merc

Neither of them ignored court orders the way Trump has done. Neither of them tried to launch an insurrection when they lost an election the way Trump did on Jan 6th. Neither of them called up governors and tried to pressure them to "find a few votes" the way Trump did in Georgia.

Why Vance and not Don Jr? Despots normally hand power down to their kids.

until a new Congress is seated in '27

So, you think Trump isn't going to have democratic candidates arrested and/or disqualified from running? It's one of the standard next steps for authoritarian leaders.

A P/E ratio that's high indicates that investors think something is a growth stock. A typical mature but growing tech company has a P/E ratio of 20ish. Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 182.

Now, there's a saying "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", but TSLA is poised for a huge collapse. It was already way overvalued even a year ago when Musk was just this right-wing asshole who bought Twitter and ruined it. Everything since then has destroyed his image and made it so nobody wants to buy his cars. He's pissed off Democrats, and now he's pissed off MAGA Republicans. And, most importantly, Tesla is clearly no longer a growth stock. Sales are declining year after year.

If Tesla were a normal, boring car company that was competently run by someone nobody hated, it might have a P/E ratio similar to Toyota: 7. To get there from here, TSLA would have to shed 96% of its value. Keep in mind, that's not what the price should be. That's what the price should be if nobody hated the brand and it was a normal well-run car company.

Somebody is going to make absolute bags of money shorting TSLA. If I were rich I'd do it. But, as I'm not rich, the downside of the market remaining irrational is too big a risk. But, IMO, it's just a matter of time.

Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.

That was back in an era where everyone watched the same "influencers". The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.

On the other hand, there were times when these "influencers" were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They'd also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.

Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / "influencers" were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.

This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.

"Financial harm" is a loaded term. People expected to make money and then didn't, but is that a bad thing?

What if the US president declared that it is now a legal requirement that every American subscribe to a new paid tier of Facebook, and that declaration was rubber stamped by the lawmakers. Anybody who didn't capitulate would be doing "financial harm" to Meta, but is that really a fair way to frame that? If a bully wants your lunch money and you resist, are you doing "financial harm" to the bully?

The way I see things, the initial copyright laws were a relatively fair trade: a 14 year monopoly on something, that could be renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive. In exchange, everything after that term became part of the public domain. So, it would encourage people to produce writing, and the public would benefit because a reasonable amount of time later what was produced would be available to everybody at no cost. Modern copyright terms are a massive give-away to Hollywood, the record labels, etc. So, while it's true that infringing copyright does reduce the potential amount of money a copyright holder might hope to receive, morally it's closer to fighting off a bully than it is to theft.

The 1950s economy was the result of:

1. The New Deal
2. A world war which destroyed the infrastructure of every developed economy except for the US.

The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.

The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.

So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.

Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren't going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn't just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.

That's absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was "invented", men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They'd sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn't as though that's all they did.

This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker's day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.

Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn't something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.

If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.

You're pretty lazy if you stopped there.

That's all that was needed.

They can drive past stops that don't have passengers.

Yes, and they often do. But, it's a massive waste of money if they drive an entire route and nobody gets on or off. They only make sense if the population density is enough.

Which makes titles like "Her Worship" and "Honourable" such bullshit. We should really just get rid of those titles.

The first who joined that Safe Place for Science program. I'm sure there have been others who didn't know about that, or didn't want the publicity, but just left quietly when they realized how bad things were getting.

it is people, indeed