US 2024 Presidential Election

Agema

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Getting there will be the problem. And I don't want to shut OPEC out. Just that they have to be in the oil business, rather than the oil shortage business. That can be a tall order.
I think by "tall order", you mean impossible: OPEC has zero interest in making sure everyone gets oil cheap, and no-one's going to force them.

OPEC countries are focused on maximising revenues so that they can a) pay off internal dissent, b) pay off other countries, and possibly most important c) diversify by investing huge sums of money in other industries and economies so that when the oil runs out they have something. After all, that massive desert doesn't produce much else they can make money off.

Outside a few producers, fossil fuels are a energy security shitshow. It's embracing massive risks of economic disruption and external interference by foreign powers (just take a look at how much trouble Russia caused some European countries with gas supplies). The sooner the West moves on from them the better: no-one's going to switch off the sun and wind.
 

Satinavian

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I think by "tall order", you mean impossible: OPEC has zero interest in making sure everyone gets oil cheap, and no-one's going to force them.
Indeed. While i hate the OPEC for lobbying for fossils o keep up demand, i kinda like the artificially inflated prices and the volatility they casue. Both make some people consider alternatives.
 

Piscian

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Shares of Trump Media fell at the opening bell Thursday, with just hours to go until former President Donald Trump is expected to be able to start selling his nearly $2 billion stake.

The company, which owns social media platform Truth Social and trades as DJT on the Nasdaq, was down 5% at the market open.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, owns nearly 57% of DJT’s outstanding shares. That stake at Thursday morning’s price was worth about $1.7 billion — almost half of Trump’s estimated on-paper net worth.



But Trump, and other early investors, have been barred from selling their shares under a lockup agreement that took effect when the company went public following a merger with a blank-check firm in late March.

Those restrictions are set to expire as soon as Thursday afternoon. Trump Media has acknowledged in regulatory filings that the end of the lockup could spur large sales of the company’s stock, and even the market’s perception of a sell-off could drive down DJT’s stock price.

Trump, the majority shareholder, said Friday that he has no plans to sell his stake. But other company insiders might try to cash in as soon as they get a chance to do so.

The company’s fortunes are tied up with those of Trump, whose use of Truth Social makes him a main draw to the platform.

After soaring in its public trading debut, Trump Media has suffered a monthlong stock slump that has coincided with Trump’s tumultuous presidential campaign against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Shareholder lock up ends today, Trump is about to be 1 billion dollars poorer.
 
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gorfias

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I think by "tall order", you mean impossible: OPEC has zero interest in making sure everyone gets oil cheap, and no-one's going to force them.

OPEC countries are focused on maximising revenues so that they can a) pay off internal dissent, b) pay off other countries, and possibly most important c) diversify by investing huge sums of money in other industries and economies so that when the oil runs out they have something. After all, that massive desert doesn't produce much else they can make money off.

Outside a few producers, fossil fuels are a energy security shitshow. It's embracing massive risks of economic disruption and external interference by foreign powers (just take a look at how much trouble Russia caused some European countries with gas supplies). The sooner the West moves on from them the better: no-one's going to switch off the sun and wind.
We saw winter storms in Texas do untold damage to wind mills that the rich are all NIMBY about to begin with. Hale storms destroying entire solar panel fields.

As for what is, I'm sure our cork up the butt energy policies are aiding China that keeps adding to its coal burning plants. Over 3,000 of them so far.


Vivek Ramaswamy warns what this really is all about is globalists giving China the opportunity to catch up to the west at the west's expense.

ITMT: sadly, capitalism is about profits. Limiting supply minus competition = higher profits. Keeping competition in place is a must. Ensure OPEC knows it is not the only game in town.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Went from "it can't happen" to "it won't happen" to "even if it happens it doesn't matter." It may not matter to YOU, but it matters to plenty of other people. You just can't imagine that something is important unless it affects you directly. I mean hell, you once said (possibly even in this very thread) that you would never live in Illinois again just because you had a bad experience with the DMV there. What you think is important is clearly on a sliding scale that's directly correlated with whether you are personally affected.



