Removing consumer protection would be something hard to argue against too, but yet, here we are: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/bessent-pauses-cfp...
"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has shut down a wide variety of operations inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in his new role as acting director."
Nothing of this makes sense in that all these actions don't seem to make life easier or better for citizens in particular or the world in general.
The goal of Trump, Musk and co. is to make life better for the rich.
Rich people don't need to rely on the CFPB because they have enough invidual power to get what they want. They are often the owners of businesses doing the kinds of things that get them smacked down by the CFPB.
They're on the same side
I mean that feels right. But, they have more money than they can spend. They can make their lives better by stopping being so greedy... it's not about better.
It's greed. It's the number on their total net worth, or some other bullshit number.
It's exactly like Musk paying others to play games to get him the best apparent player character. He pays others to earn money to make him look, to himself, like the best fascist-capitalist oligarch, or whatever he's going for.
In reality, their lust for boosting some vanity metric is most closely aligned with "make life worse for the poor". Because whilst they do pay some top employees well, the whole pyramid sits on the exploitation of many millions more poor people who, through their greed, the capitalists push down further into the bloody, stinking, fetid soup below.
Oh, and the capitalists rape the planet too... just to make sure no lining thing escapes the accretion zone of their self-destructive insecurity.
Source?
I'm only finding a Guardian article about Congressional Republicans planning a CRA action [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/republicans-...
When it launched, employees were told that we'd soon be able to receive a portion of our salaries in Libra. Every practical feature of the system was effectively a Facebook bank account where the unit of currency was tied to a basket of major currencies. The rest was smoke and mirrors.
So yeah, Zuck feigning surprise about being dragged in front of CFPB was just an act (like most of what he does in public).
LOL, crypto-company scrip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip) coupled with a touch of pump (and possibly dump).
Oh, ok.
A major difference between the US and EU is what the TikTok nonsense proved: the US is happy for a US company, aligned to Trump's authority, to track, influence and commodify its users at will; whereas the EU doesn't want any company to have that power regardless of location.
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.
It's an ongoing war.
Europol + most major euro police forces + a number of european deputees want to have access to backdoors to spy on citizens, other european deputees do not. The battle is here.
He doesn't.
The biggest mistake the dems can make is to come in and do clean up. This would be paying the bills of the abusive member in a relationship.
Personally I’m no fan of 90% of the GOP agenda, but my fondest wish is complete dissolution of the DNC, and another party taking over as the party of the non-rich to restore some balance.
Economists, policy makers etc. increasingly have to make the dems carry the weight, in a political and media market which moves so fast that facts can’t even matter.
In this situation, is it a surprise that they could deal with Covid, undo 2008, end nafta, or any number of great things, but still lose faith of the populace because they didn’t hit the populist taking points?
It now very much feels like an era of talking points, and damn the facts.
In which case either making the talking points stick, or change the talking points.
It’s a statement on the fact that the children are being held hostage, and that this is how the pattern will be made to continue.
You have to decide whether you are ok with this pattern continuing. If it’s possible to do it without harming the children, then that is what must be done.
If it’s better to let this pattern continue, then thats also an ok choice. But at least the costs must be articulated and accepted. People can know what role they are playing in this relationship; the tradeoffs they found unacceptable.
It still might happen that there won't be any further elections in which anyone but trumpists can actually win.
The Democratic Party is the conservative one.
I suspect 18F would have been adopted by USDS, if it had been less overtly partisan in its hiring practices.
People with that kind of wealth have transcended humanity. Not towards greatness but towards total indifference.
Or it would be happening absent the recent chaos.
You need to be (a) able to walk and drive, (b) in driving distance to a post office and (c) able to work around the post office's opening hours and (d) willing to waste the time to drive/line up etc.
Or you can spend less than a minute to upload a photo of your passport.
Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.
And given the frosty working relationship between federal and state agencies I am sympathetic to the idea that a private company would be able to deliver a better solution.
Is that $1.8B of revenue? Of profit? $1.8B of total funding in the last six months? In the last ten years?
Here’s $100M of funding for a 6% stake, four years ago:
https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/22/digital-identity-network...
Last year: a liquidity event for early investors and employees, none of which helps the ongoing business but instead lets the founders and C-suite buy a private island / holiday home / mobile home / home:
https://thepaypers.com/digital-identity-security-online-frau...
A $275M loan — not an investment, though you get a good deal if they default! — to keep them afloat?:
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/idme-secure...
The only rung deeper into the hype pit would be valuing them as a unicorn based on a too-big-to-fail government bailout.
A loan is a form of debt, which is one of the two main forms of capital - the other main one being equity. Debt is less expensive than equity, so companies prefer to issue to raise capital via debt than equity.
Montenegro.
18F might also be "far-left" cause it was created by Obama folks. I also wonder if it is also bad in his mind cause conflicts with taken over Digital Service.
>Obama folks
Obama was not in any way "far left"
"A quotation or quote is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written."
The same would apply to the right too, except that the right tends to shut down agencies, not create them.
Separately, your unprovoked personal attack on me is contrary to site policy.
Core leftism is about wealth distribution and unbounded solidarity. Being only pro-LGBTQ imo does not make you a leftist and yet, look around in this thread, what is brought up to proove left leaning tendencies.
The labeling/propaganda unfortunately worked and we devolve into tribal identity politics. Thats why some people think we just passed a far-left decade.
Though of course, that is by modern standards quite a conservative right position to take. (And incidentally not one I’d consider reasonable to take; though I’m obviously biased by being directly affected)
There is some chatter in the Talk page about some members of the group associating with far-right figures and pushing some very dodgy views on far-right topics. Is this what you are referring to?
Which dodgy views on far right topics?
But it's not lying to point out that she was for that in 2019. The fact that the video was made into a campaign ad doesn't make it false.
I am begging people on the left to stop slandering "we will enforce the law" as a right-wing position. It is not, shouldn't be, and the right doesn't deserve to get credit for it.
Kamala wasn't "Trump-lite" any more than AOC is "Stalin-lite". The differences between the two are fucking categorical.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon...
The big hubbub on X was about the Slack bot that recommends inclusive language. https://github.com/18F/charlie/blob/main/CHANGELOG.inclusion...
There is a hit piece article not worth linking that calls out some of the devs who worked there. The comment section of that page is very hateful. As an American it’s shameful to see that level of hate for anything to do with policies of inclusiveness.
The company looks like they hire regular people of all types. A few of the adults are trans or identify as queer and they are acknowledged as equal coworkers. Fairly representative of the tech industry I’d say. What is so bad about that? They seem to write some excellent code and have a good company culture akin to a lot of SV tech companies.
It's not taxes that are the problem per se it's fuckwits like Boris Johnson's cronies that think taxes are theirs to garnish and use any chance, even a global pandemic, to steal every dime they can lay their hands on.
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.
That's just plain stupid. Taxes are already annoying enough.
In New Zealand the government makes it really really simple to pay your taxes (automated tax returns for the majority). You can call our tax department on the phone and they answer and they are helpful and they don't seem to screw you. The idea is to make it simple for people and businesses to pay their taxes so that they pay. The IRD is run like a smart business.
According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes directly. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you're in bed with Intuit, this seems pretty hard to argue against!