Sorry, your AI is hallucinating a bit. No such mechanism exists as you describe it.

However, 2/3 of State legislatures can vote to have a Constitutional Convention for proposing amendments, any one of which would require 3/4 of states to approve in order to come into effect (just like any other amendment). This mechanism was conceived as a way to allow States to enact amendments without Congressional approval.

And before you say “Hey, that’s a great idea”, know that the batshit crazy Conservatives have been trying to call for one for years, because since everything is done by state, they have a decided advantage. The large states lean Democratic, and the 12 most populous states have more than 50% of the population. That means that the other 38 states could ratify amendments without a majority of the population behind them.

And to make things worse, although it is limited to “amendments”, there is nothing preventing a State Convention from ripping the whole thing up and starting over, without any of the nitpicky amendments that the Right hates (like freedom of speech, the press, religion, women voting, etc.), as long as 38 states agree to do it. That would likely prompt the 12 states on the losing end of the deal to attempt to secede rather than submit.

Don’t have a cow, Devin

If the Right is gonna make its own pope, they should pick Newt Gingrich. He did convert to Catholicism for his third wife, after all. The Catholics let him in even though he has been divorced twice (and started both his relationships with his future wives while still married to his prior wives). So he’d make a perfect antipope…

1977…

Roughly 80 years

If I didn’t misremember, we’re about halfway through waiting.

A bit more than halfway, although sometimes I am shocked by how long ago 1977 was. Wasn’t it just, like, 30 years ago or so?

It can’t possibly be 49 years ago, can it?

I think what they mean is that if the thing starts shutting stuff down on its own, the process to get those things started again is tedious. While if the humans tell it to shut things down, it is all more orderly.

Hegseth will be fine, he has the whiteright credentials…

All those benefits mattered a lot more before everyone had a phone in their pocket. A power outage that takes out cell towers is also likely to take out the Telco central office.

“What my friend said is that she prays for the president every day, that God will remove that hard heart of his and replace it with a softer one that has love.”

I have a similar prayer, only I leave out the part about a replacement.

Yes, I have. But when I noted I was old, I should have added I am also lazy.

The author misses a few key points about the American model:

First, in exchange for the local territorial monopoly, the providers are supposed to be heavily regulated by the local (or State) government, with controls in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly and promote the interests of its residents. Of course, we all know how business interests influence government to make business- friendly regulations. Governments have the ability to enforce more user-friendly practices, if they choose to do so.

But the more important point is that in the US, we hand out different monopolies based on the connection type. For instance, where I live we have one company that owns the twisted-pair POTS landlines, a different company that owns the coaxial cable TV service, and another company that owns the direct fiber to the home. Three companies, three connections to each home, all three (theoretically) capable of delivering the same services, since there is no longer any real differentiation between voice, video, and data service: it’s all just bits.

We just got our FTTH provider only recently. Before that, our choices were only the cable company or the telco’s astonishingly show DSL. So I subscribed to the Cable company, and their pricing model tried to force you into a bundle for the other services. Their speeds were also quite slow for broadband, until the Fiber company started digging. Then I got all sorts of emails saying “we’re increasing your speed – for free!” And sure enough, I was getting better bandwidth. But all that did was piss me off. These losers could have given me that better service all along, but didn’t bother until they were forced to.

So I’m on the fiber now. But I know how it works, this service will be awesome at first, but once this company finishes building out they won’t sign on any new capacity and it will gradually get shittier over time. It’s the American Way!

(And I still pay the local telco way too much money for a POTS landline. What can I say, I’m an old.)

So, I think that Trump starting fights with the Catholic Church is probably a bad idea from the standpoint of the Republican Party, but if I were the Democratic Party, I’d probably be watching this with interest.

But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support. Even with all of Vance’s bloviating, I haven’t seen any US Bishop say they would deny him communion, like they threatened to do to Biden.

Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself. They openly supported the candidates that are now deporting and torturing it’s most vulnerable parishioners, all to make sure they could punish women who make choices the Church didn’t like.

Everyone on Lemmy is gonna play those numbers. So if they hit… Divide that $1B by 12, I guess?

It’s because that was his day job. Somehow. It’s what provided the means for his hobby of diddling kids.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

He never finished his college degree, and after dropping out ended up teaching math at a private high school. He got fired for performance issues (and perhaps getting a bit too close to his students), but had made friends with one of the parents of a kid at the school, who happened to be an executive at Bear Stearns. He got a job trading options, and eventually spun that out into his own consultency, where he made more money than he (or anyone) really deserved to. He seems to be a chronic failure, but knew enough key people so that he could always fail upwards.

There are a lot of really weird coincidences from his early career, though: that High School was run by Bill Barr’s dad, Donald. (yes, that Bill Barr, who was Trump’s AG at the time Jeffrey Epstein “killed himself” in jail.) And Donald Barr actually wrote a trashy sci-fi novel in the early 70s in which sex trafficking of teenagers is a key plot point. Enough coincidences to keep conspiracy theorists going for decades.