So (if we take your interpretation at face value) you could call it a 'presidential power grab', or maybe even an 'executive power grab' (if we stretch things and assume power is being transferred away from executive departments subject to greater oversight), but 'federal power grab' still doesn't make sense. No power is being grabbed from or by the federal government as an entity.
DirectFile was a material product that had a 94% satisfaction rate.[0] Within the remit of this organization, if making filing taxes free and easy doesn't count as making people's lives better, then I'm not sure what does.
I'm not sure how much control the USDS that developed DirectFile (or whatever was left of it) had over that given the reasons that article cites for the confusion
> The IRS deemphasized the program on its website, the report said, and the media coverage this filing season focused on the question of if the tool existed or would continue to in the future.
> Billionaire Elon Musk caused confusion in early February when he posted on X that the team powering Direct File was “deleted,” leading to headlines like “Elon Musk says he 'deleted' IRS Direct File. Can taxpayers still use the free service?” Direct File saw a drop in use after that.
To be honest, I'm impressed there was even a 16% traffic increase this year at all.
Ask yourself: Could this website have been written anytime in the last 8 years? If so, why wasn't it? Given where we are now, the stat I gave, and that only a small number of people are mourning something important speak to my point?
> Ask yourself: Could this website have been written anytime in the last 8 years?
No? It was authorized by the IRA, which was only passed in 2022.
> Given where we are now, the stat I gave, and that only a small number of people are mourning something important speak to my point?
I mean, I wouldn't expect regular users to mourn anything until tax season rolls around next year and people find the tool is missing; even still, I actually have seen a lot of people mad about this, not that it matters. And I still think 16% growth after months of reporting about it getting shut down isn't bad.
That wasn't obvious to me, because in that case the answer to why this website wasn't created in previous years seems obvious - because USDS wasn't being demolished in previous years.
Interesting, thanks for reinforcing the point. I would note the two columns 'From Individuals' (which includes all employees) vs. the 'From Organization' column. Worth noting that the R-affiliated GOPAC is the only listed recipient that actually recieved funds from the organization.
Of course, this page doesn't include the $1M inauguration donation, so it's still incomplete.
I suppose we all see what we want to see and have reasons to explain away any dissonance. $1m to an inauguration committee for an already elected president might counterbalance the disproportionate donations to democrats during campaign season from execs, employees, and their family members. I mean, bet on the wrong horse, amends must be made, right? Money goes where the power is. If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala. The data is the data.
Yup, and what I see is that Intuit, Inc. gave to exactly one PAC, that donates exclusively to R candidates. Tesla employees also overwhelmingly donated to Kamala Harris[0]; does this mean Tesla and Elon were backing Kamala to win?
> If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala.
They didn't donate to him in 2020, so I'm not sure why I should assume this.[1]
At the time this movie was being made I don't think NK was any more sanctioned than any other Eastern Bloc country, and plenty of other Eastern Bloc countries had little issue scraping together enough cash to pay westerners to do stuff
> At the time this movie was being made I don't think NK was any more sanctioned than any other Eastern Bloc country
The U.S. “imposed sanctions in the 1950s and tightened them further after international bombings against South Korea by North Korean agents during the 1980s” [1]. And by the 80s, savvy Eastern Bloc countries could read the writing on the wall.
Nobody in the Eastern Bloc was trading with the US very much; I was thinking more about other countries. North Korea would have been relatively unfettered within the Eastern Bloc, for example, same as most communist nations.
Also, the director was kidnapped in 1978, so before those sanctions were tightened down in the 80s and well before any Eastern Bloc states could see any writing on the wall. I'd be curious how those restrictions compared to those the US had on most other communist nations.
How's this project doing after it lost its founder and biggest contributor (Andreas Kling)? I see the commit history is still reasonably active, so it's not dead at least . . .
Ladybird is no longer part of the SerenityOS project, and Jakt seems pretty dormant; my understanding is that Ladybird is moving to Swift as an eventual C++ replacement.
Please note that some Visual Studio Code extensions have licenses that restrict their use to the official Visual Studio Code builds and therefore do not work with VSCodium.
...
In some cases, ... [workarounds] won't help because the extension is hard-coded to only work with the official Visual Studio Code product.
Notably absent are all of the remote debugging extensions and Copilot. This would be a deal-breaker for many.
You can compile from public source code, you can use any extension not using MS proprietary code (notably, other LLMs) AND you can use VSCode without telemetry. Credit where credit is due.. it's miles better than whatever Apple is doing.
This is common? Did the Biden admin halt all communications, grants, travel, etc.? NPR posts transcripts of their programs, do you have a link so I can see what they said?
The Trump admin repeatedly weakened regulations around atrazine imposed by the Obama admin[0][1], only for the Biden admin to reimpose them.[2][3] I suppose we're about to see them severely weakened again.
