It's done that way because it's to incentive prosecutors not to do shady shit to try to get convictions.

Which has, historically, been a real problem.

Go ahead and read what I wrote again.

Note the phrase "MINUS some chunk".

Those exceptions exist -- and more. I didn't list all of them, just a few.

And people use them. Not everyone who qualifies will use one, but plenty do.

Druze, for instance, have a full conscription -- but only men, not women. A number of Yeshiva students utilize an exemption (Torato Umanuto I want to say? Young men in Haredi yeshivas can serve shortened -- 4 month-- service or none at all. And when i say "can" I mean like 99% of them don't serve. Israel has been working on that for awhile to remove the exemption but last I checked it was still there in practice).

Israeli practices universal conscription, so everyone serves.

With...some exceptions. Obviously they don't allow Arab citizens who are Christian or Muslim, but there is also a long-standing religious exemption that heavily favors the ultra-orthodox sects. I understand they've been trying to repeal that for like two decades (with the last attempt I heard of struck down by the courts).

So in practice the military service isn't quite that universal.

The military, in practice, is the civilian populace between certain ages PLUS career military of all ages MINUS any non-Jewish Arab citizens, MINUS some chunk of the more right-wing and ultra-othrodox sects.

Which is a bit of a different kettle of fish than, say, a purely professional military like the US uses.

No more guns for him.

Also I love the idea that this dumb fuck spent two years watching others get slowly arrested and charged, hoping he'd get away with it -- and finally having the FBI show up with the receipts and felony charges.

If you ever win more than, say, a million? Go to the biggest city in your state, pick the biggest fucking law firm, and tell them you need their help to handle a sudden windfall.

They'll help you build a trust, and claim the ticket on behalf of the trust. So the winner will be the trust. They'll also file all the appropriate legal documents and affidavits claiming you are eligible to win.

Even if the State insists on speaking to the trustee (you!) and verifying it themselves, the winner will go down as -- and be publicized as the trust. And your big firm lawyer will be the one whose photo is on the wall under something like "50 million winner! 'FYIGM Trust"

It's worth the money not just because of keeping anonymity, but they'll help you find an accountant and tax attorney to structure how you get your winnings, and you can also keep a bunch of it safe from yourself -- and others.

Stick 80%+ into a trust where you can't touch the principal at all (or doing so is a huge, time-consuming process to prevent yourself from impulsive moves or manipulation) means when someone DOES work out you're rich, tough shit. You can't touch it.

You just have that 20% and the passive income.

(25m, for instance, in a trust is about 500k a year conservatively after taxes in passive income -- that's about 2.5%, minus taxes. 500k a fucking year after taxes is a lot of goddamn money, especially since you're likely debt free as well. Like 40k a month is fucking insane money)

About a third allow fully anonymous claims.

Even the ones that don't, in many (perhaps most) trusts can claim it. So winners set up a trust, and lawyers working for the trust claim it on behalf of the trust.

So the 'winner' might be two guys in really good suits with the name "ABC Trust". Now, the lawyers have to attest to a whole bunch of shit to ensure it's not an ineligible winner hiding behind the trust, but a big-name law firm isn't going to perjure themselves over what's really a pretty small amount of billable hours. THEY aren't winning tens or hundreds of millions.

Because if you win even a few million, a good law firm and account is worth every penny just for the work they'll do, but not having every dumb fuck you went to school with known you won is goddamn priceless.

As mentioned in the article -- store cameras if they have it -- I think some of the self-serve machines have cameras and snap stills like ATMs do as well.

Then some simple stuff like --- where you even in that area geographically at the time the ticket was sold, etc. Like if you're Bob from Newark claiming you won a ticket in Sacramento, they're gonna be more skeptical than if you live 6 blocks from the store it was sold at.

Feel the same way about season tickets to, say, football.

My dad had them for years, on a foreman's salary. Good seats too, his one big "for himself" item.

Now? Shit, someone doing that job would spend a week's salary for two shit seats for one game.

Reddit bans shit that gets them bad press, too.

I like C.

It lets me shoot myself in the foot very efficiently.

He also has not, despite this being the entire way social media and especially Twitter works, not figure out that Twitter's users are it's commodity and that the advertisers are Twitter's customers.

