But I’m forced to credit them with intelligence, by the framing of the theory.

You see that, right?

The supposition is that these people engaged in a massive ballot stuffing scheme, and covered it up so well (including successfully obtaining the silence of every one of the people involved) that the only evidence left is an abnormally high number of bullet ballots.

So they have to be smart enough and self-serving enough to do all that, but stupid enough to not do the obvious - and selfish - thing and make those ballots straight ticket votes.

See my previous point about any argument that relies on the same people simultaneously displaying extremes of competence and incompetence. I’m not saying that never happens, but it is usually a good indicator that you’re engaging in wishful thinking.

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.

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.

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!”

Wow, it’s almost like they fired all their developers, cancelled every good game they were working on, and underfunded the crap out of the rest so they were destined for failure.

Remember when Aspyr released a hotly anticipated remake of Battlefront and it failed because Embracer gave them no time to fix the bugs and no money to run servers? Yeah, like that.

Do you know who used to be part of Embracer? Sabre. Who just released Space Marine 2, a game that sold absolute gangbusters (because it’s fucking awesome).

Embracer are the cause of all of Embracer’s ills. They hoovered up excellent mid-shelf studios, fucked them over, and then cried foul when consumers rejected the second rate slop that came out.

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

Very excited for this. I played the demo and it was perfect; exactly what a remake of this game should be. I really hope they’ll do the sequel as well.

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!”

I’m a big fan of the maxim that how people talk about furries tells you a LOT about how deep their progressive ideals actually run.

There are way too many self proclaimed leftists who either want to or feel compelled to reflexively shit on furries, because they’re the designated punching bags that it’s OK to mock. This, despite the fact that furries aren’t harming anyone.

I don’t get furry kinks. I don’t get spending thousands of dollars on a fursuit. I don’t get the fursona thing. I do know enough to know that for most furries it’s not a kink, furry porn is only consumed by a very small subset of the community, and a lot of self-identified furries probably can’t afford a fursuit.

But most of all, I know they’re not hurting anyone. So who the fuck cares what they do with their time and money, or how they get off, or fucking whatever? It’s none of my god damn business.

I hope every furry is having a good time, and I hope you all get an abundance of head pats.

And I wish that the so-called leftists who keep punching down on them would find someone actually worth shitting on to be mean to instead.

Like Nazis. It’s always good to be mean to Nazis.

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

Companies release free products to bring people into their ecosystem. If your company is already using Workstation Player, and now they’re looking for a Type 1 hypervisor, it makes sense to seriously consider ESXi. The idea especially is that you get smaller companies hooked on your free products early and then as they grow they buy more of your stuff rather than reconfigure their whole setup. You also get IT enthusiasts and home users to adopt, which gets you name recognition and builds familiarity. Then in the workplace those same users look to your brand as one to trust.

For VMware, the problem is that they recently made a huge volley of deeply anti-consumer moves - basically told all their small customers to fuck off, and told their big customers to prepare to get fucked - and it really did not go the way they’d hoped. Turns out when you’re competing in a space where KVM, Hyper-V and XCP all exist, it’s actually not that difficult for customers to leave. So they did.

This won’t directly help their bottom line but it’s presumably a sacrifice play to salvage their brand somewhat. Turns out when you tell people to fuck off, they tend to do just that.