Hmm, there may be a long game going on here. Making Elon the Speaker is total nonsense, of course. But if enough Republicans insist, and we have another protracted Speaker battle, it may go past Jan 6, when the Electoral Votes are counted. Can they even be counted if there is no Speaker to convene the House? If they are not counted, it goes to a contingent election. But can there even be a contingent election in the House if there is no Speaker?

Keep this up long enough, and we end up with President Vance. Boy, will that make Trump upset. All his cases that are “on hold” start up again. And the new President starts his immigration crackdown with one very visible illegal immigrant who broke the rules when he came here…

Ah, makes sense

Why would a reboot matter?

On the other hand, no one is obligated to listen to you, and freedom of speech does not equal freedom from the consequences of said speech. If you voice an unpopular opinion, be prepared to not be popular.

He would never accept a deposit from the interested parties before making this decision. That would be a bribe, and extremely illegal.

He will accept his deposit from the interested parties after making the decision. That is a gratuity, and is now totally legal, thanks to SCOTUS.

Have you ever looked at the makeup that theater or TV performers use? It is layered on super thick, so that it looks good from far away, but up close it looks overly made up.

Trump has been on TV so much that he knows all about that. He wants to project an image of vitality, so he layers that stuff on as thick as he can to mask his natural pallor.

I bet there is a hidden lower bound to the size of packages their Economy rate, so you are essentially paying the same rate for this Economy letter as you would for a small box. While the First Class rates have separate rates for letters vs. small boxes.

Yes, it is possible to be a “landlord” in this fashion and keep your ethics intact. Just don’t be an asshole about it.

Charge a reasonable rent for the other apartment, don’t harass them if they are a few days late with rent, keep the place updated and well maintained. And certainly don’t let an AI tell you what to charge. The best possible situation is to rent to a young person just starting out or a young family, who can use the time renting from you in a non-predatory fashion to build up savings to buy a place of their own, then rinse and repeat. Wouldn’t that be fulfilling?

On the other hand, though, look into the basic tenant law in your area so you know what you’re getting into, and make sure your lease contract is enforceable should it come to that. Some locales are notoriously tenant friendly. You might rent out your space to someone who signs all the paperwork saying that they will pay rent, and then when the time comes they never pay. This might persist even after their lease is up, and not move out when required to. But as a landlord, it will be totally your choice to decide what to do in that situation. While the law may allow you to evict that person, you don’t have to escalate that far on day 1. The choices would be up to you. You can choose grace and patience if you want. It may not always be enough.

Your relative is doing this to give you a sustainable path to a better, more stable life. While this path is not for everyone, it doesn’t automatically make you exploitative.

All of those points are true for some crypto projects, and untrue for others. There are some projects with their own Blockchain that have ultra-low fees, others with quick transactions, and others whose algorithms are much more environmentally friendly. (There are other projects and tokens they are full-on scams with no redeeming value whatsoever).

And consumer protections are something that can be added to crypto, but out of necessity they involve trusting some entity to arbitrate when protection is required. Cryptocurrency is designed to be trustless, so any protections need to be added on top, like the escrow someone else talked about.

The worst thing that ever happened to crypto was for it’s price to balloon. Because improving all those other aspects that make it usable as a currency took a back seat to “wen moon?”. OG Bitcoin explicitly rejects improving its energy footprint and fee structure because it sees itself as a Store of Value.

He lies to literally everyone but still people regard him high

So, politics is his next move, then?

It’s simply because they are not paying attention. And I don’t mean that as a put-down, I simply mean that Trump has their attention, not the broader GOP, nor anything about the government. They don’t care about the GOP Agenda, beyond a few of Trump’s sound bites. Many of them have an inherent distrust of politicians yet trust Donald Trump completely.

The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.

There is nothing wrong with making a profit. People have to be paid, after all, and that includes the ownership who put the money at risk in the operation to begin with. The problem is when making a profit becomes the only motive.

Every company is established with the purpose of offering a product or performing a service that makes their customers’ better or simpler. If is successful, it grows from nothing to something in a relatively short period of time. Then it gets the attention of the Investor Class, who shovels money into it with the expectation that it will sustain that growth. Now, the focus is on Building Shareholder Value, and the customer is seen as a necessary evil toward that goal.

The worst thing that ever happened was when we decided that public corporations had a duty to maximize shareholder value above everything else. It renders all those mission and vision statements irrelevant. No matter how much the CEO says the firm’s goal is to make the world a better place through selling stuff, we all know it’s a lie. Their goal is to enrich tthemselves, at our expense.

It truly is SOL

Socket, a security firm that helps detect supply-chain attacks, said the back door is “believed to be the result of a social engineering/phishing attack targeting maintainers of the official Web3.js open source library maintained by Solana.”

That’s super interesting. From the sound of it, the Maintainers must have been targeted to force a malicious Pull Request to be accepted. That article showed some of the code from the commit. I am not a Solana developer but understood enough to know what it was doing and that no maintainer should have approved it willingly.

I wonder if those maintainers will end up having any liability for the hack.

The sad part is that the brunt of this will likely be borne by nationals from countries that the US President has officially deemed “shithole countries”. Or, in other words, not white. You only have to look at his “Muslim ban” from last time, and know that he will expand it, to see how bad things are gonna get.

You may think you have some protection if you are a permanent resident. And you may have some protection if you are in a state that will not assist the Federal government in rounding people up. But you will continue to deal with the hassle every time you enter or leave the country. Which state you live in doesn’t matter at the border (and the airports are technically borders).

In my uninformed opinion, if you decide to stay, you shouldn’t make any plans to leave the country, because you will never really know if your authorization to stay in the country will be arbitrarily denied while you are away. It is probably better to just plan that the next time you leave the country, it will be for the foreseeable future. We will, unfortunately, not be very hospitable to you for the next 4 years (and maybe longer). Unless you are white. Which is all sorts of wrong. But the way it is these days.

System 7 Ready!

Yes, the VP position can remain vacant indefinitely, or at least until the end of a term when another VP can be elected through the normal process. The only thing that is lost is the tiebreaking vote. Well, and the fact that if the President has a colonoscopy and is put under sedation nobody is available to be acting President. I don’t think the House Speaker is able to take that job for just a few hours like the Vice President can.

Kamala Harris was actually Acting President for 85 minutes in 2021, and probably at least once after that.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/19/politics/kamala-harris-presidential-power/index.html

(nope, she did it just that once. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_President_of_the_United_States )

It has never happened before, so we don’t really know. What I think would happen is that Vance would just get immediately sworn in as the President on Jan 20 if God exercises His Ultimate Veto on Trump’s second term.

But the Presidential Succession Act only covers vacancies for the Presidency. Once the office of the President is filled again, nothing else happens. It’s not like everyone else “moves up” a slot. Mike Johnson would probably see the VP position as a demotion honestly.

The Office of the VP would remain vacant until President Vance nominates a candidate, and then it must be approved by both houses of Congress in order for the position to be filled.

How is Mint internationally?