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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • So I dug into it a little deeper and it looks like the answer is kind of. Government still gets first crack at the value of whatever the property is, but leftover funds may be distributed to other creditors. It also depends on the kind of loan in question as to whether the government will repay them or if they have to sue Trump.

    Overall the process works much like bankruptcy does, creditors get ranked based on various criteria (generally the more money you’re owed the higher you’re ranked) and higher priority creditors get first dibs and whatever is left over goes to the next creditor in line. Government pretty much always goes first. Once they’ve gotten their money next would be anyone who has an actual lien on the property. It’s also possible to have given a loan whose terms are tied to the property but doesn’t result in an actual lien being issued for it. Those creditors are just fucked in this case. They’ll have to chase Trump through court to get their money back as it’s essentially a contract dispute at that point.

    What’s highly likely to happen is we’ll see a panic recall on any outstanding loans Trump has as nobody wants to be on the bottom of the pile fighting for scraps after the financial corpse of Trumps assets has been picked over.

    There’s a reason no banks have been willing to loan to him for 30 years, and when he went looking for a bond the ones who were willing to give him one were demanding double the amount in property as collateral. They wanted to make sure that there would be enough left over for them to get their money back after the government took their cut.

    As for what you cited, that’s for civil asset forfeiture which is a little different. In that case the government isn’t treated as a creditor since you don’t owe them anything, they’re just straight stealing your property. In the case of property with a lien on it they repay the lien holder essentially the full value of the lien as there’s no valid claim to those funds by the government.

    At the end of the day the government will just keep seizing property until both they and all Trumps creditors are paid off or until there’s no more property to seize whichever comes first. What’s definitely not going to happen is the government goes “This property isn’t worth it because it has too many loans on it, we’ll just let Trump keep it”.


  • That’s not how it works. The courts get first crack at that property. If something is worth $100 million, and it’s used as collateral on a $50 million loan, the courts can seize it and sell it for $100 million and keep all the money. The one who issued the loan for $50 million can then sue Trump for the $50 million along with any other creditors who Trump owes money to.

    So, Trump can’t sell his properties without paying off the loans, but the courts can seize them for their full values.


  • Trump is, was, and has always been, a conman. It’s his bread and butter. It was critical to the facade of “highly successful businessman” that he put up that he appear ridiculously wealthy. Not just wealthy, but ultra wealthy. While he has always had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, and owned many properties that when combined would total over a billion dollars in value, he has never at any point in his life had access to the kind of wealth that the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates have. Even worse for him, he’s actually an incredibly bad businessman, nearly every venture Trump has directly been involved in (rather than just licensing his name for someone actually competent to use) has failed utterly.

    In an effort to shore up his image Trump has for decades inflated the value of all his properties, and then used those inflated values to take out loans and mortgages that he then blows on bad business decisions. There’s a very real chance that he might actually be telling the truth for the first time in his life and he can’t actually scrape together the nearly $500 million even if he sold every piece of property he owns. He may have already over leveraged it all so badly that there’s just not $100 million of value left to squeeze out of it.

    Of course it’s also possible he actually could come up with the money but doing so would require him to liquidate every property he owns and would also expose just how badly he has managed the wealth left to him by his father. Something he desperately wants to avoid lest it utterly shatter his “successful businessman” facade forever (not to mention legitimately bankrupt him for once in his life).

    Either way it’s about time a lifetime of fraud and lies caught up to him.







  • State leadership would still have control of their state. As you point out powers not given to the federal government belong to the states, but as it stands now if the public wants something they need the blessing of the states to get it which is entirely too much power. It allows tiny states to kill attempts by larger states to enact policies because even though the larger state would have more than enough votes to get something through Congress, the Senate treats all states as the same, despite some states representing a tiny fraction of the population. It literally allows a tiny group of elites to override the will of the people.

    City/county leadership is focused on how best to keep their city/county running for maximum benefit of their population. States have the same focus over all the cities and counties therein.

    This is not even remotely true. They focus on what will first not cause them to lose elections, and second on what will most benefit themselves. Thanks to a finely honed playbook of dirty tricks there’s very little these days that will actually cost politicians elections leaving them free to maximize their personal profit.

    It is also relatively stupid to put everything to a mass democratic vote, especially for things that should be decided by experts.

    That might hold water if experts were deciding those things, but they aren’t. Instead those decisions are being made by the highest bidders. Eliminating the Senate wouldn’t entirely fix that problem but it would help at least a little. A congressional representative is much more concerned with the needs of his constituents than a senator is and its much harder and more expensive to bribe a majority of Congress than it is to buy a majority of the Senate.

    The US is no longer a loose republic, states are tightly bound to the federal government. The US was forced into that position because a bunch of assholes threw a hissy fit when other people said they didn’t think they should be allowed to own slaves. They hadn’t even been told they couldn’t, just that it looked like things were headed that way. So because a bunch of the states demonstrated they couldn’t behave like decent human beings and instead acted like bigots (and still seem to be acting like bigots to this day) the federal government had to step in. The US isn’t quite a democracy, but it’s closer to being one than it is to being a republic, and it’s about time people realized that.

    The Senate makes no sense because it’s a relic of the pre-civil war government that serves no useful purpose anymore. The current state of dysfunction in the US is ample demonstration of that. The fact that we have a political party whose entire policy for a decade now has amounted to stripping rights from various groups of people and blocking or reversing literally every piece of legislation supported by the other party (even to the extent of blocking their own legislation if the other party supports it), and that they’ve been successful at that despite a significant majority of the public opposing them is even more evidence of why the Senate has to go.



  • Yes and no. The US system is a bastardized version of the British system but with States replacing nobility. So the UK has a House of Lords which corresponds to the US Senate, and a House of Commons that corresponds to the US Congress. The number of congressional representatives each state gets is based on population as in theory Congress represents the people of each state. The Senate in contrast has a fixed number of representatives per state and in theory represents the will of the state. The whole thing gets a little muddled because senators are still elected by the people of the state, but since they aren’t based on population so you can play shenanigans like what’s being discussed in this thread.

    Realistically the Senate should be abolished, it’s entire reason for existing is fundamentally flawed.








  • That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

    LLMs can’t “talk to each other” as they don’t think, they’re more like a really complicated echo chamber. You yell your prompt into it, it bounces around and when the echo comes back you have your result. You could feed the output of one LLM into the input of another, but after a few rounds of bouncing back and forth you’d just get garbage out. Furthermore a LLM can’t learn from its queries as the queries are missing all the metadata necessary to build the model.