Shorter, but exactly as you say:

Because the double-standards cripple "lawfare" from the Right entirely.

They have more people that think "The End justifies any Means", and thus are more willing to cross the lines of perjury and knowingly false accusations. They have enough presence in law to find fellow travellers. "Inditement" is not that high a bar. They know in their guts they're immune from problems of a knowingly false inditement. And they're networked enough to nudge things along with a wink-and-a-nod just right to avoid concrete evidence of conspiracy.

Lawfare from the Right must be from viable, concrete, provable facts.

Pinephone and Fairphone are not complete solutions, but they have pieces of the puzzle.

Body cameras should be sealed as far as the police are concerned.

They should dump their data directly to the Judicial Branch somewhere.

This would push officers filing their reports before reviewing.editing/deleting the tape...

The answer is in your own description.

You moved from a town to a city .

In all cities, "Republicans" are basically in hiding. There's no one to say "Stop that shit" to anyone , and the conduct of most people is simply atrocious.

Now, as a newbie to a city, it's easiest to notice the thug-types...

The only thing an address for a 0.1%-er does is give you a place to send mail.

Does the corporate type spend his actual time at house number six - that happens to be inside a walled, armed compound.

Or does he spend it at his palace in a downtown Blue Zone at the "Corporate Executive Foundation and Trust" building?

Or does he basically live on the darn plane/yacht?

And those are just the obvious ones.

Shrugs.

Yes. But pinning corporate crimes on individual executives is extremely difficult through the legal system.

That very difficulty give the executive tier, every executive tier, some disconnection to the consequences of their actions. They don't think they can be touched even through extra-legal means.

But if you wedge a route to punish the actors involved much earlier in the creep of business inevitably going too far, you're putting the executives personal interests into their thinking.

Fines don't hurt the correct people. There needs to be a fundamental re-think of "Punishing Megacorps" - because it's simply not the same thing as punishing a small company.

The core is: They're always actually considered "Too Big To Fail". And that directly leads to the fines being smaller than they might need to be to (A) make the injured party whole, or (B) impact the actual decisionmakers.

I have a pet Amendment/Bankruptcy Law line of thinking that could be applied in precisely this case - but I did not reword the whole thing specifically for this case. So, here's a frame for both how to deal with a company that's either bankrupt, and TooBigToFail, or an excessive capital punishment level of criminal.

I propose a new class of bankruptcy for megacorps - also a "Corporate Death Penalty"

1. Slice it into five pieces.
2. Five Trustees with their primary pay based on 'Futures' in their slice.
3. The entire executive tier fired, and contracts (Golden Parachutes) all cut. (Which you can do in bankruptcy.)
4. Accept as a matter of law that the executive tier "Is working together" for consideration of any RICO investigations.

-Now- Decide how to bail the companies out.

1. Workers not taking the brunt of it.
2. Execs punished.
3. Smaller slices mean it isn't -just- the behemoths that can rescue one.

Too Big to Fail

If one accepts the notion that a fundamental duty of the government is to level the playing field as much as possible, the entire concept of bailing out large, politically connected companies and executives with tax money is quite galling. The key piece in my mind about the phrase “too big to fail” is the start - too big. How can one get large companies to steer less risky paths and generally avoid the failures of corporations that are too big in the first place? And also make it quite certain that not one of the upper echelon is rewarded or personally bailed out?

The idea that a monopoly is generally a bad idea is well understood. And the anti-trust legislation exists with the nominal goal of disfavoring and restricting monopolies. But the problems of monopoly pressure extend beyond true monopolies into any market that has a constricted list of competitors. Ten roughly equal corporations are quite a bit more competitive than five, particularly if one or two of the five are dominant. Think Coke and Pepsi.

How about a new standard chapter in bankruptcy just for the megacorps? The company is too big, so the first order of business is resizing it. First, the entire executive level can go. They have contracts - but bankruptcy Judges have the power to annul contracts. The executives are the ones steering the ship into the shoals, they don’t need to be rewarded in any fashion. Another set of contracts that merits evaluation is the “golden parachutes” of anyone employed at the executive level in the past five years.

