Lurker > PeaceFrog

Alito has also been paid for and didn't include it on any of his forms, nor provide any comment.

https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court

Very long winded article that is difficult to find one single sufficient quote, but the tldr is a billionaire treated Alito to private vacations and flights, and had cases before the court on multiple occasions. One of the most prominent ones was a case where the Supreme Court agreed to force Argentina to give the billionaire's hedge fund $2.4 billion dollars. Quite the return on investment there.

The year after that, in 2010, Alito delivered the keynote speech at a dinner for donors to the Manhattan Institute. Once again, Singer delivered a flattering introduction. He and his small band of like-minded justices are a critical and much-appreciated bulwark of our freedom, Singer told the crowd. Samuel Alito is a model Supreme Court justice.
Alito did not disclose the flight or the stay at the fishing lodge in his annual financial disclosures. A federal law passed after Watergate requires federal officials including Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. (The year before, Alito reported getting $500 of Italian food and wine from a friend, noting that his friend was unlikely to appear before this Court.)
The law has a personal hospitality exemption: If someone hosts a justice on their own property, free food, lodging, or entertainment dont always have to be disclosed. But the law clearly requires disclosure for gifts of private jet flights, according to seven ethics law experts, and Alito appears to have violated it. The typical interpretation of the law required disclosure for his stay at the lodge too, experts said, since it was a commercial property rather than a vacation home. The judiciarys regulations did not make that explicit until they were updated earlier this year.
In his op-ed, Alito said that justices commonly interpreted the laws exception for hospitality to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.

I forget who said it, but basically "debating you looks much better on your cv than on mine" when it's a respected scientist or public figure vs a nobody

I despise how the alt right idolizes debates as though they're equivalent to (or greater than) scientific journals.

We watched Who We Are on Netflix last night to recognize Juneteenth and educate ourselves. I thought I knew about a lot of the history but I still learned so much. Highly recommend.

Pittsburgh synagogue shooter found guilty on all 63 counts.

Sentencing expected to last up to 6 weeks, will start in two.

Suprak_the_Stud posted...

I'm assuming they were referring to the Onion article preceding yours, haha.

Oh yeah that makes a lot more sense, thanks

And it made it less readable anyway. Dumb gfax mobile quotes.

Is there something wrong with that source? I don't know anything about them, I remembered seeing it way back when and had it in mind during the discussion earlier.

Corrik7 posted...

In America you can base your repayment on your income so it doesn't tank you, and if you pay it for 25 years straight, it is discharged regardless of balance left.

And you have to personally monitor it like a hawk to ensure that it is renewed annually and applied appropriately.

Although details have changed significantly over the years, the basic design is straightforward: Pay a percentage of your monthly income above some threshold for some number of years possibly zero payments in some months and you are eligible to get any remaining balance forgiven after some period, usually longer than the standard 10-year period for repaying loans. About one in every three student-loan borrowers whose loan comes directly from the government, known as Direct Loan borrowers, is enrolled in some form of IDR, according to Department of Education data.

Discussion of Income-Driven Repayment dates at least to the 1950s, and Congress created a pilot program in 1992. The report, Income-Driven Repayment of Student Loans: Problems and Options for Addressing Them, summarizes the evolution of IDR over the past three decades. It also identifies problems with IDR and the pros and cons of solutions that have been offered for addressing them, including:

Few borrowers have historically used IDR, including some who would likely have qualified for reduced payments and eventual forgiveness. Many borrowers never learn about IDR and, while federal loan contracts with servicers have improved, IDR is bureaucratically challenging, and servicers have not always had incentives to enroll borrowers in IDR.

Borrowers who enroll in IDR plans often fail to remain in them, many because they fail to recertify each year, as currently required. U.S. Department of Education data from 2013 and 2014 show that more than half of borrowers in IDR plans did not recertify on time. For some borrowers, this might be intentional (perhaps they find a higher-paying job and/or wish to avoid interest costs by paying their loan faster). But many borrowers fail to recertify because of inattention or because of bureaucratic, technical, or legal difficulties recertifying. For many borrowers, this leads to an increase in required payments (sometimes an increase in the automatic debits from a borrowers bank account, capitalization of unpaid interest that increases total debt, and delays in payments that extend the life of the loan, and, for some, default).

