Community rating, charging the same premium across a cohort, is intended to prevent this sort of thing. Unregulated health insurance markets will use whatever data they can to underwrite potential policy holders, and try to isolate uninsurable individuals and either charge them unaffordable rates or deny them coverage. This is much more socially acceptable in other insurance contexts, such as an uninsurable risk for car insurance being unable to get coverage (due to many collisions or drunk driving convictions or whatever) and thus being unable to drive legally is acceptable. In the case of being unable to health coverage due to prior illness, the consequence can easily be death.
So when there is the talk about repealing Obamacare or single payer or free market maximalism for health insurance, this is very much what is at stake. Unregulated private insurers maximize their profit by isolating high risk individuals and either pricing them in or kicking them off the rolls. The money and resources spent on these deep dives are wasteful and detrimental from the standpoint of society as a whole, but totally rational from the standpoint of the individual insurers because those downsides can be offloaded onto someone else.
That distinction is why Clinton's history with the Starr investigation and the Jones case is important on top of the background with Nixon. Starr subpoenaed Clinton over testimony, and the big pitfalls that Clinton ran into that led to his impeachment were over his testimony. The Jones case was civil as opposed to criminal, sure, and Clinton made a deal for voluntary testimony, but you add those pieces together and it paints a pretty unconvincing picture that Trump could refuse a subpoena for testimony. Of course he still has the Fifth Amendment, despite how politically perilous invoking that might be.
This is also what I was getting at a bit with why Kavanaugh being on SCOTUS and him being a supporter of presidential immunity is important in areas of the law that aren't completely settled. If the previous cases didn't specifically cover subpoenas for testimony in federal criminal cases, but ruled against the president in slightly different contexts, then he could craft a ruling justifying Trump's position that he doesn't have to testify without explicitly overruling the precedent in those cases. He could refuse the spirit of rulings like United States v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones without overturning them outright, which is a lower bar to clear.
You are making pretty much the same arguments Nixon's lawyer made in United States v. Nixon, that the only thing that the president had to answer to is impeachment proceedings and that the courts should not interfere with internal matters of the executive branch:
The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.
That didn't work. It was ruled 8-0 that he had to turn over the tapes to the special prosecutor (who was within the executive branch) and the federal district court. And the ruling granted limited executive privilege, but not as protection against criminal inquiry.
There's a reason why Kavanaugh was primarily arguing for presidential immunity in 2009 as policy matter to be taken up congress: because it didn't exist in the law as it was. Your position is not novel, it has been tried and failed, and Nixon quite clearly showed that impeachment was a more effective and proper check on Presidential criminality when aided by more than just Article I powers. Even Trey Gowdy, a fairly strong loyalist to Trump and the Republicans in the House of Representatives, said as roughly as much in April:
"I can't say what's in the universe of witnesses we have not talked to," he continued. "And I have always maintained I am awaiting the Mueller investigation. They get to use a grand jury. They have investigative tools that we don't have."
"Executive branch investigations are just better than congressional ones. So we found no evidence of collusion. Whether or not it exists or not, I can't speak to, because I haven't interviewed the full panoply of witnesses."
Please don't be obtuse. Nixon resigned because he was about to be impeached and convicted, and he knew it. The articles of impeachment passed out of the judiciary committee with clear majorities, in a couple of weeks he was gone.
If Nixon was protected from criminal investigation, and if United States v. Nixon wasn't a unanimous ruling against Nixon's demands for unrestricted Presidential immunity from the judicial process but instead went the other way as Kavanaugh would prefer, then Nixon would have been in a far safer position to defend against his removal.
If a president is immune from investigation and scrutiny, then it is far more difficult for anyone to contain a criminal president, impeachment is an impotent check if must be carried out in the dark. And well, if what you really want is an unconstrained criminal president (such as Nixon was at his very worst), then I have no patience for you.
The overwhelming problem was with the advocacy for protection from criminal investigations. If a president is impeachable for criminal activity, then how would a reasonable assessment as to whether those crimes occurred unless an investigation took place? If Nixon was held to that low standard, then he likely wouldn't have been impeached, because he could have refused the subpoena for the tapes that incriminated him.
I can see a reasonable argument to be made that a president can't be indicted by federal prosecutors prior to impeachment (on different grounds however), but to make him immune from processes to determine whether he committed wrongdoing is to put him above the law. And the founders were quite clear on their opinions on chief executives who were above the law (spoiler: they were not fans).
This has been making the rounds almost immediately after the announcement, though I haven't seen it here, is a Minnesota Law Review article written by Kavanaugh in 2009. In it he argues that the President should be protected from criminal investigations and prosecutions in addition to civil litigation. Here are some of the key exerts:
Congress should consider doing the same, moreover, with
respect to criminal investigations and prosecutions of the President.
