They won’t have sharpened edges. There are too many events that don’t allow sharps.

I am a historic reenactment nerd, and both the halberd and sword I ordered from two different smiths should be done this spring. FYI it takes a long time to get quality reproduction pieces made.

This is exactly what needs to happen. Every government fundamentally runs on the voluntary cooperation of the people involved. Every government is susceptible to a breakdown of that cooperation. “Or what?” is not the biting political analysis you think it is.

But I’ll spell it out. The administration will comply with the order or they’ll be found in contempt. If they’re found to be in contempt, they’ll either comply with the remedies, or we’ll have ourselves a proper constitutional breakdown.

The point is that it’s all on the record, black and white, in public. If things really go wrong it is critically important that every media outlet, and every civic institution can point to these public facts so that it is abundantly clear that the administration has become lawless.

It would be much worse if the courts were already so submissive to the will of the executive that they won’t even rule against them. Then maga would get to continue doing what they’re doing with a pretense of legitimacy, and it would be many times harder to muster public resistance.

People have been saying that the world is getting ruder for thousands of years. I didn’t see anywhere in the article where they compared this finding to that baseline.

This is not true. The United States v Trump ruling was that a president can not be held criminally liable for their exercise of the powers of the presidency. It does not mean that anything the president does is legal. It does not even mean that every presidential action is legal. Courts can still rule that a president’s actions are illegal and order injunctions, or even find contempt if court orders are not followed. This has already happened several times in the last month.

It’s a bad ruling but making it more catastrophic than it actually is does nobody any good.

Sure there’s the maga cultists, but that is not the majority of people who voted for Trump. I honestly think a self-inflicted recession may turn out to be a good thing.

Right now Trump is behaving like, and being treated by the opposition like he’s invincible. But I do not think we are at the point where maga has such a hold on power that they can withstand being broadly unpopular. There is still a lot of the government and civil society that remains intact, and could be a platform for stopping the authoritarian takeover, but they are going to need a huge amount of public support. Causing a recession when your mandate was to improve the economy may be enough for this.

The longer this festers, the more maga will be able to destroy or compromise the state and civil society. I think we need to force the crisis sooner rather than later.

I don’t know of any reason that the proportion of ESL writers would have started trending up in 2022.

You guys are only working on one project at a time?

Any alternatives you like?

The permanent veto holding members of the security council are specifically those countries capable of starting a nuclear conflict. Those vetos are expressly for reducing the risk of that happening. Not saying the world can’t do better today, but let’s remember why it is the way it is.

It’s up to you now, Europe.

I think this only makes a few weeks difference to the withdrawal of US military support. The deal Trump and Russia are putting together should not be thought of as an attempt to end the war, but the creation of a pretense for the withdrawal of support. The terms that will be offered to Ukraine will be completely, and intentionally, unacceptable to Ukraine and Europe. Ukraine will refuse and the US will name it as the justification for walking away.

Eh. He’s a human being. I hadn’t heard about his fleet.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php

It seems nearly impossible for a person to be billionaire loaded and not make some irresponsible purchases. Is there anyone with that kind of money we should be highlighting as a role model instead?

I don’t see the interest in who voted what on my stuff, but it could be interesting to do some analysis of system-wide voting behaviors. The bigger Lemmy gets the more of a problem it’s going to have with bots. People will need to create tools to identify these bots, and voting behavior seems like the primary data source.

There have been two court orders requiring that payments continue normally. It looks like Musk has decided that court orders do not bind him. It hasn’t even been two weeks and already we’re at the constitutional crisis?

I’m not sure the head of the DNC really has anything to do with the party platform. It’s always seemed like more of a fundraising and coordination position. I dunno, maybe someone with an agenda could take the position and try to do something with it, but that doesn’t seem like the norm. There doesn’t seem to be much leadership happening anywhere else in the Dem party.

Anyone care to offer arguments that this election means anything?

Neither illegal immigrants, nor non-citizen residents get to vote. In what sense are they represented in either case?

Then they have a higher hurdle to clear. All I’m saying is it seems reasonable to give a state representation based on the number of citizens.

I got curious about the size of the issue. The numbers I found for Texas was an estimated 1.6 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 30.5 million, or roughly 5%. There are 38 reps from Texas, so they’d lose one or two.

This doesn’t seem like it ought to be all-or-nothing. Knowing the number of citizens and the total number of residents is useful for different purposes. Electoral votes: citizens. Disaster response: residents. And so on.

That’s roughly the total COVID death toll for that period. The term “excess deaths” is used to refer to the deaths which occurred above the typical yearly mortality rate. In other words, the deaths which are roughly attributable to COVID.

I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but it would be easy to read your comment, given the context, as saying that Trump caused 522,368 deaths in 2020.

If you want to quantify the deaths caused by Trump’s mismanagement, you’d need to compare COVID deaths relative to population. I actually managed to find that (to my surprise)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

If you sort by deaths per million (total), the US is 16th from the bottom right above Brazil, Slovenia, and Lithuania. And right below Latvia, Chile, and Poland.

You could also download that data set there, find the global average, sum up the difference between that and the US, and roughly say that number is the death toll for Trump’s mismanagement.