This case involved charges of fraud made against Trump’s company by the State of New York. This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The consequences were not supposed to be criminal.

The defamation lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll were also civil cases. She was not charging Trump with the crime of raping her many years ago; She was suing him (twice) for lying about whether he raped her many years ago. (She won both times.)

I think I get where you are coming from, though. When a person is rich enough to pay the fine, and also shameless enough to revel in the infamy of being found liable in a civil dispute, it can seem like that person doesn’t end up suffering any significant consequence for their actions at all.

$355M is a lot of money. Add in the $83M owed to Carroll and these recent fines top $400M, which is an estimated amount of Trump’s liquid assets. Trump is now likely running out of cash-on-hand, which could explain his recent takeover of the Republican National Committee – the GOP’s fundraising (and fund-spending) organization.

Criminal consequences come from criminal cases. Trump has invested most of his legal defense against the criminal cases he is facing. Pending criminal cases involving Trump include:

1.) A RICO (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”) case charged by the State of Georgia, against Trump and several others who allegedly conspired to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes, including by having the President call (Republican) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ask him to “find 11,780 votes” for him. Four people in that case have already accepted a plea deal. This case is currently delayed by a motion to disqualify the DA because she had a romantic relationship with a lawyer her office hired to help prosecute the case.

2.) A federal case against Trump for retaining classified documents. A year or so ago, it was found that former President Trump and former VP Mike Pence had kept classified documents after they left office, and that when Joe Biden left the office of VP in 2017, he also kept some classified documents. Both Pence and Biden complied with federal investigation and surrendered the documents immediately when asked. Unlike Pence and Biden, Trump did not comply with federal investigation, and instead took action to conceal the classified documents in his possession. This case is being heard in a Florida courtroom, because Trump was storing these stolen national secrets in a spare bathroom at Mar-A-Lago. The judge is a Trump appointee, and has demonstrated a tendency to rule in Trumps favor whenever she can, but if she shows too much bias she may get taken off the case.

3.) A federal case against Trump for his involvement in the insurrectionist attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count in congress on January 6, 2021. Trump has been indicted on four charges in this case: “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Trump’s defense has been that he has “absolute immunity” for any actions he took while serving as President. This claim of immunity has been denied and appealed multiple times. Trump has now asked the SCOTUS to hear his appeal, but they haven’t said if they will yet. Until they do, that case is on hold, but there’s no one else to appeal to higher than them. If SCOTUS chooses not to hear Trump’s immunity appeal, the lower court’s denial of it will stand and the case will go forward.

“People’s definition of good is also different.” That’s exactly what makes working as a server a difficult job.

Take you, for example. It sounds like you don’t like to be bothered when you’re dining out. An excellent server might be likely to recognize that and leave you alone after the first or second visit – as well as get your order right and bring your bill promptly. Even if not, there’s nothing wrong with politely asking to be left alone, but you can’t expect your server to read your mind. Some people do like to be bothered. Some people value the experience of being served while dining out to be as important as the food or the ambience. People have different definitions of good.

In your “first” part, I hear you talking about resentment toward feeling obliged to tip servers when they give poor service. I understand and agree, to an extent. Paying servers minimum wage (or more) would not necessarily improve the service, however, and could possibly allow it to become worse. The amount you leave as a tip – if anything at all – is still completely up to you. That’s a big part of tipping culture as well.

As for your “second,” and your “third,” I’m talking about tipping culture at sit-down restaurants in the United States.

Because you are able to conceptualize tipping as a “a mechanism to justify suppressing wages” does not mean that’s the only way to conceptualize it. Do you really believe that raising server pay to minimum wage (or more) would end tipping culture in the U.S.? I do not believe that at all. Because there really is a culture to it, even it is merely a custom to folks like you.

We can stop its spread – we can refuse to tip at places that never expected a tip before. But tipping at fancy sit-down restaurants is ingrained in American culture. It would take generations of social engineering to breed it out. There are people who like to be able to tip for good service, wealthy American people who will seek it out. Even if it became the norm not to tip at restaurants, I bet tipping would been seen as a status symbol at the fancier ones.

