There are lot of problems. The biggest is funding.

Most politicians come from money. Not all, but a good number. This, oddly enough, can make them a bit more independent since they don’t have special interests demanding their time to get their money. But depending on their motives for running, this can also make them very susceptible to corruption to make their money back.

If you don’t have money, you have to raise it. You can either do this by meeting with special interests (oil, pharma, etc.) and be their lapdog or you can solicit money from the public. Both have their pros and cons in terms of getting elected, staying elected, and making sure you can do the work you set out to do.

Let’s assume you have money and it’s untainted.

The second biggest problem you have is name recognition. If you are a nobody, no one is going to elect you. You have to earn name recognition by either winning several smaller elections, by being active in the community, or by being famous. Usually if your rich, you have name recognition so you can usually skip this step. But if you’re not, and you’re raising money the old fashion way, you need to get your name out there. You remember Joe Exotic? You know him because he ran a ridiculous campaign.

Let’s assume that you’re active in the community and you have pretty good name recognition.

The hardest hurdle is going to be that you have almost half of your electorate actively rooting against you.

IMO, the reason why you don’t see many young people in politics, even at the local level, is because all three of these steps seem so insurmountable. I looked into it. I never formed a committee or anything but the amount of money alone you have to raise is crazy.

You need a thick skin and you need to be willing to compromise, either your morals or your values, often both.

Honestly, if you scam them and then donate the money to progressive causes, it’s as if you collected taxes.

I wouldn’t even call it a scam at that point.

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My conspiracy theory is that he wasn’t a serious contender for AG. He got the nom which allowed him to resign from Congress. This forced the ethics committee to stop investigating him because he was no longer a member.

While he was a contender for AG, the Senate pushed for the release of materials anyway. Gaetz withdrawals from consideration, making the report moot.

This has Bannon written all over it.

The rich need more money laundering vehicles.

The ironic thing here is that the ethics committee is a shit committee. They don’t have anywhere near the influence you think it does.

This is the most power the committee is ever going to have.

Trump WANTS the highest level of law enforcement to be political.

There is a difference between someone who is new and experiences something like their IDE deletes a file that was unexpected and asking a question about why it did that.

Then there are arrogant assholes who believe their shit doesn’t stink and that they couldn’t have done anything wrong and it was the IDE’s fault for not knowing what they wanted to do versus what they commanded it to do.

The OP is the latter.

Breaking the law does not mean that the business will get punished. And if it does, it’s a fine.

When the punishment is a fine, it means that it’s a law against poor people.

Sharpie. Cheeto in chief uses sharpies.

If I’m reading this correctly, the haystack is the malicious compliance of providing all documents printed and in Korean. The needle is the document that snuck between other documents so that Valve attorneys wouldn’t find it.

This has been my experience as well but as a coder.

I can’t count the number of contributions I’ve made, many of them minor. I’m talking 20-30 lines of code max.

I can count on two hands the number that have been either accepted or declined for a legitimate reason.

This is far too coherent to be Charlie.

When I worked a clearance job, I was trained and informed that removing classified documents from the SCIF was a felony.

Turns out that you only see prison time if your net worth is less than a few million.

Cloudflare sort of provides this now by being a MITM to secure your site between your server and the end user. But this requires you and your end user to trust Cloudflare.

And fwiw the ACME protocol is open so anyone can implement it. I believe even the ACME software that EFF sends out allows you to choose your server with some configuration.

I remember complaining on Amazon about the price of digital books when they were still relatively new. They wanted me to pay the same price for a digital book as a physical book. Back then, Amazon still had pretty decent customer service and wrote me back saying that the price for the book wasn’t for literal pages but for the work in making the book, etc. etc.

I told them I understood that but I don’t get the same rights with the digital book as I did with the physical, namely the right to sell the book.

Books, board games, etc. any physical media is technically a license, yes. BUT the copyright holder cannot bar you from doing whatever you want with the physical copy, within the limits of copyright law. Those same rights simply do not exist with your digital copies and, in fact, is often codified within your terms of service that you don’t fucking own anything and they can pull your license at any time.

DVD is next to impossible to revoke while Blu-ray is not. But you can’t revoke Blu-ray licenses to specific people but to regions. I haven’t heard of this happening but if it did, you could, in theory, still play your Blu-ray disks on players that aren’t connected to the internet to receive those updates. That said, I’m like 80% sure that Blu-ray keys have been leaked and you can rip them like DVDs today.

Trump didn’t win by “tens of thousands of voters”. I just checked and he won by almost 3M votes.

I’m not saying that Trump and the Republicans didn’t engage in voter suppression. It just doesn’t cover enough of the votes.

The post mortem is still pending but the theme is that, like most elections that Democrats lose, they failed to coalesce their base. They didn’t speak to the working man and tried to convince everyone that the economy was fine. While GDP might be good, you can’t explain that to the single mother of three working two jobs.

Sure wages are higher now than they were under Trump but the dollar simply doesn’t go as far because of rampant greed disguised as inflation.

The Democrats won’t learn their lesson. They’ll continue to slide toward the center instead of leaning more progressive.

Think of it from the patriarchy sense:

If you’re married, it means you implicitly consent.

So yeah. 50+ year old men can marry 13 year old girls and not rape them. Because the Bible says so.

Has Trump rehired anyone from his previous administration? I know he fired a shit ton of them but I know a few managed to stay on.

Because if this is all new people, it’s very telling and I have a feeling it means it’s going to be more dangerous and not less.

I feel like the only people who can do anything powerful would be the front line government workers and contractors. If they all quit their jobs en masse on January 20th, it might prevent the new administration from doing even more dangerous shit.

I wonder if mobile providers are still getting paid for long distance calls. Because if they are, they have a perverse incentive to keep scammers on the line.

Which, in this isolated case, I’m okay with.