IHeartBadCode

A group of investor plaintiffs sued Musk for securities fraud alleging that Musk lied about the number of spam accounts on Twitter as part of a plan to drive down the company’s stock price and manipulate the terms of his acquisition.

You know what I find funny in all of this.

• How it started: Musk tweeted for Twitter to be more transparent about Twitter in general and specifically about bot accounts.
• How it's going: Musk suing people for showing everyone Nazi shit next to Disney ads.

I tell you, that 180° there, life comes at some folks fast.

the law is written specifically to disallow people from boycotting companies that destroy the environment, hate LGBTQ, actively promote anti-LGBTQ ideals, etc., but it DOESN'T stop the alternate

That's correct! The law is written to be non-commutative. That is it works one way, but the lack of indicating the other, implicitly indicates that it is not true. Here are the sections from the bill.

(a) Engages in the exploration, production, utilization, transportation, sale, or manufacturing of, fossil fuel-based energy, timber, mining, or agriculture;
(b) Engages in, facilitates, or supports the manufacture, import, distribution, marketing or advertising, sale, or lawful use of firearms, ammunition or component parts and accessories of firearms or ammunition;
(c) Does not meet, is not expected to meet, or does not commit to meet environmental standards or disclosure criteria, in particular to eliminate, reduce, offset, or disclose greenhouse gas emissions;
(d) Does not meet, is not expected to meet, or does not commit to meet any specified criteria with respect to the compensation and composition of the company's corporate board and the employees of the company;
(e) Does not facilitate, is not expected to facilitate, or does not commit to facilitate access to abortion, sex or gender change, or transgender surgery or medical treatments;

As you can see they are worded to have meaning in a single direction but aren't reflexive in language. So this allows people to boycott the opposite of the above, but prohibits boycotting anything above.

It's literally a law compelling conservative belief. And they know it's not going to survive a legal challenge, but they also know they'll get something like two or three decades out it before being completely overturned. It's literally a legislative Hail, Mary.

Yeah, that's already a thing. New York, California, Florida, Missouri, and Illinois enforced their anti-boycott laws in 2018 against Airbnb when Airbnb said they would remove Israeli listings that were in areas where the land was taken from people. Airbnb stood to be completely forbidden from the largest economic markets in the United States at the behest of the Israeli strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan.

There's been challenges to these kinds of laws like Arkansas Times LP v. Waldrip, but the State upheld the Legislation and SCOTUS refused to hear the case letting stand Arkansas' ability to force all companies operating within the State to "stand with Israel" or face removal from any State program and anyone whom they did business with removal from State funds. Because that's what happened with the Newspaper. The Newspaper itself had no contracts with the State, but those who advertised might and they would be prohibited from purchasing ad space in the newspaper.

There's Jordahl v. Brnovich where a lawyer was providing legal services in Coconino County, Arizona and was found by Arizona's anti-boycott law with regards to Israel. Eventually appellate courts sided with the lawyer that such a ban on boycott's was against the State's Constitution, but Legislators eventually carved out an exception for legal firms and rendered all further cases moot before it could make it to the Supreme Court of Arizona.

There's Martin v. Wrigley where a filmmaker would not sign a pledge for State film making funding that they would not "boycott Israel" per the State of Georgia's anti-boycott laws. In the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, the court ruled that the law was compelled speech. The State then amended the law to not apply to businesses under $100,000 rendering any final challenge moot. And any losses were indemnified as the State of Georgia claimed qualified immunity. In appeals, the Eleventh Circuit in a per curium that was unpublished affirmed the lower court's ruling but did not rule on the full Constitutionality of the law. The Eleventh dropped the case completely in June of 2023.

There's Koontz v. Watson where a Mennonite church boycotted Israel and the State of Kansas required a math teacher who was a member of that church to sign an affidavit that she did not boycott Israel before she could attend a required teaching seminar. That one went really complicated, very long story short, the State carved out an exception in HB 2482 and the court's dismissed the matter as moot. The Teacher was allowed to attend the training.

And I could go on and on and on, because at the State level there are several legal challenges in pretty much every State to the various State laws that prohibit boycotting Israel. So yeah, on this "it's already a thing" pretty much everywhere and we are nowhere near through enough court cases to get some final resolution on these kinds of "you cannot boycott Israel" laws. They're likely going to be around for another ten to twenty years if we just keep chipping away at them via legal challenges.

And that's likely the success that Missouri is trying to get with this law. Get a good solid thirty or so years out of "you cannot boycott conservative values" and seed things into a new generation by force, since allowing people to measure these conservative values by their own accord isn't working. But yeah, if this law passes, it's golden for at least three decades or enough of Missouri's Assembly changes to remove the law.

Okay, but this is not an unusual practice with car makers and specialty cars. Now is it legal? That's a whole other can of worms. But the biggest instance of this whole kind of thing that I can remember is when John Cena was sued by Ford for selling his Ford GT.

So you don’t really own the truck then

Well yes and no. Yes you may transfer the property like you own it, you just cannot resell it, which sounds silly but there's a technical difference. But in the utmost strictest sense, nah, if you cannot turn it as a profit "ownership" is seriously lacking.