Second, slice it into five roughly equal portions. This might be along divisional lines, or product lines, or a brute-force Solomonesque division of everything. Appoint not one Executor for the bankruptcy, but one for each slice, and then let them swap factories, stores or products. Offer the Executors long-term bonds based on the future earnings of their slice to reduce the incentive to collude to the disintrest of their slice.

Now you’ve removed the people that caused the problem, none of the people requesting help are rewarded financially, and you’ve resized the companies. Only now can one consider adding funds to prop up the individual slices in the short term.

One reason a company might really be “too big to fail” is because the company employs a large number of workers. With the company split up, there’s a good chance that a couple of slices will be bought out immediately. When you’re the old AT&T there are a lot fewer companies that can afford a hostile takeover compared to when you get sliced into the Baby Bells. The slices are going to be more nimble, they should be easier to understand and require less executive heft to guide.

This new chapter in bankruptcy law might seem quite harsh if sprung on an unsuspecting company that finds itself in this type of situation. Lehman Brothers, AIG, GM, Chrysler - none would have been happy to run into this buzzsaw. But if one gets this chapter of bankruptcy law onto the books, then you’re going to get a contervailing pressure to oppose the “high risk, high rewards” approach of some the most out-of-control companies. All without extensive new regulations, or an entire new layer of oversight. Oversight and regulation have the unending issues of having smart people trying to wiggle out of them while having lobbyists simultaneously intentionally obfuscating every little change in the details of various laws.

XX In a regular bankruptcy, the Judge can annul contracts. There’s no good reason this isn’t applied to every golden parachute contract from any executive employed at the company within the last five years.

XX Another key reason a company might be too big to fail is if the company provides some essential product whose disappearance would be enormously destabilizing. That can be economically destabilizing, or it can mean militarily destabilizing

Back to the "Corporate Death Penalty" aspect: presume that the corporate officers, board ... the entire executive and legal tier of the company is "Working Together" for purposes of firing off RICO-style investigations. You know the company is guilty of XYZ already by this point. But I want the effing corporate veil pierced and the individual actors falling all over themselves to rat out other members of this Executive Tier instead of the usual company investigation where every single person lawyers up and says "I did nothing/I saw nothing/I heard nothing".

counties

Do it by counties

Well, heh.

I was sure the forbidden question would be "So, how many jabs did you take? Does that include the flue shot?"

And I'm not aiming to make "whole house distiller".

1. Kettle: 1kW heater. (All the ones I've seen for household use are well below 1.8kW, which is a rough guide of what a 15A circuit means.) 1kg. Say 25C. Taking that to 99Cish is 309kJ or 5 minutes, 15s at 1kW. At 0.16/kWh, that's $0.014

2. Distiller: First do everything the kettle did: 309s. Then handle the 2264kJ of latent heat. 37 Minutes. (+5:15) At 0.16/kWh, that's $0.12

Too long for "I want a cup now.", especially when you consider cooling back down.

But the recommendation is 3L per person per day IIRC. $0.36 per person per day is a doable price to pay.

3. "Shrike's Ideal Water Heater/Distiller" would add $100 of copper tubing and $1.56 of electronics and try very hard to integrate the needed heating of the distilling into dumping it's waste heat into the not-distilled hot water tank. But calculating how much extra heat, and when involves hauling out rusty memories, and actual math. ;) I suppose that's why no one's done it.

Sure.

But it's not that long or complex. There's simply no simple "over the counter" widget to do it like the kettles.

I'd actually use it more like a storage of 5gal carboys for a drinking water fountain, or integrating it into the house more like hot water heater.

The electricity cost to distill the water is a tiny fraction of the premium pricing "Distilled Water" has when you buy it by the bottle, jug, or carboy.

I really want to know why "water filtration" is 1000x more common than flat-out water distillation.

It's not too tough or expensive to do was a batch process, but there's nothing commercial at all. The stupid electric kettles are 90% of the way there, for instance.

Enough people didn't take the vaccine for it to be a significant statistical group.

Things that are reasonable excuses for why the death rate is higher now are useful to the main argument that "The vax is safe, you science denier."

