Perfect, thanks, the additional context of this applying to billionaires living off of loans based on assets held in the form of unrealized gains makes it make sense. I just wanted to make sure the quoted line wasn’t implying something like lenders being required to accept realized gains being made from said loan in the future as collateral when granting the loan in the first place.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Collateral for loan is realized gain

Functionally how would that work? Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but it sounds like a Catch-22.

Australia has had mandatory voting for eligible voters (18+) for a long time. It works like this:

Prior to elections, the Australian Electoral Commission updates the electoral roll of all eligible voters. On election day, voters have their names crossed off the roll at whichever polling place they attend.

After the election, the electoral roll is cross-checked against voter records. Anyone who didn’t vote and can’t provide a valid reason (for example - illness, living remotely, religious beliefs) is issued a $20 fine by the AEC. If not paid, this can escalate to further fines of around $180 plus court costs if convicted.

Over 180,000 penalty notices were issued after the 2022 federal election to enforce the compulsory voting laws. While controversial to some, the system has maintained over 90% voter turnout in Australia for nearly a century.

A similar system would probably moderate political extremes in the US. I think any fine that is used as a means of enforcement needs to be scaled to the means of the individual being fined in order to not disproportionately target lower wealth individuals (but an elimination of the enforcement fine completely for the lower end of the wealth scale would maybe ironically result in less from that group voting and thus give them disproportionately lower representation in outcomes).

Lol, the documents are either marked classified or not - he’s not being prosecuted for having “dangerous” (whatever that means) files, he’s being prosecuted for possessing and improperly handling classified files and trying to hide evidence of this and refusing to turn them over when asked to do so.

The core of the alleged crime deals with documents that are classified, not the contents of the classified documents, it does not matter why the documents were classified, only that they are classified. Whether the documents should be classified or where to mundane to be classified in the first place is not something for the jury to consider and not what the prosecution is about; any suggestions to the contrary are smoke and mirrors meant to muddy public discourse.

All the jury needs to be able to verify about the documents possessed by Trump is whether they were marked classified or not, which is a matter of record and is generally denoted by the documents being marked as such.

The judge is being absolutely unreasonable here and the only benefit of the doubt she can be granted is that maybe she just doesn’t understand the law (which would be pretty much just as bad).

This AP timeline of the events leading up to the indictment is a neutral recounting of the facts surrounding the case that should help provide a better understanding, assuming you’re posting in good faith.