were using it to respond to the Elon Musk “Fork in the Road” attempt to get people to resign

The problem is that the Trump/Musk administration doesn’t much care what the law is or what the courts say. Why would this issue be different from others where they’re ignoring the law? What does it mean to be a US citizen if those carrying out deportation orders don’t care what your legal status is?

The problem with “from water” is that it takes as much energy to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water as you get back by oxidizing the hydrogen to produce water. You can’t use water as a useful way to store hydrogen for energy because of that.

There’s a protest going on right now, including several Congressional Democrats.

We never had the support in congress to pass carbon pricing, which is why the Inflation Reduction Act was structured the way it was.

Nah. That was to support the Russian takeover.

The “malnourished fuckface” was working for Triple Canopy, part of what used to be called Blackwater. Talk is easy. Taking a bullet is not.

What they’re doing as a result of constituent pressure is voting ‘no’ on everything. It’s not having a huge impact yet because confirming cabinet appointments only needs 51 votes, and Republicans have that with a few to spare.

The place it’ll be meaningful is on the debt ceiling increase, where it will take Democratic votes to pass it in both houses.

The objection was always that somebody dark-skinned might be President, or that assets might be expropriated from billionaires, not that tyranny might be an issue.

Little-known fact: US sanctions are similarly keyword based. So if you call your international terrorist group Exxon, you can cause real problems for the oil company

That’s the problem with being on the side of the rule of law: you’re constrainted by it, but the side of lawlessness is not.

We could be, but are also avoiding a lot of drownings that are likely if we try disassembling it while at sea

We are very very far from anything like the Star Trek prosperity society though. I’m not expecting changes to monetary policy to be able to get us there either; they’re a way to moderately improve peoples’ lot, and to shift the balance of power from capital to labor and tiny bit

It was part of how we got out of the Great Depression — it transferred money from the owning class to people who had debts. We don’t actually want to go back to gold (or any other non-inflationary currency) because it gets rid of the flexibility to do that, which part of how we prevent bad recessions from turning into deflationary recessions.

In any case, having fiat currency, or not, is a separate issue from whether the US will actually pay its debts as promised. And it’s the debt payment that Trump is putting in question.

A lot of countries have defaulted without doing that. I’m a lot more concerned that it’ll cause an interest rate spike, with associated stock market crash, and bring on a sharp cut in business investment and employment.

The FBI knew what their plan actually was

:P

Yeah, I think the fact that they were running stories on the seedier side of the tech industry created a bunch of contacts and background knowledge which made a lot of this reporting possible.

That’s what happens when you have an unlimited plastic surgery budget and have forgotten what the uncanny valley looks like.

Because they were doing it at work, where other employees saw them. Other people having sex in front of me is generally inconsistent with getting work done.