From Article II, Section 1:

    The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Trump, on the other hand, openly goes out of his way to cash in on his office, even to the extent of accepting bribes in the form of planes from foreign countries, large donations of foreign and domestic powers via his cryptocurrency, and accepting direct payments for pardons.

I should note that bribery is one of the explicitly mentioned crimes for which impeachment is designed, as mentioned in Article II, Section 4:

    The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Not really. Rocketry is hard.

You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.

Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

This is more than simply having demand high enough that RAM flies off shelves faster than it can be produced, where a future lull in demand and/or increase in production resolves or even over-corrects for the problem. The AI craze has caused several companies (most notably Crucial) to abandon consumer RAM entirely. At minimum, I think we can expect it to take several years before RAM prices fall back out of the clouds, let alone come anywhere close to what they were before.

A reference book on a particular language is going to have a pretty short useful lifetime, since any language of significant popularity will evolve relatively quickly.

In contrast, a reference book on general programming knowledge (e.g., design patterns) could very well last a lifetime.

We'll only return to normalcy after Trump upon implementing our own Nuremburg-style trials for members of his administration and enacting a number of constitutional amendments to fix the structural failures which allowed it to come this far. Even then, it would take at least a generation before the rest of the world will consider treating the US as a sane, good-faith member of the global community.

Unfortunately, the chances of either reform occurring are near zero right now.

The only way to get enough support for such reforms requires the bulk of the MAGA cult wake from their delirium, which won't happen unless/until things get a lot worse. Loyalists have a pretty large capacity to compartmentalize their dislike of actions taken by Trump separate from their support of Trump the person, even when you can get past the "fake news" mantra that lets them dismiss anything negative which doesn't affect them directly.

The primary difference I've noticed, however, is that the AI evangelists also have a flair for painting a picture where everyone's jobs are eliminated, while many CEOs are already using it as an excuse for layoffs.

I can see no reason why there'd be any negativity about AI.

That's why we recently saw every red state pass new congressional district maps which split up minority representative districts and combine the pieces with deep red rural districts.

In the absence of any other considerations, I'd agree with you. However, the last half-century has seen that same tiny minority taking nearly all productivity gains from the rest, to the point that wealth inequality is greater now than during the first gilded age, so I have somewhat less sympathy for the tiny minority when the rest want to claw some of that back.

> It's a democracy red flag when an unpopular minority is vilified as the cause of society's problems. It short-circuits real policy making and distracts from real issues.

It's less of a red flag when that unpopular minority is the cause of society's problems. The ultra-wealthy have commandeered government to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

We have massive consolidation of markets and media due to lobbying for deregulation and against enforcing anti-trust laws. We have further wealth concentration, the likes of which exceeds even the first gilded age at the hands of massive tax cuts and loopholes predominantly benefiting only the wealthiest, while also cutting tax enforcement personnel, making it easier to get away with tax evasion. Of course, in the face of the massive budget deficits resulting from those tax cuts, we make cuts to important social programs affecting many (and with largely positive ROI) while protecting subsidies to some of the most profitable businesses on the planet and leaping at any chance to start wars abroad whenever we need to distract from embarrassments at home. We have lax enforcement of labor laws which would allow workers to organize and demand higher wages, while at the same time passing unconstitutional laws at the state level which try to prevent organized labor in the first place. We have not only allowed the federal minimum wage to lag significantly behind inflation, but we have lobbying groups coming out of the woodwork to stop any proposed increase. When we have large economic crises caused by the malfeasance of the wealthiest of the wealthy, our corrupt Congress passes large bail-outs for the culprits while telling the majority of us to suck it up and tighten our belts. Of course, our consolidated media landscape increasingly obfuscates the real problems, presenting alternate boogeymen like immigrants so the downward spiral continues.

Allowing so much wealth to concentrate in the hands of a tiny minority is itself a giant democracy red flag. The US is on the cusp of losing its democracy as a direct result, damaging global security and markets in its death throes. The mere existence of billionaires and their corrupting influence on government is the issue.

Some people have to be reminded to take time off for themselves (like me in my early years), and without a predefined amount of PTO and an expiration mechanism, there's nothing stopping them from going extended periods without taking any time for themselves.

Most people grow out of that eventually, but their gems turn black before they fully advocate for their own work/life balance.

The other side to that coin is that when employees take varying amounts of time off, it becomes easy for managers to pressure anyone taking more time off to conform with those who take less (and sometimes none at all).

$1.5B is roughly the wage theft recovered between 2021-2023. It's estimated that more than $15B in wage theft occurs annually just from minimum wage shortfalls.

See: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/

Keep in mind that wage theft is narrowly defined to include only blatantly illegal actions such as underpaying minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, denying meal breaks, etc. It that doesn't even get into more general wage suppression via abusing visas, anti-poaching collusion with competitors (a favorite pastime of FANNG), and at-or-below inflation raise policies, among other things, which have caused wages to diverge from productivity over the last half century.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

As an example:

A 2026 Honda Accord LX has a combined gas mileage around 32 mpg and a curb weight of 3,239 lbs.

See: https://automobiles.honda.com/accord-sedan/specs-features-tr...

A 2025 Ford F-150 XLT has a combined gas mileage around 20 mpg and a curb weight of 4,941 lbs.

See: https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2025/features-specs/

Keeping things simple and calculating the axle weight to the fourth powers of both vehicles, the F-150 causes 5.4x the road wear of the Honda Accord while using only 1.6x the gas.

The reason this doesn't matter so much, though, is that the types of trucks used for shipping goods, when loaded, cause on the order of 10^4 the road wear, dwarfing any differences between standard commuter vehicles, which is why commercial trucks have to stop at weigh stations.

At minimum, taking out a loan based on the current value of an asset should trigger immediate realization of capital gains/losses for at least those assets used as collateral. After all, the gains are already de facto being realized for the purpose of the loan.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure how to address the other side of things - that said loans often don't have to be repaid so long as the assets continue to gain. As such, the capital gains are actually being realized continuously by the loan, but I doubt it's feasible to properly handle that in tax law.

What gives you this impression?

That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.

It can both be true that Gawker's individual bankruptcy was no big loss but that the way in which an ultra-wealthy person was able to crush a news outlet for reporting things he didn't like set a dangerous precedent for all journalism outlets.

Of course, the whole thing seems rather quaint now that nearly all media is owned by a handful of billionaires who are actively and increasingly controlling what gets released to the public.

You have to both apply the law equally to all and apply equitable criminal penalties for breaking the law, but the latter is pretty useless without the former. In that way, you could say that honoring the rule of law is necessary but not sufficient for truly equal treatment under the law.

You should be careful to distinguish "rule of law" from the law itself.

Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all. It shouldn't matter if you're rich or poor, man or woman, a member of the majority or minority race, famous or obscure, politically well-connected or not, etc. This is an inherently just principle, but it's also extremely difficult (impossible?) to live up to 100%.

On the other hand, you're correct that individual laws can be just or unjust, moral or immoral. We have plenty of historical examples of unjust laws (e.g., a recent and hopefully unquestionable example in living memory is segregation), and it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience.

They shouldn't. The reality is that the rich and powerful have never been particularly beholden to the law.

For a while, there was a lot of energy spent maintaining the illusion that we had rule of law, and I don't doubt there are some who believed it was an ideal to strive for that we'd get closer and closer to over time, but Trump and his administration stopped pretending.