He's still literally trying to charge people for the privilege of making content he sells to advertisers.

He's got a combination of "being in the news is good advertising, no matter why!" thinking combined with the usual hype man bullshit of "I can spin this/sell this".

Last time he tried to spin it to advertisers they were literally canceling ad buys on the call with him and he's actively gone downhill since.

It's desperate flailing.

Oh bull fucking shit.

Musk broke, fired, or deliberately removed every mechanism to try to curtail that shit and openly and personally invited every worst actor back on.

So fuck off with that "it's not a musk in charge problem".

You have no idea how much worse it's gotten.

I took a peek around -- in addition to their algorithm being deeply broken (it was not unusual for me to log on, see the newest post being 12 to 20 hours old, half "recommended for you" shit -- none of it I was interested in, etc -- I had to turn to chronological to have a readable feed) a casual look at, say, any trans account would see a horde of new bots just responding with basic misgendering to any post. (just auto-replies of "Okay Sir" to trans women, etc). I suspect you'd find various other forms of cheerfully botted bigotry towards any minority on there, and of course as noted he's actively re-platforming actual Nazis.

This is important because Twitter is fucking bleeding Elon's money dry, and their algorithm is what drives their ad sales (the idea that they can put the right ad in front of the right eyeballs) and the bigots drive away ad sales.

He's basically stomping on his own nuts, and costing himself billions a year. It's fucking amazing. I've literally never seen someone that rich so determined to go broke.

I'm literally wondering if he's a masochist.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure he's letting banned Nazis, fascists, and other grifters back on to drive hate-views and media attention to keep his metrics up as he desperately tries to raise ad revenue or sell Blue accounts.

Twitter's draining him dry and he has no ideas how to turn it around, so he's turned to stunts and penny-wise, pound foolish shit to try to generate anything at all.

He unplugged that server, I'm sure.

He honestly seems to think US law applies everywhere AND he doesn't seem to realize the EU is fucking slow, but they do levy actual punishments even Elon is gonna feel (especially having lost so much wealth), and they have every reason in the world to fuck over the rich American ignoring their laws.

Especially as Twitter is faltering, it's all upside to throw everything at him and no downside.

We're dripping with guns. You can't take a piss without tripping over a fucking gun.

Guns are real easy to use and really good at killing people.

And of course the lesson we'll take is "We should do more about mental health [while refusing to fund it]" and "That just shows we don't have enough guns" and "He had a gun, therefore gun control doesn't work [despite having no real gun control here]".

I'd said it's learned helplessness, but honestly it's more like some weird death cult dedicated to enriching firearms manufacturers.

My dude, mass shootings are a fucking daily event here. This our fucking life.

How sheltered do you have to be to assume an American mass shooter just had one fucking gun? When he was tooling around in a fucking van?

Right but in this case default isn't "we don't have power" (emergency lights are battery powered for that reason) it's "The control system is totally not working, our software is borked, what's our failure state".

I mean if it's going to be a few days to get fixed they'll want to be able to still use the building!

Auto-on makes sense for lights. If there's a failure, it's nicer if you can see what you're working on.

And doubly so for a building that likely has plenty of fully indoor rooms, with poor to nonexistent natural lighting, so if the system breaks and it defaults to off you have a bunch of people in the dark trying to get out.

Like any of the school theaters or band rooms in my HS back in the day would have been pitch-black nightmares. Of course people have phones now which help, but you really don't want to depend on whomever is suddenly in a pitch-black room having their phone on them.

Well, it's almost always they didn't raise wages. Generally at all.

I've seen plenty of "20/hr" postings where it turns out they're offering 12 or 13 -- and other places are offering 15 or more.

After that, well, COVID killed off a lot of people and let a lot more disabled.

Alcoholism.

Rudy's got all the hallmarks of that (and a reputation for hard drinking, day or night). He might be suffering some severe cogitative defects at this point.

That dude has never left his momma’s basement.

Courts (in America -- although there might be a new case about this hovering around?) basically view passwords/PINs as speech. So you have a fifth amendment right (in general) where you cannot be compelled to tell them or unlock it for them.

Biometrics are seen as physical -- like a key to a lock, or your DNA -- which you can be compelled to provide. Forcing you give them up isn't seen as incriminating yourself any more than demanding your fingerprints are.