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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Biden’s next move: Nothing.

    while 76% said a not-guilty verdict would have no impact

    And this is playing pretty true with where I live. Pretty much Trump was found guilty, everyone spent 37.1839 seconds processing that new bit of information, and then went on with their day with the needle on how they will vote in November moving 0.3nm in either direction.

    Like, how everyone is going to vote. That’s already done. There are very, very, very few people who are left in the undecided category. So, this whole thing wasn’t going to change the calculus of anyone running for office.




  • Yeah, I think that’s the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this “overhual” is indicating is that they haven’t quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.

    The only thing I’m reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I’m going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google’s thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that’s out there. And I have a good feeling they’ll look at this collapse as “well the technology just isn’t a good money maker.” No you idiots, it’s not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn’t mean that the technology is a failure.

    But it’s whatever, Amazon’s ship to wreck.


  • This issue is a bit more complex than just “hospitals shouldn’t be for profit”. Not to dismiss that’s a big driver here, but there’s a lot more going on.

    Rural communities tend to have lower insurance coverage, that means for the people who do show up, their debt will eventually go into collections or be completely written off as a loss. Rural communities have vastly less access to better insurance and many just completely forgo insurance altogether.

    Additionally, rural communities have a tendency to enter a death spiral between visits and costs. The number of people showing up at the hospital is low, but for the ones that do they show up with incredibly expensive conditions.

    A lot of the financing and extended lines of revenue for rural hospitals is tied into the expanded Medicaid offerings under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There’s clear demonstration that states that have opted to not expand Medicaid are the ones overwhelmingly facing hospital closures. States that have expanded still face issues, but states that have not are facing worse outcomes for rural hospitals.

    Finally, costs for healthcare have steadily increased at rates that outpace pretty much every program out there. Pharmaceutical companies are ever shifting costs of materials and medication making long term planning difficult. These companies cite new regulation requiring a remixing of their costs of products. Basically, if some state mandates $30 insulin, that makes cancer treatment go up some, massive percentage. So a requirement to reduce cost to consumer in one area induces an increase in cost somewhere else.

    And no just telling hospitals they can’t drive a profit won’t fix the issue. The doctors, insurance, coverage, politics over the ACA, the education of those doctors, the supply chain of the hospitals, and the production of medical supplies all have played a role in this. There’s just thousands of things that have to change or we’re going to see more of this.

    The entire thing is predicated on a completely unsustainable economic model. This system we have is completely unsustainable. It was never sustainable, it’s just that the losses had to eventually add up enough to run the thing into the ground. And this isn’t limited to just Red States, it’s just that the Red States are the ones least prepared for this slowly building problem. This issue is coming for everywhere. There’s no hospital that’s going to survive this if we do not fundamentally change the system upon which our healthcare is built on.

    There are just too many flaws to band-aid here. We have to have a massive overhaul of our system or people are literally going to die. The problem is, that we can’t tell who is going to be at the steering wheel to direct those changes. There has to be a shared vision between the two major political parties that can endure for decades to ensure that whatever new systems is made, is actually built. If the two parties that run our government can never agree, hang it up folks, we’re done here. I know some people are going to take that as an invite to bash the other party, but at the end of the day, we either all work together or we don’t.

    We have to have some sort of change to our system like yesterday. It needs to be a massive change that take effect at ALL of the layers within the healthcare system. We cannot keep making minor incremental changes, it’s just plugging one hole in the dam only for another one to spring forth.


  • I looked at that picture that they had up for that “100,000” headcount. All I know is that there’s a lot of people on Trump’s team and in Wildwood, NJ who are extremely bad at estimating headcount. That picture of the crowd at it’s largest is (being absolutely generous here) is roughly 20,000 tops. 100,000 people is a massive amount of people, like it is a lot of people. There are zero ways there’s 100,000 in that picture. When you hit 100,000 people, you know it, because it’s an ungodly amount of people.







  • NOTE: This is to add some context to the whole Special Counsel argument.

    28 CFR 600 is what covers all the ins and outs of a Special Counsel appointment. Note the CFR there? That stands for Code of Federal Regulations. Regulations are created by the various Executive offices, but you might ask yourself, how can the Executive create something without Congress being involved, and this gets into the fine details of how the US Government works.

    As you know LAW requires that Congress pass a bill in both chambers and then send it to the President for a signature or a veto. And if vetoed then Congress can override it with a ⅔ vote. LAWs usually don’t get into a lot of detail, they’ll usually do something along the lines of:

    The United States Department of Defense shall build unto Congress an army worthy of Mordor and it shall not exceed the cost of $14 bazillion. Additionally, the following units are required to be purchased (insert a lengthy list of things Lockheed-Martin sent to Congress)

    And that’s about it. Now the exact method for “who’s going to the local fighter jet store to pick up a few F-15s, who’s building the antitank missles, where is this all being delivered to, etc” All of that falls into whoever was named, in this case it’s the DoD. So now the DoD will begin issuing RULES and REGULATIONS on how to get that LAW done. How that happens is way longer than I want to talk for, but it’s complex.

