The article was quite clear that they were told by a particular someone in the “Republican Establishment”, which right now is a subsidiary of Trump.

No, they don’t need to be told to hold the partisan line, but I wouldn’t put it past Trump (or even Stephen Miller) to treat them like employees. Which must be a bit humiliating for a Member of Congress…

The actual formula is a bit complicated, but it boils down to a few key points:

• you “pay into” the system at a fixed tax rate relative to your income, subject to a maximum cap after which you do not get taxed anymore.
• in order to be eligible for benefits, you need to have 10 years of some amount of income. I think the threshold for that is extremely low, something like $8k/year.
• when you retire, your income from your 35 highest earning years are sort-of-averaged together, subject to that cap I mentioned, to determine a monthly payment.
• But, that value assumes you retire and take payments at 67. Take payments early, and you get less per month. Take payments later, and you get more.
• Of course, none of this is guaranteed for future retirees. Current payments from workers go towards payments to current retirees, with the excess either saved for later or not due to the whims of the current administration. If there is ever not enough money to make payments, everyone likely takes that haircut.

Instructed by whom, exactly? The article doesn’t say. It just says “a source in the Republican establishment”. That could be anyone.

My money is on Stephen Miller. It sounds like a thing he would say…

AI agents are not legal entities with the right to own or inherit property.

Maybe not yet. But we’ve decided that corporations are people already. Maybe he’s incorporated his AI girlfriend somewhere…

It’s the opening act for the Bad Bunny concert

Bold of you to assume they view immigrants as human…

It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. Michael Dell did it, after all, but he did it in a different time.

And Dell is actually a good case study for all this. It went public rather quickly after it started growing, but grew a bit stagnant by the 2000’s. So much so that 2013, Michael Dell orchestrated a leveraged buyout of his own company (with the help of venture capital) to make it private again. He pretty much admitted that the changes he wanted to make to the company would be impossible while it was still public. It stayed private for a while, but went public again as part of some deal made after it acquired the parent company of VMware.

Another notable thing is that Carl Ichan owned a large chunk of Dell, both in its first public incarnation and in its private incarnation. When Dell tried to take it private, Ichan challenged the plan, and thought about putting in his own bid, only to back off when he decided it wasn’t worth the effort to revive the company. Still, he was publicly against Dell’s buyout plan but was outvoted by other shareholders. Yet, he must have still held a part of the private company, because Ichan also protested it’s second plan to go public, and sued to force Dell to increase its terms to the private holders.

Michael Dell is no saint, but I conclude that he realized that the company meant more than a spreadsheet, and needed a purpose to justify its existence. He also realized that in order to sustain a business over the long term, having to constantly sustain quarterly numbers may be counterproductive. I think Carl Ichan, on the other hand, only cares about Number Go Up, and doesn’t care at all about how the company makes that happen. Over the long term, that will never be sustainable, but fuck you all, he got his bag already.

As I recall, though, the Harris campaign raised a shitton of money. What good did it all do? A huge war chest is no guarantee of anything.

Getting out votes always beats fundraising. If you can vote in the US, don’t let anything stop you. (Particularly doomers on Lemmy, hah!) If you have a friend who can’t get to the polls, help them.

"The DHS Inspector General first realized this when he overheard Noem refer to him several times as ‘Cricket’. "

~(not a real quote)~

This is yet another thing I blame on American Business sacrificing itself on the altar of Shareholder Value. It’s no longer acceptable for a public business to simply make a profit. It has to grow that profit, every quarter, without fail.

So, simply having a good consumer product division that makes money won’t be enough. At some point some executive will decide that he can’t possibly get his bonus if that’s all they do, and decide they need to blow it all up to chase larger profits elsewhere.

Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware. They still need components, though, so will have to navigate getting that from public companies who won’t return their calls. And even once they are successful, the first thing they will do is cash out and go public, and the cycle starts again.

That’s the rub: that whole time everyone thought he was a business titan? He wasn’t really rich at all. Not only are real estate ventures heavily leverages to begin with, but he also ran his businesses into the ground by grifting money out of them. When the E. Jean Carroll verdict came in, there was a very real chance he would not have been able to meet it without significant pain.

However, since then, he found his Crypto religion, and then once he won the Presidency the second time, he has been inviting right foreign interests to bribe him through Crypto. So he is actually rich now, based solely on selling influence via meme tokens.

He literally faked it until he made it. And needed two tries to get it right. No wonder he also needs to grift his name into existing things.

You just don’t understand, what choice did they have? The only other choice was a lady!

They should send their AI notetakers.

Or better yet, attend with a bot that Livestreams it publicly.

Um Ackshually, he doesn’t seem to be taking in big $, at least according to his financial disclosures (PDF). Most recent estimates of his net worth are in the $7 million range, but that also counts his house in Park Slope, which is probably worth over $3mil now but I doubt he paid that. And a bunch more is in his retirement account. He’s not struggling by any means, but he doesn’t have “Fuck You” money like Elon has.

There are a lot of memes going around about how rich some of these politicians are but they are mostly fake

It’s too bad Penn only has 21 tracks, I could see them naming Track 34 for him

Republicans have decided they don’t care if the President overstep his authority anymore, as long as it hurts people they hate. A category which includes Palestinians, I guess.

I guess cornering the market in Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice futures will be yet another anachronism, like taping a show or dialing a phone

Sorry, NYC doesn’t get to disown him. He grew up in Queens, went to Molloy for HS, and got his undergraduate degree at Fordham.

Doubtful. Cuomo couldn’t even win in his hometown. He’s toast.

He might decide to run, though, and live off campaign funds for a year or two, then decide he is “throwing his support” to Newsom right before Super Tuesday, just to make a Newsom nomination inevitable.

That’s the way these Democratic “primaries” work: start out with several establishment candidates to prevent any one alternative candidate from breaking out. But all of those establishment candidates secretly back the Next One Up, and gradually concede during the first few weeks of the primary so that the establishment candidate gets all the backing.

The only time Democrats didn’t do it this way was 2008, when Obama beat out Clinton. Democrats want to ensure a more qualified and charismatic candidate never beats out the establishment choice again!