Haven't you have claimed that Roe v Wade was a "batshit" ruling with no credibility and no constitutional protection? Weird that the supreme court made that decision and it was in place for over 50 years and withstood many challenges, and yet you think they can't make any other "batshit" decisions because it would be bad for their credibility.

Which is it then? You can't talk out of both sides of your mouth claiming that Roe V Wade hurt the court's credibility while simultaneously saying that the court wouldn't make any decisions that would hurt their credibility.
Again, I'm still saying it's not gonna happen. Don't you think fixing healthcare is better overall good than having some people have to travel to another state to get married? It's simple priorities. Am I here saying that one of Illinois top priorities should be improving the DMV, Illinois has a lot more higher priority problems than that.

I said Roe was legal nonsense, not "batshit". There's a spectrum for everything. There's no way any court can make rulings on all the cases they get and not have people question them and doubt their credibility in some amount. And gay marriage reversal would cause a massive amount of people questioning their credibility. Abortion does not have close to the claim and obvious constitution protection. People more so simply didn't like the ruling vs pointing to something specific in the constitution and being like "WTF". Abortion has no constitutional protection yet people got mad when it was overturned, doesn't make sense to me (you should be mad at the legislative branch for not making a law).

I don't think there were any challenges directly to abortion:

Firstly: the fourteenth amendment is far, far more explicit and specific in banning slavery than anything that could be construed as protecting same-sex marriage. The exact parts of the constitution that you're arguing protect same-sex marriage... were not written to protect it, don't mention it, and factually didn't cover it for 200 years. And four current Supreme Court justices explicitly said they don't think it covers it.

Secondly: the Constitution is far from the most important factor when we're discussing reputation/credibility anyway. The status of the issue to the American public, and the positions of the two primary parties, matter a lot more. Same-sex marriage is on much shakier ground.
This is your claim down below. You said the constitution doesn't prevent them from ruling how they want. It's obvious it does. I don't care if slavery is more specific or not than gay marriage because that wasn't what you were arguing. I don't care if the constitution is more vague on gay marriage, I'm saying it's not gonna get overturned. That's my opinion, not fact (we'll see though).

Again, I don't care if the constitution is the most important factor for credibility or not, the point is that it is a factor.

No: my claim from the start has been that the Constitution doesn't prevent them from ruling how they want.
 

Asita

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You probably can't go back that far and have to wait until the 14th amendment at least. It's no different in say DnD and a DM saying you can't do XYZ. One of the players has to find where in the rulebook it says you can do XYZ (which might be from referencing multiple things) and then challenge the DM. In the DnD example, was XYZ always protected or not until it was challenged? You can say it is both depending on how you're defining actively protected.
Such an argument necessarily assumes that a DM that is simply ignorant of the plain text of the rules. It would be analogous to them saying "murder isn't illegal" and then being shown 18 USC 1111, which defines murder as illegal.

If you wanted to make an actually appropriate analogy, it would instead be something like telling WoTC that an ability score should apply to circumstances that don't apply on paper. E.g. (for the sake of argument), arguing that despite the rulebook being silent on the matter, your fly skill should be usable as a swim modifier on the grounds that logically there's enough overlap in the mechanics of flight that your PC should be able to quickly suss out a crude swim-style or enhance their existing one. In this case, the rule isn't in the books (which is to say that the legal precedent affirming your case does not exist and it has not historically been understood to apply in this sense), but you're making the argument that it should be the case, which is a different question entirely.

An example of this would be Loving v. Virginia, which argued - as other cases before it did - that anti-miscegenation laws were a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Historically (such as in the case of Pace v. Alabama), anti-miscegenation laws had been ruled as constitutional on the grounds that the punishment was equally applied to both the black and white participants, thus "equally burdened" whites and non-whites, and therefore did not violate that same Equal Protection Clause. In Loving v. Virginia, the court called that same argument and ruling horseshit and that the anti-miscegenation laws and rulings supporting them had no discernible purpose other than invidious racial discrimination intended to maintain White Supremacy.

