No. However there is considerable evidence that Trump requires bribing in some manner before he will do something that other Presidents would do without a bribe because they are the right thing to do for the Country. Whether these particular contracts were only given because of the bribes is impossible to prove since they are indeed contracts that should have been given. But the opinion that they would not have been given without a bribe is a valid one, and Musk at least seems to have held that opinion. Hence the bribes.

While the second post did indeed contain publicly verifiable facts, the claim that they contradict the original claim is disputable at best. All they show is that Musk's Companies were capable of getting contracts and Government loans under Obama and Biden without the need for bribes. They do not show that Musk did not bribe Trump. In some ways this is even more damning for Trump, because the implication is that bribing Trump is necessary even if your Companies are deserving contracts. Or at the very least that Musk believed bribes to be necessary under Trump.

I personally agree with you that it didn't deserve a troll modification. It maybe deserved to be down-modded as irrelevant, although replies pointing out it's irrelevancy were sufficient as long as people weren't modding it up.

Bigoted scum like you lost the argument. In a Democratic Society, you get your way by winning the argument and then winning the vote. But your side didn't manage that. You lost, because the majority of people think your bigotry is laughable at best and should make you a pariah in any civilised Society.. And because your side lost the argument and the vote, they turned to underhanded tactics to try and get thier way anyway, undemocratically. But the civilised side isn't stupid and so noticed this underhanded tactic and voted it down. So your side lost again. And now, like the whiny little crybaby you are, you are bawling your eyes out about having lost and trying to misrepresent the facts of the case. You lost, get over it. Maybe try and join the civilised world instead of continuing to spread your bigotry and hatred, although I think that's unlikely. You'll just keep crying about how civilised people think you're a dickhead.

After looking further into this, it was indeed an amendment put in by bigots to try and wreck a piece of legislation they don't agree with but know they are in the minority on. The legislation was to cement recognition of trans women as women, and trans men as men. This amendment could have been used to bypass this because if passed, then if a trans man can get pregnant they would be a women not a man and this could then also be used to argue the vice-versa. It was an attempt to scupper a vote they were going to lose by making the legislation unworkable and was rejected on that basis.

Why would you need a regulation to say such a thing? What possible purpose could it serve? Are you suggesting that because they didn't vote to confirm this now men can get pregnant? Without knowing what the proposal actually was, or even if it exists outside some bigot's imagination, I suspect that this was part of some wider amendment designed to bake bigotry into regulation. They included that particular clause so that when it inevitsbly got voted down they could cite this to make it seem silly

It appears to be more that the wannabe King is using existing unrest to try and gain power, with the assistance of the Western powers. The unrest would likely be happening without that, although it's debatable how much sanctions helped cause it. If The Western powers had any integrity or decency at all they would assist those looking to create a Democratic State, but that would be unlikely to have much love for those Western powers so instead they are favouring the wannabe King, who will need to show love to the West constantly if he wants to remain in power.

We already have that. It's called Grok.

The gathering in Tiananmen Square was not primarily a pro-Democracy protest. It was a commemoration of the life and career of a recently deceased CCP official who had been promoting and bringing in reforms. The gathering was both to commemorate his life and to send a message to the CCP leadership that the people wanted his reforms to continue even though he was no longer alive to promote them. The pro-Democracy element inside the Square was only a small minority of the people there. The majority of the 'pro-Democracy' forces were gathered outside the Square and were heavily armed. It has since been shown that the CIA funded and armed these forces.

It's difficullt to see what the CCP could have done differently here. These armed forces attempted to storm into the Square and showed little concern about any civilians who might have got in the way of their march toward the CCP headquarters. In fact, from CIA documents since released all the actual fighting took place in the streets surrounding the Square, not actually inside the Square. Those same documents also state that more than half of the deaths were in fact of CCP forces trying to prevent these separtist forces enterring the Square. Those CCP forces took great care to avoid civilian casualties, while the seperatist forces showed no such concern. Again, this is all taken from official CIA documents written at the time but not released until much later. If these seperatist forces had been allowed to enter the Sqwuare civilian deaths would have been MUCH higher, whereas in reality civilian deaths were minimal, unless of course you count those heavily armed seperatists as civilians.

That's nonsense. Mathematics is plural because there is more than one type of mathematics. Arithmetic and geometry to name just two of them. If your course is in arithmetic and nothing else than calling it singular makes sense. But if it covers more than one type of mathematics then it is obviously plural.

