Gödel saw it first.
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Here is the video of her bashing Amazon. Although Amazon denies they have committed to doing it.
Especially amendments 13, 14, and 15.
I think another part of it is that there’s probably a certain intense focus that shows off skill and creativity as one of these guys builds a business from scratch and makes their way to success and having fuck-you money. But then they can’t stop there and their quest towards having “I want to theoretically be able to like buy a mid-sized country” money involves doing a lot more weird and bizarre shit, like helping elect a guy that you know is a moron and is capable of crashing the world’s economy.
I almost liken it to finishing a videogame vs. going on to 100% all the achievements or trophies or whatever. Sometimes to do the latter you have to play in all sorts of unnatural ways and lose all sight of what was any good about it in the first place.
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ICE stormed into house looking for the former residents
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JFC this whole story.
I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it. Hours passed, with many confused opinions about my case. The officer I spoke to was kind but told me that, due to my previous issues, I needed to apply for my visa through the consulate. I told her I hadn’t been aware I needed to apply that way, but had no problem doing it.
Then she said something strange: “You didn’t do anything wrong. You are not in trouble, you are not a criminal.”
I remember thinking: Why would she say that? Of course I’m not a criminal!
She then told me they had to send me back to Canada. That didn’t concern me; I assumed I would simply book a flight home. But as I sat searching for flights, a man approached me.
“Come with me,” he said.
There was no explanation, no warning. He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands and ordered me to put my hands against the wall. A woman immediately began patting me down. The commands came rapid-fire, one after another, too fast to process.
They took my shoes and pulled out my shoelaces.
“What are you doing? What is happening?” I asked.
“You are being detained.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean? For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.
Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?
One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.
There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.
Through them, I learned the harsh reality of seeking asylum. Showing me their physical scars, they explained how they had paid smugglers anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 to reach the US border, enduring brutal jungles and horrendous conditions.
One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.
Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.
Just give them work visas. No one is spending five figures to come to the US to go on welfare. This is such a stupid clusterfuck situation that we create for no reason other than racism.
I got a message from Britt. My story had started to blow up in the media.
Almost immediately after, I was told I was being released.
My Ice agent, who had never spoken to me, told my lawyer I could have left sooner if I had signed a withdrawal form, and that they hadn’t known I would pay for my own flight home.
From the moment I arrived, I begged every officer I saw to let me pay for my own ticket home. Not a single one of them ever spoke to me about my case.
To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.
Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.
It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.
The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
What worries me most about all these stories is how willfully and ruthlessly the police/ICE w/e does all this with impunity. Just following orders…
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Agent: I know it was a little rough this morning.
You do not have an edge on the market and you should not buy or sell based on your personal view of where the market will go.
Did the tech bros (sans Musk who is an actual idiot) actually back Trump in a substantive way? Or did they just publicly say mildly nice things about him out of self interest.
Sort of back whichever candidate is likely to try to punish you if he wins seems like a plausibly correct strategy even if horrible for society.
Even more worrying when Herc from the Wire handles stuff like that better:
Left a card after all!
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A faction of tech bros has demonstrably been all in on Trump.
Yeah but now you’re talking 2nd/3rd tier tech bros.
amazon uses it’s own delivery vans now; even in my rural nowhere land there’s one here now. I’m sure they still have to use other carriers at times but that’s why they cut down with them.
Not in the midwest that I’m aware of but some other areas of the US I’ve heard there’s now a huge problem with internal thefts of package contents in some hubs, just don’t order more expensive items online now I guess.
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Gestapo
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Elon, Sacks, Thiel, Andreeson, Chamath are 2nd/3rd tier?
Have you seen the group chat stuff?
But not all of this is just bureaucratic box-checking. Some of the Office of Research’s obligations have enormous implications for mortgage markets. The office must update various regulatory thresholds to account for changes in the Consumer Price Index; if they don’t, what businesses can charge or what consumers can qualify for will be out of date. A weekly rate spread calculator mortgage lenders rely on to determine compliance has to be published as well.
And we’ve discussed before, the research office produces average prime offer rate (APOR) tables that must be calculated weekly. This is a tool so mortgage lenders know that the mortgages they offer are within a prescribed range to avoid ability-to-pay rules; if there’s uncertainty, the entire market could seize up.
First off, the data needed to calculate APOR is purchased through a third-party contract; that contract has to be maintained, and the chief representative for it was fired. Analysts have to comb through that data to calculate the results; Brown and the remaining staff if the RIF went through haven’t been trained to do that.
CFPB leadership has talked about outsourcing the entire calculation, which as noted is a regulatory tool, to the private company called ICE Mortgage Technology that supplies some of the data. Teams at CFPB have been discussing whether the statutory language that CFPB “must generate and publish APORs at least weekly” would be followed if the whole process were outsourced, and whether ICE could do subjective analysis while staying within bounds of the law. They’ve also been concerned about small volumes of data that have come from ICE to calculate APOR in recent weeks; CFPB supplements that with information derived from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, but if ICE had the responsibility that would not be possible. Where the data would live could also bring up legal issues, or how public agency code can be shared with a private company.
A good deal of work, in other words, has gone into figuring out how to outsource something that has gone off without a hitch for years, on the dubious assumption that this would save the agency money or add efficiency.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT CFPB’s ability to supervise and enforce the law would be almost nonexistent, its ability to safeguard and maintain data degraded, and its ability to carry out what Congress asked it to carry out would be destroyed. “I don’t think we can keep operating even for 60 days without keeping many of these folks,” is what the agency’s chief information officer, Christopher Chilbert, said in a document produced by CFPB leadership.
The lessons are threefold. First, Vought and his allies are contemptuous of the law as it relates to CFPB, and will consistently do what they want if given even a tiny chance, regardless of their obligations. “The documents suggest that the defendants thought they could get away with firing the vast majority of the Bureau, as long as they left one warm body in each office explicitly identified by the Consumer Financial Protection Act,” as union attorneys wrote in their brief.
Second, this buildup of laws, most of them designed specifically to constrain regulatory activity, that federal agencies must comply with, requires a lot of manpower. It can be done, but not without caring about following the law. And maybe it could be streamlined. But that’s the job of Congress, and the enemy of that streamlining is the financial industry, in this case.
And third, this particular gang of Vought and DOGE is so zealous to make the nation safe for financial scammers and predatory lenders that they’ve wielded the axe in a way that is obviously unlawful, has been cited by the district court repeatedly, and will probably be cited again today. It’s good that CFPB’s employees have such persistent advocates that we can see this lunacy laid bare.
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