In particular, Congress might consider a law exempting
a President—while in office—from criminal prosecution and investigation, including from questioning by criminal prosecutors or defense counsel. Criminal investigations targeted at or revolving around a President are inevitably politicized by both
their supporters and critics. As I have written before, “no Attorney General or special counsel
will have the necessary credibility to avoid the inevitable charges that he is politically motivated—whether in favor of the President or against him, depending on the individual leading the investigation and its
results.”
31 The indictment and trial of a sitting President, moreover, would cripple the federal government, rendering it unable to function with credibility in either the international or domestic arenas. Such an outcome would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.
Even the lesser burdens of a criminal investigation—
including preparing for questioning by criminal investigators—
are time-consuming and distracting. Like civil suits, criminal
investigations take the President’s focus away from his or her
responsibilities to the people. And a President who is concerned
about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably
going to do a worse job as President.
This seems like it is at the central concern for why Trump chose Kavanaugh in particular, and they haven't denied that they considered Kavanaugh's opinion that the President should be protected from legal inquiry of various kinds. The policy issues around him, including net neutrality, may serve to polarize opinion and political support and opposition, but this seems to be a major overriding issue beyond those given the reality that Trump is the subject of a federal criminal investigation by the special prosecutor, and the questions as to his powers to resist or even eliminate the probe are ripening.
For example, the question as to whether Trump can refuse to answer a subpoena have been regularly raised, including by his own lawyers, which seemed like they would be settled law given that Nixon was forced to relinquish his incriminating tapes under a subpoena. However, a different SCOTUS could overturn such precedent if they so fancy, they have done so before (including recently) despite the invocation of principles such as stare decisis. This is also why the reply that this law review article is advocating congressional action to protect the president is not as convincing as it may seem, since it taking the standpoint of what should be done in response to the law as it existed. When in the position of a justice of the supreme court with a little bit of the so called "judicial activism", the law could be revised if Kavanaugh could find enough like minded fellows to go along with him.
Or more likely, they could make precedent in the unexplored and unsettled areas of law that have a maximalist view of presidential powers, which seems likely given Kavanaugh's background. Ironic given Kavanaugh's role in the Starr investigation and report that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
With these valuations of things based on stock prices, remember that the listed prices are based on what it last traded for, or sometimes what the offers are for buying or selling some are at the moment (bid and ask). But if push came to shove, and he wanted to realize the value of that stock and sell a bunch of it to get cash, the price he'd get would go down, how much depending upon liquidity and how deep or shallow the demand for the asset was.
So the composition of their holdings really matters to tell how much their wealth really means if they actually want to do something with it or are faced with downward pressure. $10 billion in Tesla or Facebook stock is a lot more precarious than $10 billion in cash or well diversified holdings, even though the topline number is the same.
Adding a bunch of achievements that aren't gimmes in either direction seems like it would help narrow the possibilities a lot, and more opportunities to have primes show up to simplify things. Presumably they just used the lowest number that is consistent with the ratios and common denominators, since if you have enough achievements with effective noise around the number of people who achieved it then that cuts down on the chance that the higher harmonics are the real values.
Or they could have done a short term time lapse, and used the changes in numbers over period of time with a more controlled number of sales and achievements gained to try to sift out the results with a small longitudinal dataset. That seems like you could do some sort of anti-aliasing like effect to filter out or at least mitigate the trouble cases.
At this point, I basically assume that everyone who brings up the term "SJW" unprompted and unironically is a shithead.
I wonder how good my odds are on that guess. Because it seems like an obvious path to troll or display a defensiveness towards socially undesirable behavior. I don't see how this sense of victimhood could more likely than not be the result of a healthy rational thought process.
There's quite a bit of asymmetry in this, in multiple ways. In raw dollar value terms, the downside risk for Tesla is a lot bigger, and if they defame him they could be on the hook for a whole lot more money than Tesla could ever hope to win in a lawsuit, for no more complicated reason than he would go bankrupt over far smaller sums of money than Tesla would. Tesla's reputation, for good or ill, also has a bigger stake than the reputation of the ex-employee, and if they abuse the legal system to slander a genuine whistle-blower then that will have much more wide ranging effects.
Conversely, if Tesla is trying to break this guy and either leave him destitute or in a prison cell, then he has everything to lose, even if "everything" is a smaller number from a context free standpoint. And he is almost surely going to be outmatched in available resources to handle drawn out litigation and the associated legal fees.
Since they are both making pretty strong claims, I'd recommend to wait and see what the evidence is, rather than have a kneejerk reaction siding with one or the other. If one or both of them are full of shit, in the parlance of our times, then they have quite a bit to lose in the legal process and its aftermath.
