Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.

Wasn't he also in the USA illegally because he was in violation of his student visa?

Wow, I can’t believe this is so controversial. When companies A and B merge, what would you describe the A-founders as, in relation to the resulting company?

Reverse merger makes it an acquisition not co-founding.

> This article is about the defunct online bank.

Assuming you meant X.com (formerly known as Twitter) - in no universe is there a Twitter cofounded by Musk.

Do you think Trump understands how tarifs work exactly? Or is it just something he learned other countries are afraid of but he has no idea that American importers and their customers are gonna pay them (and he shares this misunderstanding with more than half of the population)?

While this is true in principle, it's worth adding the caveat that EU countries have also been pushing for backdoors to encrypted communications in order to expand law enforcement access. Of course while this contradicts the stance on privacy the EU put forward with the GDPR (which sneakily redefined the right to privacy and control of your personal data as an indelible human right btw).

But in case anyone thinks this is a dunk on the EU: this is still not as invasive as the US law enforcement's powers of warrantless surveillance which have repeatedly blown up the EU-US frameworks for data sharing (Privacy Shield and its other iterations, which Mr Schrems seems to have personally made a sport of shooting down faster than they get implemented). It's also not entirely contradictory as the focus here is on protecting the rights of people against corporations while still providing means for the state to violate those rights when necessary (similarly to how the state can violate your right to free movement through incarceration or your right to bodily autonomy by shooting you, neither of which seem to upset the people who'd think this one is a gotcha).

Considering the EU's main function is being a transnational economic region (if you ignore all the fluff about shared values and history and instead follow the definition of "a system's function is what it does"), it's absolutely true that the EU is remarkably restrictive on what corporations can do compared to the US - even before Trump.

EDIT: The two sibling comments prove my point: while EU member states have been pushing for legislation like providing backdoors to encrypted communication, this is neither unique to the EU nor a contradiction and the US already has far wider reaching measures in place.

Consider for example the Switzerland-based CIA and BND (Germany) shell company that distributed backdoored encryption to hostile nations which Germany backed out of when the CIA defended distributing the same technology to friendlies without informing them or their intelligence agencies. Or literally any of the Snowden leaks, which described not only mass surveillance of US citizens but also espionage against US allies (infamously including wiretapping then-chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone) to a degree none of the EU member states have ever done anything comparable to - and which those mostly didn't act on because of the importance of maintaining good terms with the US. Or the post-9/11 legislation which not only allowed warrantless surveillance with gag orders (which is why "canaries" became popular in cryptography communities) but even literally killing or abducting and indefinitely incarcerating US citizens without a trial - not to mention torture.

You can criticize the EU for state overreach. You can't do so by using the US for grounds of moral superiority - not even moral equivalence. You can argue about different attitudes to free speech, gun ownership or the right to self-defense (e.g. castle doctrine), sure. All of these are valid grounds for debate. But the US government can (according to its own jurisdiction) legally do so many more things to both its own citizens and non-citizens both within and outside its borders that trying to use it for a libertarian "win" against the EU seems farcical at best.

...Seems more like the EU reserves that power to itself, which I'd argue is even worse

Looks like we'll have leaded gas back in pumps pretty soon.

I guess I'll just have to become a shareholder

Was it before or after he tried to pull off that Libra thing?

I'll have to look into that. But giving these people any good faith is quite charitable to say the least.

> CFPB Warns that Digital Marketing Providers Must Comply with Federal Consumer Finance Protections > Tech firms that use behavioral targeting of individual consumers regarding financial products are liable for violations

Oh, ok.

Care to provide an example? I was casually looking at applying, but I am on the conservative side as easily searchable on Google by voter registrations

The only person Musk ‘elevates’ is himself.

People with that kind of wealth have transcended humanity. Not towards greatness but towards total indifference.

I added air quotes to make irony obvious.

Especially on the international stage. American "far-left" is totally different to say, European "far-left."

Obama would be "far right" by current Democrat standards. He was against gay marriage in 2008, for example.

Obama was further to the right than the conservatives in the UK at the time.

Agree, but when you staff an entire agency with his supporters, the echo chamber effect can result in it becoming a hive of far-left types.

The same would apply to the right too, except that the right tends to shut down agencies, not create them.

