It seems to me that it feels that the world, or at least the US, decided that far far worse things are acceptable too.
Not easy to be a parent and explain to kids that no, this is not how the world should be run. How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
> How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
They shouldn't. The reality is that the rich and powerful have never been particularly beholden to the law.
For a while, there was a lot of energy spent maintaining the illusion that we had rule of law, and I don't doubt there are some who believed it was an ideal to strive for that we'd get closer and closer to over time, but Trump and his administration stopped pretending.
I taught my kids the rule of law and what's right and wrong or desirable are totally separate concepts. The law itself only tells you what's proscribed and potential penalties, all of which have to be analyzed in the light of how or who will actually bother to enforce it and the incentives of the various parties enforcing it.
Unfortunately the police come to public schools and try to do their brainwashing very early before you have the opportunity to even address it. So unless you address this issue at a very young age they likely won't question it again until near college age.
> I taught my kids the rule of law and what's right and wrong or desirable are totally separate concepts.
You should be careful to distinguish "rule of law" from the law itself.
Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all. It shouldn't matter if you're rich or poor, man or woman, a member of the majority or minority race, famous or obscure, politically well-connected or not, etc. This is an inherently just principle, but it's also extremely difficult (impossible?) to live up to 100%.
On the other hand, you're correct that individual laws can be just or unjust, moral or immoral. We have plenty of historical examples of unjust laws (e.g., a recent and hopefully unquestionable example in living memory is segregation), and it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience.
> Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all.
Which sounds good at first, but...
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
― Anatole France
"To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" -- Oscar Benavides
You have to both apply the law equally to all and apply equitable criminal penalties for breaking the law, but the latter is pretty useless without the former. In that way, you could say that honoring the rule of law is necessary but not sufficient for truly equal treatment under the law.
> it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience
If none of those work, there can come a time when it will be appropriate to take similar actions to those taken to secure US independence from Britain.
100% a demonstration that who we elect as a leader absolutely does set the tone for the rest of the country. I have lived through two elections of Donald Trump and both times the shift in what kinds of behavior were socially acceptable was palpable within hours. Like a lot of people suddenly decided they could come out and be their true self, it just turned out that it was gleefully ugly and hateful.
This is better though, no (as ugly as it is)? At least we now know what this Country actually is and who are its citizens… vs. leaving in some “we are better than this…” fantasy
Disagree. If one behaves in a decent way, does it matter what this person “really is” and why they behave like that? Is it societal norms? Is it a fear of punishment? Is it because Jesus tells them to? Or are they genuinely a good person? Who can tell and why does that matter. The net outcome - they behave in a decent way.
The terms, updated April 6, state that the deposit is not a binding sales contract. It provides only a "conditional opportunity" to purchase the phone if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it, with all discretion resting with the company. The company "does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase," The Verge and IBTimes UK reported.
Does that require the corporation doing the crowdfunding to be based in Washington, or no?
Anyway it was never framed as raising money a la crowd sourcing, no more than the Tesla Roadster has been, you are promised nothing for your money besides a reservation to buy the product when it eventually exists.
The Verge has an on-going series Where's the Trump Phone? [1] with updates every week. They even managed to get an interview with one of the execs a few months back.
It's normal for grifters to preselect their demographic.
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
Yet another phenomenon that scholars will be studying years from now.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
If you ever talk to them, they rationalize all the scams and self dealing by claiming that "both sides are corrupt," and they like the guy because he's just better at the grift.
While I agree in principle, at least Tesla has delivered something pretty impressive. FSD is not really something I am personally interested in, but I cannot deny that it has gotten quite good. Better than any other system being offered, certainly. Waymo is better, but you cannot buy your own Waymo.
Or bots, but yea the many followers is also likely.
If you check news.ycombinator.com/active regularly instead of the main feed you’ll see that anything critical of the king or Musk is regularly flagged to oblivion quite quickly.
It’s one of the failure modes of how self moderation works in this site.
It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market.
