For the record the “change” from that deal would be, measured to any reasonable degree of accuracy, exactly one googol.

It’s really really hard to explain how numbers that big work.

Basically if you had ten trillion dollars, and you spent one single cent, you would have spent a greater proportion of your wealth than that fine would be as a proportion of one googol dollars.

And just to really put all that in perspective, let’s talk about how big that fine actually is.

It’s frequently said that it’s more than the entire world’s GDP, but that’s not even close. Imagine if every single planet (not “habitable planet”, just “planet”) in our galaxy - all eight trillion of them - was terraformed to support life. Imagine if all of them had a population and economy like Earth. The entire galaxy’s GDP wouldn’t be enough.

In fact, a hundred of those galaxies wouldn’t be enough. A thousand wouldn’t be enough. A hundred thousand wouldn’t be enough. It would take 20 million of those galaxies to pay that fine (at the time of reporting; by now its more galaxies than exist in all the known universe, because it doubles every day).

And all of that would still be a rounding error to a rounding error against one googol.

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Generally speaking, a good test for fantastical thinking is when your theory relies on the same people displaying outlandish degrees of both competence and incompence at the same time.

If the people who did this are good enough to pull off - and keep quiet - a fraud at this scale, how did they fuck up such an elementary component?

If they’re capable of fucking up something that basic, how is it that they’ve failed to leave any other stunningly obvious evidence?

Personally, I’m of the opinion that even apparently fair elections should be treated as active crime scenes. That’s how we do things in Canada. Everything is checked and rechecked. But this particular theory seems to have veered pretty far into moon landing territory.

The people below him matter because they enact his agenda. The fact that there is a cult of personality around Trump absolutely explains why real voters would vote that way. But anyone enacting a ballot stuffing scheme on his behalf would almost certainly understand that he needs cronies to actually do any of the things he wants to do.

Without calling into question the broader possibility that malfeasance did occur, I don’t feel like this argument is particularly credible.

Suppose you were to engage in some form of straight up ballot stuffing? Why then would you make them bullet ballots? Why not vote straight ticket Republican? Straight ticket ballots are not unusual - even less so then bullet ballots, apparently - so you’d draw less suspicion, and you’d get the benefit of lots of extra down ticket votes.

If someone was going to cheat, what benefit would they gain from cheating this way?

To be fair, it’s been a longstanding rule with Republicans that whatever they accuse others of is merely a projection of what they’ll do the moment they can get away with it. Whether or not they would try to steal an election isn’t even a question. They’ve as much as admitted it. The only question is whether or not they did. I’ve not seen any evidence to that effect, and I’m not presuming there is any, but it would be idiotic not to at least contemplate the possibility.

It’s astonishing to me that anyone ever entertained the idea that MAGA was a freak event, even back in 2016.

Why? No one ever accused chatbots of always being wrong. In fact, it would be actually be better if they were. The biggest problem with LLMs is that they’re right just often enough that its hard to catch when they’re wrong.

I want to point out that even if they are, the incentive is still having the desired effect, because in that scenario it makes it much more profitable to sell an EV than to sell an ICE vehicle, meaning the manufacturers are going to push the EV’s more. And given that incentive, they would still be strongly incentivized to price the EV’s in a, way that compares will with their ICE offerings, even if they could theoretically sell them cheaper.

A big part of getting results is understanding how to turn greed to your advantage.

Amazing that the state that is the poster child for “destroying your economy with aggressive tax cuts” is like “Surely this time Reagan will rise from the grave and bless us with his divine power.”

Republicans: “Billionaires are just better than everyone else and we should all get out of their way and hand them the keys to everything for the betterment of all mankind.”

Republicans After Being Forced to Spend One (1) Week Around Elon Musk: “No, shit, wait, these guys are fucking idiots!”

Heavy on number 3. Everyone tap dancing with glee over how badly this is going to blow up in the Republicans faces is seriously underestimating the degree to which this is going to be a government absolutely built from the ground up on corruption, bribery and extortion. I can’t help but think that in a few years the US is not going to look an awful lot like Russia.

And the reality is that, by the standards of billionaires, these people will all be very, very easily bought.

I genuinely don’t know how they plan to make a parody of InfoWars that will not be indistinguishable from the original thing.

You’re missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone’s wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on “essentials”, and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.

I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.

No

An investment contract exists if there is an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”

And just to be absolutely clear, many cryptocurrencies do not qualify as investments, and the government agrees. However there are numerous other regulations that the crypto industry apparently cannot handle, such as “Know Your Client” laws, which all financial institutions have to abide by, and which exist to prevent money laundering (Binance’s internal emails revealed that they knew perfectly well that their clients were using their service to facilitate crime, and they were perfectly happy with that).

These are not bad faith regulations. They exist for good reasons, and there is absolute no good reason why the crypto industry shouldn’t also be subject to them. If these are currencies they should be regulated like currencies. If they are investments they should be regulated like investments.

That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.

There wasn’t a need to “define a new regulatory framework that actually fits” because, funnily enough, the existing regulatory framework already fits. It turns out, inventing new words doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the thing you’re describing. Refusing to call something an “investment” doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling an investment, refusing to call something a “security” doesn’t prevent it from being a security if it meets the definition.

Edit: Sorry, let me address that ridiculous point about Coinbase “asking for clarity” directly. Yes, Coinbase repeatedly “asked for clarity” in the same manner as a dude in a girl’s DMs repeatedly asking for nudes while being told in the bluntest of terms to fuck off. They were given perfectly clear answers, they just didn’t like them, so they kept claiming, with zero fucking basis, that these will laid out rules that every financial institution has been following for decades were somehow “unclear” to them. It was a conversation not unlike a Sovereign Citizen trying to get out of a speeding ticket by claiming that they don’t understand where the officer’s authority comes from. The law is prefectly clear. If you don’t understand the law, you hire a lawyer who does. That’s a cost of doing business. Sticking “smart” in front the of the word “contract” doesn’t suddenly invent a whole new field of law. I can’t suddenly get away with murder because I call it “crypto murder”. The law is based on what you do, not what you call it.

Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the “nothing but sales taxes” approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.

Coiners: “We want to be taken seriously and treated as legitimate businesses!”

Biden Government: “OK. We’ll treat you as legitimate businesses in your respective fields and expect you to comply with the same regulations everyone else has to.”

Coiners: “Oh shit wait no this sucks, our whole business model only works because of crime, quick everyone vote for a fascist conman!”

Are you somehow under the impression that Public Citizen were responsible for Harris’ nomination?