Musk is saying himself that they don't have the full picture, so I don't see what would be controversial about that. The possibility that he is saying or speculating too much has already been raised, that he may be going too far out on the limb to insinuate that there may outside actors involved in this. If true, that could potentially be a criminal conspiracy.
He hasn't shown the evidence he has yet, and not publicly airing evidence in the investigation phase prior to the actual trial phase is normal, though. So maybe he's full of hot air, or maybe not, hard to say when we can't see his cards yet. The evidence will get out this if goes through the trial process instead of being settled, the defense will get their hands on it in discovery and Tesla will have to use the evidence to prove that they are owed money for damages and how much.
Tesla's complaint says that he wrote software that hacked Tesla's manufacturing operating system in addition to the data exfiltration. So, maybe that was sabotage? Maybe not?
We'll have to wait until they provide more evidence as to what happened, though they might not do that immediately if they are still trying to figure out what happened, especially if law enforcement is involved. Tesla will have to put up or shut up in the discovery process of the law suit if they are going to press that, though.
The big one Sessions referenced was Romans 13:1-7, which is a New Testament Pauline epistle. It argues for submitting to governing authorities.
Generally, if government officials are using that passage to defend themselves or justify their actions they tend to be in a bad way. It was used as one of the scriptural bases for the Divine Right of Kings, opposition to the American Revolution, and by pro-slavery forces to justify adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. More recently it has been used as a support by the apartheid government of South Africa.
When Romans 13:1-7 is cited while ignoring the next couple of passages (Romans 13:8-10) it's pretty obvious that it is being used for dubious ends, as that goes:
8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,”and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
I'm not a biblical scholar, nor am I a well-versed adherent to the Pauline epistles, but I do have a hard time seeing any love in this.
Uh, you do realize that the "Christian fundies" have been tracking abortion doctors already, right? Here's a story about them using license plate tracking. And there have already been multiple assassination attempts (and successful assassinations) on abortion doctors previously, so the violent innuendo has already been breached.
I'm not going to speak to the efficacy or wisdom of doxxing ICE agents, but you seem to be behind the times on the willingness and capability of the radical right wing to resort to political violence. It's going to get extremely ugly very quickly if both sides start regularly using violence for political ends.
In practice, the children can be separated indefinitely (possibly permanently), since there is poor tracking of the parents and minors, with multiple poorly communicating government agencies involved. At least one case has had a mother deported separately from her son. Can you say with any certainty that a parent deported separately to Guatemala will be reunited with a child that was still detained by the US federal government within 20 days?
To pile injury upon injury, Border Patrol is making it difficult for asylum seekers to declare themselves in ports, turning them away from legal entry. (I'm not 100% on the intercept as a source, here is their story and description of the practice). As an unfliching proponent of adherence to the law, an honest appraisal of this behavior by the border control arms of the US government may induce discomfort or cognitive dissonance, if a capability for dissonance remains present.
Breitbart is a proponent of this sort of behavior, and them promoting a line of propaganda to reinforce denial of the true consequences of their goals is unfortunately expected. Denial is a key component of atrocity. Holocaust denial is not an isolated phenomena, denial goes hand and hand with ethnic cleansing and genocidal movements in general. It may seem hyperbolic to discuss this particular issue using such terminology, but if you read through the warning signs and look to the dehumanizing rhetoric being used now, such as Trump saying these migrants are trying to "infest" us, you might understand why many, myself included, are starting to freak out.
Not that surprising if you take it from the standpoint of the idiom "the guilty dog barks the loudest". If he had a guilty conscience he could understandably react by overcompensating in attacking others reflecting that, whether or not he is consciously trying to divert attention from his own guilt. He wouldn't be the first person to do that.
High up front capital costs have been a primary problem for nuclear power generation for most of its existence. The Washington Public Power Supply System lead to a massive multibillion dollar municipal bond default in the 1980s.
It takes a lot of time and money to build traditional nuclear power plants, so if the financial and political system shifts underneath a potential plant builder then they can go bust with a partially built plant and nothing to show for it. The financial risk is huge and has already been painfully realized in the past.
I won't call you a sock puppet for that, but I do think it is a serious oversimplification of the history. Prior to being conquered by Russia, Crimea was held by the Crimean Khanate, which had Crimean Tatars as the dominant ethnic group. While Crimea was within the Russian empire and subsequently the USSR, the Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed, many fleeing to the Ottoman empire earlier on and eventually the entire population was exiled, mainly to central Asia, by Stalin in 1944. So when you talk about the indigenous population being "Russian", you mean the indigenous population that replaced the previous indigenous population that was wiped out or kicked out by the former empires.
