I mean, I have a chaotic solution we might try. Let’s simply…reverse the Budapest Memorandum! Let’s just hand Ukraine a few hundred thermonuclear warheads, with launchers and launch codes and say, “here, go have fun!”

“The president has announced…that we have reversed the Budapest Memorandum…”

:D

I don’t get why companies can’t solve this problem entirely by just flying out applicants for in-person interviews towards the end of the hiring process. Or hell, maybe only even ask the candidate to fly out for a visit after they’ve already accepted the job offer. Just one minimal and relatively cheap step to confirm the remote worker you’re hiring is who they claim to be. For the cost of a flight, a night or two in a hotel, and some meal vouchers, you can verify someone’s identity. Sure, maybe not for freelance work. But for any well paid technical field? This is a trivial expense.

I know that anybody who has consistent access to an internet connection in North Korea is almost certainly working for the benefit of the great leader and they aren’t actually seeing any money or benefit for themselves.

Eh, this doesn’t sound like the job you would give someone in a prison camp. You’re talking about people that you’re allowing to interact and work regularly with foreigners outside the country. That does not sound like the type of position you trust to a political prisoner. That sounds like a position you put someone of high trust. It’s probably a pretty cushy job as the standards of North Korea go. Sure beats scratching at dirt or working in some godawful arms factory. It’s probably the type of job you need some good family connections in the Party in order to get. Sure, the government takes all the direct monetary benefit of the work, but that is just kindof how Communist systems work. I imagine the people working those jobs have some of the highest standards of living available to people that aren’t senior party leadership.

Harris could have promised to kiss Bezos’s feet and anyone remotely antifa should have still voted for her.

You’re beyond saving. You are why Kamala lost the election. Please emigrate to Russia so you can vote for the lesser of two evils there and not pollute our electorate further.

Forget charging ICE agents with terrorism. We need to rendition ICE agents to the countries of their victims. The US justice system cannot be trusted to hold ICE agents accountable for their crimes against humanity. SCOTUS is corrupt and not a legitimate court. So let’s send ICE agents to where they will be held accountable. All those ICE agents that sent innocent Venezuelan citizens to a torture camp in El Salvador? They should all be rounded up and sent to Venezuela to face justice for their crimes against Venezuelan citizens.

They should have made any bank bailout contingent on nationalization. That was the big mistake.

Is your bank insolvent to the point that it needs emergency federal assistance? Is it so grand that letting your Tower of Babel collapse endangers the entire nation? Do we the taxpayers have a guns to ours heads here, forcing us to give out these bailouts? All to clean up the mess left behind by overpaid, overconfident, completely incompetent bank executives?

If so? Fine. A bailout will be given to protect the customers and the nation, but the existing shareholders are completely wiped out. The feds take ownership of the bank. They divide the accounts and remaining assets of the megabank up amongst a dozen smaller new banks it creates as a replacement for the failed giant. The Federal Reserve provides credit to the new banks as they get started. Eventually, when they stabilize, the government holds IPOs for the new banks and completely divests ownership of them.

THAT is how bank bailouts should work. This way, moral hazard is avoided, the government isn’t fleeced, and market consolidation is reversed all in one go.

No. This thread is just full of guys who don’t understand how female anatomy works.

This is why it’s now becoming standard design practice in the design of restrooms for large public buildings to simply build the women’s restroom larger than the men’s. This is really the classic “equality vs. equity.” Equality means building both restrooms the same size. Equity means realizing that to deliver the same level of service - the same average wait time, the women’s restrooms probably should just be built larger and with more total stalls. So you build out your restrooms with the number of stalls in the women’s room being about 40% or so greater than the total number of stalls and urinals in the men’s.

Or better yet, and more to the point, if they’re just defensive, why aren’t we giving the Gazans and iron dome system to shoot down any Israeli aircraft that cross into their skies? The Gazans have just as much right to armed self defense as the Israelis do.

We’ve entered the “purge of intellectuals” stage of Israel’s neo-Nazi campaign.

Where’s your truck bomb?

Well then they obviously don’t give a shit about government policy and are just mindless fools following the breeze. They can vote Democrat if they want, and their votes are welcome. But “not turning them away” implies actually trying to adjust the party’s positions to appeal to them. Sorry, but we don’t need to for example, throw trans kids under the bus, just to appeal to a bunch of idiots that happily voted for a known rapist. These are fundamentally not good people.

