Is this moron still involved in any way?

Was he ever?

(Apropos reminder that Musk has nothing to do with Tesla staring; he just showed up with his PayPal golden parachute, picked "founder" as the title he wanted, and they proceeded to success largely in spite of anything he actually did.)

As said elsewhere: 30 days or else what?

Trump will withhold the federal dollars Congress appropriated to NY that he already wants to withhold? Projects that would be DOA in a hard-right Congress might be even deader?

Hochul will get another empty threat from the fed DOT?

What exactly business are taxed on varies a bit from state to state, but for a tax on "profit", which is the most common in the US, wages are definitely deductable from revenue to get the "profit" for a given period.

Walmart and Amazon would pay a hell of a lot more tax if they couldn't subtract the wages they paid to their employees and contractors from the money that comes in the door when calculating their tax bill.

Maybe note that Wages arent like office equipment, in that there's no asset to plausibly be sold to recoup a purchase price?

(This isn't directly my area of expertise either, but I have a hard time thinking of a tax scheme that would allow deducting the cost of an office chair rented for an employee but not the wages paid to her.)

If you work for someone else, and THEY provide coffee, they can (and do) deduct it from taxable revenue. Same as they do the wages they pay you and the chair they have for you to sit in.

Security,.privacy, and logistics would all adapt and be of weirdly more manpower with teleportation than without.

There would be companies who do nothing but teleport goods across the world all day. Just because I don't have to drive an hour to the warehouse doesn't mean I want to take an hour to teleport to the warehouse and pick up my purchase myself.

I assure you that anyone who ever put on a town hall debate, including the League of Women voters and definitely the TV networks, screened the questions and reserved the right to exclude anyone they chose to.

No debate or political event since well before Nixon/Kennedy has been "open to everyone".

"town hall" is a style of event. Back when there were meaningful debates during presidential campaigns, it used to be a regular choice.

I guarantee you that they were closed events, with attendees chosen legally-arbitrarily by whatever TV network was hosting the event.

So long as he takes questions from those in attendance, it's a town hall. Even if no cameras are allowed.

So, what rule do you think makes "congressional town halls" work differently than any other campaign activity?

So, how does it work? Does your state have a law requiring congressional "town halls" to be open to the public?

Things like the MS-PL strike me as Open Source but not Free Software, but I can't think of a contrary example which is Free Software but not Open Source.

Unless the town hall is paid for with taxpayer dollars or held on government property, it's a citizen who happens to be in Congress having a private event with their political supporters.

Same as a political party convention or fundraiser dinner,.AFAIK.

(And, depending on state law, even a function on government property may be legally private.)

There is a mythical "Sony fan" customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.

It's a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.

AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.

"task masking" happens for only one reason : managers value appearance over honesty.

Gallant writes code and documentation quickly and efficiently, then pulls out a Gameboy while waiting for new issues to come in = must be a bad worker.

Goofus mutters all day and types furiously, but produces no usable code = obvious the backbone of the team.

Schumer said that a shutdown would enable Trump to arbitrarily shutter parts of the government he doesn't like.

Trump is already shuttering the parts of the government he doesn't like, and the "CR" gives those acts the veneer of lawfulness.

If there had been a shutdown there would likely have been more pain in more places. But the Dems could have plausibly negotiated for a better result than what Schumer voted for, and aside from the pain of the shutdown itself it's not at all clear how the end result would be any worse than what we got

And despite what Fetterman and the other Senate Democrat collaborators might claim, a vote for cloture was a vote for the bill to become law. The rules of the Senate are dumb, but "this bill would not have passed save for that vote" is a pretty empirical rebuttal.

This really depends on what you mean by "pray."

Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It's as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.

Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.

Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God's service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.

There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it'd be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including "water is wet".

There's plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.

And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.

My parents chose each other. They're both good people, but they weren't a good match at all and none of us were especially surprised when they divorced.

The Mrs and I chose each other, and while it would be arrogant to assert that we're definitely a good match I get the impression that my kids would be shocked if we split.

The structural key to a happy marriage is, I think, the freedom to leave. If my parents had split when I was a kid they'd probably have a better relationship. But because of economics and law and pride they didn't, which made the pain last way longer than it should have.

It sounds like you're not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.

Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.

If "people vote" is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

If you don't see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.

The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.

Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.

You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.

I don't think you'll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.

Let's talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they're in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are "fake" economists? How would we remove them from power?

If we're talking about which forms of government are "better" than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I'm a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.

A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that's still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.

Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.

Technocracies don't have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies -- at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.