Justifying modern annexation and conquest based on claims of fallen empires is a pretty dangerous game in general, though. One of primary ancestors of modern Russia was Kievan Rus, centered in modern day Ukraine, and many modern Eastern European countries were at some point under control of either the Russian empire or the USSR. Letting Putin reclaim all that territory based on those old claims would be a great way to start WWIII, this time with nuclear war in Europe. Which gives you brief glance as to why a weak and distracted US and Western Europe and sundering our alliances is in Putin's interest.
How is it stale if he is running point for the Russians just this week? He's acting in their geopolitical interests now, and is quite open about it. The lingering issues haven't been resolved yet (though Manafort is being buried under a mountain of indictments), and Trump piling on more and more new issues. I have a hard time seeing how the damage won't be extremely long lasting and reshape the post Cold-war political order, well past however long the Trump presidency lasts.
That's an...interesting take on the G-7 summit. Perhaps you missed (or are trying to miss) Trump's open treachery on lobbying to get Russia brought back into the G-8. The news shows don't want to use that word, treachery, and have just been calling it highly unusual and risky and whatnot, or with Sen Sasse calling it weak.
But there's plenty enough there to see in this one instance that he is betraying the interests of our country right then and there; the G-8 kicked out Russia for invading and annexing Crimea, and Trump is ignoring that and trying to reward Russia most likely for their aid in getting him elected. I guess Russian information and psychological warfare against the US is ok if it helps Trump, huh? Add in his pretty explicit attempt to start a trade war and sandbag on the other diplomatic measures with our allies, he seems pretty hellbent on tearing apart the post WWII western alliances.
If Trump's not a puppet of Putin, then it is getting to the point that is pretty hard to see that distinction, and maybe doesn't even matter anymore. He's giving Putin precisely what Putin wants: the US and our alliances divided, weak, and focused internally.
The summit only exists because of Trump because he is the only one reckless enough to agree to it. This is what the North Korea's want, to be at the big boy's table, a respected and legitimate nuclear power, but what does it give us? Other presidents could have easily done if they wanted to, if they thought it would have accomplished anything for us.
I know we are in a 1984 post truth age and have always been at war with Eurasia, but the relationship with North Korea has always fluctuated up and down because they are duplicitous and skilled at using extortion to extract concessions. Trump's policy towards North Korea has been similarly schizophrenic, talking about "little Rocket man" and threatening with nuclear war, now switching back and forth to the nice nice, but what makes you think that if this doesn't provide the magic results that only those in the cult of personality seem to believe will occur that we won't go back to "fire and fury" on failure. John Bolton seems to have been brought in explicitly for the purpose of fire and fury.
The gratuitous f-bombs and hostility about posters on this subject suggest to me that the parent may just be a troll and treating it in good faith is a foolish endeavor, but if this what represents a widespread consensus of thought then we are in serious trouble.
Sort of sad that reckless braggadocio is what passes for "insightful" nowadays, and I really don't get why people are conned into thinking that large and intractable security problems with set and firm interests can be resolved with the swagger of a used car salesman who was born into a real estate empire.
If you focus on Kim Jong-Un, his interests are pretty straightforward even if his methods and rule are extreme. He wants to stay alive and stay in power, and balance the internal threats from a horribly subjugated population and potentially ambitions rivals in the military and his family with the external threats of the US, South Korea, Japan, and yes, even China. So what sort of uninformed bullshit will baffle Kim into losing grip on his primary interests and capitulating? And why in the world would he believe the promises of the highest profile pathological liar in the world, the one who just reneged on a similar sort of deal with Iranians, proving that the US very much is not a reliable dealmaker right now.
And you need the nuclear weapons experts to prove that any program to dismantle the weapons program works, as if you walk in blind on the basic scientific and engineering details of the nuclear programs then you will end up blind as to the effectiveness of any disarmament measures. Not really hard for the North Koreans to cheat (which they've done before) if you don't even have the basic competence and mechanisms to verify compliance with a potential disarmament pledge.
Perhaps you don't what to have everyone working on the nitty gritty details coming in and chatting it up with Kim in the summit, but that brings forth the lie to how this summit is supposed to be a magical way to solve the problem. Normally these high profile summits with leaders just confirm the lower level detailed negotiations and diplomacy that lead up to them and provide a bunch of nice photo ops, and last I checked the prep work to actually draft out then cement a deal has not been done yet, likely intentionally.
