So you are using an excise tax for your definition of "rent-seeking"? In other words, you're just using your own personal definition. Taxes would only be rent seeking if they are being used to funnel money to a particular manufacturer. The excise tax you are describing is indiscriminate. In a rent-seeking scenario, there needs to be a party looking to extract rents. Who would that be in your excise tax scenario? The mere fact that the government is taking a fee doesn't make it a rent. So what other party is trying to commercially benefit from this excise tax on suppressors, etc.? Also, what market are the people trying to buy suppressors being kept out of by this excise tax, I am curious? Is the hit man market sadly experiencing a government caused monopoly? I suppose you could be talking about gun ranges that might hand out suppressors to clients so that they're less noisy while shooting to deal with noise ordinances. Except I haven't heard of that being a thing. Certainly the playground at my child's old school had a constant background noise of gunfire from the nearby shooting range.

Your next example is basically more of the same thing. You complain that "they don't even test you". In other words, there's basically no discrimination, meaning there's no market distortion in favor of particular parties. Now, I could argue that it is discriminatory against the poor, perhaps. But I am pretty sure you would draw the line at the suggestion that society systematically disenfranchises the poor in yoenur arguments because it would conflict with other ideological positions. In any case, the fees in question are almost always held as being small enough to not be discriminatory in nature by most parties. Basically, you're lumping taxes and license fees into "rent-seeking" when they are clearly not that by the classic definition.

You go on to a definition of rent-seeking behavior from Wikipedia. Though, I will note, it is not from the Wikipedia page on rent-seeking behavior. The text you cite is not on there, and it hasn't been edited since the 9th. I suppose there are other pages with definitions for it, but it would have been nice to specify which. Two things are interesting here. One is that it seems highly likely that definition is "somewhat limited" because you are omitting additional sentences that extend the definition (aside from the additional bit about Adam Smith), but I can't tell because no link or reference to what Wikipedia page you mean. The other interesting thing is that, in the excerpt you use, it says "Rent-seeking is the practice of individuals or businesses...". So, "individuals or businesses" are not the government, but your examples of supposed "rent-seeking" are government. However, Adam Smith did not consider government taxes to be the same thing. He wasn't a huge fan, but he thought they were necessary, but he made a definite distinction between government taxes and fees and private monopolies. He only applied the same criteria to government action when it was being used to do things like grant monopolies or skew markets towards specific non-government individuals and groups. In any case, holding up Adam Smith as an example is a bit of a balancing act for anyone against government granted monopolies because he was in favor of patents and copyrights. Also, he was totally in favor of taxing things that were not necessities. He would likely have been fine with the gun suppressor tax. For an example of something he was not fine with: tariffs.

With regulatory capture, you at least have a more valid example. Though you don't actually get specific. That is a rent-seeking behavior. I will note though, that you have yet to give an example that doesn't directly involve government...

The rent seeking parts that were talked about were not the general collection of rent for property. They were collusive elements in pricing rents, either direct or systemic. You literally use the word gentrification in your paragraph. You clearly recognize what it is. In its modern sociological usage, it refers to the original inhabitants of a neighborhood being forced out in favor of an influx of wealthy newcomers because of rising land values. Despite not actually offering any more real value, landlords raise their rents to exploit a "rent gap" between what they are getting in rent and what the market may now be willing to bear. Look up Neil Smith and "rent gap theory". Note that this was even before the modern trend of rental market speculation.

Sure, sure. Can't be anti-monopolistic without being a "Marxist", I get it. Having read this post, I think it has crystallized your opinion a bit. It seems to me that you're a "taxation is theft" neo-libertarian type who is taking the concept of "rent-seeking" and viewing it through your own personal lens so that it exclusively refers to government activity. At least, that seems to be the point we've reached in the conversation. That's fine, it just means that meaningfully communicating with others on the subject is going to be difficult for you.

What the hell are you talking about? What I wrote boils down to "call yourself whatever you want, I can't be bothered to believe you or disbelieve you.". How would that be a straw man argument? Or even an argument, for that matter. It's conceding that it doesn't even really matter.

No, but using the term TDS for Trump Derangement Syndrone certainly does seem highly partisan. It's a nonsense made up condition invented by Republicans originally as Bush Derangement Syndrone, and then later adapted by Trump supporters who, ironically, tend to demonize Bush. Also, in the context of Trump, it was originally actually used against Republican never-trumpers. It's not a real thing. It is quite literally only exists as a partisan attack against everyone who isn't a MAGA. So your use of it does leave a certain impression.

