Assuming all seats are filled and are present, 218 in the House to impeach, 67 in the Senate to convict and remove.

Venezuela could do the funniest thing right now.

My buddy and I would regularly backpack in state parks and just park the car in the lot. We only found out a few years later we had voicemails from the state telling us we were illegally camping overnight. It was around that time when talking to other enthusiasts that they called it bandit camping.

Not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure the park Rangers did a search on my license plate then looked up registration or personal property and found a phone number tied to something. I didn't have my voicemail setup for a very long time so never got their messages, lol.

Yeah, last i checked on 270 to win, Dems would need to win some VERY improbable Senate races to pull off the 67 needed to convict and remove both. Possible, just improbable.

If they don't reach the 67 needed, they need to save any impeachment hearings because people are voting based on economy and having impeachment hearings will come off as out of touch, like the last time.

Instead they should focus on investigating and releasing the Epstein files, as there seems to be bipartisan support for that, and once fully released, test public sentiment on impeachment. That may be the only way to get enough votes, but the end result would be a Vance presidency, unless they can somehow tie him to it as well, which is unlikely.

So let me get this straight:

USA and Israel vs Iran

Trump and Putin are basically best buds

Russia is providing Iran with drones

So this is just one big circle jerk war?

Bonus connection:

Trump/Vance wants Orban to win so Vance goes to Hungary to stump for him.

Orban is a Russian puppet trying to undermine the EU.

Netanyahu and Orban are best buds, Orban says he would leave the ICC when he wins the election

Orban reached out to Iran in 2024 offering aid, raising questions about current ties.

Some would argue they are still 15yo boys in mindset.

My somewhat conservative brother told me the other day that if we tax billionaires, they will be forced to lay off employees.

I just don't have enough time and dry erase markers to break down how to effectively setup a BETTER economy where we can tax billionaires and still have a low unemployment rate, and not be beholden to fake job creators who were going to do layoffs anyways because line needs to always go up.

Would it help if you knew we paid providers billions of dollars in the 90s for fiber and they ran off with the profits, and we got nothing? So it took almost 2 decades after we paid them, to finally get gigabit speeds, on top of paying them again to do it for reals this time.

Could this just be an email? I've already got enough on my plate.

Fuck yeah, rip it top shelf bud.

What you're describing is called a Growth Stock as opposed to a Mature Stock. I heard these terms recently when reading about the AI bubble and will just quote the relevant parts, because the author describes it better than I ever could:

Pluralistic: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI from Cory Doctorow

You see, when a company is growing, it is a "growth stock," and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you're making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings. This is called the "price to earnings ratio" or "P/E ratio."

But once a company stops growing, it is a "mature" stock, and it trades at a much lower P/E ratio. So for every dollar that Target – a mature company – brings in, it is worth ten dollars. It has a P/E ratio of 10, while Amazon has a P/E ratio of 36, which means that for every dollar Amazon brings in, the market values it at $36.

It's wonderful to run a company that's got a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company, or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeroes into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors.

So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans, which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars.

That's the upside of having a growth stock. But here's the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you gonna grow?

Once the market decides that you aren't a growth stock, once you become mature, your stock is revalued, to a P/E ratio befitting a mature stock.

If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you're not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the USA than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240B sell off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history.

That's a monopolist's worst nightmare, because once you're presiding over a "mature" firm, the key employees you've been compensating with stock, experience a precipitous pay-drop and bolt for the exits, so you lose the people who might help you grow again, and you can only hire their replacements with dollars. With dollars, not shares.

And the same goes for acquiring companies that might help you grow, because they, too, are going to expect money, not stock. This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they don't trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI.

Can't be held liable during the next set of Nuremberg trials?

According to Wikipedia: District 22 has been held by a Democrat going back to 1969 (except one rep flipped from Dem to Repub for a year in 2005 then lost his next election lol). In recent elections, the Dem ran mostly unopposed, and winning by 35 points in the others.

District 42 is similar going back to 2007.

Still fantastic news, but the headline says they flipped these seats, making it seem that these were previously held by Republicans.

I'm convinced they used AI to redact everything, and didn't double back and check them until after a particular page made headlines.

I've seen numerous videos where they program a script to remove the 5-6 different ways "redactions" were added and they make no sense from a technical stand point, leaving me to believe that someone non-technical told AI exactly how they wanted to redact, and then put those files in their outbox.

The issue was more that they needed to identify only the ones that illegally entered the premises, and separate those from people legitimately working there. They then had to cross reference those IMEI/MACs to camera footage of them illegally entering the building. Some of those dipshits were ID'd and picked up immediately, others used burners and covered their faces with masks (ironically) and had to be tracked similarly to how Luigi was caught; establishing a timeline of events with that same individual using other cameras in the area until you find one of them without a mask on.

In our game, the DC is just the passive perception of the enemy, unless they are on active watch duty then they make a contested roll. That usually requires us fucking something up to put them on alert though.

And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can't vote or forced to update their ID's, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.

Unfortunately to your second point, I don't think that's the best approach either. Check out the first 6-12 months of the Iraqi government rebuild during the Iraq war. The Americans basically fired 20,000 Iraqi officials and military members who then had nothing to lose anymore. They then immediately started an insurgency.

Also after these fascist take overs, it's not as easy as simply saying "you're a Nazi, therefore you go to jail" because if you didn't swear fealty to the new government (i.e. if you were Democrat you would now have to call yourself Republican) you could be summarily executed on the spot (check out the video of Sadam's take over).

So you could resign. But then you get called a coward by armchair generals for not trying to stay in the system and slow it down as much as possible.

So you stay in and keep your head down, and may try to slow the processes down enough to hopefully save some innocents without getting pulled out back and shot. But then you're called a Nazi collaborator. Idk, I would probably just as well resign, but that could put a target on your back, too, because you're basically outing yourself as hostile.

Personally, i think how we handled it after WW2 wasn't perfect, but should be the goal. There's always clean up that can happen even years afterwards. But if you go purging an entire country's worth of government officials, you have to replace those you purged with equally qualified people. And you often find that those who are eager to step in, are often just eager to enact revenge, or in some cases, even worse than their predecessors because they are just opportunists who now have the good graces of the new regime who just wanted a quick transition to a friendly government.