What would breaking them up even mean? I feel we would be in the same situation as brexit - How do we split them without collapsing all the pieces? You can point to microsoft but modern american has brought an entirely different, much larger, more entrenched behemoths than what we've seen.
I agree, in the sense that "break them up" seems to be an undefined action left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not necessarily against reasonable regulations, but it is hard to agree or disagree if there is nothing on the table other than "break them up". Some specific framework or principle or proposal is needed to have any sort of a cogent discussion.
This brings up the question - What is the role of government?
Ensure contracts are upheld, to harm bad actors (via prison, fines, etc.) and to protect us from foreign invasion.
so, where did that fall apart in our current American system and what can we do to save our democracy? As the article has hinted at, regulation has gotten too esoteric for a bipartisan split in congress. When you have almost 500 people arguing about the use of SPACS for going public, limits on PPE loan, rights of citizens and business in regard to the pandemic, etc. etc.
John adams said 'God forbid we be 20 years from [..] a rebellion.'
We as Americans need a bit more of a centralized system and move a bit more towards an oligarchy. Same things that plagued the roman republic (Bipartisan politics) are plaguing our system. Augustus' answer? bring it down to him and 30 other people who where the most important people from each 'area' and the only thing that gave him more power than the rest was the fact the he was the only member who didn't rotate. Otherwise, it still came down to voting albeit with a forum that allowed for open discussion without rambling into nonsense and listing to 500 people say the same thing over and over.
Secrets is a very lose term here. I'm sure some wall street dudes would pay millions to get the emails of congress members. Also, just because the computers locked doesn't mean i can't copy a hard drive...
The first two paragraphs are reasonable. It descends into conspiracy fueled guff from then on. By the final paragraph they're alleging that "mountains of fraud" took place.
Twitter has permanently banned people for far less. Showing that the President is an equal seems like a fairly American concept from over here.
It's entirely honest. There are "mountains" of legitimately confirmed votes, proportionally there are only a tiny number of cases where something objectionable may or may not have happened. In your original post you intentionally misrepresent how frequently potential wrongdoing may have occurred and jump straight to asserting "mountains of fraud".
It is perfectly fine to find irregularities and question them, it crosses into bad faith when those irregularities are explained[1] and they continue to be repeated as if they were not.
What we are seeing is people repeating points that appear compelling at first glance, but only when wilfully ignoring any context that comes with those points. Some extremely egregious examples of this have come from last night's Capitol incident where the same people claiming or incensed by "mountains of election fraud" were falsely claiming that the protestors were "communist Antifa"[2].
Here's what's going to happen when you read this and respond (if you choose to). In response to links 1 and 2, you're going to post some kind of "fact check" which is no more than a "he-said-she-said" rebuttal from the very people who must be prosecuted for the theft in the first place. And in response to links 3 and 4, you're going to insist that they're isolated events and don't represent a pattern. In both cases, I'll have presented evidence, and you won't have.
1. Is evidence that the mail man should be disciplined or fired, not of a mountain of fraud.
2. You've literally proved my point about ignoring any kind of context with this one. The title intentionally misrepresents what is happening from the outset by misqualifying the containers ballots are regularly stored in as suitcases. It's not attempting to raise a concern about the election process, it's attempting to incense people with a particular ideology. This is further reinforced when you entirely ignore the testimony of anyone with any knowledge of how the ballot counting process is carried out, including ignoring the fact that any of the independent observers that the officials alleged to have left of their own volition could easily challenge that claim at any point.
3/4. All you've done here is prove that the methods already in place are effective at catching people who try to cast a dead person's vote.
Throughout this you've entirely ignored the fact that these discrepancies have been brought to people's attention and that they are either pure conjecture or on the level of individual misconduct. Any actions required to have /any/ effect whatsoever would be much more obvious and would have been put.
> I'll have presented evidence, and you won't have.
You've provided absolutely no evidence of the kind of mass fraud you're asserting has happened, once again isolated incidents will happen and in general they will be caught. Fraud mountain is a fiction of Trump's fucked up ego, and is evidenced by the fact that the absolutely overwhelming majority of votes have been agreed as legitimate by both independent and partisan observers.
This is evidence of fraud. You're asserting without any evidence (as I predicted) that these are isolated incidents. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We may never know the exact amount of fraud that occurred because the left, mass media, and establishment Republicans are intent on forging ahead with the so-called President-elect without conducting a robust investigation of the claims. At this point, it looks like the theft could be successful.
You have no proof that any fraud exists beyond the small amounts that have been brought up or dismissed, yet you are repeatedly asserting that everything is thrown into doubt by the utterly insignificant instances you've brought up.
If a cashier is caught stealing you don't then assume the whole shop was stealing.
At this point you appear to be out to run an inquisition. You've decided there is a widespread heretic problem and now any deviance found are an excuse to overstate the problem further, even if they can be rationally explained.
I urge you to do some self reflection as to why you think the election was stolen because the arguments you're currently tangled up in are exactly what lead to the mess in the Capitol, an event which only made it more untenable for more moderate republicans to continue supporting you.
If a cashier is caught stealing, you don't assume it's his first time. And you'd be wise to at least investigate whether his comrades have also been stealing. You'd be a complete idiot to assume that it was a single instance and no other theft is occurring in your shop.