Blue MAGA nonsense.

I mean every single swing state? Why would it be surprising for all the swing states to swing in one direction? They don’t swing randomly, they usually swing together.

One county in NY with ZERO Kamala votes?

Precinct, not a county. A precinct dominated by an orthodox Jewish community that all vote together. The congregation decided to vote for Trump.

Something like 12% bullet ballots in blue counties only when the avg is 1%?

Trump drives out low-propensity voters, and he’s way more popular than Congressional Republicans generally.

Voting machines connected to Starlink?

Voting machines aren’t connected to the internet.

Don’t be like Republicans. You’re better than this.

I like the idea of the transition happening slowly over several decades. Basically you found a company, and you’ll be able to maintain majority control over it until you reach your retirement. You can have a vision and carry it through. You just can’t create a multi generational empire that makes your children and grandchildren into newly minted aristocrats.

I mean, obsess over performative semantics if you want. I just want to see the bastards hang.

Nah. SCOTUS will never let that happen. Rendition him and his ICE goons to countries like Venezuela. He and his ICE gestapo will have caused the deaths of countless Venezuelan citizens. They’re fully within their legal rights to charge him and his agents with crimes against humanity. If Trump can rendition innocent people to third party countries, we sure as hell can extradite the guilty to face trial. Don’t even try to use the US justice system, not while SCOTUS is so openly corrupt. Just ship all these bastards off to the home countries of their victims. Let them do with them as they please.

We need to rendition Trump to Venezuela or other applicable country. They can then try him for all the deaths of their citizens he’s caused in his numerous concentration camps. SCOTUS can take its presidential immunity ruling and boof it up Kavanaugh’s ass. If we can’t try him and all his ICE goons here, then we can send them all somewhere where they can be tried. Trump is sending innocent people to random countries. No reason we can’t do the same with mass murderers.

Work should provide ownership. Worker-owned co-ops should be the default form of business organization. We should write it into corporate charter law that any business over a certain number of employees must gradually transition to a worker-owned co-op. For example, maybe every company over 30 employees must transfer 2% of its equity to its employees each year. This would mean after about 35 years, the business would be majority owned by its employees. Business founders and investors can still make plenty of profit, but you prevent the accumulation of generational wealth. You prevent the formation of an aristocracy by slowly transferring the ownership of company’s from their founders to their employees over time. (And obviously you have a lot of other policy details to make this work, such as not just having a flat threshold. Always have to point this out as the “umm aktually” brigade likes to confuse aspirational policy descriptions for actual legislation.)

I want Democratic politicians to start talking about the proper response to this. I don’t expect them to endorse people trying to perform armed raids against these facilities, but they need to start talking about holding people accountable. I’m sorry, but if you’re working at a concentration camp, you need to be in prison at best, and possibly even hanged for crimes against humanity. We need to start talking NOW about putting all these ICE agents in jail when this is all over. These people are criminal scum who need to be prosecuted for their crimes. And to head off any possibility of a blanket pardon, we need to be talking about using extra-territorial rendition to try these people for crimes against humanity.

A presidential pardon will not save ICE agents from this legal liability. Even with a pardon, these agents can still be tried in the International Criminal Court or other body that practices universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity. And even beyond that, there are dozens of potential nations to send ICE agents to for their crimes. After all, they are committing crimes against humanity against the citizens of dozens of nations. If the ICC isn’t viable, we can extradite these people to Venezuela, Mexico, or any number of other countries. These countries can then try them for the deaths of their citizens at the hands of ICE agents.

Quite possibly. Look, we’re in a state of cold civil war. On the path we’re on, we’re likely to end up in a hot war that will destroy all our infrastructure, level our cities, and leave millions of us dead. We could do all of that, or we could simply admit this isn’t working, go our own separate paths, and find a new way forward.

The US is honestly too big for its own good. There’s a reason the oldest nations on Earth tend to be much smaller than the US. Nations as large as the US either break apart or collapse into dictatorship and authoritarianism. The only way to hold such a large nation together is with an iron fist. Frankly, I would rather have smaller countries and retain democracy than lose democracy in the name of retaining a large single nation.