I always thought of it as an alternative to lottery tickets or slot machines.
Maybe they see this as a "better" vice to have with excess income.
If the mean is large, it's mostly an off-the-books bribery scheme. If the average stake is small, it's mostly a pump-and-dump con of regular people.
But it was probably just a gambling scheme with just one big bet, where as ever, the house always wins.
Sure, and cynically, just like in traditional casino gambling, the wipe-out could be viewed as the price of "entertainment".
If there is no class action lawsuit, then we know that the people who got wiped out thought the price was worth whatever they got for it, whether favors or fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Law
It's just that the middle class is no longer going to be the "In" group.
That has nothing to do with the specific thing I’m obviously saying.
It’s very clearly a comment on the lack of norms or enforcement of rules (emoluments clause, among MANY others) on the presidency.
We’ll likely wobble between periods of relative stability, with about the amount of liberty and corruption we’re used to at the federal level, and more-authoritarian high-corruption periods like this one.
Breaking out of the cycle, I rate less likely than a full collapse into authoritarianism. I just don’t see a viable path to the kinds of reforms we’d need. And it’ll get harder the longer this goes on, as the rot of corruption affects state capacity, industrial capacity, and drives even more entrenched local corruption than we already deal with. Plus we’ve got multiple debt and cost crises about to slam into us full-force, over the next 1-3 decades.
But for now: hybrid regime.
Some of it was done to receive bribes in exchange of favors from the govt. We all paid for that shit.
Have some empathy. With your attitude, we'll have many more Trumps to come.
One of my favorite books is Excellent Cadavers. It's about two judges in Sicily who systematically rooted out the Mafia. And were both assassinated for their work.
The moral is: action is necessary. Trump is hoping we all stop at trying to find empathy for his team.
I'm not talking about his team, I'm talking about the people who voted for him.
For instance, he wouldn't have even got off the ground if free trade hadn't decimated the US manufacturing sector. I won't fault anyone with a blue-collar job for voting for him, because the choice was him vs. some neoliberal. When the choices are bad, I understand making a desperate move.
And now we have even worse polarization, which fuels his type even more. More and deeper polarized "action" (like the snide remark I responded to upthread) is not the way to make things better.
And I would agree with you for the 2016 election. However, when Trump lost more manufacturing jobs under his first term than were lost under Obama despite all his bluster about saving and restoring said jobs, and his administration's only legislative win was a big tax cut for the wealthy, it's no longer a valid reason to vote for the guy in 2020 or 2024.
And, the joke's on any who did vote for him a second and third time: he's lost even more manufacturing jobs.
The tragedy is if you look at the actual data, manufacturing jobs generally recover under Democrat administrations, and they tend to be lost in significant numbers under Republican administrations. People are more easily swayed by memes and sound bites than actual data, though.
Using his power to make billions is not exactly enshrined in the constitution.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Cryptocurrency has always been a scam of no real utility for honest actors (compared to alternatives).
> Using his power to make billions is not exactly enshrined in the constitution.
Not exactly. Trump is dishonest and greedy, and doesn't care about a lot of appearances that prior presidents cared a lot about. In this case, he's not "using his power to make billions," he's actually not refraining from making billions because he has power.
I'm pretty sure Obama and Biden could have made money from a meme-coin, if they were so inclined. But if they even thought about it at all, they would have rejected the idea because it would look bad, hurt the office, etc. Trump doesn't care about those things.
Edit: Carter put his farm into a blind trust, he didn't sell it.
I can be angry about memecoin rug-pulls as a general scam, and I can be angry that the sitting US president is running shady scams.