In this case the shop is full of security cameras and they've been watched by members of both parties as well as third parties.
Once again if fraud had taken place there has been enough scrutiny to turn up more than a single dodgy mail man and a counting station in georgia where no one who knows how the counting process works has challenged the explanation given.
Trump lost, he didn't like it and immediately denied he lost with zero evidence to the contrary. It was only afterwards that he went searching for any evidence that fit his narrative, fabricating it where there was none and catastrophising the cases where illegitimate votes were cast.
> In this case the shop is full of security cameras and they've been watched by members of both parties as well as third parties.
This is false. Republicans were routinely denied the right to watch vote counts. In some cases, they were forced to stand more than six feet away "because of COVID", and in other cases, they were sent away entirely.
> Once again if fraud had taken place there has been enough scrutiny to turn up more than a single dodgy mail man and a counting station in georgia where no one who knows how the counting process works has challenged the explanation given.
I gave you examples. There are more examples at the "Here is the Evidence" web page. I'll post it, but I predict that you'll either ignore it or, instead, google for other web pages that "debunk" it.
> Trump lost, he didn't like it and immediately denied he lost with zero evidence to the contrary.
Now you're making up a narrative that doesn't fit the facts.
You have attempted to effect an air of condescension multiple times in this conversation. If you truly believe that half the country is living under Trump's spell and needs to be freed, and you also believe that condescension is going to help win them over, then it is not your opponent who is in need of introspection.
> Now you're making up a narrative that doesn't fit the facts.
The point I was making was that the assertion of "Winning the election" was made first, only when it became apparent that in fact he had not won the election did people start looking for evidence of fraud. Evidence was only gathered with the intention of supporting that fact and was then presented as proof of something much more widespread than it suggested. This has lead to things that are absolutely not evidence of fraud being conflated with acts of fraud.
The website you posted was torn apart elsewhere in this thread. From the outside it looks like a desperate grasping at straws.
> You have attempted to effect an air of condescension multiple times in this conversation. If you truly believe that half the country is living under Trump's spell and needs to be freed, and you also believe that condescension is going to help win them over, then it is not your opponent who is in need of introspection.
You've repeatedly refused to accept any criticism of your arguments throughout the conversation. Your evidence has been evidence of a few isolated incidents and fraud that has been detected by the safeguards already put in place. It is not evidence at all of any kind of widespread fraud.
The Capitol building was raided by Trump supporters directed there by the man himself. Inspired by this "stop the steal" rhetoric and calling for Mike Pence of all people to be hanged, they are being lead into a very dangerous situation that is not designed for their benefit. They are very much in need of some introspection before more of them die from this.
It's not about whether the 'election was stolen' and the court cases weren't in regard to 'fraud'. The court cases were on whether or not the federal government had the right to audit the state votes. The court cases decided that no, you can't. The states have all the power to run their own elections on their own accord, fraud be damned.
If you're going to argue back against someone who's post has already been deleted as misinformation you're probably the reason we shouldn't be trusting the System.
Not sure I'm parsing this properly, but I think that you are saying that I'm untrustworthy for some reason, like I'm denying too hard or pushing back too hard against a fringe opinion?
First, redis_mlc's comments are auto-killed, so just because it was dead already doesn't mean that people had flagged it yet.
Second, that comment contains verifiably false information of a sort that is being spread around far too much already, so I am pointing that out, in the hopes that someone will have that be the straw that breaks the back of their illusion.
I recognize that the US gov. does a lot of bad things. Between the three letter agencies, the extrajudicial killings of US citizens, the non-stop spying, the control by corporate interests etc.
There's enough actual bad being done by the government, there's no need to invent any.
Your argument is that "You haven't seen any evidence" while purporting to respond to someone whose posts are deleted _automatically_ by the machine. Saying "I haven't seen any evidence, so we're just going to keep this autodeletion machine running..." is an exercise in sanctimonous stupidity. I'm sure everyone who ran the censorship machine in East Germany or Russia (or programs the Great Firewall in China today) says the same damn thing.
NYT reports 'hundreds' at a crowd and organizers were preparing for an expected crowd of 5,000 on Tuesday and more than 30,000 throughout the week. Not particularly newsworthy for HN.
and at least 6 have been arrested for weapons possession and assaulting police officers... so not exactly peaceful pro-democracy folks, given that what they are protesting is a (mostly) functional democratic process.
> With unusual characteristics (especially the use of outputs from transactions being used as inputs to new transactions without much confirmation depth on the chain)
I'd love to hear more thoughts on this. I'm new to crypto but what are your thoughts on the reasoning here, fraud?
Also, what would explain the creation of so many yellows?
Yellows mean you don't care about privacy (a big company doing legitimate business may not care), or have accepted that blockchain analysis will defeat your privacy efforts anyway (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy), or you're a novice bitcoin user who doesn't understand what is safe and what is not
High frequency speculative trading could explain the pre-confirmation transactions. Maybe the probability of double-spending is so low, and the chain consensus is so strong, that a transaction in the mempool (before being locked into a block) is good with high probability. Or it could be novices who don't understand the danger
Definitely the Bitcoin network looks unusually "hot" today
