tburkhol

That's income, though, not net worth. Imagine you've got $250k in your 401k and you spent $250.

I mean, if you're starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.

It's definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.

I think, for 'lefties,' the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.

It's schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They're still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.

I'm surprised the rest of the world hasn't tried Russia-like sanctions on Trump. When Russia invaded Ukraine, all the countries got together to target sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs, on the theory they'd undermine political will without hurting uninvolved Russian civilians. So now, I'm imagining embargoes on Ivanka Trump's fashion bullshit, a massive property tax rider on Trump's Scottish golf resort; freezing the assets of Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners.

My thought exactly. OTOH, I feel like the anti-Musk ball only really got rolling in March, and this report can't possibly cover March - it's got to be Dec24-Feb25, so probably just a hint of things to come.

Even if there's a coherent policy goal behind the tariffs, which I doubt, achieving that goal with punitive taxes on undesirable goods means that the greatest burden falls on people with the lowest income. Reaching the same goal with promotional tax incentives means the burden is paid through our normal, slightly progressive tax system and falls more on the wealthy. Tariffs and sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes.

I'm OK with a live filibuster. Being able to "filibuster" a bill by passing a note to the teacher threatening to talk all night does not promote compromise or good lawmaking.

It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn't put on a postcard...how did this happen?

He's not the majority leader any more, and without all the sycophants flattering and distracting him, it turns out that someone has been systematically sabotaging US democracy going back years.

Wonder if there's an opportunity there. Some way to archive one's self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I'm imagining a service one's heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.

At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.

If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?

I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don't really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.

Your articles seem to say that congress has periodically rearranged and eliminated "Article III courts," recently avoiding the Constitutional crisis of not paying judges of the eliminated courts by posting them elsewhere. But I'm no lawyer, so maybe I'm misinterpreting "In 1891, Congress enacted legislation creating new intermediate appellate courts and eliminating the then-existing federal circuit courts." and "In 1982, Congress enacted legislation abolishing the Article III Court of Claims and U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals"