100% a demonstration that who we elect as a leader absolutely does set the tone for the rest of the country. I have lived through two elections of Donald Trump and both times the shift in what kinds of behavior were socially acceptable was palpable within hours. Like a lot of people suddenly decided they could come out and be their true self, it just turned out that it was gleefully ugly and hateful.
Assuming this was not a scam from the beginning. I just think they got more orders than they expected. This seems to be a reskinned HTC U24 Pro (I think earlier Images and specs were advertising another phone). Also seems to have changed from "produced in the USA" to "Designed with American values in mind" & "With American teams helping guide design and quality" according to their website. At best this is bait and switch (assuming they deliver anything) but I can understand people calling this a scam.
I don't disagree. As far I understand this is 100 dollar deposit up until now. So the customer would have to actually go through the order process where they would see the updated website with new specs etc. so it's not fully a switch yet. I am from the EU and no a lawyer so I would not know the legality of it all.
The terms, updated April 6, state that the deposit is not a binding sales contract. It provides only a "conditional opportunity" to purchase the phone if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it, with all discretion resting with the company. The company "does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase," The Verge and IBTimes UK reported.
The Verge has an on-going series Where's the Trump Phone? [1] with updates every week. They even managed to get an interview with one of the execs a few months back.
I don't know any. Maybe I just have a better social circle than most. Or maybe this is a fake number. There are not as many people preordering this clearly fake device, instead this is just another way to launder money.
It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market.
By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars (in the 80's) for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this. Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience for the entire tour. Oh and he raped children too. Seems like Trump's taking it right out of his playbook.
Incidentally, MJ was also hanging out with Epstein.
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
Why did he want to turn himself into a white woman? I think he had issues with race, his kids came from a white sperm donor, and he only raped white kids.
> Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
> it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
> Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
It's normal for grifters to preselect their demographic.
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
Yet another phenomenon that scholars will be studying years from now.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
While I agree in principle, at least Tesla has delivered something pretty impressive. FSD is not really something I am personally interested in, but I cannot deny that it has gotten quite good. Better than any other system being offered, certainly. Waymo is better, but you cannot buy your own Waymo.
It feels analogous to giving alms to a religious institution at the end of a prayer service - you don't get anything material for it in return, but maybe for the faithful, that's not the point?
Tithing is not fraud. People give money to support the church, pay the pastor, and so that the church can use it to care for the needy in the community. Good churches do, in fact, use the money for all of the above.
The above argument is exploring the framing that the Trump phone is not fraud because it is more like tithing. As long as Trump puts it to good use then it's all good.
There's another article somewhere indicating how Maga is furious because their money is lost. Someone commented on the article something like - "I'm MAGA and I'm not mad at all".
This is exactly it, I see it in my family members. They are willing to sacrifice so much money and, well, everything to the "cause." It's a cult, and it's deranged.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
I think it really is just the simpler explanation, they have decided they hate anybody left of them, and defeating them is the cause which much be won at all costs.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.
...
The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.
People think/believe/hope that returning the country to the situation that they perceived that the boomers had when they were growing up without care (because the boomers hadn't yet reached adulthood) would bring back that lifestyle today. ... without having all of the other parts of the social contract between government and the populace in place. People still think that boomers had it best (and maybe they did) and want that lifestyle too.
Not so common, any other president pulling that shit pretty much anywhere in the world would instantly lose all credibility and most likely would have to resign. But then again this dude shits himself on live TV and shilled cans of beans from the oval office
Broadband/fiber internet accessible to all residents of the USA, anyone? Always love reading about how the telcos took that tax money, hemmed and hawed, and ended up never fully delivering what they agreed to.
“ The device would work with Trump Mobile's service plan. For $47.45 per month, Trump Mobile's "47 Plan" (2), which operates on the T-Mobile network, claims to be "better than the rest," offering 100% U.S.-based support; extensive 5G coverage; unlimited talk, text and data; telehealth services; roadside assistance, and international calling to over 230 countries and territories.”
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
A lot of people are still on ancient plans like $80/5GB since they don't know they can change providers and still keep their number. Or they're old and avoid changing any aspect of their lives. The mobile companies are fine with "grandfathering" these customers.
There's nothing libertarian about MAGA. It's all about using the immense power of government to hurt the right people, and seizing every opportunity to grow and expand that power with that same goal in mind.
Thats not what i meant. Only in a society who no one cares about the others and thinks its always the fault of their own, this is normal. Otherwise we would have guard rails to protect us.
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
Recent and related comment:
"I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094961
100% a demonstration that who we elect as a leader absolutely does set the tone for the rest of the country. I have lived through two elections of Donald Trump and both times the shift in what kinds of behavior were socially acceptable was palpable within hours. Like a lot of people suddenly decided they could come out and be their true self, it just turned out that it was gleefully ugly and hateful.
Was it crowdsourced? WA state has a crowdfunding law on the books, and the state AG has gone after people that are very late to deliver.
Assuming this was not a scam from the beginning. I just think they got more orders than they expected. This seems to be a reskinned HTC U24 Pro (I think earlier Images and specs were advertising another phone). Also seems to have changed from "produced in the USA" to "Designed with American values in mind" & "With American teams helping guide design and quality" according to their website. At best this is bait and switch (assuming they deliver anything) but I can understand people calling this a scam.
Bait and switch is a scam.
I don't disagree. As far I understand this is 100 dollar deposit up until now. So the customer would have to actually go through the order process where they would see the updated website with new specs etc. so it's not fully a switch yet. I am from the EU and no a lawyer so I would not know the legality of it all.
The terms of what that $100 went to were updated last month...
https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/news/trump-mobile-t1-sma...
The IBTimes UK article is https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-mobile-preorder-terms-179546...So yea... a $100 voucher for a conditional opportunity to purchase one if Trump Mobile ever decides to sell one.
So just a scam.
The Verge has an on-going series Where's the Trump Phone? [1] with updates every week. They even managed to get an interview with one of the execs a few months back.
1. https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/843498/trump-phone
> Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas — two of the three executives that run Trump Mobile
Does anyone know who the third person is? Surely it's not Trump himself? I'm guessing Trump just sold the ability to use his likeness and name?
Wow. That's a lot buyers. You likely know some of them.
I don't know any. Maybe I just have a better social circle than most. Or maybe this is a fake number. There are not as many people preordering this clearly fake device, instead this is just another way to launder money.
It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery.
Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars (in the 80's) for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this. Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience for the entire tour. Oh and he raped children too. Seems like Trump's taking it right out of his playbook.
Incidentally, MJ was also hanging out with Epstein.
For reference, this seems to be what you are referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that "hundreds of dollars" is $500, and the risk free rate is 5%, and they hold it for 3 months, then you get $6.25 per victim. Hardly a huge sum. If you factor in credit card processing fees, they might even be losing money on it.
Why did he want an all-white audience? You lost me there.
Why did he want to turn himself into a white woman? I think he had issues with race, his kids came from a white sperm donor, and he only raped white kids.
It used to be fraud was the problem of the perpetrator, and not the victim.
Welcome to the grift economy.
> Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.
There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.
Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
> been black-letter law
Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.
> it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000.
Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.
In practice how often does that actually happen to well-heeled, well-connected fraudsters?
> Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.
Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:
, if I get caught.
Good.
It's amazing what Trump can continue to get away with and still have many followers.
True but when you see what megachurches have been getting away with for years, it's less surprising.
Yes, IIRC this is not the first time this happened. I think it happened with his watch too.
Remember the saying: "Fool me once shame ..."
It's normal for grifters to preselect their demographic.
At this point the "faithful" have fully signed up for the cult. While rest of world looks on in horror, the scamming and extraction will only intensify.
Yet another phenomenon that scholars will be studying years from now.
For better or worse, it will be interesting to see to what extent his faithful are willing to transfer their loyalty to whoever comes next. I am not seeing any signs of that happening yet. I mostly expect that Trump will maintain an iron grip on loyalty up until the day he drops dead, and then there will be a free-for-all fight for his followers. I do not think Trump can [or will] bless a successor and transfer the reigns.
I mean, Elon Musk can get away with selling FSD capability and not delivering it.
While I agree in principle, at least Tesla has delivered something pretty impressive. FSD is not really something I am personally interested in, but I cannot deny that it has gotten quite good. Better than any other system being offered, certainly. Waymo is better, but you cannot buy your own Waymo.
Why is this getting downvoted?
The many followers.
It feels analogous to giving alms to a religious institution at the end of a prayer service - you don't get anything material for it in return, but maybe for the faithful, that's not the point?
Tithing is not fraud. People give money to support the church, pay the pastor, and so that the church can use it to care for the needy in the community. Good churches do, in fact, use the money for all of the above.