And what about the “excellent server” I talked about earlier, who makes more money in tips than anyone else on the shift? To you, maybe that person is akin to some sort of prostitute, to be asking for extra money in exchange for personal consideration, when already making almost as much as “ffs EMT personnel”? Seriously though, no matter how much you raise that server’s wage, they’re still not going to be making anywhere near as much as they did working those big-money shifts for big tips. All else being even, they’re not going to choose to work those crappy hours anymore either, so the restaurant no longer has its best staff working its most demanding shifts.

Anyway, it didn’t really seem like you were punching down. It did sort of seem like you failed to address some of the points I tried to make about tipping culture in the US, and instead provided information about your personal preferences and bad experiences dining out at full-service restaurants. That, and pushing the single-problem-single-solution minimum-wage idea, again without really addressing any of the possible collateral consequences I tried to suggest in the original post.

Tipping is more than just a custom; there really is a culture to it. If you’re tipping only because you know the server makes less than minimum wage from the restaurant (or that greedy restaurant owners are completely to blame for this injustice), I think you may be misunderstanding an aspect of this culture.

Working in a restaurant is as hard a retail job as there is, and working as a server is often the hardest job in the restaurant. Being a truly good server requires a rare mix of people skills, math skills, memory, and a thick skin. So why do people choose to take the hardest job there is in the whole restaurant, when it pays less than all the other jobs?

Most servers end up getting paid better than the people doing other jobs in the restaurant. In most restaurants, servers make more than minimum wage. At the end of their shifts, most servers in turn tip-out the front-of-the-house employees, such as hosts and bussers, who often do only make minimum wage.

A truly excellent server may be the highest-paid employee for an entire shift – that certainly includes the manager and anyone else on salary, and it may even include the owner, when you add in labor and upkeep costs.

In order to make all that money, however, this server has to work at all the times that everyone else is out having fun – Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning. This server must put up with drunks, picky eaters and other narcissists, as well as seating errors and kitchen mistakes, all with a smile, for six or eight or ten hours straight. This server, who earns more than anyone else on the shift, is working harder than anyone else on the shift.

This is the other aspect that I wanted to address. Tipping culture is what gives that excellent server the opportunity to earn a better wage, more appropriate to the effort and expertise they devote to the job.

I’m sure this all sounds very capitalist, because it is. This may not be the most capitalism-friendly forum, I know, but I’m not trying to make any larger argument here.

I’m just saying that to me, it seems like this should be a “don’t hate the players” (owners, managers, servers, rich/drunk people who like to leave big tips) “hate the game” (tipping culture). And even if you do hate tipping culture, it couldn’t hurt to consider how it works for the people who don’t hate it.

Removed by mod

I remember Gilbert Gottfried at a Friar’s Club roast. Can’t remember what the actual joke was, but I remember he lost the whole audience, and then won them back with a spontaneous telling of “The Aristocrats”

Kudos for Carlin, who made fun of government propaganda. Maybe not so much for Joan Rivers for making fun of FDNY widows.

(I’m not a boomer, though. Or a millennial. Or really that edgy anymore, if I ever was…)

This strikes me as a particularly ahistoric take. I’d like to make two points in that regard.

News Radio was the biggest gig yet for both Joe Rogan and Andy Dick, who played main characters on the show from the start. Jon Lovitz was already well known from his time on Saturday Night Live – arguably a higher-profile position than the one he took on News Radio.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t spawned by News Radio, is my first point. To the contrary: Lovitz was brought onto the show as an established big-name talent after (his friend and fellow SNL alum) Phil Hartman died.

And how did Phil Hartman die? Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, Brynn Omdahl, who struggled with substance abuse. According to Lovitz, Andy Dick was said to have shared cocaine with her at a Christmas party at Hartman’s house.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lovitz-speaks-out-on-dustup-with-andy-dick/

“[Andy] was just complaining and really giving me a hard time for no reason. Phil told me that they had a Christmas party and Andy was doing cocaine and he gave it to Phil’s wife Brynn, who had been sober for 10 years. So Andy said to me, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t given Brynn coke in the first place.’”

