They are paying creators a lot. $220 million in 2023. [1]
That combined with trying to undercut Steam on royalties, the 2025 softening of their cash cow, the Apple legal wars, a number of R&D bets, giving away free games, and an absolutely MASSIVE marketing budget...it can go fast.
CBP is doing it electronically for quite some time, as they can see your date of entry in the system and they are not controlling your date of leave against passport when you are leaving USA (you won't even meet CBP at that stage), but it is all checked electronically.
Last time I got stamped. But it seems like an exception than a rule.
A lot of countries don’t stamp passports — if you can guarantee the entry is immediately recorded in your central database, and you can reliably look up the latest entry for a given passport, a stamp doesn’t really gain much.
And that you can't print a trillion dollars and have half the country not go to work for a year without pain further down the road. Which was, by the way, a Trump policy... (Not that it was an incorrect one.)
Misinformation, low voter turnout, and an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density.
That’s ignoring any possibility of interference with insecure voting or tallying computers.
Don’t forget racism. This administration got elected in large part because they are openly racist, delivering outcomes at a velocity that ‘Southern’ dog-whistle deniability doesn’t allow for those that do, for whatever reason, want to continue having positive or neutral reputation with those opposed to racism (which includes half of U.S. women, or more if you limit to those younger than 30) while also benefiting personally from racism’s privileges to them and their families.
racism was a minor factor in the 2024 election. Had Harris been white, she still would have lost. She ran a campaign that said nothing about what she as going to do, she only said how evil Trump would be. She lost the election when she was asked on "The View," a Democrat friendly show, if there was anything she would do differently than Biden. There's only one wrong answer to that question ad she gasve, saying not a thing. Had she just said she'd tackle the border and illegal immigration, she'd have had a chance.
Had Biden kept to his word and been one and one, the Democrats would have had a primary and selected a candidate who could have won. (Harris would not have won the nomination in any sort of primary.)
It isn't just "the dem candidate is black and I am racist so I will vote for the republican candidate." Trump and his people going on TV and whipping up racist paranoia about how refugees are eating people's pets and how he is going to get rid of all of the immigrants motivates racists to the polls.
Why voting day isn't a federal holiday is baffling to me. Along with all the weird-ass rules about "registering to vote" and people having to queue for hours in the heat and nobody is allowed to even give them water.
I usually vote a few weeks in advance while grocery shopping, there's a booth set up at the supermarket. I can just walk in with my ID, vote and the vote is sealed in a box until the official day.
Or I can walk like 1km to the nearest school, again show my ID, vote and go home.
If I had to "register to vote", I'd most likely forget it or not bother to do it.
In the US, this is a partisan issue. The left benefits from higher turnout and the right gets less traction. States with Republican leadership and vaguely competitive elections are doing their best to make it harder to vote.
> an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density
We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
Paper ballots that we almost never bother manually checking against the insecure digital tallies unless there’s a very close race or explicit challenge to the count.
Nearly every state routinely does statistical audits of voting machines compared with paper records.
People hate to hear this but: statistics work. You can randomly sample a portion (say, 2% to 5%) of ballots and have effective certainty about how much fraud or error there is in your voting system.
Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
A common property of conspiracies is that any evidence is evidence of the conspiracy. Not enough data produces "what are they hiding" stuff. More data produces deliberate misunderstandings of the data to justify the conspiracy. We saw this very clearly with covid. When public health agencies were less transparant it was evidence of an evil coverup. When public agencies were more transparant about limitations or things they didn't fully understand it was evidence that public health efforts didn't work.
You could blame the backing of the richest oligarchs in the world, you could blame a morally bankrupt culture amongst a large chunk of the electorate, but at the end of the day it was a very tight race and there was a global wave of incumbent losses[1], regardless of the incumbent party's position.
Between 2021 and 2024 the world went on a rollercoaster ride. Pandemic economic stimulus made everyone feel rich in 2021, and then harsh monetary tightening led to everyone feeling like their world was collapsing in 2024. They punished whoever was in charge at the time.
Because the Democrats tried to run Biden again, despite the obvious-to-everybody signs of decline and unfitness. Then, when that became impossible to ignore, they anointed Harris. (Thereby overturning the results of the primaries, which created bad memories from the previous two campaigns.) Then Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, despite people being tired of Biden.
And because the electorate had kind of forgotten what Trump was like, because they'd just spent four years seeing what Biden was like. There was a bunch of stuff that Biden (or at least his people) did that didn't really resonate with voters, and a bunch of them voted for "not that".
The other thing they did wrong was, they were a year late in prosecuting Trump. Trump managed to delay things out to the point that the campaign (and then the office) protected him. I don't know if Democrats delayed deliberately, so that the prosecutions would be damaging Trump as the campaign season started, but if so, they were well-paid for that bit of attempted chicanery.
Democrats funded, armed and protected a live-streamed genocide so horrific that roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, even in a close race against Trump [0].
There are other reasons Dems lost, also important. Still, genocide remains the blazing neon-red 12-ton elephant in the room. And there seems to be absolutely no sign of owning that fact, which means that no lessons will be learned or policies changed.
However, it still points to the fact that Harris lost millions of votes due to her support for arming Israel.
And, even for the people who voted Harris there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm - directly because of Gaza.
> Even among Biden 2020 voters who did vote for Harris in battleground states, voters by a seven-to-one margin say they would have been more enthusiastic in their support if Harris “pledged to break from President Biden's policy toward Gaza by promising to withhold additional weapons to Israel” rather than less enthusiastic.
> More enthusiastic - 35%
> Less enthusiastic - 5%
At least in the large airports, the international flights come in to a separate terminal. Will ICE limit their involvement to that terminal only, and only inbound flights? Immigration and Customs have no business on the outbound side or with domestic passengers.
Some international flights arrive in to domestic US terminals. These are from a limited set of countries where passengers have cleared US immigration in the departure country.
Canada, Ireland and the UAE are the major three, plus Aruba, Barbados and Bermuda.
These tend to be utilities, and a lot of AI coding either reduces the need for utilities, or uses them but doesn't publish to a package index.
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