By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Yes a lot of scams basically are elaborate ways to get interest-free loans. The only way to discourage these types of scams is to require the claw-back to include high interest. Which probably feels very punitive, so we don't do it. Generally we award the damages and then that's it. But like... damages 2 years ago don't equal damages now, that's not how money works. I guess our courts don't know that.
> Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
> it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
Are you sure? I'd have guessed that the debt is created when they generate the $36 000. Getting caught would just make it easier for the victim to collect.
> Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
Some people have argued that Sam Bankman Fried just had unlucky timing. If his Anthropic investment had an opportunity to mature everyone would have been happy.
I don’t subscribe, but I have seen the argument a few times.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
Tour attendance: 2.5 million
Only 1 in 10 purchases were honored, so purchase for 25 million tickets were attempted.
$750 million in Money market at 7% for 6 to 8 weeks.
So, 6 to 8 million in interest depending on the weeks (6 to 8) in money market.
I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
>Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons:
1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it
2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubstantiated, and seemed to be a side effect of making the tickets expensive.
3. Jackson donated his earnings to charity, so the "... for his own profit" claim was also questionable.
> Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience
How did that work in the 80s? Did he spend days and weeks poring through (paper) census data and correlating it with ZIP codes? Did he use VisiCalc on an Apple ][ or Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC?
Whatever his other misdeeds, I never got a racist vibe off MJ.
“ The device would work with Trump Mobile's service plan. For $47.45 per month, Trump Mobile's "47 Plan" (2), which operates on the T-Mobile network, claims to be "better than the rest," offering 100% U.S.-based support; extensive 5G coverage; unlimited talk, text and data; telehealth services; roadside assistance, and international calling to over 230 countries and territories.”
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
A lot of people are still on ancient plans like $80/5GB since they don't know they can change providers and still keep their number. Or they're old and avoid changing any aspect of their lives. The mobile companies are fine with "grandfathering" these customers.
Mobile companies will never, however, grandfather plans which have better value. They will happily grandfather more expensive plans, hell they won't even tell you.
This is actually cheaper than what my parents currently pay Verizon every month--somehow they're spending $161 every month on two lines, with no special services, and they're on ancient phones (an iPhone SE and an iPhone X). They know they need to switch, but have no idea how to pick a replacement service. (I'm going to sort it out in the next week or two.)
There's nothing libertarian about MAGA. It's all about using the immense power of government to hurt the right people, and seizing every opportunity to grow and expand that power with that same goal in mind.
Thats not what i meant. Only in a society who no one cares about the others and thinks its always the fault of their own, this is normal. Otherwise we would have guard rails to protect us.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
I don't know any. Maybe I just have a better social circle than most. Or maybe this is a fake number. There are not as many people preordering this clearly fake device, instead this is just another way to launder money.
I didn’t see anything in his post saying people shouldn’t have the right to associate with trash.
We also all have the right to judge people for their associations. You’re right to an action or belief doesn’t make it inherently good, or even equal to other actions and beliefs.
Getting scammed is objectively bad. If you're surrounded with people who are routinely getting scammed by Donald Trump of all people, that's bad. That doesn't mean they're bad people but... something is going on there for sure.
It feels analogous to giving alms to a religious institution at the end of a prayer service - you don't get anything material for it in return, but maybe for the faithful, that's not the point?
Tithing is not fraud. People give money to support the church, pay the pastor, and so that the church can use it to care for the needy in the community. Good churches do, in fact, use the money for all of the above.
The above argument is exploring the framing that the Trump phone is not fraud because it is more like tithing. As long as Trump puts it to good use then it's all good.
There's another article somewhere indicating how Maga is furious because their money is lost. Someone commented on the article something like - "I'm MAGA and I'm not mad at all".
This is exactly it, I see it in my family members. They are willing to sacrifice so much money and, well, everything to the "cause." It's a cult, and it's deranged.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
I think it really is just the simpler explanation, they have decided they hate anybody left of them, and defeating them is the cause which much be won at all costs.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.
...
The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.