Many borrowers find their IDR payment unaffordable. The current formula protects a borrowers income up to 150% of the federal poverty level and sets monthly payments at up to 10% of the discretionary income above that level. The formula for setting IDR monthly payments reflect income and family size, but not regional differences in the cost of living or other expenses a borrower may have. Because individuals file taxes based on prior years income, the federal government has no real-time measure of income or employment, so payments are based on last years income. If a borrower falls on hard times, for example by losing a job, it falls on the borrower to update their income. Several of the recommendations for the prior problem have also been proposed to address affordability.

No matter how well-intended IDR is, its success depends on how well it is administered. Borrowers generally deal not directly with the federal government, but with servicers hired by the government to deal with borrowers. Servicing errors and abuses along with Department of Education policies often prevent borrowers from accessing all of the benefits of IDR. For example, lost paperwork can result in delays in IDR processing and a loss of qualifying payments towards cancellation. Many borrowers say that servicers either failed to alert them to the existence of IDR and/or encouraged them to enroll in forbearance and deferment which may not qualify for IDR cancellation. This leads to increased loan balances (interest keeps accruing and is capitalized) and prevents a borrower from accumulating months that could have counted towards the 25-year forgiveness threshold. In part, this reflects Department of Education guidance to servicers; the GAO found the Departments instructions and guidance to loan servicers are sometimes lacking, resulting in inconsistent and inefficient services to borrowers.
Many borrowers in IDR do not make payments large enough to cover the accruing interest, so they see their balances grow over time. Even though their balances may eventually be forgiven, rising balances are, to say the least, discouraging to borrowers who are making required monthly payments and can mar borrowers credit reports. In contrast, borrowers in fixed-payment plans see their balances fall over time. In certain repayment plans the government subsidizes the interest to reduce or eliminate this problem. For instance, for qualifying loans under REPAYE, the government pays 100% of the interest for the first 36 payments in which a borrowers payments dont cover the interest, and then the government subsidizes 50% of the interest on any subsequent payments.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-driven-repayment -of-student-loans-problems-and-options-for-addressing-them/

Edited for readability and emphasis

I absolutely believe that student debt forgiveness cannot be the only thing done here. If it meant getting half of the forgiveness now but future generations would not be screwed over to the same extent, then I'd be one hundred percent on board.

The issue is that that kind of solution is going to be infinitely harder than striking a debt from the books. The problem has only gotten worse in the past decade, so i don't expect anything meaningful here any time soon.

To return to the logistics of this though, most borrowers have had their loans change hands at least once during the last three years. It would reduce the burden on both the government and the companies (whose call centers are entirely insufficient to handle the volume of starting payments back up for everybody) if they could simply... not worry about the bulk of borrowers, who have less than $10k in loans. It's not like there's one single place that lists every name and what they owe.

Most of politics is deciding who to give money and when. Student debt relief is a big talking point for a lot of people who would be impacted because if it returns with no changes - ignoring the republican call to retroactively change the terms of the deal and apply full interest to balances since the start of the pause - then they're going to be significantly worse off than they were before. Even the subsidized student loans have a higher interest rate than my mortgage.

If you're at all worried about a recession, forcing millions of people to start throwing money down the drain is definitely going to slow down consumer spending.

LordoftheMorons posted...

These were loans in name only. It was just a mechanism to give businesses money with strings that were supposed to force them to use it on keeping people employed.

And most of them didn't do that so it was just a bailout with a pretty name

Ok I'll make sure to let them know that the next time the banks that own your credit cards need a bail out from the government

Student loans are the only debt that can't be removed during a declaration of bankruptcy. Their interest rates are higher than other kinds of loans, and the terms of this interest can be changed after the contract for the loan is signed and funds disbursed. They're more likely to be mismanaged and have errors because the companies that manage them are objectively bad at what they do.

