100% a demonstration that who we elect as a leader absolutely does set the tone for the rest of the country. I have lived through two elections of Donald Trump and both times the shift in what kinds of behavior were socially acceptable was palpable within hours. Like a lot of people suddenly decided they could come out and be their true self, it just turned out that it was gleefully ugly and hateful.
The terms, updated April 6, state that the deposit is not a binding sales contract. It provides only a "conditional opportunity" to purchase the phone if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it, with all discretion resting with the company. The company "does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase," The Verge and IBTimes UK reported.
The Verge has an on-going series Where's the Trump Phone? [1] with updates every week. They even managed to get an interview with one of the execs a few months back.
It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market.
By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars (in the 80's) for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this. Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience for the entire tour. Oh and he raped children too. Seems like Trump's taking it right out of his playbook.
Incidentally, MJ was also hanging out with Epstein.
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
>Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons:
1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it
2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubstantiated, and seemed to be a side effect of making the tickets expensive.
3. Jackson donated his earnings to charity, so the "... for his own profit" claim was also questionable.
> Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience
How did that work in the 80s? Did he spend days and weeks poring through (paper) census data and correlating it with ZIP codes? Did he use VisiCalc on an Apple ][ or Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC?
Whatever his other misdeeds, I never got a racist vibe off MJ.
Why did he want to turn himself into a white woman? I think he had issues with race, his kids came from a white sperm donor, and he only raped white kids.
> Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
> it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
> Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
I don't know any. Maybe I just have a better social circle than most. Or maybe this is a fake number. There are not as many people preordering this clearly fake device, instead this is just another way to launder money.
It feels analogous to giving alms to a religious institution at the end of a prayer service - you don't get anything material for it in return, but maybe for the faithful, that's not the point?
Tithing is not fraud. People give money to support the church, pay the pastor, and so that the church can use it to care for the needy in the community. Good churches do, in fact, use the money for all of the above.
The above argument is exploring the framing that the Trump phone is not fraud because it is more like tithing. As long as Trump puts it to good use then it's all good.
There's another article somewhere indicating how Maga is furious because their money is lost. Someone commented on the article something like - "I'm MAGA and I'm not mad at all".
This is exactly it, I see it in my family members. They are willing to sacrifice so much money and, well, everything to the "cause." It's a cult, and it's deranged.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
I think it really is just the simpler explanation, they have decided they hate anybody left of them, and defeating them is the cause which much be won at all costs.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.
...
The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.
People think/believe/hope that returning the country to the situation that they perceived that the boomers had when they were growing up without care (because the boomers hadn't yet reached adulthood) would bring back that lifestyle today. ... without having all of the other parts of the social contract between government and the populace in place. People still think that boomers had it best (and maybe they did) and want that lifestyle too.
Certainly that does happen, and you'd be right to say it's fraud. At the vast majority of churches, it's well understood that the church staff need to eat and pay for the mortgage and upkeep on the facility. Trying to frame tithes as "often grift" is extremely cynical.
It's normal for grifters to preselect their demographic.
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
Yet another phenomenon that scholars will be studying years from now.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
While I agree in principle, at least Tesla has delivered something pretty impressive. FSD is not really something I am personally interested in, but I cannot deny that it has gotten quite good. Better than any other system being offered, certainly. Waymo is better, but you cannot buy your own Waymo.
Or bots, but yea the many followers is also likely.
If you check news.ycombinator.com/active regularly instead of the main feed you’ll see that anything critical of the king or Musk is regularly flagged to oblivion quite quickly.
It’s one of the failure modes of how self moderation works in this site.
Broadband/fiber internet accessible to all residents of the USA, anyone? Always love reading about how the telcos took that tax money, hemmed and hawed, and ended up never fully delivering what they agreed to.
Not so common, any other president pulling that shit pretty much anywhere in the world would instantly lose all credibility and most likely would have to resign. But then again this dude shits himself on live TV and shilled cans of beans from the oval office
“ The device would work with Trump Mobile's service plan. For $47.45 per month, Trump Mobile's "47 Plan" (2), which operates on the T-Mobile network, claims to be "better than the rest," offering 100% U.S.-based support; extensive 5G coverage; unlimited talk, text and data; telehealth services; roadside assistance, and international calling to over 230 countries and territories.”