After that, you go on with some more "both sides" stuff, and claim to come to your own interpretations rather than just listening to talking heads on TV. In a paragraph where you used the term TDS - that you got from those same talking heads - multiple times. Or are you going to claim that you consulted primary sources to come to an understanding of the medical research on the syndrome in question?

Duh, yeah. We all understand how political campaigning, lobbying, etc. work. That still doesn't mean the ridiculous "both sides" fallacy holds. The White House, the vehicle of the executive branch of government in the US, not the Trump campaign, just released an official statement referring to Newsom as Newscum. It's not the first time, and it is also not the first time that official channels of the executive branch have been used for personal attacks and campaign activities. There are laws against this. These are Hatch act violations, and egregious ones. Some of them, like using the White House and the Kennedy Center for Republican party events without paying for use of the facilities should be prosecuted as felonies. While many politicians have used the bully pulpit their office gives them to, for example, tout their achievements in ways that definitely seem like campaigning, the sheer scope and level of that sort of thing under the Trump administration is astounding, and devoid of any sense of propriety whatsoever. That is just one of many examples, of the extreme excesses of Trump and his MAGA movement that make any "both sides" argument obvious as nonsense.

It's not immaterial. The actual details should be the entire basis of your claim, but you refuse to provide any. You just write vague generalisms that you expect to be taken as truth. The problem is, you're not actually saying anything without those details. You're essentially just spouting nonsense and it appears that you're not giving details because you don't actually have them and your opinion on this is just a half formed mishmash of emotions and half-remembered sloganeering.

The term lawfare as you use it (it had a different original meaning related to actual war) is just a whiny excuse for being prosecuted for crimes by Republicans. It was adapted from its original use. Steve Bannon complained that it was Lawfare when he was being prosecuted for stealing from Republican donors to his "we build the wall" project. Fortunately, Trump saved him from the dastardly lawfare with a pardon, also saving the people he robbed from the terrible burden of the federal courts ordering Bannon to pay them back their stolen money.

Yes, but that doctrine normally applies to warrants obtained using evidence that was obtained unconstitutionally. The dossier was not obtained unconstitutionally.

Irrelevant. They didn't use the dossier in court. The point of getting a warrant is to gather evidence to potentially later use in court. Once again, evidence used to obtain a warrant uses the "probable cause" standard. Criminal court uses the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.

For the purposes of the FISA court granting the warrant, no, it really doesn't.

Yes, like when coming from officers in court, or when applying for warrants. In other words, in the exact situation I already said it applied.

You seem to be very confused about what a straw man argument is. The whole point of listing different types of evidence that would never fly in criminal court, but is fine when getting a warrant is to drive home the point that there are extremely loose rules for evidence for a warrant compared to evidence for a criminal conviction. How would that be a straw man?

I've got an idea. Why not - instead of claiming that I am lying while wallowing in complete ignorance yourself - look it up yourself if you don't believe me. You're clearly not going to believe anything I say about the provenance of the information anyway. Incidentally, the reason I didn't round until after the fifth decimal place is because I would have had to round up. I reasoned that, if I rounded up, making the percentage a tine fraction higher than it actually was, you would cry foul and call me a liar. So I went to the fifth decimal place after which I was able to round down because that digit was below 5. Silly me bothering with that when you were always just going to call it a lie anyway without bothering to check.

And what does Russian Collusion have to do with it? I brought up working as an agent for a foreign power, because that is generally one of the specific requirements for the FISA court. I never made any statements that there were any convictions for direct Russian Collusion in the Trump campaign. Talk about a straw man. What I actually did say is that there were a bunch of people convicted of serious crimes as a result of those warrants and they did, in fact, fit the foreign agent requirements for a FISA court warrant. I named a few, but there were more. With a host of crimes like money laundering, obstruction, witness tampering, etc. It should be pretty hard for any serious person to say with a straight face that those investigations were baseless.

Also, I should note that, while no "collusion" charges were brought, the investigations did show plenty of Russian money going into the Trump campaign or pro-Trump PACs from Russia, Republican operatives were involved in straw donor schemes to transfer the money. They were just firewalled off from the campaign so that, when they got caught, the campaign itself could not be said to have colluded. It was just rogue operatives, working on their own.

