I agree with the sentiment but you lack context. The SuperFund has been a training ground for stall-and-pad-billing for decades. Certain bureaucrats gained lifetime employment for stall-and-declare skills.
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
Hollywood is its own worst enemy. The number of giant scandals and last-minute game changes are innumerable. As is widely documented, the extensive and stable assets of Hollywood studios are not being used on the best of days.
The person I'm responding to is the one who brought it up.
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
I‘m pretty sure they mention a strict vegan diet as only a part of the solution.
And it’s a fact that meat needs more resources and produces more CO2 and methane then plant based food.
It would already help to consume less meat.
It seems to me you focus on vegan diet to use the annoying vegan stereotype for your purposes.
> The president is immune to prosecution for any crime committed in office
That's a misreading of the SC decision. If he walks down the street and murders someone, unless he can make a case that it was an official act, then he wouldn't have immunity. He'd need to demonstrate that he has the Constitutional authority to murder people on the street, and he doesn't, so it wouldn't be an official act and he wouldn't have any immunity.
ok, so we managed to get a decision that the president wan't immune from having to pay out in a civil suit related to the molestation of a woman from before he even became a politician. but part of the problem here is the blurring of the personal and the official. should the president be liable for overtly violating the constitution 'while performing official acts'. Is interfering in the state's right to hold their own elections an official act? is instructing the military to order someone in cold blood an official act? does pursuing a series of novel legal interpretations imply that he was violating the law or not? is accepting money in exchange for a presidential pardon an official act?
whether or not you believe this is a pass from the Supreme Court, it opens up a whole new unexplored space of lack of culpability.
The point is that the state needs to flip enough that Trump would not be in a position to control what the state (the court actually) views as an official act.
If Trump continues to have enough influence in the SCOTUS after he's done being president, then yes, you could imagine they contort any action into an official act. But that'd be a failure of the next government to first establish a less biased SCOTUS (either by packing it or removing existing justices).
“Aye, scallywag, yer SCOTUS rulings reading ain’t fit for kindergarten; read the chart again: official acts may be immune, but private crimes still face prosecution.”
For a king, and one that presumes themselves king, every act is official. The theory is that Congress can always impeach but we have seen and still see that they have no interest in doing so for any reason, no matter how egregious.
google seems to know my exact age, my address, where I log in from often, but definitely the devices (unique ID) I use to connect. California voter here.
I cannot get over the volume of techies calling for more centralized systems, in response to an obvious corruption of a mass scale of a crucial centralized system
Critics on all sides have ample ammunition AFAIK
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