Edit: to the people talking about RFK Jr., he's not going to be running the EPA; anti-regulation crusader and laissez-faire fan Lee Zeldin will be.[4]
You're overindexing on formal authority and prematurely discounting informal influence. RFK will be a prominent member of the administration. He'll have the ears of powerful people. He'll get some wins at the FDA (because it's blindingly obvious we're poisoning ourselves), and he'll be able to use these wins to drive changes at other agencies.
Is the next administration really likely to do, on purpose, anything that would affect earnings for large corps? It would absolutely blow my mind. I think RFK will do zilch unless it aligns with more profits for the right folks.
RFK was telling us he'd never support Trump, too, and here we are.
RFK has demonstrated repeatedly that he has absolutely no principles whatsoever, and he'll sell out if a soft breeze passes by. If the agribusiness sector tells Trump that banning this chemical will cost them 10% of their profits, Trump will tell RFK to get in line, and he'll give a slight whimper as he does so.
Trump was willing to build a coalition while Democrats were not. RFK, assuming he gets past the Senate, will be in a substantially better position to influence health policy than if he were to have snubbed Trump.
The game of politics makes enemies one day become allies the next. If you want real progress on an agenda, being dogmatic generally isn't the best way to accomplish it (imo).
I'm not American, but to me this looks like a preposterous take, when the Democrats had Cheney and a pile of other Republicans lined up in what looks more to me like a coalition than getting the endorsement of a bizarre personality-cult fringe candidate.
It depends on your perspective. Dick Cheney is generally considered persona non gratta due to his role in pushing the US into forever wars during the Bush Jr years. The Left hated him during the Bush and Obama years, the Right came around to hating him during the Obama and Trump years.
Trump Republicans very much dislike Liz Cheney for being completely against Trump during J6 investigations, and recent news implicates Liz Cheney in having tampered with lawyer relations for one the J6 testifiers [1,2]. Right-leaning commentary during the J6 investigations considered them sham investigations with the Republicans on the J6 committee often called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), as those Republicans were anti-Trump.
This is the perspective that makes the Chenys supporting Democrats seem ridiculous. Other republicans supporting the Democrats generally have pro-war big government views which are largely incompatible with the new Trump Republican base.
I'll disagree that this was just an "endorsement of bizzare personality-cult fringe candidate" as these individuals all have some political pull and have been given substantial positions in the upcoming administrations.
Cheney is just one person in a long list of republicans who endorsed Harris[1], and these people were part of a much longer list of republicans who opposed Trump[2].
Meanwhile The Trump-endorsing 'coalition' individuals in question are wildly unserious people, to the point that they're going to be laughed out of their senate confirmation hearings if they don't withdraw beforehand.
This is correct, there is an unfortunate acceptance of a lot of political mythology that I believe explains the results of the election (as we see above).
The GOP couldn't even form a coalition with itself, you saw a lot of people within the GOP who wouldn't endorse their candidate (the most stark example being the former VP). The democratic nominee coalition built to a fault. Many point to exactly this, and the failure to scorch the opposition to the degree warranted, as the reason for the loss.
RFK is your garden variety opportunist grifter, as are the entire confederacy of scammers and dunces (no offense, this is strictly a factual assessment) who are now on their way to positions of power based purely on their loyalty.
Was this linked from any of his existing social medias? Do we have any way of knowing it's actually him? I'd be just a tad cautious at this stage, given that the Substack page says it was 'Launched an hour ago' as of writing. The article, sure, dead man's switch, but the Substack publication itself was only created after his arrest?
Edit: also worth noting that whatever this is, it's not the document he had with him when he was arrested, since that apparently contained[0] the following excerpt, while this doesn't
> “These parasites had it coming,” one line from the document reads, according to a police official who has seen it. Another reads, “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
this archive link is floating around on blind and reddit. I have no idea if it's authentic. I didn't find a link to his other social media but the part about back pain lines up with this bit I found in a nymag article [0]
> Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”
The Substack is still live[0]. Anyway, one of the images in his Twitter banner[1] is an X-ray of a spine with a bunch of screws in it. The Substack is also named after Breloom and has a picture at the bottom, and that's also in the Twitter banner but doesn't seem otherwise prominent in any of his social medias. Not very hard to figure out a spinal issue as a potential motive and guess at an interest based on the banner and cook up a quick viral post. I'm not saying it's definitely fake, just urging a bit of caution for the time being.
I dunno, but the article continues to be live, and I can't imagine Substack doesn't know how to scrub posts from their platform if they wanted to. We'll find out eventually I guess, so I'll continue to urge people to be cautious with this and wait a bit.
A federal power grab from . . . the federal government?
reply