Perhaps CZ's prosecution was generally regarded as political among the people you talk to regularly, but the contemporaneous media consensus (at least to my recollection) was that Binance had openly flouted US law for years and was finally being reined in. E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/binance-crypto-c... was representative.
Beyond the reasonable suspicion of a threat to their life, the officer must believe that: a) the threat is imminent, and b) the threat will reasonably be mitigated by the application of force. An officer cannot, for example, immediately shoot someone who plausibly promises to murder them in 36 hours.
Just because some people who say "no one is illegal" also say "no more borders," that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter. If that were the case, we could paint everyone who agrees with Nick Fuentes on any point (including, in the extreme, "nice weather we're having today") as a antisemite. The old joke linking dietary choices to Nazism ("You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!") is meant to make light of this logical fallacy.
The grandparent post accurately captured what I have understood people to mean by "no one is illegal" -- it is meant to protest a dehumanizing way to describe a class of people.
> What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal?
There aren't good statistics on how many undocumented immigrants overstayed a visa (and therefore legally crossed the border) vs how many entered without a visa, but experts estimate that it's somewhere around 40-45% [0]. It's not a criminal act to overstay a visa, though you do become subject to deportation. So a good chunk of "illegal immigrants" are doing something less illegal than, say, driving a car whose registration has expired (which is a criminal act), but, as another commenter noted above, we don't refer to "illegal drivers" on our roads.
The traditional term for someone who has not fulfilled a positive legal obligation like renewing their car registration is a "scofflaw," and I would not object to anyone referring to "scofflaw immigrants" the way I object to the phrase "illegal immigrants."
It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.
Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.
Yes, I can imagine it’s hard to prove, which is a pretty good indicator it’s a slippery concept to being with. Everyone wants to “eliminate the competition”, including your competition!
The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive
What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!
Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?
Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.
This is an historical question I’m not equipped to answer, but I’d guess it was just the opposite: These laws were intended to protect incumbents from more efficient, better financed new competitors!
Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.
50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.
I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.
The Biden admin went slightly harder against anti-competitive actions and anti-consumer actions by companies and all the billionaires freaked out and poured money into Republican campaigns in 2024 in order to roll all that back.
What was rolled back? There was no major change in action whatsoever, only rhetoric, which is meaningless. As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin. [1] Dark money also overwhelmingly flowed to the DNC. [2] And a large chunk of all of Trump's funding came after the previous administration tried to imprison him, which rather freaked people out - even those not particularly fond of him. That also likely played a significant role in the more DGAF presidency we're seeing today relative to 2016.
I would probably go for natural resources management or population biology.
Masters degrees are (from my experience in the US workforce) generally only professionally useful when there is an explicit requirement for one set by a professional standards body or codified in law. As in, you usually need a masters to get tenure as a teacher in a public school, and some government jobs have specific and inflexible degree requirements. But for private sector employment, masters degrees are mostly just for personal enrichment.
There’s a certain amount of independence between municipalities, counties, states, and the federal government.
Except in a minority of cases (e.g. NYC), it is states and the federal government that taxes income and capital gains, and they are already not taxing citizens on the y realized value of their home.
So if one is upset about that, you have to take it up with local elections or introduce a measure with your state to prevent municipalities from levying this specific tax.
Yes the idea of property taxes is NOT to tax based on increase in wealth, just the current amount of wealth. And it serves a good purpose in municipalities who have to make sure infrastructure such as roads power and sewage systems are paid somehow. More expensive houses typically require more of those.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that wealth should be taxed but only at the county/municipal level? Or are you saying wealth can't be taxed because of federalism?
Yes, I pay property taxes every year that are based on the current assessed values of my home and car. Only special classes of assets are subject to property taxes. "Wealth tax" proposals are a generalization of the idea of real property taxes so as to stop penalizing specific asset classes like homes.
If you dig into how property tax is allocated, your tax will only go up if your house appreciates more than similar properties - which usually has something like redevelopment or other externality.
It is normally not a fixed percentage of your value, but simply "here's what the county/city paid this/next year, divided amongst the properties proportionate to the value."
Some, like sewer, etc, are per-property, but most are done via the above.
California is an outlier because of Prop-13 but that makes it usually better except when buying.
Side-effects of this can mean that development in your district can reduce your tax rate, depending on what kind of development and who lives there (as property tax is often mainly a school tax, a development for 55+ will bring in more tax payers but not increase the school burden noticeably).
Right. Property taxes are a combination of fee-for-service for infrastructure, and a "congestion tax" for occupying land that nobody else can use. It's explicitly not a wealth tax because you owe it even if you have 0% equity.
You owe tax based on your percentage of ownership. The taxing authority doesn't care about equity because you own 100% of your house (albeit with a lien) even if your outstanding mortgage obligations exceed the value of the house. Generally, when you close on a house in the US, you walk away with the title to the house and a mortgage equal to a large percentage of the house's value. The bank only owes property taxes if they foreclose on the property and take the title from you.
I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but all the property taxes I have ever paid (which, to be fair, has been in one county) have been a fixed percentage of the value of the property.
I don't think the percentage has changed since I moved here, though the dollar amount I pay has gone up significantly as the assessed value of my house has risen.
Like with any tax, I'm guessing the rate would change if the county's revenues didn't match their expenses?
In my county, tax rates have to be renewed every year. So every year there's a chance for the rates to change. There is an automatic suggestion of a "no new revenue" option formulated by the appraisal district based on their new assessments, there are then voter approved changes, and then the county (or taxing entity) decides.
My property taxes have practically only gone up over the years, but the tax rates from the various entities have mostly trended downwards.
Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine is a good overall history of the Luddite movement (though be aware it does not strive to be ideologically neutral).
Genuinely curious: what did you see in GrapheneOS history that indicates that the OS is specifically designed to defeat law enforcement (as opposed to their stated goals of defeating ad surveillance and stalkerware)?
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