Israel has already lost this exchange. The goal of any terrorist attack is to provoke an overreaction which weakens the target and which strengthens the cohesion of the opposition while recruiting new soldiers for that opposition. Netanyahu's attempt to seize the land while there's a democrat in the White House did all that and so much more. And once he was knee deep in it it became very clear that his attacks were extremely unpopular with his own citizens and that as soon as they stop they're going to throw him out on his ass, which caused him to double and triple down.

If you're an American you saw the exact same thing play out after 9/11 with our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Word for word and beat for beat it was the exact same thing.

Trump's actual bankruptcies really did bankrupt him. We found out quite some time ago that the reason he isn't in the poor house (apart from the 1% taken care of their own) is because his creditors didn't want to take away all his money because they were hoping he would be able to use the billionaire branding to scam rubes out of some money and that they would get more of their money back over time.

I don't recall whether or not those particular creditors actually came out ahead or not it's tough to say since Trump has a habit of not paying people. But Trump was correct he really did go bankrupt completely it's just that when you're rich and famous you get away with it

will make that kind of herd mentality harder to maintain. Conservatism in the general population isn't an accident, it's actively pushed by the ruling class. Increasing education and with it critical thinking skills severely undermines that.

It's why you're seeing a rash of book bannings in schools. They're trying to stem the tide.

The real problem is every grifter is competing for a smaller and smaller share of marks.

Using google you can find articles from 5 years ago where the average Fox News viewer was 65. Those same articles written today put the average Fox viewer at 70. Life expectancy in America is 76.

Doesn't take Einstein to do that math. Fox news might be the #1 cable news network but that's not sayin' much. And everyone else is competing for at best second place.

Trump's properties are by all accounts massively over leveraged. e.g. he owes more on them then they're worth. He is, in all likelihood, effectively broke, and only able to cover up that fact by juggling money around and some light gifting like those bible sales.

If his court cases go bad he's going to need to come up with a ton of cash and that means he's gonna wanna dump his shares. If he does that $DJT collapses in value immediately.

You can actually tie the spikes in value for $DJT to when various things in his court cases get announced, most notably when his bond got cut to $175m the stock spiked, when it came out he *still* couldn't find somebody to pay it it dropped, when he found somebody it spiked, and now it's come out that the company he found doesn't really have the cash so it's dropping.

It's all kinda crazy given that it's a company with $4m in revenue and $50m in expenses that is 100% dependent on the health of a 77 year old man. But that's meme stock for you.

in car maintenance & gas alone. If I could count on it lasting (I suspect my number's up soon) I could easily add $10-$15k a year in housing costs by moving.

That's money the employer has to pay me so I can survive and function as an employee. I can probably cut that in half by drastically reducing my quality of life (beater car breaking down all the time, paying for cab rides into work when it does, extra roommates, etc) but you're still talking $8-$10k a year that goes out of my pocket and that I either have to have or I can't do the job (kinda hard when you're living out of your car that breaks down all the time).

That said the value of commercial real estate is so massive it dwarfs those costs. Not just the office buildings, think of all the restaurants you frequent on lunch breaks or because your commute exhausts you too much to cook. Or stopping off to shop somewhere on the way home. Or hell the profits from replacing your car every 10 years instead of every 20.

CEOs own stock in all those companies and make cash off their dividends, stock buy backs, etc. And if you think they aren't considering the value of their multi million (sometimes multi-billion) dollar portfolios I don't know what world you live in but I'd like to live there...

If you don't know the entire point of a terrorist attack is to provoke an overreaction that hurts or cripples the target.

They won when we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with the attack and spent trillions occupying the land instead of on our citizens well being.

Everything else is just gravy.

You also have to pay a bunch of other taxes. It's not quite as bad as Texas where Texans pay more than Californians in taxes but you're not getting off the hook. For one thing there are fuck ton of toll roads around Florida and that's essentially a tax. There's all sorts of other ways they nickel and dime you too.

Again though because they can soak the tourists a bit it's not quite as bad but on the other hand the local and state governments have been chasing off a hell of a lot of tourists lately so pretty soon they're going to need to start soaking the locals if that keeps up

IRS agents go after wealthy tax cheats because they are scored and graded on how much money they recover and they're going to recover many many times more going after a wealthy tax sheet then they are going to go after some random Schwab who makes a little six figures or less.

On the other hand they will go after those random slobs when they are required to by statute. There are several laws that require them to audit a certain percentage of low-income Americans. These laws were often put in place in exchange for keeping the government open and not causing an economic collapse. No prizes for figuring out which political party threatened an economic collapse in exchange for being allowed to audit low income earners...

but there really was substantial votes against it from Republicans... but not because they oppose the bill. They're trying to make the House Speaker look bad by blocking his legislation because there's a ton of infighting between different factions in the GOP.

That's why it passed, the House Speaker went around them, in the process making the members who blocked it look bad instead of him and pissing them off further.

The entire Republican party is a mess right now.

there's a ton of infighting going on right now inside their party. They have what's called the "twitter faction" which is a bunch of members that make a lot of noise on twitter but don't get much of anything done.

The House Speaker allowed their impeachment inquiry against Biden to die off for lack of evidence (their main witness was revealed to be more or less a Russian plant) and they're pretty pissed about that, so they wanted to remove the Speaker (again) but they don't have the votes.

So they blocked this (along with a border reform bill) to make him look bad. They got outmaneuvered though and it eventually passed.

Make no mistake they'd cheerfully support the bill, they couldn't care less about your privacy. This is just party infighting at play. The entire GOP is in total disarray because Trump barely won the primary by 60% and that was *after* his opponents dropped out.

but there was a quirk of the studio system that caused us to get all those awesome movies in the 70s and 80s. If anyone remembers what it is feel free to chime in, but it was more a happy accident than anything else.

I know for TV what happened was there was so much censorship it got insanely boring to watch TV. Their solution was kind of novel, they packed every show with gays (mostly men) which was controversial at the time. It's one of the reasons we saw such a huge shift in opinion on stuff like Gay Marriage. At any rate that got TV pushing the envelop in different areas and made it more interesting... until cop shows took over everything that is.

it'll get people talking about anti-trust law enforcement and it's a target everyone hates, if only because of the high cost of Taylor Swift tickets.

But the courts are pretty well packed with pro-corporate judges now, so I suspect it'll die at the Supreme Court, if not sooner.

Still, awareness is important. It'll get folks passing new laws and the courts are still stuck *interpreting* the law. Even if they sometimes quote a witchfinder general to do it...

Mean I know this is low quality bait in all but damn that's a mean spirited thing to say.

People are born into poverty all the time. My mom was a chain smoking alcoholic and it had a significant effect on my life. On the other hand she was able to hold down a job and so I have been too. Since I don't drink and smoke being a nerd and all I did not pass that down to my kid. But even taking that into a fact the incredibly high cost of college and the extremely low pay for anyone under 40 means that my kid is likely to struggle to afford a decent living even with a college degree, albeit an undergraduate one

This is why everyone hates boomers. The world changes in the economy changes and they all just pretend that nothing changed and everything's just like it was when they were fucking kids and you can walk into any place of business and get a good paying job and you could retire from

Yeah from the structure of the headline I know I'm supposed to be outraged but from a criminal standpoint that's a pretty good deal if you get away with it.

I guess it does show that cryptocurrency mining is less than worthless now. Maybe that was what the author was trying to show but didn't want to stated bluntly for some reason?