The above argument is exploring the framing that the Trump phone is not fraud because it is more like tithing. As long as Trump puts it to good use then it's all good.
There's another article somewhere indicating how Maga is furious because their money is lost. Someone commented on the article something like - "I'm MAGA and I'm not mad at all".
Which is perfectly in line with your comment.
This is exactly it, I see it in my family members. They are willing to sacrifice so much money and, well, everything to the "cause." It's a cult, and it's deranged.
These sorts of scams go on continually in email lists, and vulnerable people just hand over their hard-earned money fist over fist.
Pointing out what's going on makes the family member hate whoever points out the con, rather than the con man. If anything, it strengthens the love of the conman and accelerates the grift.
What's the cause exactly? Make America a white evangelical "paradise"?
I think it really is just the simpler explanation, they have decided they hate anybody left of them, and defeating them is the cause which much be won at all costs.
I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.
Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.
It's an appeal to restore the country to some form of nostalgic view of it.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137357/the-fractured-repub...
People think/believe/hope that returning the country to the situation that they perceived that the boomers had when they were growing up without care (because the boomers hadn't yet reached adulthood) would bring back that lifestyle today. ... without having all of the other parts of the social contract between government and the populace in place. People still think that boomers had it best (and maybe they did) and want that lifestyle too.Tithing often involves the implicit or explicit promise of rewards from God, both spiritual and material.
That's how this is framed as well.
This is always common. Do a huge preorder and then delay. Given how high interest rates are, this is profitable.
They will just rag pull it.
Its not like anyone cares over the USA right? $TRUMP? $MELANIE? TACO?
I like how you conjugated that in the future tense, as if the scam wasn't a done deal.
Not so common, any other president pulling that shit pretty much anywhere in the world would instantly lose all credibility and most likely would have to resign. But then again this dude shits himself on live TV and shilled cans of beans from the oval office
Bitcoin miners did preorders and then wait a year before filling them, with the riggs being delivered with signs of usage and already obsolete.
>But then again this dude shits himself on live TV [...]
source?
>> But then again this dude shits himself on live TV
For a second I thought you were talking about Biden.
Notably, Biden would have gotten the 25th treatment instantly, with not a hint of loyalty from Democratic voters.
Trump has a level of loyalty from Republican voters that is unprecedented in modern US history. Why is that?
Because he's their golden calf
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Common where?
Tesla roadster 2, since 2017
FSD,2019 still waiting with HW3.
Broadband/fiber internet accessible to all residents of the USA, anyone? Always love reading about how the telcos took that tax money, hemmed and hawed, and ended up never fully delivering what they agreed to.
Whenever countries raise the age for social security eligibility, they usually impact those that have already been paying into it, up to a point.
what are they going to do, sue him?
grifter presidents grifts fans out of money
More concerned about the BILLION dollars he stole from nuclear missile maintenance for QatarForceOne, which he fully intends to keep
And the $10 BILLION he is stealing from the IRS by ordering DOJ to settle his lawsuit
Oh and a million dollars PER DAY he steals for each golf weekend
However with his dramatic health decline he is golfing less and less now, so savings?
https://DidTrumpGolfToday.com
“ The device would work with Trump Mobile's service plan. For $47.45 per month, Trump Mobile's "47 Plan" (2), which operates on the T-Mobile network, claims to be "better than the rest," offering 100% U.S.-based support; extensive 5G coverage; unlimited talk, text and data; telehealth services; roadside assistance, and international calling to over 230 countries and territories.”
If you fell for that you deserve to lose your money.
A lot of people are still on ancient plans like $80/5GB since they don't know they can change providers and still keep their number. Or they're old and avoid changing any aspect of their lives. The mobile companies are fine with "grandfathering" these customers.
Thats more expensive that my top tier tmobile plan which is $120 for 3 lines.
Unlimited with an *.
Only in a libertarian society.
Education wasn't enforced to a big part of our society and it shows.
There's nothing libertarian about MAGA. It's all about using the immense power of government to hurt the right people, and seizing every opportunity to grow and expand that power with that same goal in mind.
Thats not what i meant. Only in a society who no one cares about the others and thinks its always the fault of their own, this is normal. Otherwise we would have guard rails to protect us.
> There's nothing libertarian about MAGA
Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.
There's also nothing particularly libertarian about the failures of American education. Like, what, government isn't involved?