This was not some secret they discovered years later. It's in the plain text of the ALSC's opinion that the state had a compelling interest in forbidding such unions because they might result in - and I quote - "the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization". It really did wear its racism on its sleeve. And it wasn't that Loving's attorneys simply made a better argument and Pace's attorneys were simply deficient. The different conclusions reflected a fundamental shift in attitude regarding race and interracial marriage over the decades between Pace and Loving. The judges who ruled on Pace saw no issue with anti-miscegenation laws and therefore looked at equal protection in terms of whether or not whites or non-whites suffered unequal punishment for marrying the other. As the participants suffered the same punishment, they concluded that it was not a discriminatory law and therefore constitutional.

The judges who ruled on Loving did not agree with anti-miscegenation laws, and therefore looked at equal protection in terms of whether or not the marriage itself was treated differently because of the couple's races than other marriages (and before you start, that's the same argument that Pace's attorneys made), and ruled that the underlying logic was not only inexorable from racism, but in fact had no purpose beyond enforcing that racism, and consequentially that it was unconstitutional. It was not that the judges in Loving were presented with significantly different arguments or circumstances than in Pace, it is was that they explicitly rejected the logic that Pace's ruling was built upon. And I quote: "However, as recently as the 1964 Term, in rejecting the reasoning of that case, we stated 'Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court.' "

You can argue that the Loving ruling should have always been the case, but that's fundamentally a moral/ethical argument, not a historical one. The simple truth is that as a matter of law, interracial marriage was not protected until Loving, and the courts before then affirmed as much. That's precisely what makes Loving a landmark decision. It changed the interpretation of existing law and established a new precedent, invalidating the anti-miscegenation laws of the previous precedent.

Tangentially, this is what makes your invocations of the RFMA as if it made Obergefell irrelevant so vexing. The entire point of overturning such cases is to be a vehicle through which to either affirm or repeal related legislation. That's the point. To bring a case before the Supreme Court is to challenge the legality of the applicable (and related) laws. See, for instance, Lawrence v. Texas in which the Defense asked for a higher fine so that they'd be allowed appeal the case to the USSC in order to raise a Constitutional Challenge to anti-sodomy laws.

This is not something that you can bullshit your way out of. You're simply wrong. The law is not some static truth handed down from on high that needs only be correctly interpreted and then is set in stone. It's an ever-changing system that attempts to reflect the ideals and perspectives of the people who codify it, and as such is constantly adjusted and refined by the societies that live with them. It is filled with contradictions, oversights, and loopholes, and its conclusions involve at least some degree of subjectivity. This in turn means that they're also subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and even brazen spin-doctoring by different judges with different values (See for instance, the Dred Scott case).

We are not "discovering" things that the law covers. What we're doing is deciding what the law should or should not cover (e.g., the judges in Pace decided that the law should not protect interracial marriage, whereas the judges in Loving decided that it should and justified their respective rulings accordingly). And it's the height of pretentious arrogance to act as if the only reason that landmark decisions didn't get established decades earlier is because nobody was smart enough to make a good argument for them. And make no mistake, that is exactly what you're doing when you claim that these things had always been "in theory protected" and that the same judges would rule differently in the same case if simply presented with a better argument, as if they were computer programs answering mathematical formulas rather than humans interpreting social contracts through the lens of their personal values and beliefs about what those social contracts should do.

Your characterization spits in the face of every civil rights movement and landmark decision in history and that of everyone who fought to change their status quo and made change happen; condescending that the only reason that it ever got to that point in the first place is because they and their predecessors must not have made a competent argument for their position. It's victim blaming in its most archetypal sense: insisting that the only reason something bad happened to someone was because they weren't good enough enough to stop it, and if they'd just made a better case for themselves it never would have happened.

I didn't say it wasn't... and I didn't really care because my point wasn't just on gay marriage. Prior to the 70s when that case was, you can't say it wasn't protected because it wasn't challenged.
Wrong. It's closer to the opposite. The law defaults to not protecting something unless it is explicitly declared otherwise. E.g., your cat's not protected from being declawed because there's no law saying that you can't declaw your cat. The maxim you're bastardizing is "everything that is not forbidden is allowed", which means that an action can be taken if there is not a law against it, which is very different from the action being protected under law. In the context of protection, the application is perhaps most easily understood in the form of protected classes. Those are characteristics that cannot legally be used as the basis of discrimination. E.g., it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of race because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It became illegal to use the fact that someone was over the age of 40 as a criteria for discrimination in 1967. It became illegal to discriminate based on disability status in 1973. And it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in 2020. Before those respective years, these were not protected classes. You could legally discriminate on the basis of orientation before 2020, and on the basis of race before 1964.

