The Supreme Court can’t take back an amendment the way they can strike down laws (I.e. by ruling it unconstitutional for whatever reason), because it IS constitutional by definition.

Yeah, but the problem is that the Supreme Court are also the arbiters of the interpretation of the document, and there’s nothing to suggest that they can’t simply come out and say “Oh, it means two consecutive terms”, which is exactly what Putin does in Russia with their term limits - some stooge takes over for a term and then Putin wins in yet another landslide.

I mean, the 22nd Amendment is very clean, IMO. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” is pretty unambiguous, but I really can’t put anything past this corrupt administration. A coup is probably more likely, but if Trump can somehow get the law on his side he won’t need to, so I’m sure he would prefer that route.

Inflation was on the rise before Trump left office. It continued under Biden for the first two years of his term, but he managed to get key legislation passed in that span of time that has measurably reduced inflation. It’s still not back down to what it was pre-pandemic, but we are leading almost every other western democracy in that metric. It really is incredible that people are giving Biden shit for the economy when he is actively fixing the problem, and it shows that the Democrats have a tremendous failure in their ability to do effective messaging.

If it doesn’t feel like inflation has been improved under Biden, that’s because the price you pay at the gas pump or the grocery store has more to do with what they chose to set their prices at than what the current rate of inflation is. The “vibe economy” is real, but they aren’t casting the blame for it at the right people. For once, government did it’s job. Who knows if the current trend will continue under Trump, but given that he set off the massive inflationary spending spree by injecting a ton of cash into a booming economy with stimulus checks, I imagine he’s not going to care much about the fundamentals of a healthy economy and will instead do whatever makes his donors happy.

Immigration is such a horseshit issue. Why are people dumb enough to fall for this shit?

Immigration will be “solved” come January, but not because Trump will actually do anything about it, but he’ll just say the problem is solved and then stop talking about it.

Too late for that.

I’d like to believe that the only reason 2020 got so ratfucked in the first place was that Trump was intentionally not putting the screws on anybody to do their jobs.

A second Jan 6th won’t happen, at least not this year. A MAGA mob will show up at the capitol and be met by a fully prepared and well armed national guard, because Biden is the commander in chief and he’s going to take threats like that seriously.

If the house declines to elect a speaker, Biden could in theory put pressure on them to pick one. The constitutional crisis can swing both directions - yes the Republicans will likely try to avoid certification, but then Biden could threaten to not step down unless the certification happens, or hand over the reigns to VP Harris anyway by resigning. I don’t see it working in their favor to try something like not certifying or not electing a speaker, because they don’t have the luxury of Trump in the white house to look the other way at their bad behavior.

At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.

This emoji has two meanings:

1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.

Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.

His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.

I suppose he could dismiss them, but considering he just had two recent attempts on his life, that would probably be unwise to say the least.

The minimum sentence is a hefty fine, but the judge in that very trial already determined that fines do not discourage Trump’s behavior, given the contempt punishment that he ignored, so I don’t think it’s going to be a slap on the wrist for him unless the judge truly is a hypocrite or a coward.

That being said, even if he gets prison for each of his felony counts, he can serve them all concurrently, a maximum of 3 years per count. So he could theoretically be out of prison right before the next election cycle with a year left to campaign for 2028, that is assuming he truly is sentenced immediately after the election in November and it’s not just pushed back indefinitely due to recount horseshit or Trump crazies doing another insurrection.

But there are other trials that are far more likely to result in additional prison time, the most important two being the classified documents case and the Jan 6th case. I have faith that the justice system will eventually follow through with punishing Trump, but the system is set up to slow-walk the rich and powerful to accountability.

USSS won’t just let him get on a plane and fly off to Russia. His security is their top priority, so allowing him to secrete himself somewhere without first verifying his itinerary and securing both the mode of transportation and the destination, would be unthinkable. That means they are reporting all of his movements to local law enforcement. Can’t exactly flee the country in secret when every cop in the state will know his exact position and have eyes on him at all times. If the courts think he is a flight risk, someone involved in the process will know what he’s trying to do and prevent him from going anywhere where it will be hard to get him back again.

The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.

The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.

Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.

Well, I’m not psychic, so for lack of appropriate context I’m going to naturally assume that you’re talking from the perspective of an American in the thread about how China is destroying the United States (California specifically) in high speed rail production.

Now that I know better, feel free to disregard my comment.

We have plenty of domestic derailments to go around, so I feel like this is just casting stones from our glass house. Although in our case it’s not that the build quality is bad, it’s that maintenance has been skipped for so long that everything is falling apart.

Breaking News: Biden takes big sip of water from “World’s Greatest Dad” mug.

MBFC: “This source is left-leaning.”

I’m inherently distrustful of anything that tries to tell me if a source is biased or not. Who verifies that the bot isn’t also programmed to have an agenda?

I think I’ll just stick to plain old critical thinking skills and evaluate things for myself.

If you are trying to share a personal story or have contextual questions about my story, please ask them, because getting defensive about your own assumptions related to straw men scenarios you are propping up is bewilderingly off-topic.

Uh, what? I think you’re the one who is getting defensive here.

You are continually making incorrect assumptions and drawing false conclusions about someone you don’t know and have not tried to learn about.

Again, if you feel the need to share or ask questions, by all means go ahead, but try to divorce your own assumptions and preoccupations from my experiences.

Oh! Now I think I see what’s happening here…

I’m not trying to make any assumptions or conclusions. Yes, I am just sharing a personal anecdote with you. We’re having a conversation, not a debate. Sorry if you took that the wrong way. I’m not trying to convince you that you are wrong about anything, because quite frankly, I don’t think I’d be able to do that nor do I have the desire, especially since I don’t know anything about you that you haven’t already shared.

On that note, I think I’ll excuse myself from the thread. Have a good’un.

she literally said " I want to work in an office. I like offices."

What’s wrong with that? I want to work in an office too. I like offices. When I’m in one, I’m in the headspace of “this is work and I am here to focus and do my job”. I actually hated working from home during the pandemic and my mental health suffered greatly because I had so much difficulty “switching off” at the end of each day without the clear separation of environment. I strongly disagree with the notion that someone who desires to work in an office setting is somehow corpo-pilled and a slave to capitalism. I’d really rather be doing something else than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, but if I have to be working to survive I’m gonna want to keep my work at work and my home at home.

As for the “spread out” point, maybe I didn’t articulate that well, but I wasn’t talking about owning land. Not everyone can fit their entire lives into a tiny home or an RV. I think I could do it, but I’d have to part with a lot of my possessions in order to make it all fit inside comfortably and it’d be difficult to manage. For others, maybe it’d be impossible? Sometimes it’s just little stuff, like having a living room with a coffee table and a furniture set that gives people the comfort of being in a home, even if it isn’t strictly necessary for survival.

I admire anyone who can commit to that lifestyle, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are born with wanderlust and others just want to put roots down somewhere they can call their own.

I don’t think it was so much her desire to confirm to some capitalist expectation of paying an enormous sum just to live in one place on the grid (because honestly nobody wants that), but a desire for stability and space to spread out, which are often in short supply when you live the camper/van/bus lifestyle.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.