I could get more sardonic and sarcastic, but if you've glanced at least a bit at Trump's business history like I have then you should probably be even more pessimistic about relying on the mythological art of the deal. The multiple bankruptcies are just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the precise sort of foolishness that lead to short sellers losing $1 billion in this article. In the long term, Tesla could be a guaranteed loser headed to liquidation and still you could go completely broke shorting Tesla stock, because in between the price could jump way higher before plummeting to zero. You go on margin and put yourself on hook for the upswings, and if you don't have enough money and there isn't enough stock available for sale at a price you can afford to cover then you go bust.
See the concept of a short squeeze. This is probably why the stock price is so high and even overvalued, the short sellers are attracted like moths to a flame and then get incinerated by a squeeze pushing the price even higher.
You can look at Tesla's financials and see for yourself that yes, they are lousy. But I still wouldn't short the stock if I had a million dollars and a firm conviction that the price will eventually go down.
Slashdot Mirror
Community rating, charging the same premium across a cohort, is intended to prevent this sort of thing. Unregulated health insurance markets will use whatever data they can to underwrite potential policy holders, and try to isolate uninsurable individuals and either charge them unaffordable rates or deny them coverage. This is much more socially acceptable in other insurance contexts, such as an uninsurable risk for car insurance being unable to get coverage (due to many collisions or drunk driving convictions or whatever) and thus being unable to drive legally is acceptable. In the case of being unable to health coverage due to prior illness, the consequence can easily be death.
So when there is the talk about repealing Obamacare or single payer or free market maximalism for health insurance, this is very much what is at stake. Unregulated private insurers maximize their profit by isolating high risk individuals and either pricing them in or kicking them off the rolls. The money and resources spent on these deep dives are wasteful and detrimental from the standpoint of society as a whole, but totally rational from the standpoint of the individual insurers because those downsides can be offloaded onto someone else.
That distinction is why Clinton's history with the Starr investigation and the Jones case is important on top of the background with Nixon. Starr subpoenaed Clinton over testimony, and the big pitfalls that Clinton ran into that led to his impeachment were over his testimony. The Jones case was civil as opposed to criminal, sure, and Clinton made a deal for voluntary testimony, but you add those pieces together and it paints a pretty unconvincing picture that Trump could refuse a subpoena for testimony. Of course he still has the Fifth Amendment, despite how politically perilous invoking that might be.
This is also what I was getting at a bit with why Kavanaugh being on SCOTUS and him being a supporter of presidential immunity is important in areas of the law that aren't completely settled. If the previous cases didn't specifically cover subpoenas for testimony in federal criminal cases, but ruled against the president in slightly different contexts, then he could craft a ruling justifying Trump's position that he doesn't have to testify without explicitly overruling the precedent in those cases. He could refuse the spirit of rulings like United States v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones without overturning them outright, which is a lower bar to clear.
The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.
That didn't work. It was ruled 8-0 that he had to turn over the tapes to the special prosecutor (who was within the executive branch) and the federal district court. And the ruling granted limited executive privilege, but not as protection against criminal inquiry.
There's a reason why Kavanaugh was primarily arguing for presidential immunity in 2009 as policy matter to be taken up congress: because it didn't exist in the law as it was. Your position is not novel, it has been tried and failed, and Nixon quite clearly showed that impeachment was a more effective and proper check on Presidential criminality when aided by more than just Article I powers. Even Trey Gowdy, a fairly strong loyalist to Trump and the Republicans in the House of Representatives, said as roughly as much in April:
"I can't say what's in the universe of witnesses we have not talked to," he continued. "And I have always maintained I am awaiting the Mueller investigation. They get to use a grand jury. They have investigative tools that we don't have."
"Executive branch investigations are just better than congressional ones. So we found no evidence of collusion. Whether or not it exists or not, I can't speak to, because I haven't interviewed the full panoply of witnesses."
Please don't be obtuse. Nixon resigned because he was about to be impeached and convicted, and he knew it. The articles of impeachment passed out of the judiciary committee with clear majorities, in a couple of weeks he was gone.
If Nixon was protected from criminal investigation, and if United States v. Nixon wasn't a unanimous ruling against Nixon's demands for unrestricted Presidential immunity from the judicial process but instead went the other way as Kavanaugh would prefer, then Nixon would have been in a far safer position to defend against his removal.
If a president is immune from investigation and scrutiny, then it is far more difficult for anyone to contain a criminal president, impeachment is an impotent check if must be carried out in the dark. And well, if what you really want is an unconstrained criminal president (such as Nixon was at his very worst), then I have no patience for you.
The overwhelming problem was with the advocacy for protection from criminal investigations. If a president is impeachable for criminal activity, then how would a reasonable assessment as to whether those crimes occurred unless an investigation took place? If Nixon was held to that low standard, then he likely wouldn't have been impeached, because he could have refused the subpoena for the tapes that incriminated him.