This is what "everything that is not forbidden is allowed" means. It means that the law will not protect you from something committed against you unless specific provisions were made to forbid that something. That is to say: it is powerless to prosecute something that has not officially been declared a crime.

When we say that the law protects something, we mean the opposite: that what it protects against is explicitly illegal. The law protects against slavery, meaning that enslaving and keeping someone as a slave is illegal. The law protects against murder, meaning that murdering someone is illegal. The law protects against theft, which means that stealing from somebody is illegal. Etc. It does not protect against things that it does not acknowledge. To put it another way: Infidelity not being a crime is very different from infidelity being protected under law, hence why it can be used as a disqualifier in prenuptial contracts.
 
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The Rogue Wolf

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Piscian

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The man who openly called for Russia to hack his political opponent is now demanding that his political opponent resign because his campaign got hacked.

Its funny to imagine like

  1. What could possibly be of interest? Its not like hes running some 4d chess, schemes within schemes. I can imagine reading their internal emails and just thinking "fuck they are really that dumb". Plus their internal emails and texts have already gotten leaked many times because of sex stuff and butt dials. Its always shit like "please ask him to stop using slurs" "I tried he won't stop!!!" and head shaking emojis.
  2. Literally the minute this shit happened they had the FBI in the phone like "get this shit out of here, we don't wanna be caught up in this.". Unlike Trumps campaign which would drool all over any leaked democratic emails they can get.
 
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Gergar12

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Essentially, currently polling, across the spectrum has declared Harris the front runner in Pennsylvania and that North Carolina is a toss up.

The market is now siding with Harris.

I think it really just boils down to Harris having formed an agenda for her tenure that focuses on boosting the lower middle class, squeezing corporations, and Trump is raving about WWIII.

The sad part is that I think Trump could win this pretty easily if he presented some kind of comprehensible gameplan. It would be as easy just saying "I will direct DHS to eliminate these [whatever] immigration programs, eliminate the H1B visa. Cut of all foreign military aid, etc.".

Because at the heart of it people still are dumb fucking sheep that think

View attachment 11898

Instead he rants about people eating dogs and says "WERE GONNA DO THINGS".

People are fucking idiots, but they need more than vague miracles.

Harris is winning the very basic "I know what Im doing" race.
If we got rid of the H1B visa, say bye-bye to America being a technology superpower. I don't like fighting people in China, India, the Philippines, South America, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe for data analyst jobs any more than you do, but without that pressure, competition, and stick, you don't get amazing tech products like ChatGPT.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Satinavian

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As for what is, I'm sure our cork up the butt energy policies are aiding China that keeps adding to its coal burning plants. Over 3,000 of them so far.
First, yes, China needs to do more as well. Depending on source it has long overtaken the EUs emission even on per capita base. We really need to stop talking about emissions on first world/developing countries/global north/south bases and focus on the bad actors like the US.

But as China is doing more than the US with a higher percentage of renewables than the US already achieved, it is ridiculous to claim that Green policies are hampering US economy more than Chinese economy.

Second, why would "globalists" try to help China catch up ? Where is the profit here ?
 
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Silvanus

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This is your claim down below. You said the constitution doesn't prevent them from ruling how they want. It's obvious it does. I don't care if slavery is more specific or not than gay marriage because that wasn't what you were arguing. I don't care if the constitution is more vague on gay marriage, I'm saying it's not gonna get overturned. That's my opinion, not fact (we'll see though).
The specificity directly affects whether something is likely to be considered protected. That's how the constitution works-- and its how the judiciary works, too, because their entire job is to make calls when things are arguable/ambiguous. You cannot discuss this seriously if you refuse to recognise that.
 
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