LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on the wrist for getting caught with the same amount of coke? Our country having the highest percentage of people in prison sounds like we were winning too. Lots of winning.

Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?

It's my understanding that the 1st amendment applies to everyone, not just citizens. So if that's true (not 100% sure about that), how can political speech (protesting) be a valid reason to remove someone from the US?

It's not that cut and dried - it all depends on what your company needs from SaaS and how big it is. SaaS companies like Salesforce don't charge a "small monthly fee" - they charge 10s of millions of dollars per month for large corporations. It's not hard at all to push that money towards AI development and have a better solution built in-house now. Yes, it still takes serious project management skills, but so does integrating Salesforce or other large SaaS software.

Except the problem in the US now is that newspapers are owned by corporations that own a bunch of newspapers, or very rich individuals/families - and a single individual can dictate what an entire newsroom says.

I don't see much of a difference when it comes to corruptibility.

The other issue is that the vetting will likely not just look for terroristic or other 'illegal' social media content - it will look for whatever the administration decides to look for - again without oversight.

So the skill of knowing how to "println" debug is still very useful.

You may be missing something - there's so much money flowing upwards in society that the rich/ultra-rich will simply be able to buy ALL of that real estate as it becomes available. If not ALL, then everything that's desirable.

What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.

NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?

I've replaced two heating elements in my ~9 year old Samsung dryer, I think the heating elements were less than 50 USD. I did the labor myself so I don't know how much that would have been - you do have to take the dryer apart, but it doesn't take very long if you have experience, 15-20 minutes or less.

I would not recommend Samsung - I've had to take that dryer apart more than 10 times to replace/fix things, I can't imagine how much it would have cost me if I couldn't do it myself. The only plus there is now I can literally break it down and put it back together very quickly when I need to fix it.

Luckily the Samsung washer has been fine.