The ultra rich got plenty of debt forgiven from their covid loans. Debts get forgiven all the time under the rug. Do we need to do more to help the lower class get secondary education? Of course. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good ffs. This should be seen as a step to making all college more affordable for everyone, not a final action to take and be done with it.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/e-jean-carroll-damages-trump-cnn-town-hall/index.html

A federal judge will allow E. Jean Carroll to amend her original defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump to include comments he made at a CNN town hall.

She should sue CNN for their part in it too, imo

Seems like a lot of bigly crimes, if you ask me

Mike Pence declared that he's running.
Surely he knows intimately how many Republicans want him to eat shit and die, right?

LightningStrikes posted...

On the twitter stuff I just want to say I feel really awful about the whole situation. Simply put capital cannot be expected to safeguard vulnerable people and not promote hate by itself. There needs to be regulation of these platforms, that is the only way forward.

Agreed 100%.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-left-wing-extremist-lina-e-found-guilty/a-65767893

State prosecutors said Lina E.* and her three co-defendants Lennart A., Philipp M., and Jannis R. carried out a series of attacks on neo-Nazis in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony between 2018 and 2020, including two attacks on Leon R., a notorious far-right extremist who was himself arrested for allegedly forming a far-right extremist organization.

The group around Lina E. is believed to have raided a well-known neo-Nazi bar in the town of Eisenach in late 2019 and attacked Leon R. with hammers and batons. When the initial attack failed, the group attacked him again a few weeks later outside his car. Other neo-Nazis were left with broken bones and other injuries after the attacks.

Should receive an award imo

That's unbelievably fucked up. Wow.

Thanks for the updates. I haven't been seeing many updates in my circle since last weekend.

In irl mafia with more than 1 scum, how do they get together during night phases to decide on a kill?

Sorry to spam the topic, but with the presidential primary all nice and kicked off thanks to elon and ron having an impeccable team around them that perfectly launched their campaign... I found this to be a really interesting read.

https://reason.com/2023/05/24/the-republican-primary-consensus-for-sending-the-military-into-mexico/

I think what is most disconnected for me here is that they're saying do to the cartels like we did to isis... but the entity that conducted the largest attack on US soil in the modern era, we basically gave them full government control of an entire country on a silver player. Sure would stink if we happened to do that to a country that we shared a border with, no?

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1661483713773944835

Some humor to clean your palate

Well he knows that the constituents that he cares about won't see it.

https://twitter.com/birnbaum_e/status/1661055169969242125

Lmao birds of a feather

When you do, you can relabel my fruit vendor game from "experimental" to instead be "kingmaker-inspired"

https://twitter.com/ANewman_forward/status/1660654853134200834

Will be interesting how this shakes out

Just like with last year's elections, PA progressives swept moderate democrats that had republican fundraising in today's primaries.

And Jacksonville, FL has a democratic mayor for the first time in a while now in what was a pretty major underdog story. The republican in the race had 4x her funds and was the favorite to win at one point. It's not local so i haven't followed it very closely, but it was part of the summary i saw for today's results.

I was considering sitting one out but then you said

Kirby321 posted...

I want everyone to be able to choose their own flavor

Everything is fine, it's not like we depend on her to actually do her work

Ok put me in for experimental fruit vendor Mafia, please

^

Hang on... This could go somewhere with another idea i had floating around...

I like it, very creative and elegant

wallmasterz posted...

I just cant seem to balance my next game properly (Watchers and Ninja Strongmen Mafia)

Have you tried tracker instead? Or maybe a town roleblocker can help

I have some ideas that I've been planning out for a spop theme but it's been tricky going

https://twitter.com/seth_hettena/status/1658189689248174080

Yikes

I don't have the exact numbers on me but I remember seeing a while back that new Twitter had given in to way more government demands than old Twitter did, along those lines

^