I think autocorrect made Gareth from Garak.

And likely fiscally. Did anyone check if a bunch of senators bought defense stocks?

You would be extremely surprised. Car maintenance is expensive, and lack of inspection very often leads to people driving vehicles that should have been off the road years ago simply because a lot of states that axe it, axe inspections because they’re expensive for the driver (a lot of these states are in the former Steel Belt). In better-off areas or places where people have more time/money/equipment/space to wrench on cars, then yes, but here in my city, I definitely have seen cars where the entire frame is basically being held together by Bondo and prayer, cars where they’re running on 4 spares, cars where enormous sections of the body paneling are just gone. I’ve nearly been hit by people who clearly relied on yearly inspections to tell them “hey your brakes are failing” because they drive on autopilot and just adjust how they drive to accommodate failing/failed brakes.

In fact, I suspect maintenance costs are HIGHER in areas without inspection, because shops could rely on that regular-ish influx of cash even if it was only like $50-$100 a vehicle, AND you have the customer in the shop, so it’s easier to go “hey you really need brakes, it’ll cost you an extra $200 and take an extra hour or two”.

No, MAGA doesn’t have the “embrace of death” ideology that much. I feel they’re trying to “score points” with Jesus by simply killing as many “undesirables” as they can get their hands on, and some MIGHT kill themselves when they realize He ain’t coming back.

The issue is the precedent. It means my state can do it. Nevada can do it. Texas can do it.

Never mind that the CIA’s role doesn’t only include surveillance. What’s to stop another governor or lawmaker from deciding the Florida Intelligence Services need assassination protocols, to start killing off anti-Florida assets? What’s to stop them deciding they need sabotage capabilities to destroy infrastructure that is detrimental to the Florida way of life?

I was about to say, isn’t this the same thing that closed down Gawker? Even if it’s accurate, Thiel can flood the courts with paperwork and effectively commit paper terrorism on the company to draw proceedings out and eventually bankrupt them on legal fees alone.

Trump did this last term too, we killed their intelligence chief when he landed for peace talks with Iraq.

This is a war crime, BTW. Attacking someone under a perceived state of truce or ceasefire is called “perfidy”.

It’s also AFTER their IPO, so the owners can cash in beforehand

Yes, but the Ford is new, shiny, and most importantly for Great Leader, bigger.

Pretty much exactly this. You stick useless people in these important roles so they can’t get enough traction to try for your chair, but you also want people who are at least smart enough to do whatever you tell them to do. Patel is actually a smart pick, he’s just too dumb to know how to push around actual field agents and only knows how to push around analysts and media.

Not really doomerism when we literally had the DHS secretary on mic in public say “we’re going to have ICE making sure the right people vote for the right leaders”.

When the enemy tells you their plan, believe them the first time.

He might look it, but not feel it. There’s a LOT of eyes looking at the big chair and saying “wow Trump is doing a shitty job, I could easily do better if only he’d move out of the way.”

They got Capone on tax evasion, etc.

Same as “President has speech for if astronauts die on Moon”. Pretty easy to prep ahead and simply fill in the blanks, so to speak.

Bingo. You use ML to narrow down results, not to give you answers. I have a friend who uses ML models to analyze radio telescope data, because it’s really good at the mind-numbing work of throwing out noise and junk from broadcast satellites and known radio sources. Then you go through the narrowed stuff to see if anything in that is more interesting.

It’s the question between sifting a million hits or a thousand.

Remember that one of the biggest internal dangers to average people in Nazi Germany was literally children. The Hitler Youth and the girl’s group that I can’t remember the name of literally turned kids into snitches against each other, against neighbors, against parents, everyone. This was all dressed in the clothes of “being a good citizen”.

No no, you can’t call it that because Kavanaugh hates that they’re associated with him.

So do it as often as possible and remind people of it.

Might be a nurse, too. I have met some nurses who very clearly weren’t taught to do things like solve problems or think critically.

All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that’s $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).

So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.

That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.