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
This is actually cheaper than what my parents currently pay Verizon every month--somehow they're spending $161 every month on two lines, with no special services, and they're on ancient phones (an iPhone SE and an iPhone X). They know they need to switch, but have no idea how to pick a replacement service. (I'm going to sort it out in the next week or two.)
A lot of people are still on ancient plans like $80/5GB since they don't know they can change providers and still keep their number. Or they're old and avoid changing any aspect of their lives. The mobile companies are fine with "grandfathering" these customers.
There's nothing libertarian about MAGA. It's all about using the immense power of government to hurt the right people, and seizing every opportunity to grow and expand that power with that same goal in mind.
Thats not what i meant. Only in a society who no one cares about the others and thinks its always the fault of their own, this is normal. Otherwise we would have guard rails to protect us.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
Assuming this was not a scam from the beginning. I just think they got more orders than they expected. This seems to be a reskinned HTC U24 Pro (I think earlier Images and specs were advertising another phone). Also seems to have changed from "produced in the USA" to "Designed with American values in mind" & "With American teams helping guide design and quality" according to their website. At best this is bait and switch (assuming they deliver anything) but I can understand people calling this a scam.
I don't disagree. As far I understand this is 100 dollar deposit up until now. So the customer would have to actually go through the order process where they would see the updated website with new specs etc. so it's not fully a switch yet. I am from the EU and no a lawyer so I would not know the legality of it all.
You recognize it’s a bait and switch scam but don’t want to call it a scam, and then you hedge with claiming you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why don’t you say you’re opinion directly instead of trying to put it out there and having a fallback to defend yourself when you are properly called out.
"I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094961
https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/news/trump-mobile-t1-sma...
The IBTimes UK article is https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-mobile-preorder-terms-179546...So yea... a $100 voucher for a conditional opportunity to purchase one if Trump Mobile ever decides to sell one.
1. https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/843498/trump-phone
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Incidentally, MJ was also hanging out with Epstein.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
Edit: link from sibling comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons:
1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it
2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubstantiated, and seemed to be a side effect of making the tickets expensive.
3. Jackson donated his earnings to charity, so the "... for his own profit" claim was also questionable.
2. Kansas City was 30% black but his audience at that show was almost entirely white. I have a hard time believing none of them could afford a ticket.
3. Yeah which he announced after the public letter from his 11 year-old fan which had a ton of press coveeage saying how it wasn't fair
How did that work in the 80s? Did he spend days and weeks poring through (paper) census data and correlating it with ZIP codes? Did he use VisiCalc on an Apple ][ or Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC?
Whatever his other misdeeds, I never got a racist vibe off MJ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
, if I get caught.
Welcome to the grift economy.
Does anyone know who the third person is? Surely it's not Trump himself? I'm guessing Trump just sold the ability to use his likeness and name?
That’s not a lot of people in general.
It is a lot of people for the king to have scammed.
Which is perfectly in line with your comment.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137357/the-fractured-repub...
People think/believe/hope that returning the country to the situation that they perceived that the boomers had when they were growing up without care (because the boomers hadn't yet reached adulthood) would bring back that lifestyle today. ... without having all of the other parts of the social contract between government and the populace in place. People still think that boomers had it best (and maybe they did) and want that lifestyle too.Remember the saying: "Fool me once shame ..."
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
If you check news.ycombinator.com/active regularly instead of the main feed you’ll see that anything critical of the king or Musk is regularly flagged to oblivion quite quickly.
It’s one of the failure modes of how self moderation works in this site.
And the $10 BILLION he is stealing from the IRS by ordering DOJ to settle his lawsuit
Oh and a million dollars PER DAY he steals for each golf weekend
However with his dramatic health decline he is golfing less and less now, so savings?
https://DidTrumpGolfToday.com
Its not like anyone cares over the USA right? $TRUMP? $MELANIE? TACO?
source?
For a second I thought you were talking about Biden.
Trump has a level of loyalty from Republican voters that is unprecedented in modern US history. Why is that?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
Education wasn't enforced to a big part of our society and it shows.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
Why don’t you say you’re opinion directly instead of trying to put it out there and having a fallback to defend yourself when you are properly called out.