590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
"I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..."
Not easy to be a parent and explain to kids that no, this is not how the world should be run. How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
They shouldn't. The reality is that the rich and powerful have never been particularly beholden to the law.
For a while, there was a lot of energy spent maintaining the illusion that we had rule of law, and I don't doubt there are some who believed it was an ideal to strive for that we'd get closer and closer to over time, but Trump and his administration stopped pretending.
Unfortunately the police come to public schools and try to do their brainwashing very early before you have the opportunity to even address it. So unless you address this issue at a very young age they likely won't question it again until near college age.
You should be careful to distinguish "rule of law" from the law itself.
Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all. It shouldn't matter if you're rich or poor, man or woman, a member of the majority or minority race, famous or obscure, politically well-connected or not, etc. This is an inherently just principle, but it's also extremely difficult (impossible?) to live up to 100%.
On the other hand, you're correct that individual laws can be just or unjust, moral or immoral. We have plenty of historical examples of unjust laws (e.g., a recent and hopefully unquestionable example in living memory is segregation), and it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience.
Which sounds good at first, but...
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." ― Anatole France
You have to both apply the law equally to all and apply equitable criminal penalties for breaking the law, but the latter is pretty useless without the former. In that way, you could say that honoring the rule of law is necessary but not sufficient for truly equal treatment under the law.
If none of those work, there can come a time when it will be appropriate to take similar actions to those taken to secure US independence from Britain.
Compulsory education was supposed to usher in a new age but obviously that didn't last.
https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/news/trump-mobile-t1-sma...
The terms, updated April 6, state that the deposit is not a binding sales contract. It provides only a "conditional opportunity" to purchase the phone if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it, with all discretion resting with the company. The company "does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase," The Verge and IBTimes UK reported.
So yea... a $100 voucher for a conditional opportunity to purchase one if Trump Mobile ever decides to sell one.
Anyway it was never framed as raising money a la crowd sourcing, no more than the Tesla Roadster has been, you are promised nothing for your money besides a reservation to buy the product when it eventually exists.
Remember the saying: "Fool me once shame ..."
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
If you check news.ycombinator.com/active regularly instead of the main feed you’ll see that anything critical of the king or Musk is regularly flagged to oblivion quite quickly.
It’s one of the failure modes of how self moderation works in this site.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
, if I get caught.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
> Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught
Are you sure? I'd have guessed that the debt is created when they generate the $36 000. Getting caught would just make it easier for the victim to collect.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
I don’t subscribe, but I have seen the argument a few times.
Welcome to the grift economy.
And the $10 BILLION he is stealing from the IRS by ordering DOJ to settle his lawsuit
Oh and a million dollars PER DAY he steals for each golf weekend
However with his dramatic health decline he is golfing less and less now, so savings?
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
Education wasn't enforced to a big part of our society and it shows.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
This is very subjective. You can have your own opinions, but its really important to remember everybody has a right to their own too.
We also all have the right to judge people for their associations. You’re right to an action or belief doesn’t make it inherently good, or even equal to other actions and beliefs.
The fact you are randomly calling people trash supports your theory!
That’s not a lot of people in general.
It is a lot of people for the king to have scammed.
0.2% of the population is not a very large number.
Does anyone know who the third person is? Surely it's not Trump himself? I'm guessing Trump just sold the ability to use his likeness and name?
Edit: still technically a Trump phone?
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137357/the-fractured-repub...
The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.
...
The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.
Someone (not a baby boomer) working in a traditional blue collar job today looks back at the portrayal of life in a rerun of a 1970s sitcom - Happy Days (or spin off, or even an "average" person sitcom from the 80s... Roseanne, Married with children) on late night cable and wonders what it would take to have that lifestyle today? Well, taxes are taking too large of a chunk of the family budget so people gravitate to candidates that say they'll cut taxes.
Though, they're missing out on the 1950s tax structure... where people making $200,000 (1950s dollars - about $2M in 2020s dollars) were getting taxed at 91%. Corporate tax rate was much higher too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
The plank of "we're going to raise taxes" doesn't get as many nostalgic votes for people hoping to return to the lifestyle of the 1950s.
There's a whole lot of other factors too.
A right leaning 30 year old today is voting to try to have what they perceived how it worked in the 1950s from shallow portrayals of the period.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
Which is perfectly in line with your comment.
I did not intend to say that tithing/church donations are equivalent to fraud. I didn't click through to read the story, and therefore hadn't assumed it indicates actual fraud taking place (delayed shipments in and of themselves are unprofessional, but needn't be fraudulent.)
I was implicitly wondering what might motivate people to trust that a brand that has been known to commit fraud, or at the very least to severely under-perform in terms of quality and on-time delivery, can be entrusted with $500 of their money, to produce something the brand isn't known for (consumer electronics.)
Having wondered this, I then proceeded to write my next thought down: Maybe there's more to human motivation than simply the possibility of a material exchange. For example, when one donates to a church, one can reasonably do so without expectation of receiving something tangible and material in return.
I by no means think tithing is fraud, per se. Can and do churches embezzle money? Yes. Does that mean they are inherently fraudulent institutions? Absolutely not. And I am as godless as they come, so I have no desire to defend the motives of any religious institution.
Oh well, I am now at the bottom of this comment pile, so this response, just like other religious acts, is one merely of personal penitence, lol.
source?
Its not like anyone cares over the USA right? $TRUMP? $MELANIE? TACO?
Why don’t you say you’re opinion directly instead of trying to put it out there and having a fallback to defend yourself when you are properly called out.