President Elon Musk
He probably deserves his own thread at this point, discuss accordingly
Or maybe we just don't want there to be a recession?
The Fed was nearly finished with the fabled "soft landing" of reducing inflation with no recession, while Republicans were doing their best to convince their uneducated voters that we were already in a recession (which was Biden"s fault).
Now they're likely to cause an actual recession, while explaining to those same voters why it's a good thing.
unfortunately the attempt to remove the unemployment buffer and try to run a "full employment economy" as expected by most macro models is too inflationary.
I mean it wasn't even absurd to try, things might have changed enough in the decades that it could have worked. but it didn't.
so it's time to go back to cyclical recessions with spikes in unemployment which keep workers in their place, subdue wage increase demands and so on, as it was since Volcker at least.
inflation is so corrosive to the national psyche for whatever reason, that some increase in unemployment isn't that bad comparatively.
especially if it's among people who often don't vote anyway or vote for the other party.
how to engineer higher unemployment among democrat voters?
savagely cutting public employment outside defense/law enforcement :-) and DEI initiatives.
unfortunately the attempt to remove the unemployment buffer and try to run a "full employment economy" as expected by most macro models is too inflationary.
I mean it wasn't even absurd to try, things might have changed enough in the decades that it could have worked. but it didn't.
so it's time to go back to cyclical recessions with spikes in unemployment which keep workers in their place, subdue wage increase demands and so on, as it was since Volcker at least.
inflation is so corrosive to the na
Funny when all those negative would have never been acceptable under Biden , blaming it on “leftish” policies and calling it destruction of America not even 3 months ago ….
But now it’s trump , recession is possible , using socialist policies like tariffs and guess what -> it’s all good ?
lol …
Partisanship at its best .
that's not probable cause , just a hint, and it's not even necessarily criminal as you don't know the amounts of the potential evasion yet, and they don't need probable cause to audit you.
being investigated isn't a violation of your rights and doesn't require probable cause.
they need probable cause to conduct a search or get a warrant.
not to, say, talk with people who know about you looking for, you know, the probable cause (=investigating)
But investigating trump was so bad use of the DOJ right ?
Even with massive justifications they had …..
no? trump made many redic promises he couldn't keep at all and he hasn't kept them.
and the vast majority of voters if not basically everyone knew they were all hyperboles and are fine with it as per approval ratings (for now).
if his uneducated voters were actually believing it, and were now angry, it would show in approval ratings.
Of course not .
Trump is never responsible of anything in their cultist mind , even when trump broke the law .
Stop with that bad corollary.
Pretty sure the US is not at war with Canada, Denmark, or Panama. So you can calm down.
While "not at war" and "war" certainly includes all the possible relationships between two countries, it isn't very useful as the only way to describe them. This in the same way that "sitting" and "not sitting" isn't very good for describing all human postures.
It is unfortunate that the US government does not currently seem to recognize the sovereignty of these three countries. It also a challenge for those countries and other countries that it doesn't seem to matter which kind of relationship they have had with the US historically. Historically as used here also includes "yesterday".
It is also opening the barn door for many other countries do use similar rhetoric and even act on it. There isn't exactly a shortage of governments that desire some land that is currently part of another sovereign nation. And yes, some of these countries are indeed only held back by international diplomacy.
I think a lot of people don't recognize how absolutely wafer-thin international cooperation and agreement is, nor do they understand that international law is not law. People will also boo these agreements for being weak or making compromises, which is an historically illiterate take of such magnitude that it says a lot about the person making it. Wars and conflicts aside, we still live in an age where a lot of international conflict is resolved with the pen. And however stupid and incompetent that process might sometimes be, it is definitely preferably to stupidly and incompetently resolving these conflicts with guns.
There is also the point that powerful and solid historic alliances like the Trump administration are throwing away are extremely rare, both currently and throughout history. They take generations to build and refine. Of course, they're complex and chaotic beasts and don't do well in a 10-second format, so it has little value to an administration composed of influencers.
Some also argue that as an extremely geographically secure country as well as the most powerful nation in the world, the US might do well on a more isolated path. That is a debate that require more text than I have the time to write. I'll merely note that it would be very unwise to trust anyone who argues this point in slogans. Such people often lead their countries to bad times.
if you decide to speak in favor of a terrorist group you are actually a suspect of being a material supporter of that group.
plenty of actual terrorists in the 60s movements as well yes
You have the right to speak in favour of terrorist groups, under freedom of speech, long as you're not actually inciting people. And yes, you very probably will indeed be a suspect and subject to scrutiny by LE, due to your big mouth, but provided you haven't committed any crimes, you're perfectly entitled to opine how awesome Hamas or neo-Nazi terrorists are, again provided you don't commit any actual crimes, regardless of how odious the groups you're stanning for are.
I've said this to you before, but again you're essentially talking Thought Crime here.
That's the caveat of Freedom of Speech, it's for everyone, even a-holes who "abuse" it if you will. It's not just freedom to espouse stuff you personally agree with.