It quite simply is not. Of course, ultimately it's stupid we have to argue over this. We're talking about Trump's words here. It's like arguing whether a cloud looks like a turkey eating a meat pie or a slightly puffy version of absolute moral truth. He should be babbling in an empty room alone by himself with no-one having to listen and interpret all the things he says that start on one concept and pass through several others before the end of the sentence.

In the case of the Unite the Right event, our interpretation of his words may hinge on his actual understanding of what was going on. Trump never seems to understand what's actually going on. Especially anything related to things like logistics and scale. This is a person who thought that a moat with alligators could be built along the entire Southern Border, or that multi-million hectare forest could be "raked", or that hurricanes could be stopped by nuking them. This is the kind of understanding of the world you see in Saturday morning cartoons. The less realistic ones for the younger kids, or the ones that play up ridiculous physics/scale, etc. for comedic effect (stuff like painting vast areas of land with a giant paint roller, that sort of thing).

For Trump's words, you have to first consider who the both sides were that had fine people on them. Was that referring specifically to the actual attendees of the rally, or did it refer to both sides of the debate about removing the statues? We will look at what Trump actually said, but it is possible that, regardless of what he said, his excuse could be that, even if what he said seemed to indicate he was talking about the marchers, he still could have been confused and thought he was talking about the debate over the statues. Of course, if he was confused, that's called incompetence. Anyway, as for what he actually said. The next day after the fine people remarks, Trump said:

Aside from being yet another "perfect" Trump phone call, speech, etc. what we see here is that he is talking about "people that went" so he does mean marchers. However he also talks about people feeling very strongly about the monument. He could think that the people that went include both the white supremacist marchers and people who are really just there because they are historical preservationists (we will look to see if that appears to be the case). Later he says:

So, that does indicate that he either thinks that there were people who were just there about the statue an unaffiliated with the white supremacists, etc. Either he thinks that, or he's lying and thinks he said that.

Let's, for a moment, see if that appears to be the case. It is virtually universally described as a white supremacist rally. The poster for the event was based on Ben Franklin's "join or die" poster with segments dedicated to "(K) “Kekistani,” (AC) “Anti-Communist,” (L) “Libertarian,” (N) “Nationalist,” (I) “Identitarian/Identity Evropa,” (SN) “Southern Nationalist,” (NS) “National Socialist,” and (AR) “Alt Right.” Photos show people with swastika flags, confederate battle flags (generally indicating that they are not just history buffs, but are instead devotees of the "lost cause", white supremacy, etc.), St. Andrews Cross flags, Kekistan flag, US National Socialist flags, roman legion flags, black sun flags, traditionalist workers party flags, Vanguard America flags, identity evropa flags, american guard flags, Detroit Right Wings logo shirts (not a typo, and yes, it does contain nazi symbols), Dues Vult symbols, the iron cross, bonnie blue flag, Every identified attendee I can find is a white supremacist and/or neo-nazi, Klansman, or similar. All of the named organizations involved are likewise of the same persuasion. The Proud Boys, notably, did not come and the reason for that is also notable. They didn't want to be associated with explicit neo-nazis. I can't find anything suggesting that there was a single person there (aside from the counter-protestors) who wasn't a member or affiliated with one of these groups. Certainly nothing about any historians or preservationists who decided to show up to stand with the white supremacist militias, neo-nazis, Klansmen, etc.

So, a critical question for you. Do you consider neo nazis, white supremacists and their ilk to be "fine people"? I really do expect you to answer, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt that your answer is no and I will proceed under the assumption that we agree that, physically present as members of the rally, there were no "fine people".

So, Trump has been reasonably clear that he meant people at the rally. However, we can grant Trump the benefit of the doubt that his brain is unable to comprehend the actual situation of the rally or is just totally ignorant, and he thinks that the rally goers include despicable racist scum, but also, standing next to them, but somehow completely unaffiliated, a bunch of tweed enclosed history professors, concerned old ladies worried about where the pigeons will roost, and, I don't know, weepy Jimmy Stewart types sad because they proposed to their wife in front of that statue 40 years ago, and now it's being taken down. So, let's proceed with his words:

OK. Technically true even without the tweed-clad professors and weepy George Baileys (or would they be Jefferson Smiths?). Not all were neo-Nazis. Klansmen aren't neo-Nazis. I mean, I suppose they can be both, but combining the uniforms is tough, so they probably stick to one or the other.

