I think this only makes a few weeks difference to the withdrawal of US military support. The deal Trump and Russia are putting together should not be thought of as an attempt to end the war, but the creation of a pretense for the withdrawal of support. The terms that will be offered to Ukraine will be completely, and intentionally, unacceptable to Ukraine and Europe. Ukraine will refuse and the US will name it as the justification for walking away.

Eh. He’s a human being. I hadn’t heard about his fleet.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php

It seems nearly impossible for a person to be billionaire loaded and not make some irresponsible purchases. Is there anyone with that kind of money we should be highlighting as a role model instead?

Yeah leaked data stays leaked. You can often find out what was leaked tho.

I imagine this looks a lot like what people in the cyber security sector do after a breach. Audit all the code, scan all the servers, monitor everything for several months. It’s a ton of work and very expensive, but there are people with lots of real-world experience unhacking systems.

There have been two court orders requiring that payments continue normally. It looks like Musk has decided that court orders do not bind him. It hasn’t even been two weeks and already we’re at the constitutional crisis?

I think the idea here is that, as Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, the minority party can do a lot to simply break the government.

If the Democrats had the intestinal fortitude to be real resistance against an authoritarian takeover, they could start filibustering everything, and using every procedural trick to delay or block every Republican action until some set of demands are met. Perhaps removing Musk from every government system, or reinstating all of the DoJ personnel who have been retaliated against.

Here we see Democrats basically unanimously going along with the Republican agenda so that they can feel like “the adults in the room,” rather than fighting for the life of our republic.

Neither illegal immigrants, nor non-citizen residents get to vote. In what sense are they represented in either case?

Then they have a higher hurdle to clear. All I’m saying is it seems reasonable to give a state representation based on the number of citizens.

I got curious about the size of the issue. The numbers I found for Texas was an estimated 1.6 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 30.5 million, or roughly 5%. There are 38 reps from Texas, so they’d lose one or two.

This doesn’t seem like it ought to be all-or-nothing. Knowing the number of citizens and the total number of residents is useful for different purposes. Electoral votes: citizens. Disaster response: residents. And so on.

This mirrors how I’ve been thinking about the broader world trends. The neo-liberal world order is dying. It has solved all the problems it has the capacity to solve, and the people have run out of patience with the problems it can’t.

The groups that have been best positioned to fill the gaps created by these retreating institutions are the ones that had always been excluded; nationalists, authoritarians, xenophobes of all kinds, et al. The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.

IMHO if we’re going to avoid a century of oppression, the left needs to abandon the neo-liberal coalition, and get into the fight for what comes next. We’re already two steps behind.

That’s roughly the total COVID death toll for that period. The term “excess deaths” is used to refer to the deaths which occurred above the typical yearly mortality rate. In other words, the deaths which are roughly attributable to COVID.

I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but it would be easy to read your comment, given the context, as saying that Trump caused 522,368 deaths in 2020.

If you want to quantify the deaths caused by Trump’s mismanagement, you’d need to compare COVID deaths relative to population. I actually managed to find that (to my surprise)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

If you sort by deaths per million (total), the US is 16th from the bottom right above Brazil, Slovenia, and Lithuania. And right below Latvia, Chile, and Poland.

You could also download that data set there, find the global average, sum up the difference between that and the US, and roughly say that number is the death toll for Trump’s mismanagement.

I think there’s a place for both. So long as none of it becomes mandatory, and online communities can freely choose to offer anonymous or verified identities, it’s an idea worth trying.

Resistance requires hope. I appreciate people being willing to imagine how things could get better from this point. If you aren’t willing to allow yourself to even imagine victory, you’ve already lost.

I wasn’t thinking so specifically about Biden voters who stayed home in 24. I see that’s what you were talking about initially.

If you simply ask everyone who voted for Trump, the economy was the top issue. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/13/what-trump-supporters-believe-and-expect/

That’s all I was saying. But there are, I think, three groups which it would be interesting to have this answer for. The first is the one you mentioned. The other two are people who voted for Biden and switched to Trump, and people who chose not to vote in 2020 and voted for Trump in '24. I couldn’t find those answers readily.

Big? Sure. Biggest? No. Biggest was “the economy”. It’s practically a law of nature that inflation ends governments.