My apologies. Bad nesting. Was intended for 66197052.

You're saying that examples of self policing in the absence of laws can't be trusted because they're self regulated and not enforced by laws.

Well, I guess I can't argue with that. But it's meaningless.

The Brexit referendum in 2016 did NOT permit all British registered voters to vote. This was taken to court multiple times.

The number of people who were entitled to vote was very tightly restricted. Access to a polling station was limited. There were many factors that could result in you being excluded. Postal ballots were largely not permitted, even though they were officially allowed. If you were overseas at that precise moment, you couldn't vote. You had to specially register to vote for it, but the website (which not everyone could access, strangely enough) was only up erratically. Those in the Isle of Man, although full British citizens, were not permitted to vote, for example.

Not so much "glossing over" as resigned to it. The stack of malfeasance with this guy would crush a small animal if it fell over sideways.

When the bulk of his ill gotten gains is now measured in billions, some five hundred dollar phones with misleading country of origin provenance seems not worth dwelling on.

Yeah, that ain't good... but here we are.

I apologize. I checked the nesting three times, though, and was sure you were referring to my post. I really hate that about slashdot.

But I still maintain the point that it's only slightly scammy. It's a functioning phone and the feeling they're buying is real. They've only been scammed a little. As I said, as his grifts go, this one is pretty penny ante.

Nope. No idea how you got there.

This isn't much of a grift, anyway, Sure, they're overpaying, but what you need to realize is that they're buying two things - a phone and a feeling of contributing to, and participating in, the cause. Valuing the second part at zero is to misunderstand human nature.

Some would say policing others over what you perceive to be incorrect, unintelligent behaviour makes YOU the socially incompatible misfit who needs to be corrected. For instance, I would say that. I am saying that.

Pick your battles. That should't be one of them, Otherwise you'll spend your whole life getting angry at people who bought beanie babies before the crash.

Watches, guitars, maga hats... all Chinese products sold with fake patriotism to gullible twits. Just don't be one of those twits and move on with your life. My dad bought monster cables. He wasn't getting his money back so I kept my opinion to myself. In the grand scheme of DJT grifting this doesn't begin to move the needle.

Teens will find a way, like they always have. You can't stop the tide completely, but that's not necessary. Probably not desirable, either. You just need to slow it down. Moderate it. Like we've done for decades on other problematic things in society, I couldn't buy a playboy back in the early eighties... at least until I found the Chinese corner store owner who would look the other way. No shade - he just happened to be Chinese. Interesting factoid... it was usually easier for kids to get pot than booze...

There is not much of a downside here. Being identified might even curb the "asshole in waiting" inside of angsty teens and shave off the worst online behaviours.

I'd like to think that old maxim carries some weight... but when it comes to the US, it doesn't - at least, not now. They're going to walk away. The good news is that no matter how they end up doing it, there will indeed be a price to pay. Not immediately... but pretty quickly. It has already started to manifest. And they won't be prepared to deal with it. When their leader exits, they're left with a shell of an organization, populated by incompetent sycophants with no idea how to run the show. When the world continues to turn away and build around the US, the utter lack of diplomatic capability will leave them an island. A prickly one, to be sure... but a hopelessly indebted, broke island.

Five years ago I started telling my direct reports that they'd better start planning their exit strategy from coding and simple BA work. Get started on business and managerial skills. Prepare to go upward or out. I didn't know it would be AI specifically, but I knew that the tools were already getting sophisticated enough to signal that the front line jobs would be under threat.

Some took the advice, some didn't. Other managers were willing to tell them not to worry, which took away the sense of urgency.

I've since met with some of those folks who were looking for advice on upcoming interviews or the job search, and I've been helping as best I can, but also telling them to have Plan C figured out. Nobody wants to exit the industry and reinvent themselves... but that is the world some of them are finding themselves inhabiting.

Like it or not, we have more technical people than roles for them to fill. And the math is heartless.

If there's any lesson to learn in all of this, it's that making confident predictions on things like large percentage changes in oil prices isn't just foolhardy... it's silly. It's exactly the kind of mistaken prognostication that made Russia think they had an unbreakable stranglehold on Europe through natural gas provisioning. That power evaporated in their hands when the world reorganized around them. I've been hearing about $150-$200 oil from pundits since the start of this conflict. It may arrive, it may not. But to be so sure as to specify a date seems wildly overly optimistic.

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Although there is a right join, no far right join has ever been defined and there's no signs that it would in fact be possible.

Quite the opposite. He hates Anthropic and keeps trying to find a way, any way, to damage them. Those attempts keep backfiring, though. It's the internal image of his international misadventures.