Well, no. You just really didn't. It was an event specifically organized by white nationalists for white nationalists. If there were non white nationalists there, they were either well camouflaged, or the others would have eaten them alive (figuratively, I think). However, we are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt that he's so incredibly stupid that he could believe this is true, or that he's just a massive liar (which would mean that he's not drawing a moral equivalence later, he's just continuing the lie).

Once again, since we're talking about the actual rally-goers, then no they have not. However, same benefit of the doubt applies: either incredibly stupid, or lying, or both.

There's the phrase in question. Once again, since one side is entirely monsters, no you don't. However: liar/moron, so still in the clear.

There's more, but this part has been pretty long already. Let's just say that you have provisionally convinced me. If you are conceding that Trump is an utter deranged moron and/or (let's face it, it's just "and") massive liar and that he was being a lying idiot when he said all this, then I have to concede that he was not drawing a false equivalence because he was either too stupid to realize that there was a difference, or that, technically speaking, you might be able to stretch logic to its breaking point and say that he was not lying in this part because he already lied in the part before when he claimed that not everyone there was a right supremacist (I mean, it's a bit ridiculous because a "truth" built on a lie is still basically a lie, but what the hell, right?)

No, I am saying that the collection of characters attending as members of the rally were not all neo-nazis, but were all part of a basket of deplorable like the Ku Klux Klan, the three percenters, various other white supremacist groups, neo-nazi adjacent groups that have drifted far enough to still be an abomination, but not really nazis per se any more, etc. Why would you think I am saying that every right winger is a neo nazi?

No need, there were plenty of other acts of violence to go around. Not to mention, they kind of get blame in the first place just for choosing to be what they are. As far as groups that Fields (the piece of shit in question) might have been affiliated with, he did have a vanguard america shield during the rally, but that group disavowed him. By most accounts, he appears to have just been a loser who was obsessed with nazism from an early age who had toned it down a little for a while, but ended up getting heavily back into it when Trump announced his candidacy. He told his mother that he was going to a Trump rally (true? discuss), then went and murdered a lady and maimed dozens of others. Then got life plus 419 years.

Yes, in the context of Trump being a deranged, drooling moron and/or diseased liar, I suppose that makes some sense. Plus, the more I read it, the more I am convinced that Trump is not drawing an equivalence. He's clearly actually putting the blame more on one side: "the left".

I am actually willing to consider that there might be some George Baileys and "won't someone please think of the pigeons!!!" activists in there (not the rally crowd, to be clear, just among those opposed to removing the statues) . They would be the extreme minority compared to the racists though.

That was one solution to the problem I had in mind myself, so you do have a solution (if a fairly complex one) there. However, if we ignore for the moment the height of the structure and only look at it two dimensionally from above, it's what, 200 meters thick. So it's 850 times longer than it is wide. It's ridiculous. If you made that into a circle (not looped it around, I mean just made a circular structure covering the same ground area, it would be about 6.6 kilometers across. Inside a structure like that, the pods would not need to link up to a high speed train on a sidetrack. That sidetrack could just be the main track and they could move around the city by themselves. They could also go up and down (we basically have the turbolifts from Star Trek here). You could step into one in any part of the city and step out of it again at any other address in the city. No reason you couldn't have them go 100 km per hour and get to just about anywhere in the city in about 3 and a half minutes. At the same speed, the train would take take an hour and forty-two minutes to get from one end of the city to the other. At 460 kph (Shanghai maglev speed), it would still take 22 minutes (plus then the pods would have to go that fast.

It just does not make sense from a transportation point of view. Also, do you need to air condition it? If we once again ignore the altitude, the Line has 340.4 km of perimeter (then multiply by whatever the altitude is to get surface area) then additional roof surface area of 34 square km. The equivalent circular structure has the same roof surface area of 34 square kilometers, but circumference/perimeter of only 20.67 km. So, clearly the circular structure has a lot less surface area than the line. Which means far greater heat flow to/from the environment for the Line, so it's a lot less energy efficient for heating/cooling.

