The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn’t have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn’t really a helpful argument to make today.
Musk overpaid at $44B,
Yes, but about $14 billion was financed by debt rather than shares of stock, so the market cap immediately dropped to $30B as a result (enterprise value is market cap + outstanding debt because in a liquidation the debt would be paid out of the assets before the shareholders get anything). So in a sense, the current shares were worth about $30B at the time of the 2022 transaction.
If this new merger is a private transaction that values X at $33B and xAI at $80B, and everyone agrees, it’s functionally the same as if it were worth $3.3B and $8B.
You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.
I use Signal to avoid government accountability.
We are not the same.
Veterans tend to vote republican. I’m guessing the numbers would be about the same for active members.
No, I don’t think so.
I think it’s worth noting that “veterans” as a population skew heavily towards old white men. If you weight for age, gender, and race, does that veteran population support Republicans at higher rates than non-veterans of similar demographic profiles?
Here’s a 2023 Pew profile of veteran demographics that shows that:
I couldn’t find active duty polling for 2024, but the active duty vote leaned Biden in 2020.
I suspect if people actually broke out veteran preferences by age, gender, and race, you’d see that almost all of the veteran support for Republicans can be explained by their other demographics, not really anything special about being a veteran.
I think people paying attention to national politics but not necessarily state level stuff don’t realize just how impressive Andy Beshear has been. In 2024, Trump won Kentucky 65% to 34%, more than 30-point lead. In 2020, Trump won the state 62% to 36%.
And through that, during the Trump era, he has campaigned on unabashedly progressive policy positions (marriage equality, abortion, universal pre-k, renewable energy and EV production, legalizing marijuana), and won statewide elections in 2015, 2019, and 2023.
In many ways, the 2023 win was the most impressive, because that was when the Democrat brand was getting dragged down, and incumbents in that era tended to have a bit of a post-covid drop in the polling numbers.
People like Andy are who we need in politics: unafraid to vote his conscience, and using that charisma and voice to bring the public along to support those things.
The conversion therapy contains potassium benzoate.
Instead of blaming a victim, why don’t you get on the case of whoever made the post, for having an incomplete summary instead.
The summary contained what the person who posted it thought was important. You thought something else was important and then started making up conjecture about that, instead of looking it up yourself.
This is clown behavior. You’re not a victim of anything but your own ignorance. Digging in your heels, intentionally obtuse to the facts of the story you want to speculate about, is not productive. If you didn’t know, you’re welcome to look up the facts yourself, instead of claiming in multiple comments throughout this thread that this lady was a midwife performing surgical abortions, and that the actual charged conduct compares to the days of back alley abortions.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/17/texas-abortion-midwife-arrested/
https://www.thecut.com/article/texas-abortion-arrest-maria-margarita-rojas-midwife.html
You’re welcome.
The article is paywalled, and I cannot read it, so I’m determining my opinion based on what I read in the summary of this post
Here’s a suggestion: how about instead of forming your opinion based on known incomplete data, you decide instead to just, like, not form an opinion at all until you get that information, much less spout off based on your own speculation.
She wouldn’t have been arrested for dispensing legally obtainable pills, normaly.
???
They made abortion illegal in Texas. She performed abortions in the manner that is legal elsewhere, using a procedure that matches the standard of care where it is legal, under training and qualifications that are sufficient elsewhere. So she was arrested for dispensing pills normally and in the manner that they are regulated elsewhere. This is the safe and legal method elsewhere, and was the safe and legal method in Texas until recently.
Comparing it to back alley abortions is intentionally misleading to the point of dishonesty.
There’s no surgery involved.
Not for the mid/late-term ones.
She…didn’t perform any of those. I’m going off of the facts of what she is being accused of doing in the criminal charges.
You’re up and down this thread misrepresenting the facts here.
These are medication abortions, and the safety of those procedures is pretty well established, especially when supervised at a clinic. There’s no surgery involved.
Nearly half of U.S. adults
Half of LLM users (49%)
No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.
OP’s neighbor is one of the minority of federal workers who are probationary employees, because that’s the only group Elon has been able to really fire right now
This part isn’t true. At this point, probably over half of the fired workers were permanent, from agencies that are closing or are implementing RIFs. Most are still drawing paychecks, but budgeting does (and should) change once someone is informed that they’ll be out of a job in the next month or two.
