Another thing is, I believe, that it wasn’t dems showing up to vote, the shift in margin was Republicans voting for democrats. If that’s really the case that’s huge, cause it doesn’t mean Republicans are disengaged, they’re starting to work against the current admin.

Where’d you get the 70%? Last I saw it was like 52% - https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2025/03/31/donald-trump-approval-ratings-what-the-latest-polls-show/82703049007/

The biggest issue with this line of thinking is, how do you prove it’s CP without a victim. I suppose at a certain threshold it becomes obvious, but that can be a very blurry line (there was a famous case where a porn star had to be flown to a court case to prove the video wasn’t CP, but can’t find the link right now).

So your left with a crime that was committed with no victim and no proof, which can be really easy to abuse.

If I recall it’s a bit more twisted than that. Musk can’t legally just give money to make someone vote, so they’re actually giving the money to a sponsor, but playing it up like it’s some raffle.

Its just another game to undercut democracy and use his wealth to break the system.

Thanks! That helps a lot!

The way they’re gutting these agencies they aren’t able to fufill their congressional appointed duties, so they’re already breaking the law, but the courts are slow and seem non-plussed and congress has been coopted.

Out of curiosity what do you do at the protests? Is it just standing around or something more involved?

Some are doing republican only town halls ಠ_ಠ

Oh yeah, definitely.

With all the job cuts tied to the Republicans, I don’t think most care about tax rates right now.

Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.

That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it’s like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.

When I started reading this I thought they were going to say how it highlights the challenges of high-profile individuals in the SEC. How can they go after Elon without a conflict of interest given he basically owns the federal government.

Make a fake account and just post random things so the government doesn’t think your lame when they check your social media.

Yeah that’s why I called out it costs money.

Its also kinda similar to taxes, the US pretty much already knows all this info already, yet somehow we can’t manage to make elections easy and free.

Have you tried getting a realID? It’s just as bad as getting a passport and costs a chunk of change. I’m pissed off states weren’t able to shut it down. Now you need a passport effectively to fly domestically.

Yeah, I know why the guy came clean, but it would have been so much more useful if we stayed on the chat. Really a big missed opportunity.

Thanks for adding the additional context!

What’s funny is the covid drop isn’t even that bad either compared to some other recession. So the 2022 blip is really inconsequential.

That’s a fair criticism, if things can get worse for people when we aren’t in a recession, then why would we care about recessions.

The truth is that a recession is just one metric that we use to track the economy. However, the economy is a big complex system and things like recession are there to track a global state, and aren’t refined enough to track things like inequality.

One failing in recent times for economic data is around “full employment vs part time employment” and other things like “is this person making a livable wage”. The hard thing with a lot of inequality or livable wage discussions is they are inherently political and not something that is as easy to track/detail/communicate/etc. vs numbers like GDP.

So, yes having better numbers would be great, but most likely this admin will fudge and hide numbers making things even more difficult to track (both now and in the future). Additionally while people are hurting now, during a recession even more people will be hurting (and most likely hurting worse than they are now).

I don’t disagree. My point was that we weren’t in a recession. Things may have been bad for many people, but that was when the “economy” was doing well.

Current indications are that the “economy” is heading for a downturn. If things were already rough for people, it certainly isn’t going to get better if that happens.

I posted elsewhere, but I think the real issue is that it really didn’t look like a recession. While technically it was a recession by the two negative quarters definition, if you look at real GDP it’s barely a blip.

I suspect at the time the concern was that calling it a recession would have impacted the recovery. Not that I think that’s a good excuse, but they werent hiding the data. With Trump, he’s trying to hide the downturn rather than trying to rally the recovery.

Calling out Biden here is a very “both sides” centrist kinda mindset.