In the United States, the Constitution states that in order to take your land for this purpose, you must be compensated fairly. Of course, “fairly” in terms of market value did not amount to very much, but compensation was paid and even dilapidated housing in so-called “blighted” neighbourhoods were still worth something and the cost does add up when you’re knocking hundreds of houses down and having to pay thousands for each one.

There is no easy way to withhold the taxes because the State of California never touches the money. Most of the federal tax revenue from California is remitted directly to the Internal Revenue Service by individual taxpayers.

I’m not going to pretend that I know the whole picture as to why this project is so severely over budget and behind schedule (there is likely nobody on Earth who does), but let me give some pointers as to why countries like China have built hundreds of thousands of kilometres of high-speed rail while California struggles to build a few hundred.

For one, the legal environment in China is one of the prerogative state. “Rights” in China are whatever the Government suffers you to have or deems it expedient to honour. So if you “own” a piece of land in the middle of the planned rail route, the Government will just kick you out. What are you going to do, sue? In the US, environmental laws, land rights laws, and legal procedural law mean that anyone who can spend $50,000 on a lawyer can cause $1 million worth of headaches for the high speed rail authority using the American legal system, which believe it or not, actually sometimes holds the State accountable to the law.

Secondly, in China, the Government has an unprecedented control over the economy that allows it to offer carrots and sticks to a degree that American politicians could only dream of. Yes, you have no say on whether the Government will order your house demolished to make way for an expressway, but in return, if you go quietly, you’ll get a flat in a high-rise in exchange and generous monetary compensation. Raise a stink, and you’ll be paid three strawberries and a steamed bun for your house instead.

Thirdly, under Chinese property law, all land in the country belongs to the State. Everyone else can only lease it from the State.

Agreed. Gamers are probably one of the demographics which are most likely to care about the enshittification of their operating system, while most other users who only want Microsoft Office and their Web browser could not care less. The former can be swayed to endure a small amount of temporary inconvenience to switch while the latter will not.

If you know the root password, then you can switch to the account called root using the su root command.

In Linux there is always a user called root, which is the only account allowed to perform most system management tasks. The sudo command just executes a commend as root. Most of the time you don’t need to actually sign into the root account, just use sudo, but you can actually sign into it in the terminal as it is a real bona fide user account.

The sudoers file is located at /etc/sudoers. Do keep in mind that this file should not be edited directly. You can use the cat command which will print the content of a file to the terminal. So try cat /etc/sudoers.

I’m not sure exactly what causes this, but you can work around it as long as you can actually run commands as root (i.e. using sudo) in the terminal.

The command to add a new user is adduser.

The command to add a user to the administrators group (i.e. give them the ability to use sudo) is usermod -aG wheel.

These commands should be run as root by prepending sudo.

IIRC there’s still an ICANN fee that has to be paid by the registrar per domain registered

I might be wrong, but I seem to recall there’s an ICANN fee associated with registration as well.

Great idea! This will save the taxpayers literally hundreds of dollars in domain registration fees! That’s over 0.0001¢ per taxpayer!!

If you actually bother to read it (regularly, not just once or twice on selected columns that you saw posted online), you would not think that. The opinion column is very neoliberal with a hint of libertarianism.

The Taiwan issue has exactly to do with the fact that sending official diplomatic representatives to it means recognising its legitimacy and sovereignty. Even though most Western countries already believe this, sending the representatives would be to express that they believe this which is what upsets the Chinese government. China doesn’t care what people think as long as they keep it to themselves. It’s when they get “embarrassed” on the world stage that Chinese leadership thinks it demands action.

It’s not about “reforming” him. I’m talking about the fact that if he will at least consider whether a proposal is popular before he does it. If it’s within the margin of error or at least close enough to cover it up and pretend, it won’t stop him, but if it’s overwhelmingly unpopular it will cause him to think twice, but it is not guaranteed to change his mind. Again, this is based on past behaviour which is not necessarily indicative of the future.

There is a small difference though. Musk has shown in the past that it is possible to shame him into changing his mind. He is at least somewhat receptive to what the public thinks of him. Trump, on the other hand, has absolutely no shame and doesn’t care if 90% of the country is against him as long as the 10% who are with him are enough to fill a rally room.

Musk is not constitutionally eligible for the presidency so if we were to come to power then he’d probably assume some newly-made office created just for him. They’d probably make a new prime minister-like role where he has the power to “advise” (i.e. dictate) policy decisions to the president.

That being said, power changes people. Hard to say whether a hypothetical Imperial Chancellor Musk would act much differently from King Trump I. I wager not substantially. Trump, at least, creates a lot of funny memes with his ridiculous fuck-ups. I fear Musk would be far more competent.

Especially not their opinion column but I’m just posting here because it’s interesting to see what the neoliberals think about it and it’s a good discussion point

Washington Post columnists said it would probably just capture the “Never Trumper” moderate Republican voters who currently begrudgingly vote Democratic because they understand that the Republican Party is nominating only yes-men and fascists.

The whole system of formal diplomatic recognition needs to die. Right now, “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people. This is a very obstructive and unproductive system. It doesn’t matter whether you “recognise” a government and it also doesn’t matter what you decide to call your representatives to it. Refusing to recognise a government doesn’t mean that group of people doesn’t hold power or doesn’t actually control territory. It just prevents you from engaging with them in a constructive manner. It’s just a head-in-the-sand approach to intergovernmental relations.

If there’s a group of people calling themselves a government that holds power over a group of people or a piece of territory that you are interested in, it shouldn’t have to result in this whole game of charades. You should be able to send official representatives to that group without having to worry about offending everyone else. The whole concept of “recognition” is just nonsense.

In the US, what’s more likely is that they find some random accusation to pin on you Abrego Garcia-style and then just keep you in the legal system gauntlet by adding new charges as soon as the timer runs out for trial on the old ones.

The “some registry” they put you in is probably made up. Credit reporting agencies don’t just accept claims of debt or delinquent accounts from any random person who claims to be a debt collector. In many cases, if it isn’t coming from a financial institution, they will need to see a court judgement before entering it on your credit report.

Shocker: financial institutions want to know whether you have a good record of paying people back before deciding to lend you money