No they don't. They put it into assets, which have a limited supply. This is the cause of house price inflation, and many other forms of asset inflation. This impoverishes everyone else because the rest of us simply can't compete for these assets against people who effectively have an unlimited supply. So it ends up with the wealthy owning all the assets then renting them back to the people who actually need them. This helps keep wages down because people need to work to pay these rents and so can't afford to withhold their labour. And so the cycle continues, the wealthy get even more of the available wealth,m and the rest of us suffer.

This is the inevitable result of Neoliberal, or more accurately named Neofeudal, economics. Post 1945 Governments were providing increasing amounts of the essential services, including housing, and this held prices down and kept wages up. Oil cartels started the reversal of this by causing artificially high prices, then Neofeudal economics caused the sell-off of Government assets, and all the gains we'd made since 1945 went into reverse.

This is an example of the problem with Capitalism at this stage though. It's not just the car industry, it's pretty much all of them. Whichever industry you choose they become homogenised. When there isn't quite enough to go around competition works well enough to raise standards, increase production to the stage where there is enough to go around and keep prices down. But when there's a surplus competition simply doesn't work as well. Prices shoud decrease, but that makes profit difficult to maintain so instead of competing the industry players tend to work together to maintain higher prices and therefore profits. Artificial scarcity is maintained and new players are prevented from entering the market because that would increase supply and therefore reduce profits. Workers are squeezed, also to maintain profits. Wealth pools in a few hands which creates a feedback cycle which eccelerates the process, and this translates to political power further accelerating the process. At this stage Capitalism works alomst entirely against the interests of the general population and the previous prosperity goes into reverse. This can be held off somewhat through stringent regualtion, which is what the EU tries to do, but this can only ever be a holding action. Capitalism does not work for the gerneral population unless there is scarcity.

The point of an economy is to provide goods for the people of that economy. Firstly the essentials, food, shelter, clothing. Then luxuries. China's economy is achieving that increasingly well. America's economy is getting worse at it. Capitalism is a decent method to raise an economy up from a level of scarcity to a level of reasonable comfort for the population, but once that level is reached it becomes an increasingly poor method. In fact once a reasonable level of comfort is reached Capitalism becomes actively harmful to the population and the eocnomy as a whole. This is the level where a more Socialist model should be steadily switched to, replacing the now wasteful and counter-productive Capitalist model. Sticking with pure Capitalism once the economy is productive enough is actively harmful and dangerous to your population.

It is not at all true. AI may be based on thousands of books, but that's in the same way that a Flat Earther's nonsense explanations are based on all the science that they've seen and failed to understand. AI is a badly designed and thrown together mish-mash of everything it's trained on, seen through a lens that distorts everything and is completely unable to actually understand even the simplest part of it.

Sure, there are some humans who are writing for AI rather than humans, but all that achieves is to accelerate Model Collapse.An LLM, no matter how carefully trained, is unable to evaluate what it's trained on, meaning it gives it all equal worth no matter how batshit crazy it might actually be. While the LLM algorithm has some uses if it's training data is carefully curated for a specific purpose, that curation is simply not possible for general purpose models which is why they are simply let loose to collect slop from all over the web.Despite some people still claiming they will improve, the opposite is the truth. They will get steadily worse and less reliable. Soon enough this will become obvious to everyone and the bubble will burst. With any luck it will take out a lot of the worst Techbros with it.

You can't have a wifi device that doesn't phone home because the manufacturer keeps the price down by selling your data. While the fee per user may not be much, in aggregate it allows them to reduce prices enough that nobody can compete without doing this. It's been tried quite a few time with seversl different types of device, but the increase in price to pay for not selling your data is more than most people are willing to pay and so none of these attempts were successful. So if you want a wifi thermostat that doesn't need an internet connection you'll have to make one yourself because nobody can make a profit from making one for you.

I don't think it's entirely that. It may be for things like NASA projects where innovation is much more prevalent, but there are other factors in Government projects as a whole. I suspect there's a large element of costs and time frames being deliberately underestimated. If the true costs were stated up front it may be more difficult politically to get something approved. HS2 here in the UK seems to be an example of that. The originally stated costs and time frame were ridiculously low and have risen steeply since, but if the full price had been stated upfront it's doubtful it would have ever got approval. That may well have been a good thing, but that's a discussion for another time. I suspect (but obviously can't prove) that underestimating such things is common in Government projects across the Democratic world so that things get started, then the later rise in costs is easier to sell and often becomes Someone Else's Problem anyway.