I can see a reasonable argument to be made that a president can't be indicted by federal prosecutors prior to impeachment (on different grounds however), but to make him immune from processes to determine whether he committed wrongdoing is to put him above the law. And the founders were quite clear on their opinions on chief executives who were above the law (spoiler: they were not fans).
This seems like it is at the central concern for why Trump chose Kavanaugh in particular, and they haven't denied that they considered Kavanaugh's opinion that the President should be protected from legal inquiry of various kinds. The policy issues around him, including net neutrality, may serve to polarize opinion and political support and opposition, but this seems to be a major overriding issue beyond those given the reality that Trump is the subject of a federal criminal investigation by the special prosecutor, and the questions as to his powers to resist or even eliminate the probe are ripening.
For example, the question as to whether Trump can refuse to answer a subpoena have been regularly raised, including by his own lawyers, which seemed like they would be settled law given that Nixon was forced to relinquish his incriminating tapes under a subpoena. However, a different SCOTUS could overturn such precedent if they so fancy, they have done so before (including recently) despite the invocation of principles such as stare decisis. This is also why the reply that this law review article is advocating congressional action to protect the president is not as convincing as it may seem, since it taking the standpoint of what should be done in response to the law as it existed. When in the position of a justice of the supreme court with a little bit of the so called "judicial activism", the law could be revised if Kavanaugh could find enough like minded fellows to go along with him.
Or more likely, they could make precedent in the unexplored and unsettled areas of law that have a maximalist view of presidential powers, which seems likely given Kavanaugh's background. Ironic given Kavanaugh's role in the Starr investigation and report that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
It's not too hard to see what she was doing: trolling. Pretty plain and straightforward.
Don't feed the trolls.
With these valuations of things based on stock prices, remember that the listed prices are based on what it last traded for, or sometimes what the offers are for buying or selling some are at the moment (bid and ask). But if push came to shove, and he wanted to realize the value of that stock and sell a bunch of it to get cash, the price he'd get would go down, how much depending upon liquidity and how deep or shallow the demand for the asset was.
So the composition of their holdings really matters to tell how much their wealth really means if they actually want to do something with it or are faced with downward pressure. $10 billion in Tesla or Facebook stock is a lot more precarious than $10 billion in cash or well diversified holdings, even though the topline number is the same.
Adding a bunch of achievements that aren't gimmes in either direction seems like it would help narrow the possibilities a lot, and more opportunities to have primes show up to simplify things. Presumably they just used the lowest number that is consistent with the ratios and common denominators, since if you have enough achievements with effective noise around the number of people who achieved it then that cuts down on the chance that the higher harmonics are the real values.
Or they could have done a short term time lapse, and used the changes in numbers over period of time with a more controlled number of sales and achievements gained to try to sift out the results with a small longitudinal dataset. That seems like you could do some sort of anti-aliasing like effect to filter out or at least mitigate the trouble cases.
At this point, I basically assume that everyone who brings up the term "SJW" unprompted and unironically is a shithead.
I wonder how good my odds are on that guess. Because it seems like an obvious path to troll or display a defensiveness towards socially undesirable behavior. I don't see how this sense of victimhood could more likely than not be the result of a healthy rational thought process.
There's quite a bit of asymmetry in this, in multiple ways. In raw dollar value terms, the downside risk for Tesla is a lot bigger, and if they defame him they could be on the hook for a whole lot more money than Tesla could ever hope to win in a lawsuit, for no more complicated reason than he would go bankrupt over far smaller sums of money than Tesla would. Tesla's reputation, for good or ill, also has a bigger stake than the reputation of the ex-employee, and if they abuse the legal system to slander a genuine whistle-blower then that will have much more wide ranging effects.
Conversely, if Tesla is trying to break this guy and either leave him destitute or in a prison cell, then he has everything to lose, even if "everything" is a smaller number from a context free standpoint. And he is almost surely going to be outmatched in available resources to handle drawn out litigation and the associated legal fees.
Since they are both making pretty strong claims, I'd recommend to wait and see what the evidence is, rather than have a kneejerk reaction siding with one or the other. If one or both of them are full of shit, in the parlance of our times, then they have quite a bit to lose in the legal process and its aftermath.
Musk is saying himself that they don't have the full picture, so I don't see what would be controversial about that. The possibility that he is saying or speculating too much has already been raised, that he may be going too far out on the limb to insinuate that there may outside actors involved in this. If true, that could potentially be a criminal conspiracy.
He hasn't shown the evidence he has yet, and not publicly airing evidence in the investigation phase prior to the actual trial phase is normal, though. So maybe he's full of hot air, or maybe not, hard to say when we can't see his cards yet. The evidence will get out this if goes through the trial process instead of being settled, the defense will get their hands on it in discovery and Tesla will have to use the evidence to prove that they are owed money for damages and how much.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. --Joseph Heller
Tesla's complaint says that he wrote software that hacked Tesla's manufacturing operating system in addition to the data exfiltration. So, maybe that was sabotage? Maybe not?