At truly large scales, we'll want something like O'Neill cylinders. Except, instead of massive open areas of empty (but air-filled) space in the middle, we will probably want a ceiling over the land area in the cylinder because otherwise there will be unmanageable weather problems. Not to mention a whole lot of pointlessly empty space. As for torus space stations, maybe. It's actually probably a better use of material (higher internal volume to material used and greater potential for insulation/shielding) to just have paired habitats on arms/tethers that swing around the central hub. I suppose though, if you expanded those enough you would get to a torus. The biggest question is 'altitude" (basically the distance between the closest and furthest parts of the habitat from the hub) since the "gravity" would be variable through that range.

That hardly requires the contracts of adhesion through covenants on properties though. Municipalities can put special taxes, fees, and assessments on properties that use stormwater detention ponds or other special infrastructure perfectly well without creating HOAs.

Uh, yes you can. How would you even go about discussing whether the changes were made without looking at the source of the suggested changes? Also, mentioning both incidents and the similarities in how they were handled establishes a pattern. They make a mistake, swear to correct it, but fail to meaningfully do so and make another mistake, then swear to correct it. The pattern is demonstrated and it serves to explain my doubts. Then, you follow an inductive process to try to predict future patterns. In this case, I examine the actual future actions, which include making no real fixes to the foam strike problem (sure, they ameliorated the issue slightly, but it was still there) and basically just hoping and praying. The critical problem with NASA's safety culture to come out of those reports and subsequent ones was the issue of "normalization of deviance". That is exactly what is happening with the Orion heats shield. So, we can draw a line through Challenger, Columbia, and now this issue with Orion. Doesn't mean there will be another disaster, but the pattern that lead to the previous disasters seems to be there.

Honestly, since you're the one who's insisting that NASA has really changed this time, I swear, shouldn't you be the one showing how they're properly handling all safety concerns now?

Since your response is basically TLDR, I don't think you really get to make a dismissive summary. If you made an actual summary, you would have more credibility.

First, was that to the question of "I could ask the same of you." because you asked: "Do you have any knowledge of the NASA safety culture?" I will certainly grant that, if you work in aerospace, you could have some domain knowledge that provides some extra insight into NASA safety culture. Of course, since that could mean that, for example, you work at Boeing, it doesn't necessarily fill me with confidence.

OK. That could be anywhere in aerospace. So, let me ask you a relevant question. Let's say you are a safety inspector for aircraft and there's a model of plane you repeatedly inspect and, sometimes, during inspection, you see that the door plugs in these aircraft are missing bolts. You report this up the chain, but no-one can tell if the bolts never went in during manufacture, or were accidentally taken off without documentation and not put back on during maintenance, or if some in-flight problem is causing them to come off somehow. So, management looks at the problem and says to keep flying the planes anyway. Does that sit right with you? Or, how about something more relevant. A part that is supposed to wear in a predictable way. Let's say you are inspecting jet turbines on aircraft. The turbine in question is supposed to have a time on wing of 20,000 hours and you inspect it at 6000 hours and it looks like it should after 15,000 hours. Do you A. Shrug and check it off your checklist; B. replace it; C, start a process that will ensure a thorough investigation of how this happened, up to and including grounding of all aircraft with this turbine until the problem is understoodl (or D: other, fill in the blank)?

You seem to have zeroed in on the spinning disks part. It's completely irrelevant. I only mentioned that I used to send out spinning disks to data recovery specialists outside the company as a personal anecdote. It's not in any way really part of my argument. The only critical part of the argument is that companies who can't do it in house can outsource. You can't actually argue that point, so you're focusing on a straw man argument about spinning disks that I wasn't making.

That case almost certainly is the context, since the jury finding was just a few months ago. Of course, as I also pointed out, even without specific knowledge of the case, just knowing that Tesla said the data could not be retrieved, then the family hired their own specialist to retrieve it, and they succeeded. Whatever argument you seem to think you're making is moot. It wasn't prohibitively expensive, it wasn't prohibitively difficult. Tesla was either lying or maybe, just maybe have the excuse of massive incompetence. Also, sure the amount may change, it's still going to be a lot, and the fact that the preponderance of evidence shows that Tesla was lying certainly isn't going to help.