    Okay. So we’ve covered CFR. There is also USC which stands for United States Code. This is those LAWs “codified”. A law comes out of Congress as Public Law (or private law, but we’re not going to cover that). This is usually listed as Pub. L (Congress number)-(Number of law that has successfully been enacted). We are currently on the 118th Congress, thus the first law passed by this Congress would be called Pub. L 118-1 (note this does not apply to public law prior to 1901) All public, private, and everything else that comes from Congress gets put into a giant collection of books called the United States Statutes at Large (Stat), this is everything that has ever come from Congress. It is in the format of (volume) Stat. (numbered item), so the 5th thing in volume 23 is 23 Stat. 5 All of this eventually get codified so if one Pub. L cancels another prior Pub. L or amends it or whatever, the sum of all of those changes are in a final form in USC. Which that format is (title) USC (subsection). A title is a BROAD (and boy do I mean that word) subject matter. So like Title 16 is “CONSERVATION” and that is like National Park, endangered species, and just a smattering of all kinds of other things that remotely relate to that subject. Title 26 is all about taxes!! Subsection is a great way to drill down to a single thing in USC, but there’s also Chapters, Subsections, and so forth. And each title uses it’s own little scheme of subdivision, so boy oh boy is it fun to go through.

    So quick recap, Congress passes various kinds of bills, the public law bills that get enacted are Pub. L, those are filed into Stat., and then any that cancel/update/amend/change previous ones are coalesced into USC. So you’d find all the historic tax brackets in Stat., you’d find the current tax brackets in USC. And all of those were established by Pub. L.

    Okay, so I think that’s everything background you need. Sorry if you already knew it.

    So 28 CFR 600, since its a regulation, has to state whence it gets its authority. That’s a requirement of all regulations. 28 CFR 600 cites the following:

    • 5 USC 301
    • 28 USC 509
    • 28 USC 510
    • 28 USC 515-519

    5 USC 301 is a broad grant that basically says each department head may create regulations that they are granted power by law to do. It also bars, by default, the withholding of information from the public (but that’s not material here).

    28 USC 509 and 510 are things about what the Attorney General (AG) can do and says that the AG is officially cleared to cite Title 5 powers (see that whole 5 USC 301 thing).

    28 USC 515 is the first time we hear about Special Counsel. 516 to 519 indicate who can summon up one and who a Special Counsel can talk to etc. So specifically, all the various paragraphs in 28 CFR 600 fall into 28 USC 515(a) for Trump.

    The Attorney General …, or any attorney specially appointed by the Attorney General under law, may, when specifically directed by the Attorney General, conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal, including grand jury proceedings and proceedings before committing magistrate judges, which United States attorneys are authorized by law to conduct…

    Which Trump’s legal team says the President cannot be one of those brought under this law. Because separation of powers.

    So since 28 CFR 600 cites power from 28 USC 515, which cannot possibly have a President in there, 28 CFR 600 fails because 28 USC 515 fails. Or at least that’s the theory.


  • This gets complicated because the media does indeed summarize it as just simple “Presidential immunity” but Trump’s lawyers are approaching this legal theory from various angles all which have different underlying basis.

    There are two cases to note here. A civil trail related to the January 6th attempted coup and a criminal case related to the same event. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied cause for dismissal in that case based on the legal theory that Trump was immune from CIVIL prosecution on that mater for having been once the President. Trump was granted the ability to carry the three judge ruling to SCOTUS to which Trump’s legal passed on moving on that appeal by allowing the time period to elapse.

    The criminal case is being handled by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, that is in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and is being handled by Judge Tanya Chutkan. Trump’s legal team has recently filed with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit a request for dismissal based on the legal theory that Trump is immune from CRIMINAL prosecution on that matter for having been once the President. That is pending schedule upon the docket.

    Okay with that background. This case is being heard in the United States District Court Southern District of Florida, this is related to criminal charges that Trump mishandled classified documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act. This story circles around Trump’s legal team filing a request with the aforementioned court, a request for dismissal based on the legal theory that Trump is immune from questioning about the classification of records for having been once the President.

    Interestingly, part of the cause for dismissal that was also filed in this filing were the following (and no, I shit you not):

    • The law is vague and cannot be ruled upon, therefore the law should be ruled unconstitutional. (Basically vague laws = unconstitutional).
    • The law targets Presidents to which, a law cannot regulate Presidents and thus should be ruled unconstitutional. (Presidents cannot be restricted by laws passed by Congress)
    • Special Counsel appointments are not well founded in law and are therefore unconstitutional. (* I’ll have a second comment on this if you really, really want to know the basis for this one.)
    • The Presidential Records Act in it’s entirety is unconstitutional. (Kitchen sink attempt.)

    There were additional motions filed with the court but those were done via email and have not been released by the Court at this time.

    Yeah, it’s easy to be confused because there’s a lot of this going around. But so far, SCOTUS hasn’t actually ruled on the matter to put the nail into the proverbial coffin. But we don’t hear about the Trump legal team basically starting every court case thus far with a motion to have the Judge recuse themselves because it is impossible for them to be fair. Why is it impossible for them to be fair? Changes from Judge to Judge, but the most recent one was because of an opinion the Judge had shared in her personal capacity that Trump’s legal team felt was too Democrat-ish to render fair rulings. It was summarily dismissed.

    So Trump’s legal team uses a lot of various arguments with slight changes a lot in various venues. So that might be why you keep hearing them in the news.





  • Franklin Pierce at 42

    Pierce and Buchanan are always bottom tier. One laid groundwork for the Civil War and the other lit the match ensuring Lincoln would, if elected President, increase hostilities.

    Pierce at 42 should in my mind be 44 if not 43. Trump coming in at 45 seems about right, maybe 44 if I’m being generous.

    But Trump literally tried overthrowing the US government. There’s just no way history is going to be kind to him. There’s nothing that can be done, no one can go back and undo the past.

    Dude’s lasting legacy is going to be defined by pretty much, “Oh yeah, he attempted to overthrow the US government. And he was so powerful and charismatic, he got nominated to run for President again to get a second swipe at overthrowing the Government.”