There are plenty of reasons why someone may need to sell

Not to defend any of this, but usually those kinds of people aren't buying specialty cars, which the Cybertruck would met all the requirements for a Court to treat it as a limited run.

Having Tesla forcing them to only accept $50k buyback for a $122k vehicle sounds on par with Musk’s shitty personality.

Oh yeah, absolutely. All of the restricted resell of specialty vehicles is bull. But it's not just Musk's shitty personality here, it's an ugly side of specialty cars in general.

All of that said, A court did actually rule against Ford once but it was on a super technical term in that the owner sent the car to an auction house, which sold the car, thus technically not the "owner" selling the car. Ford has since updated their anti-flipping contracts to include this provision.

There's all kinds of reasons car makers employ anti-flipping and resale restriction. Another one is the Ford A-plan stuff. People who buy cars on Ford's AXZ-Plan have these kinds of restrictions for six months and, if they're caught it could cost them their job as well as a fee.

And I know I feel like I'm picking on Ford, they're like the Nintendo of the car industry, they will heavily litigate you to death. But all the car companies do this stuff. Ford is just especially inclined to retrieve their stuff or due payment. And if you enjoyed that, imagine how fun it is to have one of these restricted resale vehicles and it gets repossessed, those are real fun situations.

There is absolutely no reason to rush this sham to trial except to injure President Trump and tens of millions of his supporters.

Because if Trump is elected President there stands a chance that a President Trump would attempt to pardon himself from any former crimes related to his attempt to overthrow the US Government.

There are zero ways someone can convince me of any of the following:

• That Jan. 6th was anything but an attempt by the current President to thwart the process by which Congress counts the Electoral Votes
• That such a move was not in line with an attempt to install the then-President's will over the mandate of the prescribed means by which we elect a President (which I'm no fan of the Electoral College, but until we get rid of it that's how we do it).
• That such an attempt somehow doesn't arise to a coup.
• That the Founder's of our Nation and the people that drafted the 14th Amendment, meant for this kind of abuse to go unpunished.
• That anyone who has one ounce of understanding of the law believes that a person seeking Presidency should have the power to go unpunished or even worse, the power to remove any and all punishment related to an attempt to undo the order established in the Constitution of the United States.

There's just zero logical sense to a notion that a President can do anything with impunity, sky's the limit. There is no historical basis on even the loosest interpretation of the intent of the Founding fathers of this nation that supports this notion. And even knowing that, man I have very little hope that SCOTUS is actually going to pull though on this. I honestly think they're going to find some very niche technical weasel words to grant Trump literal absolution on his crimes.

And then that's just it. There's no meaning to law, if there exists a single person who can be above it all. Law makes no sense if there's a single person who can ignore it. That's was one of the major sticking points for us leaving the Kingdom way back and starting our own country. The President was never meant to be a King and if SCOTUS grants that immunity, I mean we've got a King in all but name. That's just how it is.

It's surreal that we're here now. That the question laid before the highest Court of this Country is this one. And literally any other composition of the Court I wouldn't think twice about it because that answer would be a "hell no" without a nanosecond of delay. But I couldn't honestly tell anyone how SCOTUS will weigh in on this, but if they say "yes", it's over, there's no way anyone can ever prosecute Trump for literally any crime even to the end of time. And I just cannot imagine that any Founding father thought, "Yeap, this is exactly how I intended things to go."

I mean fuck, I don't think people honestly appreciate how massive this question before the Court is. It's literally asking "Do we have a President or do we have a King?" And fuck, I couldn't tell you how they're going to rule. A coin flip would be as likely a correct answer as the current Court could possibly muster. And even worse, I have a feeling they're going to try an apply a very specific ruling here even though Jack Smith's request is much broader in scope. And then that's just going to indicate that "it's a King if SCOTUS says so" which would be an even worse outcome.

I think it’s a bit early to make any kind of educated speculation and wild speculation just isn’t really all that helpful for anyone.

For those wondering, the State’s Supreme Court is hardlining the Legislative language here.

While I don’t know medicine enough to give real percentages, the lower Judge ruled the abortion could continue because there was like a 70% or something chance of dying and the letter of the Texas law requires something along the lines of a 95% chance of death.

Again I don’t think one can attribute hard numbers, but the Supreme Court is saying that the laws indicate that only when death is pretty much assured can an abortion happen, which is a completely insane stance. And in this case death was only mostly going to happen, not absolutely going to happen.

Roughly speaking, the Texas Supreme Court basically said that the person needs to be closer to death than the defendant in this case. How much closer? The Court isn’t super clear, but clearly much more closer to death than this person was.

Because clearly taking pain and suffering into account is just beside the point at this point for Texas.

AH! Silly me, I was thinking of "benefit to the customer"!! LOL. No idea what happened to me there, swear it won't happen again, at least for today.

I mean I've been trying to formally request that ISO change the C API for send() to yeet() for sockets where connection reliability is not required at the network interface level.

Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier

To the benefit of what exactly?! Instead of having conversations with the echo chamber, I can now have conversations with a spicy RNG autocorrect? I am clearly missing the part where that connects back to, what I would assume, the definition of benefit is.

Imposter syndrome kicks into overdrive