You're joking, right? Airbags are for saving big, fragile sacks of meat that can't take much G-force. Eli Beding survived 82.6 G's in a rocket sled, but he was facing backwards, so had extra support from his seat that a person doesn't normally get in a car crash. Beding had to spend days in the hospital after. Meanwhile, SSDs can survive thousands of G's. The system in question is located inside the safety cage of the vehicle, which is the best protected part of the car. All that front end damage you see in pictures of the car? A lot of that happens specifically because the front end of the car is designed to sacrifice itself to protect everything in the safety cage.

I have mostly too, until you started going on about context, so I got more specific about the actual context. My basic point though is now, and always has been that it's nonsense that a massive company that regularly has a need to read data off computers/hard drives in its vehicles could credibly be stymied because they "...likely [have] minimal knowledge about the storage medium beyond its technical specifications." and somehow all external experts don't either, but somehow the plaintiffs found the one wizard in the world who happens to have trained with the ancient one on the right mountaintop to have the expertise.

So your defense of Tesla basically boils down to their total incompetence: they can't do it themselves, this one guy is the aforementioned chosen one wizard, and, despite the fact that they must have to retrieve data all the time, they somehow don't have the chosen one on speed dial? Yeah, sure, pull the other one.

Since Tesla already had the actual data, doesn't that sound quite a lot like a slimy lawyer trick? Like producing tens of millions of documents to intentionally obfuscate what the opposing counsel actually asked for in discovery? Or, oops, that one missing page that the prosecutor "forgot' that contains an affidavit from an eye witness who can place the accused 40 miles away at the exact time of the murder?

You draw out what should be pretty open and shut into a long, pointless megathread. Tesla _was_ lying. They didn't need special outside expertise. If they really had a problem with the data, they could have used special outside expertise. That's basically all there really is to this.

A bit odd to leave out the first sentence, from the original post, which is what we're discussing. Every other sentence in that post is irrelevant except maybe the second one. Your response was entirely to the first sentence and _maybe_ the second one about Tesla being not to be trusted. The rest of that post was about them manipulating driving data provided to the insurance company. Your entire follow up post did not address that in the slightest. You wrote of the supposed challenges to them of data recovery and nothing else.

Firstly, that you are equating the data recovery situation today, where many companies specialize in it and are available on contract to do it, with the situation in the past where it came as a surprise to some that advanced new technology could be employed for data recovery.

Also, possibly secondly:

So, yeah. I'm starting to think that maybe this whole thread could have possibly been avoided. Because it is looking possible that you misunderstood the original post you replied to. After the first two sentences, the rest of that post had nothing to do with data recovery. The rest was about how they could fake data to provide to the insurance company. The supercomputer and AI remarks were not about using those things for data recovery. The point of the first few sentences is simply establishing sentences to illustrate a tendency for Tesla to lie for its own benefit. Is that the case? Have you gone through this whole thread thinking that the super computer and AI comments were about data recovery?

Reading comprehension is, in part, a form of critical thinking, so I think I did pretty well. I certainly didn't see imaginary conspiracy theories (would that be "conspiracy theory theories" or "conspiracy conspiracy theories"?) For the rest of my critical thinking on the topics covered, I would give myself at least a B+, probably an A.

Sigh. I previously asked:

I'm starting to think that maybe, with you, it's axiomatic that the set of all rent seekers is the null set. I mean, I suspected that there was no example whatsoever that would get you to label anyone as a rent-seeker. So, maybe rather than me working my way to your definition from my end, we start from your end. Please provide a real world example of a rent-seeker.

Not that I necessarily believe that you're not MAGA, but there's no point in disbelieving it anyway. The whole pretending to be "independent" but really being highly partisan thing has been done to death. It's especially popular among those who fancy themselves libertarians. If you want to not have a label though, by all means, don't have a label. I totally get it. I certainly am not a Democrat, for example, they have plenty of problems and plenty of ways they don't align with me politically. I am not dumb enough to fall for some "both sides" false equivalence though. Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether you personally label yourself MAGA or not. The point is that you seem to just be echoing their talking points, as I said.

Which you appear to be completely incapable of detailing in any way whatsoever. Which is what suggests heavy involvement in an echo chamber where everyone "knows" that these things are fundamental "truths" and little things like facts and details are irrelevant.

OK. Not seeing any actual reasons given anywhere why they should have been indicted and Trump should not have been.

