The president is the boss of the executive branch, and he has to be able to give orders to them to tell them how to do their jobs. Of course, those orders should only be about how they're supposed to go about executing the law, as defined by Congress and the Constitution. The problem isn't the ability of the boss to give orders, that's as it must be, the problem is that Trump is giving orders that tell the executive branch to do things that that exceed and sometimes defy the laws defined by Congress and the Constitution.

When that happens, it's the responsibility of the other two branches to rein him in or remove him. The courts are mostly trying to do their job to rein him in but their ability is limited. The intention is that when the executive gets out of control, Congress should give him the boot. Instead, the GOP leadership in Congress is cheering him on.

To be more precise, it's backed by the enforceability of debt contracts, i.e. the judicial and executive branches of the nation state. But that's only what makes sure the value is provided, what actually backs fiat currency is someone's legally-binding promise to do some sort of productive work. Fiat money is created by banks when they issue loans (including but definitely not limited to the Federal Reserve bank), so every dollar created is balanced by a dollar of debt that is created at the same time, and when the debt is paid off, the dollar ceases to exist.

Suppose you want to build a new house. You go to the bank and borrow, say, $1M. Many people think the bank loans you $1M that they have sitting in their (virtual) vault, money that was deposited by people with savings accounts at the bank, but that's not true. What happens is that the bank invents $1M to lend to you. It's not quite that simple (but note that we've abandoned fractional reserve lending; there are no reserve requirements any more), but we'll gloss over the irrelevant complexities. The core point is, the bank creates (a) $1M and (b) a mortgage contract, which offset one another. $1M came into existence, but there's a promise to repay, and therefore destroy, that money.

You pay the money to the construction company, who pays it to their workers and suppliers and investors, and they build you a house. You move in and all is good, except now you have an obligation to apply your labor for the next 30 years to generate value so you can make your monthly mortgage payments.

That is what backs fiat currency: The future labor of borrowers. The exact nature of the labor is undefined, of course, but that doesn't make the labor itself any less of a very real, very productive (by definition!) asset, and it is that productive asset that gives the currency its intrinsic value. And, of course, the legal system is backing the contracts, so you can't just decide you don't want to pay, not without significant negative consequences. That's just one of a number of crucial roles the government plays. Another is the laws that mandate that all debts public and private be denominated in and payable with the nation's currency.

Obviously, crypto assets (they really aren't currencies; even ignoring their lack of intrinsic value, they suck as currencies) have nothing remotely comparable to that sort of solid foundation. Less obviously, so-called "hard" currencies don't either. The classic hard currency, gold, does have a little intrinsic value because it's pretty and has some useful physical properties, but the vast majority of its value is "pure magical thought". It has that value only because everyone believes it does, but there's nothing behind that belief but tradition, not even anything as abstract as contractual obligations. Unlike fiat currencies.

I'm not an American, but I was always under the impression that the USA was run like other democracies where an elected assembly made decisions about what laws to pass and what taxes to collect and where money should be spent and in what quantities.

It seems like Trump is doing the whole thing as a one man show, and the elected assembly is doing.... nothing?

I genuinely don't understand this. It's not like any democracy I've ever heard of before; it's a monarchy?

I guess I'm wondering why nobody seemed to notice this before? Was it just that previous "monarch"/presidents did things more stealthily than Trump? Or was the system suddenly changed when he took office?

And if the system was indeed changed, how was that accomplished?

The phone number thing has nothing to do with tracking, it's about account recovery. IMO, they should offer an option to skip it that makes you promise repeatedly that if you ever forget your password, or if your account is ever taken over, that you'll give up and make a new account instead of demanding some other way to prove your identity and recover your account. "I promise to take responsibility for maintaining access to this account and will never ask Google to reset my forgotten/stolen password".

Probably people would still pester them for a way to get their account back, though.

Why female?

Why hasn't that already happened, then? It's not like the market force in question are new.

Top 10 US states by manufacturing jobs:

1. California (D)
2. Texas (R)
3. Ohio (R)
4. Illinois (D)
5. Michigan (split)
6. Pennsylvania (split)
7. New York (D)
8. Indiana (R)
9. Wisconsin (split)
10. North Carolina (split)

The R / D / split designations above describe the current state government, "split" meaning that control is divided between the parties. So of the top 10, three are Republican-controlled, three are Democrat-controlled and four are divided (though the Michigan split is a very recent phenomenon; Michigan has been quite blue for a long time).