"caught colluding" implies they were doing something illegal

Unfortunately a lot of things are just plain stupid.

>Because paying to build society and help those around you to a better life through shared resources is something you should be angry about?

No, but paying an exorbitant amount, but seeing few things being improved around you, but endless wars funded and cronies getting richer, and useless bureucracy enlarged and making your life or business more difficult, is.

Because someone lobbied their bosses.

id.me is valued at $1.8bn and has more than 130m users and has "partnerships with 15 federal agencies, 40 agencies in 30 states and over 600 retailers".

Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.

People depend on the state. Someone has to be the adult in the room. If your marriage fails what do you do with the kids? You abandon them because you don’t want to clean up?

This is all democrats have done my entire politically aware life. It’s like clockwork. Republicans majorly screw things up. Democrats get elected in a wave and start doing the hard work of cleaning up the mess and making tiny steps of progress and then the next election comes around and Republicans win on some culture war nonsense that they created themselves and they get fuck up the system once again. Every single time. Democrats have no opportunity or willingness to enact the agenda of the people who vote for them. They are in perpetual cleanup and maintain the status quo cycle.

The Democratic Party is the conservative one.

Yeah, Dems should skip the next election, maybe a few and let the people cook themselves.

It still might happen that there won't be any further elections in which anyone but trumpists can actually win.

DirectFile makes it such that anyone with a simple tax situation (some W-2s, some dependents, etc) can easily file their federal taxes online. Free. Straight to the IRS. My only gripe with DirectFile is that it doesn't yet cover more complex cases (but let's not have perfect be the enemy of good; it's probably good enough for 75% of citizens) and you still have to find a way to do state filings based on your state.

It's an intentional position by the Republicans to condition Americans into reflexively supporting tax cuts. https://archive.ph/mQ0cu

True, except for the “almost”

This fuckery will continue unabated for the rest of our lives until we collectively stop paying income taxes with the demand that a Constitutional amendment is put in place to force the government to be honest and helpful both around the procurement (just sending a dang bill) and government spending (expressly forbidding genocides, foreign coups, certain bailouts, etc) with real teeth in it.

Of course, right now it seems even the existing amendments are not safe. Our government is a non-functioning, dishonest imperial oligarchy, and we just keep paying our tithing out of fear, telling ourselves it's all going to schools and highways.

> When did the political system stop being about making life better for the average person?

In the US, when we elected mediocre actor Ronald Reagan, I think. His trickle-down economics nonsense turned out to be a just and early example of catering to the rich in broad daylight instead of behind closed doors. And the people, for the most part, bought it, so now we have legal scams like 401ks that the average citizen thinks are there to help them.

The point has always been to seize control of the money while removing all accountability and they are finally succeeding because liberals handed them the election over Gaza, which is no longer in even in our news cycle.

It all makes my stomach turn, to be honest.

When there's interests which are making $100's to $1000's from many millions of people in the USA and want to keep it going.

(Really) not saying it's a good idea, but if Swedes were required to fill in the paperwork, or even better/worse actually transfer the taxes (maybe including payroll), we would probably be more upset with how our taxpayer money is spent.

If you are politically motivated to minimize the tax burden, it makes sense to be skeptical of direct filing (even if you are not bribed by Intuit).

This is true, but it’s much harder to compete against a free government service and that’s not the only option. For example, how much does Intuit’s advertising budget on X have to go up for it to be worth the effort of a few hours? (Repeat for xAI contracts or fleet Tesla purchases)

I don’t know if there is any quid pro quo but that’s why we have ethics laws because otherwise you have to constantly ask whether something is good for the country or just the guy making the decision.

Competitors can have mutual interests.

The argument (if you take it in the most charitable light) is that reducing barriers to paying taxes will make people less averse to paying taxes. So they fight any effort to bring sanity to the tax code or tax payment process.

So even taken charitably I think they are wrong. But I do believe it is simply just corrupt and malicious.

You should see the crazy shit they say about the IRS hiring 80,000 more employees that they desperately need.

His ideas builds on Curtis Jarvis work, dark enlightenment. He is a close associate of Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Essentially they want to destroy the federal government, buy up assets and land, start their own micro countries where they can be King CEOs. Sounds like a joke but its not.