Because the Impeachment process is fundamentally broken when you don't have moral people in office.

You have to have basically 50% of the Presidents Party go along for it to work. Any you're trying to judge whether a lying weasel will vote your way or not.

The Right could manage a large circus - but after a year of hard work, screeching, and spent political capital, all one could manage with the Democrats playing along would be ... Kamala Harris.

Why do the Democrat's work for them? They want Biden out and her or Gavin Newsom in somehow? Let them do the dirty work.

I do find it boggling to realize that whole milk, chicken wings or a bunless chilli-cheese dog (done competently, not random sketchy food) could well be better diet food than a jam sandwich, a bowl of fruit salad, or even the "Cranberry Juice Cocktails" ... that are sweetened with apple juice.

A few days of no carbs really signals to the body something like "Ok, winter has arrived, rev up non-carbohydrate/sugar based routes to processing energy out of food and our fat storage!"

The fellow below walks through the cell responses a long list of specific diet/exercise patterns. I had tried a long list of things before working though what he was saying, and now sugar/bread don't trigger me craving them, it's quite wild imo.

https://rumble.com/v234mf1-1-absolute-best-meal-plan-to-lose-weight-faster.html

There's no reason for the qualifying "in AZ."

Or "in 2020".

1. WA's default absentee ballots have your name and sorting barcodes on the outside of the outer envelope.

2. The USPS has the 'millions of letters sorters' that would be needed if one wanted to sort all the return ballots specifically by Party.

Note that it's hard to even say a crime was committed (yet) if they simply hand over a Red Bar and a Blue Bag of votes to the elections officials.

"Oops, I lost a bag" ... Well, mistakes happen.

Sure, but back around 2000 there was an entire west coast push for allowing "All Absentee", it's not precisely the same thing as "All Mail", as the terms are used now.

But, at least in Washington, we (I, at least) didn't ever have to say "I'd like an absentee ballot!" - they switched everyone en masse back around 2004.

But, like you say, You could switch back to a polling pace ... the one-or-so polling place in the county.

Note that the WA/OR/CA have been "All Absentee" since like 2000/2004.

So. It's taking awhile.

Because the legal profession itself is skewed.

And the repercussions are uneven.

There are rules for frivolous lawsuits and false charges. And the lawyers involved in that sort of thing technically are inching towards disbarment.

Yes, we can individually press on this, but we need a lot better case to start with.

It's they "You're misusing our jargon, nyah, nyah, nyah" defense.

"We didn't do it precisely like you said! So we're innocent of doing what you said!"

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. --Ayn Rand

The whining about 'the little guy' and the 'innocent victims there' and the thousand sob stories will always defang the direct "Kill the company, fire the employees!" approach.

But the regular "Fine them a shitload!" approach also is meaningless - all fines, taxes, and monetary effects are always passed to the customer by hook or crook.

My approach saves what can be saved, and decouples whatever positive value the company has, and whatever sobstories we would have heard from the popcorn-worthy criminal investigation of their leaders. Normal criminal procedure is focused on getting one perpetrator. The "little" thing of presuming that the entire Executive Tier (All the CXX's, Board of Directors, anyone with "Vice-" in their title, all their secretaries, accountants and lawyers) is "working together in a conspiracy to X" is a big deal. The individuals aren't presumed guilty, just presumed to be suspects - so people would normally be falling all over themselves to say "It was all Larry!!!", unlike the usual corporate investigation where everyone simply says "it had nothing to do with me", "I can't recall", and "I was following direct orders" a million times.

It would basically require a bill outlining it in advance.

It's the "You used our jargon incorrectly, nyah, nyah, nyah" defense.

Shrike's "Death Penalty For Corps"

"Too big to fail" means too big

Because any damages that high will inevitably have hand-wringer's saying 'we can't let them fail'.

1. Split anything convicted and too big into five separate companies, to be rescued by five separate Bankruptcy Trustees.

2. Charge the entire executive tier collectively as being presumed to be a conspiracy to do whatever the corporate crime was. And anyone else that "retired" during the scope of the problem.