sp3ctr4l

In American schools?

Normal public schools?

Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.

Most US Public schools don't even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.

Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college... US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.

The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.

Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.

Oh yeah, absolutely, it is ludicrous when people do that.

If you have decent sidewalks, intetsections that are not a 1/2 mile apart, and god forbid, regular low grade inclines at crossings and other places, so that a wheel chair bound person could actually get around?

Well then blamo, throw a back pack on the frame of your chair/scooter, now you can actually go to a local bodega and buy some groceries!

Makes it easier for people who use a cane or crutches, or have a non obvious outwardly presenting neurological or muscular condition of some kind, etc.

But, US infrastructure broadly isn't ADA compliant in the poorer areas seriously disabled people most commonly live... and we literally can't, or struggle much more seriously in physically getting to an actual town hall.

Fucking... after a two months of aquatherapy, well now all I have the option to do is show up for basically the night swim at the therapy pool.

My problem is not that I need directed care ... I was taught the excercizes/stretches, learned them, remembered them. I do the ones I can at home, out of a pool, every damned day.

The problem is it costs 5 dollars, in cash only, to attend.

I can't fucking get to an ATM!

I told them this and they just said uh well you'll figure it out.

Nope, never did.

There are no ATMs within over a mile of a walking roundtrip from me.

And the sidewalks don't even exist near where I live, and/or they are cratering into sinkholes or erupting out of the ground. No joke, there's one spot where the ground expanded and the sidewalk is entirely snapped in half, at about 40 degree angles.

But at this point, I am extremely used to falling through the cracks in systems, that are designed based on assumptions... that make no sense to hold, because ostensibly the entire point of these systems is that they are to help those who do not have those basic societal assumptions.

You tell people in these systems this, and every fucking time, no one has ever told them this before, this thought had never occured to them, or they get angry at you.

It is astounding.

As well as working the fields, in the US, producing US food.

I think its something like 70% of farm laborers in the US have now just quit, vanished.

So we're gonna have a famine now, or just replace migrant laborers with imprisoned slave labor, because US farms absolutely cannot afford to operate by paying a wage that would convince nearly any actual 'legal citizen' American to do the work.

('legal citizen' in quotes because apparently citizenship can now just be revoked for... any arbitrary reason)

Shit's extremely difficult, complicated, and dangerous.

Its a fucking crime we call that 'unskilled labor', fucking no way, picking and harvesting as fast as US farms demand is absolutely a complex and difficult skill, the kind of thing that people can and do have competitions of.

Yes, ideally, but the US system is completely rigged in a million different ways to make the emergence of a meaningful 3rd party almost impossible.

The way we award seats, first past the post, is horrendously flawed, and means that if every specifically defined area just barely has a majority... the net effect is a government that is way, way out of sync with what the broader population actually wants.

And this is all rigged by regularly and precisely redrawing all those specific geographic areas to make it so they are either clearly gonna be Rep or Dem, or 51-49 split that looks 'reasonably fair' on paper, but in practice, almost always goes to that 51.

...

Ironically, if Musk goes through with making his own third party... he, the literal richest man in the world, is basically the only person that could possibly pull that off.

That is how huge of a role money plays in US politics.

Takes the richest man in the world to be even maybe potentially able to counteract all the rest of the combined lobbying money of other corporate lobbyists... and thats assuming he was able to basically shut the fuck up and let at least strategically competent people run the whole show.

Going by the probably actually legit poll Elon commissioned to be run about possible support for an Elon party, here are the numbers I ended up with:

(will update in a moment, gotta go find my old post)

...

Ok, heres the full poll:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4pZVo0ZnrQyElZQzdNtt7CQ1zwTypuS/view

Here's some rough, but reasonable math to extrapolate.

If you say half of the 'somewhat likely's actually go for it, then you get this:

Republicans who join Elon Party: 34.25%

Independents who join Elon Party: 28.25%

Democrats who join Elon Party: 13.75%

...

There are more Dem voters than Republicans.

But there are also more independents than either.

Roughly 32% Reps, 33% Dems, 35% Indp.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/

So, throw that in with those previous calcs, and you end up with:

Reps: ~21%

Dems: ~28.5%

Elons: ~25.5%

Indps: ~25%

or, normalized to remove remaining Indps:

Reps: 28%, Dems: 38%, Elons: 34%.

...

So... theoretically, the Dems are still the largest, Elon is now second behind them, and the Reps are now a third party, less popular than having no solid political affiliation.

So if Elon actually goes through with this, I think you end up with a good number of corpo Dems leaving the Dems, so the Dems now have an easier time shifting to the left.

The Reps lose 1/3 of their voters, and basically just become a cult of idiot racist nazis, paleocons, theocrats, MAGA nutjobs.

Elon party ... basically becomes the 'centrist'/libertarian/ancap/corpo party.

Conversely, roughly 10%+ of the US has a negative net worth, ie, they owe more debt than they have assets.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br-202.pdf

And I say 10%+ because this is from 2022, and in general, credit scores have been nose diving and car/home loan delinquencies and tenant evictions have been skyrocketing, since 2022.

We've also got roughly ~40% at least using BNPL for something.

We also know that ... having a negative net wealth is, while not exclusive to poorer people/households in terms of their yearly income... it is much, much more strongly correlated with that.

Though this may change in 'fun' ways now that the housing market is collapsing, bye bye remnants of the 'middle class'!