We'll have to wait until they provide more evidence as to what happened, though they might not do that immediately if they are still trying to figure out what happened, especially if law enforcement is involved. Tesla will have to put up or shut up in the discovery process of the law suit if they are going to press that, though.
Generally, if government officials are using that passage to defend themselves or justify their actions they tend to be in a bad way. It was used as one of the scriptural bases for the Divine Right of Kings, opposition to the American Revolution, and by pro-slavery forces to justify adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. More recently it has been used as a support by the apartheid government of South Africa.
When Romans 13:1-7 is cited while ignoring the next couple of passages (Romans 13:8-10) it's pretty obvious that it is being used for dubious ends, as that goes:
I'm not a biblical scholar, nor am I a well-versed adherent to the Pauline epistles, but I do have a hard time seeing any love in this.
Uh, you do realize that the "Christian fundies" have been tracking abortion doctors already, right? Here's a story about them using license plate tracking. And there have already been multiple assassination attempts (and successful assassinations) on abortion doctors previously, so the violent innuendo has already been breached.
I'm not going to speak to the efficacy or wisdom of doxxing ICE agents, but you seem to be behind the times on the willingness and capability of the radical right wing to resort to political violence. It's going to get extremely ugly very quickly if both sides start regularly using violence for political ends.
To rebut the tyrant's advocate, I'll present the following:
No, family separation and minor detention is not required by law.
In practice, the children can be separated indefinitely (possibly permanently), since there is poor tracking of the parents and minors, with multiple poorly communicating government agencies involved. At least one case has had a mother deported separately from her son. Can you say with any certainty that a parent deported separately to Guatemala will be reunited with a child that was still detained by the US federal government within 20 days?
To pile injury upon injury, Border Patrol is making it difficult for asylum seekers to declare themselves in ports, turning them away from legal entry. (I'm not 100% on the intercept as a source, here is their story and description of the practice). As an unfliching proponent of adherence to the law, an honest appraisal of this behavior by the border control arms of the US government may induce discomfort or cognitive dissonance, if a capability for dissonance remains present.
Breitbart is a proponent of this sort of behavior, and them promoting a line of propaganda to reinforce denial of the true consequences of their goals is unfortunately expected. Denial is a key component of atrocity. Holocaust denial is not an isolated phenomena, denial goes hand and hand with ethnic cleansing and genocidal movements in general. It may seem hyperbolic to discuss this particular issue using such terminology, but if you read through the warning signs and look to the dehumanizing rhetoric being used now, such as Trump saying these migrants are trying to "infest" us, you might understand why many, myself included, are starting to freak out.
Not that surprising if you take it from the standpoint of the idiom "the guilty dog barks the loudest". If he had a guilty conscience he could understandably react by overcompensating in attacking others reflecting that, whether or not he is consciously trying to divert attention from his own guilt. He wouldn't be the first person to do that.
High up front capital costs have been a primary problem for nuclear power generation for most of its existence. The Washington Public Power Supply System lead to a massive multibillion dollar municipal bond default in the 1980s.
It takes a lot of time and money to build traditional nuclear power plants, so if the financial and political system shifts underneath a potential plant builder then they can go bust with a partially built plant and nothing to show for it. The financial risk is huge and has already been painfully realized in the past.
I won't call you a sock puppet for that, but I do think it is a serious oversimplification of the history. Prior to being conquered by Russia, Crimea was held by the Crimean Khanate, which had Crimean Tatars as the dominant ethnic group. While Crimea was within the Russian empire and subsequently the USSR, the Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed, many fleeing to the Ottoman empire earlier on and eventually the entire population was exiled, mainly to central Asia, by Stalin in 1944. So when you talk about the indigenous population being "Russian", you mean the indigenous population that replaced the previous indigenous population that was wiped out or kicked out by the former empires.
Justifying modern annexation and conquest based on claims of fallen empires is a pretty dangerous game in general, though. One of primary ancestors of modern Russia was Kievan Rus, centered in modern day Ukraine, and many modern Eastern European countries were at some point under control of either the Russian empire or the USSR. Letting Putin reclaim all that territory based on those old claims would be a great way to start WWIII, this time with nuclear war in Europe. Which gives you brief glance as to why a weak and distracted US and Western Europe and sundering our alliances is in Putin's interest.