People think/believe/hope that returning the country to the situation that they perceived that the boomers had when they were growing up without care (because the boomers hadn't yet reached adulthood) would bring back that lifestyle today. ... without having all of the other parts of the social contract between government and the populace in place. People still think that boomers had it best (and maybe they did) and want that lifestyle too.
From what I can see, as a boomer myself, is that we were best at voting ourselves more and more benefits, lower and lower taxes, and mortgaging all the value out of everything that had been built up over the previous generations. And the generations to follow are being left an empty purse.
I don't entirely place the blame on boomers for the raise of 1950s nostalgia and the corresponding misalignment of economic goals.
Someone (not a baby boomer) working in a traditional blue collar job today looks back at the portrayal of life in a rerun of a 1970s sitcom - Happy Days (or spin off, or even an "average" person sitcom from the 80s... Roseanne, Married with children) on late night cable and wonders what it would take to have that lifestyle today? Well, taxes are taking too large of a chunk of the family budget so people gravitate to candidates that say they'll cut taxes.
Though, they're missing out on the 1950s tax structure... where people making $200,000 (1950s dollars - about $2M in 2020s dollars) were getting taxed at 91%. Corporate tax rate was much higher too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
The plank of "we're going to raise taxes" doesn't get as many nostalgic votes for people hoping to return to the lifestyle of the 1950s.
There's a whole lot of other factors too.
A right leaning 30 year old today is voting to try to have what they perceived how it worked in the 1950s from shallow portrayals of the period.
Lol, this is my lesson in being much clearer when expressing any opinion that relates to religion or politics! The downvotes are fierce on this one.
I did not intend to say that tithing/church donations are equivalent to fraud. I didn't click through to read the story, and therefore hadn't assumed it indicates actual fraud taking place (delayed shipments in and of themselves are unprofessional, but needn't be fraudulent.)
I was implicitly wondering what might motivate people to trust that a brand that has been known to commit fraud, or at the very least to severely under-perform in terms of quality and on-time delivery, can be entrusted with $500 of their money, to produce something the brand isn't known for (consumer electronics.)
Having wondered this, I then proceeded to write my next thought down: Maybe there's more to human motivation than simply the possibility of a material exchange. For example, when one donates to a church, one can reasonably do so without expectation of receiving something tangible and material in return.
I by no means think tithing is fraud, per se. Can and do churches embezzle money? Yes. Does that mean they are inherently fraudulent institutions? Absolutely not. And I am as godless as they come, so I have no desire to defend the motives of any religious institution.
Oh well, I am now at the bottom of this comment pile, so this response, just like other religious acts, is one merely of personal penitence, lol.
Certainly that does happen, and you'd be right to say it's fraud. At the vast majority of churches, it's well understood that the church staff need to eat and pay for the mortgage and upkeep on the facility. Trying to frame tithes as "often grift" is extremely cynical.
Not so common, any other president pulling that shit pretty much anywhere in the world would instantly lose all credibility and most likely would have to resign. But then again this dude shits himself on live TV and shilled cans of beans from the oval office
Broadband/fiber internet accessible to all residents of the USA, anyone? Always love reading about how the telcos took that tax money, hemmed and hawed, and ended up never fully delivering what they agreed to.
Assuming this was not a scam from the beginning. I just think they got more orders than they expected. This seems to be a reskinned HTC U24 Pro (I think earlier Images and specs were advertising another phone). Also seems to have changed from "produced in the USA" to "Designed with American values in mind" & "With American teams helping guide design and quality" according to their website. At best this is bait and switch (assuming they deliver anything) but I can understand people calling this a scam.
I don't disagree. As far I understand this is 100 dollar deposit up until now. So the customer would have to actually go through the order process where they would see the updated website with new specs etc. so it's not fully a switch yet. I am from the EU and no a lawyer so I would not know the legality of it all.
You recognize it’s a bait and switch scam but don’t want to call it a scam, and then you hedge with claiming you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why don’t you say you’re opinion directly instead of trying to put it out there and having a fallback to defend yourself when you are properly called out.
"I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094961