There are very good reasons why you 501(c)(3) doesn't allow setting up a non-profit that accept "donations" that benefit one of the non-profit's wholly owned for-profit subsidiaries.
Mozilla also isn't exactly strapped for cash. They pull in around half a billion dollars per year (to accomplish what could be done on a budget a tenth that size).
It turns out that most of the world is not Europe. We have our own system, evolved over a century, responding to events in this country. Abruptly changing that system creates real harm to a gigantic population.
We don't have a national ID system, and we have millions of undocumented immigrants, as well as millions of African Americans who have been systematically oppressed in order to elevate the interests of a white majority. (that's not an opinion, it's a fact; our Supreme Court literally wouldn't let southern states change election laws without checking with them, because southern states wanted to eliminate most black people from voter roles)
21 million adults in this country lack a driver's license. Of those the largest groups are Black and Hispanic populations. 11 million more without IDs are undocumented immigrants. That's 32 million people disenfranchised and unbanked. A larger population than most EU countries, without a vote or a bank account.
IF you introduced a national ID system, and got every single American on it, then this wouldn't be an issue, because everyone could still vote and bank. But that's not what they want. They want 32 million people to suffer. That's why this is wrong, regardless of what's common in Europe.
> 21 million adults in this country lack a driver's license. Of those the largest groups are Black and Hispanic populations. 11 million more without IDs are undocumented immigrants. That's 32 million people disenfranchised and unbanked. A larger population than most EU countries, without a vote or a bank account.
Yes, the entire point of this law is to try to reduce the number of illegal immigrants (11 million is probably an underestimate) physically present in the US by making it harder for them to use banks and by deputizing banks to do some amount of illegal immigration enforcement by way of banking regulations, as we already do for a variety of classes of crime. If they are currently enfranchised at all, it's because they're also voting illegally, and this is a good argument for putting more stringent checks on legal citizenship when people vote.
> IF you introduced a national ID system, and got every single American on it, then this wouldn't be an issue, because everyone could still vote and bank. But that's not what they want. They want 32 million people to suffer. That's why this is wrong, regardless of what's common in Europe.
A huge proportion of that 32 million figure is non-Americans; literally foreigners from other countries who entered or remained in the US in violation of US immigration law. Any of those people voting is a huge problem for actual American citizens. It's not necessarily a problem if foreigners use US banks, just as it's not necessarily a problem if I (an American citizen) use a bank in a foreign country; but if someone avoids using a US bank because they are already present in the US illegally this is a perfectly reasonable outcome because what should be happening to them is that they get arrested and deported.
You're saying you want tens of millions of people to struggle to survive. For what exactly? A principle? What, that they should "not do illegal things" ?
This obsession with people violating the law is extremely one-sided. Nobody's going after the tax-dodging criminal corporations that are actually stealing billions of dollars from the government through tax loopholes and offshore accounts. Conservatives don't say peep about a literal convicted felon in the highest office in government. But they're sure happy to go after poor brown people, who just happen to be propping up the economy.
> If they are currently enfranchised at all, it's because they're also voting illegally
Illegals do not vote. (https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-5147789/voting-election...) Enfranchisement means the ability to take a paycheck and deposit it in a bank. You know, to pay for baby food, clothes, education. To buy a home. To pay taxes. To pay for gas, to go to a job, and contribute to the economy. To send kids to college, who will grow up and become doctors, lawyers, software developers, business owners.
> if someone avoids using a US bank because they are already present in the US illegally this is a perfectly reasonable outcome because what should be happening to them is that they get arrested and deported
You don't even have a clue how much this would screw you over, do you? You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. And all for what? A principle that you wouldn't apply to others the same way?
America has illegal immigrants because we asked for them. We literally have no way to process all our fruit and vegetable produce without underpaid migrant workers. This was made plainly obvious during COVID, when all the crops rotted in the ground, because we blocked migrant workers from coming in and picking crops. We do not have the labor force to do it. We also use migrant workers for a huge swath of construction, hospitality, kitchen staff, because 1) we don't have an equivalent labor force for these jobs, and 2) their incredibly low pay subsidizes the low prices you pay for the end products.
Furthermore, migrant workers are a boon to the economy. They pay taxes. They purchase goods. They provide cheap labor that we profit from. They enable businesses to stay afloat, and small businesses are critical to the US economy. Nobody works harder than an immigrant. And they're working for the country.