After this on-set exchange, Lovitz and Dick were said to have made up and were able to work professionally together on News Radio. Later, however, when Lovitz was out at a restaurant, Dick came over to his table and invoked his ostensible involvement with Hartman’s murder:

“He’s standing there with liqueur dripping down his chin and he says, ‘I put the Phil Hartman hex on you, you’re the next one to die,’” said Lovitz. “And he’s smiling, and my blood just went to my head. I wanted to smash him, but if I hit him he would have gone flying into the table behind him. He was really drunk.”

My second point is that, while Jon Lovitz maybe be a “character,” he’s an entirely different class of character than Andy Dick. (Or Joe Rogan, for that matter, just to pretend this whole long reply still has something to do with the actual OP topic.)

So like, “Biden should seize the powers of the presidency to take a more authoritarian stance against authoritarianism.” Is this really what you mean?

finger wagging is for the powerless citizenry not the president

Contrary to your premise, Biden has consistently promoted an anti-authoritarian view of how our representative democracy should work. He thinks people should vote against authoritarianism, instead of them calling on a POTUS who was elected to office because of his anti-authoritarian views to start taking authoritarian action against his authoritarian opponents.

The citizenry is not powerless. The citizenry has the most fundamental power of all: power over who is elected to office.

Just because that power can be corrupted and diminished through gerrymandering, electoral college imbalances, and two-party FPTP distortions (and a million other for-better-or-worse Constitutional safeguards against mob-rule) does not change the fact the citizenry still holds the most basic and fundamental power of all.

Tweets and finger-wagging are fine too, if you like, but if you are against fascism, I’m glad too. I hope you vote, and I hope you vote strategically instead of out of anger.

But how do they know what they know about your income? Didn’t you (or your employer on your behalf) already volunteer this information to the government in the first place? Or is your government monitoring your private financial transactions without your express consent?

If you need to check it, then maybe they are not calculating your taxes for you, so much they are taking their best guess and asking you to sign off on it. If their best guess is as good (or better) than yours, there is no difference in practice. But there is still a difference in principle: whether a citizen is permitted to declare their own income or whether the government is obliged to determine it for them.

The IRS calculates an employee’s taxes based on the income and withholding information provided to the IRS by the employer. The employee “volunteers” his tax information (and IRS witholding payment, if any) with each paycheck. The accounting for all this is listed right there on the paystub.

We have a “voluntary” tax system in the U.S. – that’s always been the situation. “Voluntary” doesn’t mean that that you can choose to not volunteer to pay your taxes. It mostly just means that the way we run things, by default, it is each citizen’s responsibility to calculate and pay their taxes each April.

American taxpayers filled out 1040 forms in the days before computers, a lot like they do now. The IRS selected certain fillings for audits, just like they do now – sometimes because of an apparent discrepancy, and sometimes just at random.

It would be a lot more work, take a lot more resources, and be prone to a lot more error and lawsuits, if the IRS tried to calculate everyone’s taxes for them. Even now that we are in the days of computers, it is much more efficient for the IRS to only audit a fraction of the filings submitted each year.

I’m also pretty sure our “voluntary” tax filling system has something to do with the Fourth Amendment and other privacy concerns. A lot of Americans very strongly believe that it is not the government’s place to be all up in their private business.

– EDIT to add:

There is a difference between whether it would be possible for the IRS to calculate individual citizens’ taxes and whether we should abandon our voluntary tax system for one in which the IRS simply calculates the taxes owed by every citizen and send us each a bill. My original response was intended to address the latter, but now I’ll say something about the former:

For someone whose single source of income is a job working for someone else, of course it is possible for the IRS to calculate your taxes. You’ve already volunteered all the information the IRS needs to do so. Your employer has already told the IRS exactly how much income you’ve earned and exactly how much of it you’ve had withheld for taxes. Remember when you signed that withholding paperwork with the HR department on your first day? That was the moment when you personally volunteered your income information and payments to the IRS. You’ve literally already been reporting your income and paying taxes on it ever since.

The way taxes work in practice for a single-income employee does not reveal the potential complexity of tax accounting for individuals who are self-employed, who have multiple sources of income, and anyone who doesn’t want to make regular fillings and withholding payments throughout the year. The tax situation for single-income American employees is not the situation for all Americans. Not everyone has an employer who calculates their taxes and pays installments for them throughout the year.