The pattern that I see is that the blue states generate most of the new ideas and products and manufacturing naturally springs up around them, then over time manufacturing of now-established products gets moved to red states for the reasons you pointed out. This is an ongoing process that keeps the manufacturing output relatively balanced over time -- but keeps the blue states richer and maintains their dominant position in US GDP.

Also, it's worth noting that the federal minimum wage is irrelevant these days; market prices have risen above it. Even in low-income states unskilled jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage. (To me, this isn't an argument that the minimum wage needs to be raised, it's an argument that it should be abolished and that we should trust the labor market to set wages.)

Do you also not know how percentages work?

I also make a living from creative work and it annoys me as well to see someone blatantly trying to rip us off. But I think you and I both know that it's unlikely measures like this will prevent piracy for very long even if they are initially successful. The only thing you can truly control is the systems that don't belong to your user, so that's where you need to put anything you don't want them messing with.

Meanwhile as someone who is also a user and also doing other things than playing games on my devices - including some things where security matters much more than it does for anti-cheat measures in some random game - requiring any kind of intrusive access to my system just to play a game is a 100% reliable way or ensuring that I will never be buying that game.

Fortunately there is now more entertainment produced than I could possibly experience in a lifetime so even if it's the best game in the world I won't be too sorry to miss it while I'm playing something else that doesn't think it should have more control of my equipment than I do.

"insurrection: an act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government."

DEI has nothing (or very little) to do with it.

The root of the problem is political PARTIES.

If everyone ran for office on their own merits and made their own case for why they would be the best representative for the area they live in (or possibly their area of expertise), then worked together cooperatively to run the government and make things work for everyone, a lot of these problems would go away on their own.

The original writers of the US constitution and so forth were not members of political parties and the idea that such a thing would arise in the future never crossed their mind.

So if you're an "originalist" then you shouldn't be part of or support any political party.

When a disorganized mob is actively trying to hamper or prevent government business from being conducted, that's called insurrection.

Whenever there's a technological "leap", incumbents try to hold it back.

Even the original industrial revolution had entrenched interests in farming and production taking steps to delay or disrupt it.

But when something can be done more efficiently, whether farming or manufacturing or anything else, those who adopt the new efficient technology eventually come out on top.

I don't see why the technological advance represented by AI will play out any differently.

Or you could just, you know, fill out a 1040. It takes about ten minutes. A bit longer if you've never done it before.

People are irrationally afraid of it because there are so many horror stories out there about people spending hours and hours and hours trudging through financial records trying to figure out their taxes, but most of those stories are heavily exaggerated, and 100% of them are from people whose finances are *way* more complicated than average, because they own a business or have a bunch of fancy investments or whatever. For a regular person who has a regular job and gets a regular W-2 from your employer, it's really not a big deal. Though of course if most of what you know about it comes from the advertising from Intuit and H&R Block, you wouldn't know that.

A few decades ago, the vote would've gone heavily in favor of requiring car dealerships to be locally owned; but at this point, I imagine a lot of Ohio voters would kinda shrug and check one of the options more or less at random. If there are still a lot of people here who care deeply about the issue, I'm not aware of it. (Maybe among the remaining members "silent generation"?) Ohio consumers have thoroughly embraced large chains (such as Meijer and Menard's and Ollie's and so on) for most of their brick-and-mortar retail needs, and the distinction between a franchise chain and a corporately owned chain is too subtle for most voters, given that the only way to even distinguish them from one another is by doing research on them.

Ideally, there should not have been a special exception carved out for Tesla in particular, in the first place. Either Tesla should have been held to the same rules as everyone else, or else the rule should have just been changed. Any time government rules treat specific companies differently from everyone else, I see that as a sign of corruption and bad governance (although "bad" is relative; there is of course much *worse* governance in some parts of the world, than what we have in Ohio).

There's a middle ground here. Require institutions that have supported too many fraudulent papers to see external confirmation of results as part of the peer review process before allowing publication, and not from sister-institutions under their own umbrella.

Honestly I wouldn't mind seeing an industry of what are essentially escrow services for this sort of thing. Institutions of what essentially are skeptics who nevertheless will look at testing and/or replicating original research while being disinterested in the success or failure of the research itself. The skeptics will both seek replication and will take the 20-foot view to look at why this is happening and if other explanations might exist for the mechanism.

For what it's worth I spent time doing software quality assurance and my job was to act as a foil to developers, who often were too close to their own projects and sometimes missed gigantic red flags because said project was their baby. As a disinterested outsider my job was to try to break their stuff in a realistic, plausible way, even if that way was something of an edge-case. And far too often it took my manager speaking with their manager to speak with them to get them to address the faults or flaws because they were too emotionally invested to be able to be critical about their own work.