And this all ignores the humanitarian impact of torturing millions of people. This is what happened to the Jews in Germany in the 1940's. Millions of people, minorities, used as scapegoats, to justify an ideological war, completely ignoring the reality and hypocrisy underneath. A lack of empathy creates horrifying ends.
> You're saying you want tens of millions of people to struggle to survive. For what exactly? A principle? What, that they should "not do illegal things" ?
No I want them to physically leave US soil before they have natural-born citizen children on it.
> This obsession with people violating the law is extremely one-sided. Nobody's going after the tax-dodging criminal corporations that are actually stealing billions of dollars from the government through tax loopholes and offshore accounts.
It's not illegal, nor should it be illegal, for a corporation to structure its affairs so that it minimizes the amount of taxes it's legally required to pay; just as it is not illegal for me personally to do this. If there's a specific problem caused by the way tax law is currently structured, the legislature can change it. Honestly though I'm not very worked up about billions of dollars of corporate tax revenue; the US federal budget is multiple trillions of dollars, and I might well be better off if those marginal dollars go to increasing corporate profits (and therefore the value of my stock-market-invested 401k, which is itself a tax dodge) than to the coffers of the US federal government.
> Conservatives don't say peep about a literal convicted felon in the highest office in government. But they're sure happy to go after poor brown people, who just happen to be propping up the economy.
A lot of people who would've self-described as conservatives before the mid-2010s are anti-Trump, and it probably makes sense to retire the term "conservative" as a descriptor in the context of US politics, the environment has changed too much. Poor brown people committing crimes near me - and not just the bare fact of violating US immigration law, I mean murders and robberies and drunk driving and driving big rigs on fraudulent CDLs and the identity theft that many brown illegal immigrants engage in in order to have legitimate-appearing documents - are more of a problem for me than the business records falsification stuff that Trump was convicted of. What it means to "prop up the economy" is pretty ill-defined, but I don't think that poor brown people do so simply by virtue of being on US soil and (sometimes) working jobs illegally.
> Enfranchisement means the ability to take a paycheck and deposit it in a bank. You know, to pay for baby food, clothes, education. To buy a home. To pay taxes. To pay for gas, to go to a job, and contribute to the economy. To send kids to college, who will grow up and become doctors, lawyers, software developers, business owners.
If illegal immigrants really want to use money in the US in violation of US law, they can use bitcoin or monero, money which is specifically designed to be independent of a state with a law-enforcement apparatus. Illegal immigrants paying for goods and services in the US doesn't benefit most American citizens and in some cases it harms them - e.g. illegal immigrants enrolling their children in American schools generally makes those schools work less well for existing American citizens, because being an illegal immigrant is highly correlated with not speaking English well, not sharing American cultural values, and being less cognitively able and therefore requiring more resources to educate.
> You don't even have a clue how much this would screw you over, do you? You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. And all for what? A principle that you wouldn't apply to others the same way?
I already live in a world where I provide legal documentation of my identity to banks and other financial service providers because they are required to ask for it by law. It's already the case that the government can in principle try to screw me over by interfering with my ability to access the legitimate US dollar financial system. I already live in a world where I have been asked to provide proof of legal US residency within several days of starting a job (and I did so because I am in fact a US citizen). I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way.
> America has illegal immigrants because we asked for them. We literally have no way to process all our fruit and vegetable produce without underpaid migrant workers. This was made plainly obvious during COVID, when all the crops rotted in the ground, because we blocked migrant workers from coming in and picking crops. We do not have the labor force to do it. We also use migrant workers for a huge swath of construction, hospitality, kitchen staff, because 1) we don't have an equivalent labor force for these jobs, and 2) their incredibly low pay subsidizes the low prices you pay for the end products.
No, we have illegal immigrants because a lot of people outside the US see that life in the US is better than it is where they are, and so attempt to gain access to the US. Among US citizens, there is a constituency of people who benefit from being able to hire low-wage illegal immigrant labor or who have other ideological reasons to support loose immigration policy and lax enforcement of existing laws; and other constituencies of people who are harmed by this. Industries that currently hire a lot of illegal labor would either start hiring citizen or legal immigrant labor at higher wages, or invest in more automation. But people, immigrants or citizens, aren't just abstract units of labor; they are human beings who reside in a place, interact with other people living near them, speak a language, have children, etc. and all of these things are relevant to deciding how much the presence of a given immigrant helps or harms existing citizens.
