In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.

In this scenario, the hostage is the company who's data was stolen... the data is the gun being held to their head and the victims are the people identifiable by the data.

Your negotiation strategy would kill both the hostage and irreparably harm the victims.

A better strategy is to ensure that your dangerous gun is kept secure and away from children. Prevention is always better than cure.

Why is it, when my wealth is transferred to the already wealthy it's never called "wealth redistribution". Like class warfare... it's only called that when we fight back.

If you don't punish companies for firing, you end up with both less hiring and more firing... And those that are left have to do the work of 3 people because if they don't, they'll be fired too.

Countries with strong labour protection tend not to have higher unemployment but they do have a better quality of life.

An OS costs under $200 in 2026 dollars.

Seems to have gotten pretty cheap.

I think the concept is that if a company announces mass layoffs because AI yountax them per employee.

I assume what would actually happen is honesty in layoffs, notbtax revenue.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

"AI" has been replacing these jobs for years. When's the last time you had to go to a travel agent, no you just use Google Flights and book direct like anyone else with half a brain. Same with vacuum cleaner salesmen.

Also I long for the day where Karens get sent to AI, anyone who has ever worked retail sees that as a utopian future.

It's the same reason they mindlessly hate unions. They sacrificed, gave everything, bled for the company, sucked every corporate knob, shoved their tongue up every managerial arse and there comes along someone who had the audacity to stand up for their rights and get everything that the corporate drone was arse licking for and then some. Worse yet, this "unionist" might even be *gasp* working class and earning more than them.

In order to reconcile their bad life choices they buy into the corporate propaganda that unions are evil, that's the ticket... they aren't actually getting what they want, good wages, good conditions and benefits, it's the union being evil... Bosses love it when people blame the union instead of them, hence they reinforce this narative constantly so that the brown-nosers never ever, not once, think of organising and standing up for themselves.