You're complaining about warrants, not evidence used in courts. In criminal cases, courts have a "beyond a reasonable doubt' standard. For warrants, there is a "probable cause" standard. Do you want me to bring up a whole list of things courts have accepted as probable cause? "I smelled marijuana", "I looked in the window and the place was untidy". How about this one: "he had a gun". Or "he was walking funny". Etc., etc. Hearsay meets the evidence standards for warrants. Information from paid criminal informants meets the evidence standard for warrants. The evidence standards for warrants are incredibly weak and generally, judges will hand warrants out to just about any request. The FISA courts are even less picky. The FISA courts in particular grant 99.96755% of requested warrants. That's only about 1 in 3081 denied. They do require that the investigation involve suspicions that someone is acting as an agent of a foreign power. We have Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Tom Barrack, and Konstantin Kilimnik and reason to suspect others. Corey Lewandowsky certainly did a lot of lobbying for foreign powers and had a lot of ties to Russian Oligarchs for someone who isn't an agent of a foreign power. In any case, the point is that, for the evidence requirements of the FISA courts, the Steele dossier, had it been the only piece of evidence, would have gotten them their warrants.

The only reason it wouldn't have since the rejection rate is so low that, for all intents and purposes, a rejection is nigh impossible, would have been the wealth and power of the people being investigated. That should never be a reason not to investigate suspected serious crimes, but it often turns out to be.

So, while I would certainly like to see warrants not be issued through a rubber stamp policy, the reality is that the FISA courts work that way. So your complaint about any involvement of that dossier in warrant applications is a nothingburger.

So, you're stating that it is axiomatic that a landlord can't be a rent-seeker? Even if they use software from a company that organizes landlords together to raise rents in unison to increase profits? If it doesn't matter how a lease payment is calculated, then it doesn't matter if it is done in collusion with other landlords to distort the market.

Depends on the municipality, but effectively yes in many of them. It's not automatic, but there are lots of rules allowing landlords to reduce or eliminate their tax burden on unrented properties.

I will note that there are no details at all there, just very vague accusations. That, of course, flies in low info MAGA circles, but not in the real world.

Yes, norms about how the indicted and convicted felons are normally treated were indeed abandoned because it was Trump, as I noted (didn't stop him from claiming to be "tortured" during the five minutes or so when he was being processed). The norms that were abandoned were all abandoned in his favor though. Once again, if you want to argue that, don't waste my time, actually give a concrete example.

Sure, but you have not actually shown what does.

??? Care to elaborate? What I see is you writing: "... look at the prosecutions of investigations of Trump during the Biden term. All directed at a likely opposition candidate...".

??? Neither of them have ever been indicted, let alone prosecuted.

So, in other words, you don't have anything. "Russian dossiers"? Do you mean the Steele dossier? The one initially commissioned by a Rubio megadonor? The one that was not actually relevant to any of the Trump prosecutions?

How many stops are you anticipating along the 170 km length? Sure, you can add more trains with some being express ones and set up a system of transfers from one train to another to reach a given destination. Either that or you can accept that getting from one end to another takes half a day. From my perspective, the travel situation in this "city" would be completely bonkers too.

Hmm, that comes out to me as 108,343 Libraries of Congress, and there are about 53 football fields to a Library of Congress. So that would work out to about 5.75 million football fields. That could just be a bit of drift from multiple conversions, but I don't think it should be by that much. We might be differing in our standard for football field size though. My definition includes both end zones, but could yours be including areas beyond that.

People think that, but it's not really the case. The heart surgeon themselves gets well paid, but, relatively speaking, it's squat compared to the rest of the cost. It's basic math. A heart surgeon does maybe 200 operations per year and the higher paid ones get maybe $900K per year. That's around $4500 per operation. Sure, there are multiple people involved in the surgery like an anesthesiologist (who both makes less per year than the heart surgeon, but also handles considerably more cases, making their cost per surgery a lot less), maybe some residents and fellows or something like that, nurses, technicians, but the total labor costs of those is quite a lot lower than the surgeon for the procedure. So, that means that the billed cost of the operation that we're talking about is an order or magnitude or two higher than the labor costs for the surgeon and his team (including the pre-operative consultation, etc.)

So, the cut the surgeon personally gets is very much not a significant fraction of the patients lifetime earnings. It's not cheap, but it's not that big a chunk.

They're older because all the developers put newly built houses into HOAs. To paraphrase what has already been said, HOAs are a way for developers to both sell the houses and extract rents from them.