True! I posted memes about that contradiction but was censored for "condoning violence" by the way. If Don sabotages the mid-term elections, you may see more "activity". I'm not making suggestions, only predictions. Got that Patel?

If that were the only impact, it wouldn't matter.

But the fact is that Trump regularly posts official public policy announcements that move markets, so getting the bullshit early can make you money.

It should be, but the Emoluments Clause has never been enforced and "Emoluments" isn't even clearly defined, legally speaking. It's pretty much a dead letter.

The only practical backstop here is impeachment and conviction, but the Republicans in Congress aren't going to allow that, not until and unless their voters begin to care.

The AC who replied is technically wrong: The immunity ruling only applies to official acts, and Trump's participation in TMG is not official. However, Trump would probably claim that he had nothing to do with this decision and the immunity ruling also effectively prevents investigation of any personal crimes that were committed because it blocks investigation of anything that touches on official acts. So as long as Trump made the call ordering it from the from the Oval Office, it's unlikely that any evidence could be obtained. If someone in the know at TMG testified against him, that would work, but it's very unlikely anyone with a conscience has direct knowledge.

Really? What vulnerabilties did you find?

Or are you talking about something completely unrelated?

...5th Ave. and NOBODY is fucking stopping him because GopSCOTUS gave him "Presidential Immunity".

U.S. is bigly fucked up.

That is a horrible answer and I suspect you don't know any more about the law than anyone else here.

The only correct answer to the question is this: "If it isn't illegal, it should be."

Same answer for selling pardons, for spending half the president's time at his own golf resort so he can charge the government to house the secret service there, for accepting lavish gifts from governments and corporations, for trading stocks based on government deals, for making government deals contingent upon business deals with the family, for loaning Pentagon money to the family, for placing spurious tariffs on businesses, for abducting people who have committed no crime and deporting them with no due process, for exporting people to dangerous foreign prisons, for starting wars without Congressional approval, for. . .Jesus fucking Christ do I need to continue?

HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU TO CONTINUE DEFENDING THIS MAN?

Your whole "derp ber derp, It depends blah blah blah" is just an obvious stupid troll way of continuing to defend this moron who you have been defending on this forum for years. You are not being nuanced, you are not being clever. You fell for a wannabe despot and that was an extremely stupid thing for you to do. Continuing to defend him just makes you it obvious how much of an idiot you really are. What level of corruption is necessary for you to admit that you made a mistake?

Yeah, it was definitely Clinton lying about a relationship that set a precedent that allowed the current administration to undertake daily corruption and turn the government into a sort of mafia state. In the past, when presidents said things like, "I am not a crook!", they were totally telling the truth.

I mean, it was extremely consequential, Clinton's lie. It changed everything and many people suffered because of it. He might as well have lied about another country having weapons of mass destruction so he could start a war that would cost thousands of lives and then use that war to enrich his corporate buddies and donors.

Yeah, that Clinton. Real son of a bitch. All our current problems are rooted in him lying about a relationship.

Why would you stop a selective recount aimed at finding more votes in a specific set of counties that tended to lean toward one candidate? Hmm...

The above is a one-sided interpretation, but it's not an unreasonable one. The situation was that Florida had voted with punchcard ballots, and there were problems with a percentage of the ballots, both "overvotes", cases where more than one candidate was punched, and "undervotes", cases where no candidate was punched in a race. But it turns out that when you're talked about punched cards, "punched" is an ambiguous term. There were cases where chads (the little rectangular pieces of paper that get punched out) were left barely attached ("hanging chads") and cases where they were partially punched but still fully attached ("dimpled chads"). And everywhere in between.

Gore's team called for the targeted recount, arguing the theory that the targeted counties had more elderly populations who were more likely to have failed to fully punch their choices, resulting in "undervotes" when the scanning machines read them, i.e. the machine saw no holes for a race and decided that the ballot didn't vote for anyone. They argued that human examination of those ballots could clearly see in some cases that a position was punched and that a recount should be done to count those. The Florida State Supreme Court ordered a selective recount of the counties the Gore team thought should be recounted, to correct correctable undervotes.

Bush's team argued to SCOTUS that the selected counties were all Democrat-leaning (they were) which meant that the voters in the Republican-leaning counties that had not been selected were not receiving equal treatment under the law. The initial statewide count was done by machine, but the recount which would be more "permissive", finding votes where the machine wouldn't, was only being done in counties where the newly-found votes were more likely to be for Gore.

SCOTUS stayed the recount while they decided how to handle this, then ruled a few days later that the recount was unequal treatment, that a proper recount would need to be statewide and it would need clear rules for how to count ambiguous ballots, rather than each county defining its own rules. But by then the clock had run out anyway. The court's rationale for staying the count while they decided was that if the count proceeded counties would release updates that would likely show the vote totals shifting, which would make rejecting the recount look really corrupt if it went against Bush and if they decided that's what should be done. "Oh, the conservative court let the count go forward until they saw it wasn't going their way, then they rejected it" was worse than "The conservative court stopped the recount before it produced any results", was the theory.