> And this all ignores the humanitarian impact of torturing millions of people. This is what happened to the Jews in Germany in the 1940's. Millions of people, minorities, used as scapegoats, to justify an ideological war, completely ignoring the reality and hypocrisy underneath. A lack of empathy creates horrifying ends.
Imposing a banking regulation that applies to people who are already violating immigration law and who could easily stop violating immigration law by simply returning to their home country isn't torturing people in a way analogous to imprisoning European Jews in concentration camps and using them as slave labor or killing them.
Has the Hatch Act ever been enforced? Every administration in the last 20+ years have had people violate it but as far as I can tell nobody has been found guilty.
What do you mean by dodgy meds? These are just the normal meds you can get at any pharmacy. They also aren't even peddling them. They just link to pharmacies or provide discount codes.
no. but it seems possible, or even likely, that they used the pictures to train targeting for military drones (think Project Insight from Captain America:Winter Soldier).
I'm not sure privacy violations are the biggest concern here.
> seems possible, or even likely, that they used the pictures to train targeting for military drones
Clarifai's usecase is around unstructured image data search which is fairly useful in cleansing and less so in targeting.
More fundamentally, almost the entire tech industry touched Project Maven - it was massive. And that was just 1 of multiple initiatives led by the DoD.
And most other great and regional powers like China, Russia, Japan, France, India, South Korea, Turkiye, etc have all been working on similar projects for a decade.
It doesn't matter what country you live in - no nation will leave capabilities on the table. Heck, a highschooler with knowledge of OpenCV and the Google Earth API can build targeting capabilities similar to what superpowers had a decade ago.
It's 2026 - the Ukraine War started in 2014; the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni Civil Wars in 2011; the Congo War reignited in 2015; the Afghan War continued until 2022; the Myanmar Civil War reignited in 2021; etc - there has now been over a decade of constant development of dual use technologies in both conflicts and civilian applications.
Technology has always had a military component - heck, much of the "civilian" technologies in the 1990s-2000s were refined and tested thanks to Gulf War 1 and the Yugoslav Wars.
Or, framed in another manner - the capabilities disclosed as part of the Snowden Leaks in 2013 were already in production 20 years ago. It is 2026.
There is a sense of starry-eyed idealism amongst a subset of techies who didn't seem to realize that technology has always been dual use.
How are you connecting the petrodollar and US manufacturing? US manufacturing was destroyed because companies closed their factories in the US and used factories in China because labor was cheaper and they were less regulated.
Under normal conditions, when your economy becomes less competitive, your currency gets depreciated, increasing competitiveness.
Unless of course everybody is forced to buy your currency to get an essential resource. This causes:
- the currency to maintain value better
- puts you in position of other countries having to maintain a trade surplus with you so they can actually purchase said resource
- the oil producers end up with great amounts of your currency, which they have to spend, getting a political foothold in your country.
Petrodollar almost certainly was devastating to US economy. And like most resource curses, it's like a drug - you need to stop taking it to get better, but it will hurt as hell.
Petrodollar creates demand for dollars. This is demand that no other currency gets. That's why US production is expensive vs other countries. China labor is cheaper and it is less regulated, but the petrodollar exacerbates the problem.
It is not even first past the post that is the problem. Even if you had some sort of ranked voting or parliamentary system you would still end up with the same problem. The person in charge gets changed too frequently to be able to have long term plans. 8 years is too short to execute a plan that will take 10 or 20 years.
I think this is why FDR was a successful president and was able to get so much done. He had 3 complete terms and a partial 4th term.
If you are going to have shorter terms you need to have your successor continue with your plans, but in a liberal democracy you don't know who is going to follow you. Even if your party wins, your successor might not continue with the plan.
In preferential Systems you must chase the centre, in the USA it might be trains versus cars, in Australia because both sides are chasing the centre they will both agree on a train line it's just the specifics they will argue about which believe leads to better outcomes.
At least from my experience I would say change of government won't lead to cancellation of a project or reform just an expansion or contraction in scope.
You can't do something like implement a 1 child policy and stick to it for decades causing a demographic collapse because it wouldn't have broad appeal from the population.
Your last paragraph is my point. Some policies may be good, but not popular. (I'm not suggesting the one child policy is good). How would you be able to continue a policy like the one child policy in a democracy for decades? You wouldn't be able to. With China since their leaders are there longer and because the leaders have a more consistent world view they were able to continue with such a policy.
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