notabot

Seriously. Can you imagine, you've had this process running quietly for years, and it's getting you round some awkward tax or import restriction somewhere, you're making a tidy extra profit, and you don't even feel too bad about fidfling the paperwork a bit, after all, who's going to notice, a bunch of flightless birds? Then along comes the orange idiot and his cadre of fascists and accidentally expose you because they don't understand how to rationally calculate tarrifs and just get an intern to copy and paste from the nearest LLM.

It's laughing at this sort of thing that's jeeping me sane right now.

It's got to be something like that, there was something like $1.3m of machinery exports from an island populated by penguins. Someone was doing something naughty, and whilst the way these tarrifs are calculated is idiotic, it's fun that it's exposed sonething like this.

That probably explains why he wants to buy one despite being a citizen already. I'd guess he thinks it'll mean he wont be taxed on overseas income either. Figuring out whether he's currently paying any, and if so how much is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

I'm not sure where you are, but typically even if you rent rather than owning you pay the normal taxes, either directy or via your landlord, so they have little to do with owning a property, and more to do with occupying one, as a proxy for the demands you put on communal services. In most places you would also not lose your home for not paying them, you'd get dragged through the courts, possibly jailed for some period, and the tax authority in question would just end up with a lien on the property, entutling them to recompense when you sold or refinanced it.

I'm not discounting the possibility you live sonewhere with different property tax laws, but you've been making extremely broad and general statements that don't match reality in many places.

They say that an ordnance tech at a dead run outranks everyone else, but I'd say a cat making a bee-line for shelter probably outranks them if you want to remain in the same number of pieces. Cats have good hearing and the nous to associate a stimulus with bad things happening and to get away in time.

it's hard to imagined it's not planned.

It was all planned. They wrote it all down, called it "Project 2025", then said they definitely wouldn't do it whilst giving a big wink and crossing their fingers. Aparently that was enough to convince enough people.

Canaries were taken into coal mines to warn the miners of poisionous gasses by dropping dead. When the canary metaphorically picks the lock on its metaphorical cage and literally makes a break for the border, I think you can consider that a sign of a similar magnitude.

All great, until he decides those bits of paper are worthless. Would that be an insane move that would destabilise the whole world economy? Yes. Does that mean he wont do it? I see no reason to assume that.

Even in cases like this justice must not just be done, but be seen to be done. It seems her guilt has been established, which is good; her sentencing comes next. It seem unlikely that there are any mitigating circumstances to reduce the punishment, but that judgement must be seen to be fair. The French citizenry are not renouned for their forebearance in the face of injustice, so I would be tempted to trust their system for now.

ETA: In fact, it seems like the punishment has already been decreed: five years ineligibility to run for office, four years in prison (two suspended), and a fine. That puts her out of tbe running for president, and likely tarnishes her enough to keep her down even after 2030.

It's not just the size, or the sound, but the fact you could comfortably concuss an elephant with it, or stop a bullet and go right back to typing. Those things were built like tanks.

That's just crazy talk. If we don't listen to the billionaires the line might not keep going up quite so fast. For the purposes of this argument, please ignore TSLA, the climatologists obviously got to that one.

That lets you test that you're not directly connecting to US servers, but doesn't confirm that the services you talk to aren't talking to US servers. It's a good start, but you'll need to validate those seperately.

Depending on your OS, you might want to just add as many US IP blocks as you can find to your firewall. It looks like there's a list here, but it'd be worth validating it against other sources too.