It is common for Americans to have a single job with an employer who calculates and pays their taxes for them. This makes it very easy for the IRS to know exactly how much the taxpayer owes (or is owed) at the end of the year. If it ends up feeling to like this is the same thing as the IRS calculating your taxes for you, however, I’m guessing it’s because you forgot that it’s actually your employer who’s been doing that accounting job for you all along, with each paycheck.

It’s not just for quality, but for authenticity too, I think.

Foods that are fermented or aged can take on a unique flavor profile, based on the unique blend of bacteria and mold and yeast in the area. Even using the same milk from the same cows and processing it the same way, cheese that is naturally aged in a cave in France might taste different from cheese that’s aged in a cave in West Virginia. Not necessarily better or worse, quality-wise, but different. Not authentic.

Weather patterns, seasonal changes, and soil conditions are also distinct and varied in different places. The same grapes grow differently in German soil than they do in Kansas. The grass that the cows eat grows differently in different places, and this can have a significant impact on the flavors of the milk and cheese.

I’m American, but I used to work in a fancy wine store that sold a lot of imported cheese and groceries. I imagine that in practice, PDO must seem like an annoying mix of over-regulation and jingoistic propaganda – especially to someone in Europe. But it does seem to serve a purpose, even if in an overbearing way.

I think being proud of local food culture is more like community spirit or neighborhood pride. It’s like saying, “here’s something ingeniously delicious we created using only our limited local resources.” I don’t think of that quite the same way as “pride” about race, gender, sexuality.

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Hall --> Powell --> Cheesebro --> Ellis --> (?)

Flippity floppity. Who will be next?

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

We have plenty of monuments and remembrances for military personnel who have given their lives for their country. We celebrate our veterans, at least as well as we take care of them.

We don’t have the same opportunities to celebrate, or monumentalize, or even just remember the people in the intelligence community who given their lives for their country. One of the few places we do have for that sort of thing is the CIA’s Memorial Wall. Like all monuments to fallen patriots, it is intended to be a place of quiet reverence and reflection.

On the night of his 2017 inauguration, Trump and his wife stopped by to do a little dance and give a little speech, in which he bragged about himself and insulted the media and his political rivals. It doesn’t sound like much now, after all we’ve been through, but back then it was still shocking.

It was shocking that anyone would act with such disrespect in that place. Moreover, it was profoundly disheartening that the person who was acting with such disrespect would be the same person who was now in charge of all the precious national intelligence that those fallen heroes had given their lives to obtain. Those fallen heroes with their stars hanging on the walls behind Trump, as blathered to the cameras on with one of his rehashed schticks about how smart he is.

–

Ex-CIA Boss Brennan, Others Rip Trump Speech in Front of Memorial [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-cia-boss-brennan-others-rip-trump-speech-front-memorial-n710366]

–

At CIA headquarters, Trump boasts about himself, denies feud [https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cia-langley-233971]

–

I remember this speech now, reading this article about Steele, because it sounds like Trump got at least two more people killed for the sake of his pathetic narcissism.

By declassifying the Steele report, for no reason except spite, Trump endangered the lives of every agent and every source even tangentially involved with its creation, across the globe. Two more sources in Russia suddenly disappear thanks to Trump, no suprise. And what else disappears? All of those networks of information, which cost thousands of hours of expert work and millions of dollars of taxpayer money to develop.

When we invest in an intelligence project, the information networks we develop are where we put all our money and resources. Those networks are the “principal.” The intelligence we gain from the networks is just the “dividend.”

Yet Trump is anxious to spend the principle, even if only as a gift to a foreign leader he’s trying to impress. As if any of it – principle or dividend – was ever his to spend. (Or to store in an extra bathroom at his house in Florida.)

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

==

EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Yes, that sounds right, except that I think it really is relevant that one party was a U.S. citizen.

There are strict laws against the U.S. government surveilling U.S. citizens without a warrant. By using FISA information gathered through warrantless foreign surveillance, the FBI appeared to be taking a backdoor around those laws.