How is it stale if he is running point for the Russians just this week? He's acting in their geopolitical interests now, and is quite open about it. The lingering issues haven't been resolved yet (though Manafort is being buried under a mountain of indictments), and Trump piling on more and more new issues. I have a hard time seeing how the damage won't be extremely long lasting and reshape the post Cold-war political order, well past however long the Trump presidency lasts.
That's an...interesting take on the G-7 summit. Perhaps you missed (or are trying to miss) Trump's open treachery on lobbying to get Russia brought back into the G-8. The news shows don't want to use that word, treachery, and have just been calling it highly unusual and risky and whatnot, or with Sen Sasse calling it weak.
But there's plenty enough there to see in this one instance that he is betraying the interests of our country right then and there; the G-8 kicked out Russia for invading and annexing Crimea, and Trump is ignoring that and trying to reward Russia most likely for their aid in getting him elected. I guess Russian information and psychological warfare against the US is ok if it helps Trump, huh? Add in his pretty explicit attempt to start a trade war and sandbag on the other diplomatic measures with our allies, he seems pretty hellbent on tearing apart the post WWII western alliances.
If Trump's not a puppet of Putin, then it is getting to the point that is pretty hard to see that distinction, and maybe doesn't even matter anymore. He's giving Putin precisely what Putin wants: the US and our alliances divided, weak, and focused internally.
The summit only exists because of Trump because he is the only one reckless enough to agree to it. This is what the North Korea's want, to be at the big boy's table, a respected and legitimate nuclear power, but what does it give us? Other presidents could have easily done if they wanted to, if they thought it would have accomplished anything for us.
I know we are in a 1984 post truth age and have always been at war with Eurasia, but the relationship with North Korea has always fluctuated up and down because they are duplicitous and skilled at using extortion to extract concessions. Trump's policy towards North Korea has been similarly schizophrenic, talking about "little Rocket man" and threatening with nuclear war, now switching back and forth to the nice nice, but what makes you think that if this doesn't provide the magic results that only those in the cult of personality seem to believe will occur that we won't go back to "fire and fury" on failure. John Bolton seems to have been brought in explicitly for the purpose of fire and fury.
The gratuitous f-bombs and hostility about posters on this subject suggest to me that the parent may just be a troll and treating it in good faith is a foolish endeavor, but if this what represents a widespread consensus of thought then we are in serious trouble.
Sort of sad that reckless braggadocio is what passes for "insightful" nowadays, and I really don't get why people are conned into thinking that large and intractable security problems with set and firm interests can be resolved with the swagger of a used car salesman who was born into a real estate empire.
If you focus on Kim Jong-Un, his interests are pretty straightforward even if his methods and rule are extreme. He wants to stay alive and stay in power, and balance the internal threats from a horribly subjugated population and potentially ambitions rivals in the military and his family with the external threats of the US, South Korea, Japan, and yes, even China. So what sort of uninformed bullshit will baffle Kim into losing grip on his primary interests and capitulating? And why in the world would he believe the promises of the highest profile pathological liar in the world, the one who just reneged on a similar sort of deal with Iranians, proving that the US very much is not a reliable dealmaker right now.
And you need the nuclear weapons experts to prove that any program to dismantle the weapons program works, as if you walk in blind on the basic scientific and engineering details of the nuclear programs then you will end up blind as to the effectiveness of any disarmament measures. Not really hard for the North Koreans to cheat (which they've done before) if you don't even have the basic competence and mechanisms to verify compliance with a potential disarmament pledge.
Perhaps you don't what to have everyone working on the nitty gritty details coming in and chatting it up with Kim in the summit, but that brings forth the lie to how this summit is supposed to be a magical way to solve the problem. Normally these high profile summits with leaders just confirm the lower level detailed negotiations and diplomacy that lead up to them and provide a bunch of nice photo ops, and last I checked the prep work to actually draft out then cement a deal has not been done yet, likely intentionally.
I could get more sardonic and sarcastic, but if you've glanced at least a bit at Trump's business history like I have then you should probably be even more pessimistic about relying on the mythological art of the deal. The multiple bankruptcies are just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the precise sort of foolishness that lead to short sellers losing $1 billion in this article. In the long term, Tesla could be a guaranteed loser headed to liquidation and still you could go completely broke shorting Tesla stock, because in between the price could jump way higher before plummeting to zero. You go on margin and put yourself on hook for the upswings, and if you don't have enough money and there isn't enough stock available for sale at a price you can afford to cover then you go bust.
See the concept of a short squeeze. This is probably why the stock price is so high and even overvalued, the short sellers are attracted like moths to a flame and then get incinerated by a squeeze pushing the price even higher.
You can look at Tesla's financials and see for yourself that yes, they are lousy. But I still wouldn't short the stock if I had a million dollars and a firm conviction that the price will eventually go down.