For many agencies, these satellite offices often have monopsony power over workers of certain job skills. NOAA and the National Weather Service employ a lot of people who have job functions not really available from another employer, especially without moving. The same is true of NIH and CDC. HHS just announced the closure of several lawyer offices, and those specialists are going to have a bit of a rough time finding replacement jobs. USDA is a big organization, and have a ton of economists and scientists who would basically have to take a big pay cut if they’re laid off in this environment.
You’re downplaying just how devastating some of these job losses are, by ignoring that many of these people moved to these cities in reliance on the job stability they expected, and downplaying the number of people affected and the length of tenure these people have.
I don’t have a strong view of whether this story is literally true of this specific account’s neighbor. But I can tell you that versions of this story have happened to thousands already, and will happen to tens of thousands more.
She said this measure would have given her officers more leeway to make arrests during the neo-Nazi rally.
Isn’t this just an acknowledgement that the mask wearers weren’t breaking any law, but the Sheriff just really wanted to arrest them for some reason?
I think this article could be a little bit more precise with its reporting.
The Washington Post reported in April 2022 that Musk had already used more than half of his more than 170 million Tesla shares as collateral to acquire loans, and planned to do so again to borrow more money to buy Twitter, now X.
This was before a 3:1 stock split, so would represent 510 million shares today. Back then, those shares were worth $62 billion. Today, it’s more than doubled. So even if he’s done nothing with his debt or his shares, all the gains of the past few years would serve to give him a lot more cushion, to where he’d be safe even if the stock price plummets further, to around half of what it is today. More likely, though, he’s used some of the money from selling some of the shares to pay down his debt.
Musk acquired X for $44 billion in October 2022, borrowing roughly $13 billion from several banks
Unfortunately, that $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter itself, not by Musk. If the corporation defaults on the loans, the banks can force the sale of Twitter’s assets and wipe out the value of the shares (destroying the value of Musk’s investment). But that’s not debt that could be called and somehow jump over to Tesla share prices.
So it is true that a tanking Tesla stock price can cascade into a bankruptcy for him. But it needs to fall a lot more than where it’s fallen today. Probably needs to lose another half of its value, at a minimum, maybe more, before it actually triggers a cascading failure.
A not-insignificant portion of Trump’s base will be in this boat, if they aren’t already. We should be ready with messaging to pull them out of the cult, so that they don’t fall back in.
We’re saying the same thing.
I read your comment to say “the only thing stopping the kill switch is rules,” when I’m pointing out that “the only thing constituting a kill switch is rules,” and those are two distinct ideas that have different implications.
So is there a point where he loses everything? If Tesla drops too low, can they call in the debt?
Yes, to whatever extent that Elon-owned stock is pledged as collateral for his personal loans. Loans like that always carry provisions where the lender can call in the collateral if the value drops to a certain ratio of the overall loan balance.
So if Tesla stock plunges enough (and we have no way of knowing exactly how much is enough), that can cascade to where Elon needs to put up some cash, or other property, or pledge more shares, or it all comes crashing down where his collateral gets wiped out at the bottom.
So, the only thing stopping this “myth” from becoming reality is a set of rules, not a physical obstacle or technical limitation.
No, I think you’ve got it backwards.
There’s no technical or electronic or mechanical kill switch. The method of limiting the use of the aircraft is entirely contractual agreements between the nations, telling the partners that they’re not allowed to modify or test the aircraft without U.S. approval.
In other words, the kill switch itself is nothing but a set of rules, not a physical obstacle or technical limitation.
Actually for federal sentencing, property destruction is punished under the same table as theft. It’s mostly measured from the amount of loss to the victims, whether the person actually profited from it or not.
Let’s talk about flying instead of voting.
What happens if you fly somewhere, have your wallet stolen, and have to fly home without an ID? Does your country have a procedure for dealing with this case?
The answer is pretty obviously yes. There are methods of confirming identification by other means, for issuing a new identification card quickly, etc.
With voting, the question isn’t whether government issued IDs can be used to streamline identity verification. Every polling site uses and accepts IDs. The question is what happens when someone doesn’t have their ID on them, or can’t get to the polling place in person: is there a procedure that still allows them to vote somehow? Those are the alternative procedures being banned by legislation like this.