You can certainly argue that these published positions by the court weren't the real reason, but they're not without merit.

In any event, as a careful, methodical, independent recount determined months later, the Gore-requested recount would still have shown Bush won. An incomplete recount which resulted in no win would have been a Bush win, because the state legislature was voting to send Bush votes for that case. An incomplete recount in which Florida failed to submit a slate would have been a Bush win, because the US House would have picked him. The only scenario in which Gore won was a statewide recount that also tried to tally "overvotes" -- having humans try to discern which of multiple punched chads was "most" punched, but no one at the time thought that would favor Gore, and it wasn't even being discussed.

Aside: "Corruption" is the wrong word. Corruption specifically refers to bribery and other compensation-related schemes (not necessarily monetary). "Partisanship" is a better word.

Indeed it does.

Yep. So all of the F-Droid-distributed apps will be associated with one account. Or maybe it'll be distributed across a handful of accounts.

For open source apps absolutely anyone can package and submit an app under their account.

You think Google is going to verify that an app was submitted by the author/developer rather than some F-Droid guy who submits all of the F-Droid apps?

They just require the code to have been submitted by a registered identity. They aren't going to check copyright ownership... and with open source apps that's rarely only one person anyway. The only risk is that if some of the F-Droid apps turn out to be malware, Google may revoke the permission of the person who submitted them to submit apps. And note that they don't insta-revoke. If it's a legitimate mistake (e.g. someone slipped some bad code in upstream), and it doesn't happen too often, it's fine. But whoever does the F-Droid submissions will want to take some care with what they submit.

That, BTW, is the actual reason for the registration requirement: Being able to block malware authors, at least to the extent of requiring them to find or create some government ID to create a new account. The way many malware authors operate, the $25 fee may actually also pose an obstacle for them.

Similar requirements on the Play store did wonders for reducing malware volume to a level where Google could stay ahead of it. Now they want to extend the same protection to the entire Android ecosystem. If you're curious how I know this: From 2014 to 2025 I was a senior member of the Android security team at Google. While I never worked on anti-malware efforts, I know the senior engineers who do and I chatted with them about stuff. The security engineers have been pushing for this change for years but it has been blocked by management because it was expected that it would generate exactly the sort of mis-perception that you have. Eventually, the engineers were able to prove their case with sufficient data that management let it happen (not without some pushback from the PR team, I expect).

It really, truly has nothing to do with killing F-Droid. No one in Google has any reason to want to kill F-Droid, and more than a few use it personally. NewPipe is a different story, though even there the Android team doesn't particularly care about it, except to the extent that the YouTube team can convince them to care.

If you're a fact-consumer, you should not say "Bush stole the election".

The best evidence is that the recount that SCOTUS stopped would not have changed the outcome. A different recount that wasn't being done, wouldn't have been done and probably couldn't have been done quickly enough, even if someone had asked for it, which no one did, might have changed the outcome.

For Gore to win (assuming the recount reached the same results as the NORC/media recount), all the following would have had to happen:

1. SCOTUS would have had to remand rather than stay (on Dec 9)
2. FLSC would have had to acted immediately to (a) change the recount to be statewide and (b) direct something very like the maximal standard used by the NORC/media (every other standard found a Bush win). There's no hint that anyone would have asked for either of those things.
3. FLSC would have had to rule that the recount didn't have to be completed by the legislatively-defined Dec 12th "Safe Harbor" date, which most interpreted as the hard deadline. I don't think anyone knows what the probability of that was, but FLSC's previous rulings seemed to imply they wouldn't have.
4. The very careful statewide recount would have to have been completed (including legal arguments and challenges) in at most 8 days. Realistically more like 5, since there absolutely would have been more time-eating litigation.

The most likely outcome if SCOTUS had done nothing is that the recount, if it completed fast enough, would have confirmed Bush's win.

It's also worth noting that another plausible outcome -- Florida just can't make a decision by Dec 18th and sends no electors -- would also have been a Bush win. Without Florida's 25 votes, Gore would have had the most electoral college votes, but wouldn't have had the constitutionally-required 270. In that case, the US House of Representatives would have picked. The result would almost certainly have been a purely party-line vote, 223-211 for Bush.

One final comment: 2000 did not represent some sort of "failure of democracy", and wouldn't even if SCOTUS' intervention actually had changed the outcome. When the electorate is very closely divided, the outcome is determined by random events. Chaos. If a butterfly in Peoria had flapped its wings a couple of months before it could have gone the other way.

I just replaced a hearing aid battery not ten minutes ago. They're 8mm by 5mm in case you were wondering.

I taught Gemini how nose-picking works. They owe me!