The guideline in question is "Gotta kick up to the big guy". If you don't pay your "taxes", you're gonna have a bad day. And, no, I'm not talking about the IRS.

I wish it were that simple.

First, note that there isn't one emoluments clause, there are two. And they're quite different.

The Foreign Emoluments clause prohibits any officer of the government, which would include the president, though that's not specifically stated, from accepting a "present" from any foreign government. The problem with this is that it's not clear how it's supposed to be enforced with respect to the president. Traditionally, presidents have treated gifts as gifts to the country, and when they wanted to make an exception they asked Congress to authorize it. Mostly. George Washington famously kept a painting the French gave him. Trump, er, took a different approach, simply ignoring the Foreign Emoluments clause, which the Constitution says isn't allowed... but then what? Congress never passed any law defining how exactly the clause was supposed to apply to the president (there are laws about not accepting gifts for pretty much everyone else in the executive branch)... so, how it might work is undefined.

During Trump's first term, a bunch of Congressional Democrats sued Trump for violating the Foreign Emoluments clause, and their suit was dismissed for lack of standing. Courts ruled that individual legislators (much less individual Americans) lack standing to sue over it, only Congress as a body has standing, and Congress as a body hasn't been interested in acting. There were also some suits by DC hospitality businesses claiming economic injury because foreign visitors chose Trump's properties to curry favor. The district court said they didn't have standing but that was reversed on appeal.. but never decided because it was mooted when he left office. The DC and Maryland governments sued and courts went back and forth on their standing, but that was never decided either, then mooted when he left.

So... at present there is no enforcement mechanism unless Congress creates one, or unless the courts decide that someone (and it's not clear who that might be) has standing. And we also have no idea what the remedies might be.

The Domestic Emoluments clause is more precise, but very narrow. It says Congress can't change the president's salary during their term, and that the president can't be paid by the federal government (other than his salary) nor any state government. That says nothing about Wall Street bros buying insider info, people paying for pardons, hodlers buying crypto to get a sit-down... none of that.

Not exactly a yawn. More like a shake of the head at more evidence that all politicians are on the take, perhaps with a wry grin that "their guy" is smarter and better at it and so makes a lot more money.

I mostly don't talk politics with my family because they're Trump supporters and it creates friction, and accomplishes nothing. This morning, though, when I saw this news, I started typing a post on the family chat to ask if they're really okay with it. By the time I got to the end, I realized I knew exactly what their response would be "Nancy Pelosi does it, too, Trump just does it better", so I deleted my post, unsent.

That reply is wrong in degree, of course, but, sadly, it's not wrong in kind. We've long tolerated insider trading by Congress, and a revolving door between regulators and the companies they regulate. The Supreme Court has allowed its justices to take veiled bribes, and even ruled that government officials can accept bribes as long as the payoff comes after the action. Prior to Trump, presidents and their staffs stayed out of this mud, but if others can do it, why not the president?

The root of the problem is voter acceptance of corruption. Too many Americans just assume that all politicians are corrupt and there's nothing you can do. They're wrong on both points -- and in fact the US previously did have massive public corruption and then mostly shut it off, but Americans don't know their own history -- but until voters care enough to get Congress to act, this is the new normal.

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?

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.

Dating is a pure market game. Men get the short end of the stick based on supply and demand and from what I've seen, it balances out with age. Dating at 18 SUCKED!!!! But it makes sense. Imagine a numeric "appeal score" that covers EVERY facet: looks, personality, wealth, whatever matters to you. I was a 6 maybe a 7 at my most confident best days. No older women wanted to date me. Women my age who were 6s were getting attention from 8s their age and 7s ranging from slightly older to older than their dads. I don't hold it against women for choosing an 8 or a 9 over me.

However, I'm told, and from what I've seen, once you're 30, it reverses. A male 7 over 30 gets attention from older AND younger 8s. The women your age have lowered their standards because at 32, your ideal natural window for having children is nearly closed.

However, that's for first time marriages. In general, the older you are, the greater the probability your pool has found someone. I have a friend who is single and horny AF in her 50s. She meets lots of great men and jokes "unfortunately, the good ones are taken". She's told me stories about the men she's dated. If they're decent, they're very entitled (the market problem from before...he could date a woman his age, but also random women in their 20s and 30s are constantly hitting him up for no-strings-attached sex...many of which have less wisdom and experience and put him on a pedestal because they don't know any better).

All this is market stuff. It's like a house. If you want to live in a nice neighborhood with a short commute and a good school district....you're not likely to find bargains and will have to make compromises.

But in the end, you're still single for a reason. Maybe you found fulfillment being single. Many women do. They don't emotionally need men as much as men need a family. Lots of single moms just give up and focus on their kids and friends and are happy without a man....that's a valid reason.

In their case and yours, I'll wager you're not relying on AI chatbots for emotional fulfillment.

It was a funny and well written!

I used to be a cat person, we couldn't afford a dog growing up, then I got a dog....definitely a dog person now. But having loved a few humans and precisely 1 dog...they're NOTHING alike. People who think they're "Dog Parents" and say it unironically are truly broken individuals. You can love your dog, but it has no choice but to love you back. It is fully dependent on you and if it pisses you off enough, you can ethically put it up for adoption like people do today or unethically just abandon it and probably face no consequence, which was common where and when I grew up. Your dog has very limited agency and had bred to submit to your bullshit. It can't give you much feedback at all and has been bred to adapt to you.

I see similarities to AI relationships. It's a relationship where you fully control it and if it displease you, you can discard it without consequence. I can't abandon my kids. If my wife displeases me, it's VERY expensive to separate and has many consequences. If a chatbot displeases you, you can start all over with a brand new one for a similar monthly fee. I know a tiny number of people who have relationships with AI bots, personally...including a friend I've know for almost 13 years. She has many issues and severe childhood trauma and went from terrible relationship to terrible relationship. I am confident she's the target audience and not an anomaly. The few others who have told me about their AI relationships...yeah, seemed similar. I actually like her and used to be close friends with her, but feel bad for her...she falls for every scam...gets talked into one-sided polycules where she's monogamous, but her boyfriend fucks as many women as he wants...and she pays all the bills because he's perpetually unemployed...and FAR from attractive or charming...like most sex cult guys.

People with healthy functional relationships will keep these AI relationships at arm's length. People who are desperate? People who are too dysfunctional to form a real relationship will likely love these. Even those who are desperate? I know a lot of eternally single desperate people: I work in software. In EVERY case, it's not that they're fat or ugly or even autistic that they can't find a mate...If you're capable of giving and receiving love, there's a lid for every pot....they have deeper issues and are really difficult to be around, even for a limited time as a friend.

It's cruel, but true. If you're single, there's a reason. I have many single friends. The ones who are loveable? They gave up looking, like a handful of single moms I know, slightly dysfunctional, but from what I've seen, good enough to marry...I could picture dating them if single...but yeah when you're 35 and have a kid, it's not as easy as when they were dating in their early 20s, so they give up after 5 or 6 tries. The ones that keep trying? They have issues. You can see it just in their friendships or being their coworker, usually severe emotional instability or unreliability...you don't have to date them to see why they haven't found SOMEONE yet.