You have the right to speak in favour of terrorist groups, under freedom of speech, long as you're not actually inciting people. And yes, you very probably will indeed be a suspect and subject to scrutiny by LE, due to your big mouth, but provided you haven't committed any crimes, you're perfectly entitled to opine how awesome Hamas or neo-Nazi terrorists are, again provided you don't commit any actual crimes, regardless of how odious the groups you're stanning for are.
I've said this to you bef
In the USA, yes.
No i am not talking about thought crime because nothing other than monitoring/flagging/investigating (when resources allow for it) is asked for them, and as i said unless material support of terror is found, there is no crime (in the USA).
Gorgo has claimed that if you are in favor of monitoring people who talk pro Hamas , to investigate the leaders of those protests and so on, that's a violation of free speech. It simply isn't.
But remember where this started: Vance said europe has completly abandoned free speech. And it's true, people are harassed by the state if they speak content which is "too much on the right" basically, on a regular bases, in many european countries.
Ofc Gorgo&al completly disregarded that factual truth and started claiming that i am against free speech as well because i wanted to investigate pro hamas protestors.
I never read Gorgo or other leftists here defending the right of german citizens to be adamantly and trasparently racist in public with no legal repercussions, did you? have they called the german and british government FASCIST, when they arrested people for social media "hate speech" content (which didn't include imminent threats of violence)? no, never.
so i know, for a fact, that they don't actually like free speech and they actually prefer the european model where speech is free for the left but not for the right.
Ofc it's not just racism (that's the most salient topic right now), but it's also "LGBTQ+" stuff, and stuff about religion
So of the 350 actually useful employees who deal with nuclear security and who were laid off, all but 28 have already been re-hired
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-...
So much for the "catastrophic mistake" which can be fixed in less than a week (if you move at corporate and not government speed, that is)
In the USA, yes.
No i am not talking about thought crime because nothing other than monitoring/flagging/investigating (when resources allow for it) is asked for them, and as i said unless material support of terror is found, there is no crime (in the USA).
Gorgo has claimed that if you are in favor of monitoring people who talk pro Hamas , to investigate the leaders of those protests and so on, that's a violation of free speech. It simply isn't.
But remember where this started: Vance said europe h
Not quit., Gorgo actually pointed out that protesting was a right. You then changed that to people supporting the likes of Hamas. Difference between 100k people protesting at a pro Palestinian rally and 10 people on a streetcorner publicly supporting Hamas. They won't be arrested for the public support, but most likely will be investigated by LE, or at least put under surveillance, to see if they've actual bonafide links to terrorism.
It was the same in Ireland with Sinn Fein rallies in the 80s when they were less "mainstream" if you will. You were perfectly free to attend such a rally, but of course the Special Branch would be monitoring for intel purposes.
Not quit., Gorgo actually pointed out that protesting was a right. You then changed that to people supporting the likes of Hamas. Difference between 100k people protesting at a pro Palestinian rally and 10 people on a streetcorner publicly supporting Hamas. They won't be arrested for the public support, but most likely will be investigated by LE, or at least put under surveillance, to see if they've actual bonafide links to terrorism.
I never "changed that". Check the verbatim by gorgo, according to him it's a violation of free speech to suggest monitoring and investigating of people who participate in a protest.
I said if they protest in favor of a terrorist group it is very reasonable to monitor and investigate them and that is not a violation of free speech at all, and he went crazy calling me a fascist repeatedly for that.
According to Gorgo the bold is fascism.
So of the 350 actually useful employees who deal with nuclear security and who were laid off, all but 28 have already been re-hired
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-...
So much for the "catastrophic mistake" which can be fixed in less than a week (if you move at corporate and not government speed, that is)
Of course they were rehired. The point is the total incompetence involved in firing them in the first place.
Hey nobody bats a thousand so it's ok.
Of course they were rehired. The point is the total incompetence involved in firing them in the first place.
the point is that if you never fail in general it means you didn't try enough things, and if you never fire people who shouldn't be fired, you aren't firing enough people (given that firing a lot of them is still a very valid goal).
When mistakes can be easily fixed it's far far better to err on the "excess of people being fired" side, it's a no brainer. It's not like they incurred into huge costs by temporarily being without them for a week.
Of course they were rehired. The point is the total incompetence involved in firing them in the first place.
This operation is far from total incompetence. It's a very strategic and well planned out mission, to rid our government of the corruption that's been draining our country dry and filling the pockets of criminal elites for decades. I can't wait until DOGE knocks on the door of Ft. Knox, then we'll really see how much we've been scammed by them.
The richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world are working for free to get rid of corruption in the United States. Why would anyone possibly be against that?
I dunno, the opposite is what we've had in the past. Government is generally a cess pool of extremely low productive workers. Not entirely the workers fault, their job is just not demanding. They can do their daily tasks in 30 minutes. And then it creates rot. If you go in there and try to improve things, you get in trouble. But no one ever gets fired. Systems are never improved. It's sad.
What could possibly go wrong here?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/17...
“I’m unaware of any instance of political appointees at Treasury or the IRS having access to this database,” Lily Batchelder, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax administration in the Biden administration, wrote on X. “I didn’t and the political appointees on my team did not.”