So anyway, I think a more realistic number for uh... people who are worse than living paycheck to paycheck, people who are actually living paycheck to loan repayment...

Its somewhere between ~10% and ~40%.

... Which is still really fucking bad, as that means something aporoximating a quarter of society sre now just literally debt slaves.

...

So basically, we have:

A ~20% debt slave class,

A ~50% exploited and struggling worker class (who is often in total denial about this being the case),

A ~25% petitie bougeois, decently paid worker / small business owner class (who routinely gaslights and belittles everyone below them, and aspirationally sucks off and praises those above them),

A ~5% capitalist owner class, that gets astonishingly more powerful and wealthy as you increment up each percent and then tenth of a percent, etc.

The SP500 hitting highs is a lot less good news when you realize most of that is simply due to the dollar devaluing against other international currencies.

That isn't asset appreciation, it's currency devaluation.

EDIT:

I m on mobile and don't have the ability to make my own chart with DXY and SP500 normalized to each other, but uh...

https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/%5EDXY/SPY

Look at this in YTD, then in 1Y, then 5Y.

Normally, these two things move in the same dirrction, though the SP500 tends to grow much more when the DXY grows a little.

Well, now, basicslly since Trump took office, they're moving in the opposite direction.

So, yeah, this is now what is called a 'melt up', where stocks climb higher, but not because of any kind of underlying fundamental strength of the US economy but because the USD has lost about 10% of its value compared to the currencies it most often is traded against.

Yeah, I am not only currently in a very, very unwalkable city...

I also literally cannot walk, not much further than uh... half a kilometer, without extreme pain, and that is using a cane and braces.

Fortunately my physical therapy is yielding good results in terms of regaining range of motion and stamina, but it is slow and painful.

That being said, a year ago, I was in a wheel chair.

So the improvements are real.

Hopefully by either the autumn or winter I'll be mostly back to my previous level of mobility, and able to rent a car or moving truck or something and move to a less shitty area.

...goes SCHWAH SCHWAH SCHWAH

I know it was meant as a joke, but unfortunately, yes, its kind of based on false premises.

Very, very broadly speaking:

A patent typically pertains to some kind of invention, some kind of unique and novel design of a machine or process.

A copyright typically pertains to some kind of created work, like a song, book, visual artwork.

A trademark typically pertains to a brand name, marketing slogan.

All 3 of these together comprise the category of Intellectual Property, IP Law.

https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/difference-copyright-patent-trademark/

The actual law on all this stuff is actually extremely esoteric and complicated... and it is probably also worth noting that I am describing and more well versed in US IP law, not that of the Netherlands, which may be substantially different ... I am not Dutch, I don't know much specifically on that, but I did study US IP law back during getting my Poli Sci and Econ degrees.

Again, the entire subject is... exceptionally tedious and complicated lol, I totally do not blame you for not knowing the details, the vast majority of people don't, lol.

I mean, yes, I agree with you that the entire state of essentially the entire legal system is up in the air, dubious at this point given recent Supreme Court rulings and Executive Orders...

But if we are to pretend/assume that... the law actually exists as is written, that precedent and the way that proceedings generally play out over the history of US law is not all now completely arbitrary...

Then the Prosecution has to actually file their subpoena to, in this case, Aetna, with the actual Judge/Clerk in the case, so that the Judge, the Court, and the Defense Counsel actually know what is going on with the case.

To subvert this process is to subvert the right of a defendant to a fair trial.

Your example regarding ICE essentially self-authorizing themself is widely, widely derided by all manner of lawyers and legal figures across the country as being a dubious violation of this kind, which functionally means they are violating the law every single time they do that.

Yes, I get that the on the ground reality and the legal framework are not at all the same thing in this era of modern facism, but that is because the facists just brazenly and repeatedly violate the law in their own supposed execution of the law.

If you can find me an example of a prosecuting counsel flagrantly fabricating the notion that they have filed a subpoena with the judge/clerk of the court, and this being allowed and the case proceeding without consequence for this behavior, I will be more inclined to believe that this will also be allowed in this Luigi case, but I will remain convinced that such would still represent an egregious miscarriage of justice in the sense of destroying the defendant's right to a fair trial.

There were no cops that issued or used a grand jury subpoena in this specific instance.

Luigi's Defense Counsel is asserting that the Prosecution Counsel issued a fradulent subpoena by way of sending Aetna a letter.

Yes, technically an officer of the court executes a subpoena directly issued by the judge in the course of ... dealing with some kind of misconduct pertaining to the actual proceeding of a case, thats true, that category exists and happens...

But I was responding to a specific comment that specifically cited a stack overflow link, which included many examples of... not that category.

Though the Prosecution acts as an officer of the court, the Prosecution are asserted by Defense to have simply made up that Judge/Clerk signed off on a subpoena to Aetna... and then the Prosecution, again, not being an officer of the court, fraudulently 'executed' that subpoena.

By my reading of New York criminal law, yes, a District Attorney may issue, as an officer of the court, a subpoena pertaining to an ongoing case... but they must also follow all the procedural rules as described in greater detail by New York civil law...

And in New York civil law, it is clearly explained that the Prosecution would have had to actually file that subpoena with the judge/clerk.

They did not do this, because if they had, the court date cited in the Prosecution's subpoena to Aetna... would have actually existed in the court's records.

It does not.

The core of the idea is that you own the copyright to your own face.

I don't think anyone is proposing any kind of system that would allow you to hold the copyright of anyone else's face.

Also, copyright != patent.