European and American banks won’t lend a single penny to Trump. He’s a notorious deadbeat who never pays what he owes. But Russian banks will happily lend him as much money as he wants. All they ask is that he kindly direct all repayment payable to the order of the Kremlin. The repayment doesn’t need to be money, they’re flexible.

Trump had a whole book of detailed plans for what he wanted to do after he got into office. His entire agenda from day 1 to day infinity has been planned out by the Heritage Foundation. You may have heard of this project. It is supposed to take effect in 2025.

I don’t think they are good plans, and you probably don’t either, but they certainly were one of the plans of all time.

Harris has no clear agenda. Compare her to someone like Bernie Sanders who loudly proclaims his entire playbook on social media every morning. Sanders makes it clear about what he’d do if he was in change. The difference is pretty obvious.

Unfortunately, this person will soon hold the office of President of the United States, the most powerful office in the history of mankind, so we must consider it.

Trump considers himself a businessman and a deal maker at heart. Ukraine is on the auction block. Shall we start the bidding at… ten billion euros?

Oh, what’s this? Putin bids eleven billion?

Tough luck, Zelenskyy…

I believe EU leaders have already made this calculation. If you prove willing to bribe him this year, why wouldn’t he ask for double the amount next year? You can never buy a corrupt politician. You can only rent him.

At that point, why not just take that money and invest in your own country’s defence instead? Defence spending increases your own country’s GDP and makes it so that you don’t have to rely on whether Trump remembered that you paid him off just last week before asking for more.

I think a big reason why people were not excited to vote for Harris is because she really doesn’t have any unique policies other than a general handwave in the direction of Joe Biden.

I’m not saying she’s bad by any means, and she’s definitely a lot better than Trump, but elections in the US are won and lost almost entirely on turnout rather than the quality of the candidate’s proposed agenda. And people really just weren’t interested in waiting in line to vote for a candidate who promises only good vibes, while being bombarded with attack adverts reminding them that a dozen eggs now costs a dollar more than it did last year.

If you lose a presidential race twice, you’re done. Hillary lost twice, Bernie lost twice, and now Harris has lost twice. It was fun while it lasted, but the Democratic Party now needs to find a new leader who has some actual policies to run on.

EU countries have laws that prohibit its leaders from bribing foreign heads of government. Russia doesn’t.

Too late for polls now. Only voting is left. So go out and do it if you haven’t already

Do we have any evidence that they are actually voting and not just filming videos they hope will become popular without really going to vote?

Well, you see, that depends on whether you have a team of highly-paid defence lawyers that can get you off if the prosecution makes even the slightest mistake in their case.

Okay, have a good day. I voted for Harris.

You’re free to disagree with the way the American legal system is structured. I’m not here to argue with you, and in many ways, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly that Garland would make a terrible judge in my notion of an ideal legal system.

The role of a judge in an inquisitorial system is to answer the questions “Did they do it? Do they deserve to be punished?”

In the traditional English system, this is the role of the jury. The judge is just there to ensure everyone is playing by the rules of the court. And in that role, Garland is pretty suitable. And yes, a sense of fairness and impartiality is not strictly required. Just a sense of logic, which Garland definitely has. You can correctly describe that as a fault of the legal system.

I apologise if you find this insulting.

Think of the judge in My Cousin Vinny. Do you think that he walked into that courtroom every day thinking “these idiots definitely did it”? It’s very likely he did. But he also recognised it wasn’t his job to broadcast that to the court. He had to put on a mask of neutrality because he recognised that it is the jury’s role to determine guilt, not his. He doesn’t need to be truly impartial to the defence’s case; he just needs to make the correct evidentiary and legal rulings. Which he mostly did.

Contrast that to the role of the prosecutor, which is what the attorney-general is. It’s the prosecutor’s job to come into court thinking “these guys are guilty” and convince the jury of the same.

Your position and view towards the law is admirable and very worthy of respect, but you are holding him to a standard that is not applicable within a legal system based on the traditions English common law, like the American one. You’re describing the role of a judge in an inquisitorial system, not an adversarial system.

The role of a judge in an inquisitorial system is to answer the questions “Did they do it? Do they deserve to be punished?”

In the traditional English system, the is the role of the jury. The judge is just there to ensure everyone is playing by the rules of the court.

Of course, it is impossible for anyone to be truly divested from personal opinion and bias. We are all human, after all. The guiding design principle of an inquisitorial system is that judges are expected to be as neutral as possible, and then the legal system presumed they succeeded. An adversarial system, on the other hand, is aware of the inherent biases of mankind and attempts to design around them.

Which approach is more valid is a long-running topic of debate in philosophy.

You do not need to “pursue justice” as a judge. You just need to allow others to pursue justice through you and possess an ability to apply the law. There are no political repercussions for judges that can harm their career. He acts the way he does because he doesn’t want political backlash about it. If he’s a judge, he has the ability to not care about others’ opinions of his rulings.

The position of attorney-general requires a different skillset and mindset. An effective attorney-general is willing to take risks to pursue justice. Judges play a more passive role. That’s why he’s not a good attorney-general, but I still maintain he’d be a very good judge.

Lemmy has the tendency to think that because a person is bad in one aspect, they must be bad in every related aspect as well. Of course, nobody will admit they think like that, but I pray you don’t.

Even though the federal Department for Justice has a standing policy against prosecuting election-related offences within two months of an election, there’s still the possibility that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania can prosecute him for offences committed under Pennsylvania’s state election law.

The governor of Pennsylvania has expressed some openness to this happening.

Oh, hey. They added the Wikipedia credibility rating to the bot.

It’s an improvement.

He would have made a decent Supreme Court justice but he’s just not cut out to be attorney-general.

It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

Yeah, so It turns out fewer people care about and really want those things than you think…

Because the “US Government” is not a monolithic entity but rather, a large and complex democratic organisation that citizens can influence the composition of through political participation.