As a prize for guessing the correct “answer” or winner, no that is wrong, and should be condemned. If the “answer” requires a substantial amount of work, knowledge or research, giving merits for a correct answer may be acceptable.

It appears that Sportsbet is effectively selling merit, which is against the spirit of the merit system.

The TV ratings for the DNC are way down this year and the ratings decline has accelerated as the week progressed. The DNC also had to duplicate enthusiastic voters on their live stream, presumably because they were unable to find 30 voters who were excited to vote for Harris/Biden.

Trump did Make America Great again...

This is false. The US has not withdrawn from NATO, in fact we provided military assistance to our NATO allies upon their request in the spring to help combat the coronavirus when their hospitals were being overrun.

Trump has however gotten our NATO allies to pay for something closer to the amounts they have promised to pay in terms of their military budgets. This makes NATO stronger over the long term, as our enemies cannot do something like get Biden elected in order to get our military to stand down in a possible conflict (similar to how Democrats are ordering the police to stand down and not arrest rioters in their cities).

No. I am saying WAP is far worse than other musicians you cite. WAP is also one of the most popular songs today and Biden today is choosing to associate with her.

You also, along with other leftists, seem to have "forgotten" to address the rest of my post:

Question: When finding people using text spinners, how do you find the original? I have some ideas as to how to quickly check two sentences to see if they are very "similar" but I am stumped as to how to quickly find the original to check against.

WAP is an especially raunchy song. Worse than either of anything Kid Rock or West has written. Pop culture is overall trashy.

I would rather that Biden voters consider Planned Parenthood, and the reasons it was founded. The founder of PP, Margaret Sanger wanted to reduce the black population via abortions. This is why there are so many PP clinics in black neighborhoods. In fact the leading cause of deaths for black Americans is abortion, by a pretty large amount. The Democrats and Biden are in favor of increasing access to abortions including late term abortions.

There may be some reasonable reasons to have an abortion, but using it as a means of population control is just despicable. PP has disavowed Sanger, but their actions continue to match Sanger. 

This is basically what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.

The on chain transition to you would need to have two (or more) outputs, 1 the 'on chain' transaction to you and 2 an output that gets 'locked' in a newly opened channel. This would work very similar to someone opening a channel valued less than the value of an input (less tx fees), and the remaining value being sent to one or more change addresses.

To be fair, Sanders is the one who is driving the platform and the party. Democrats think Clinton lost the election in 2016 because she lost the Bernie bros, and are overcompensating this time around.

Oh, wow. Trump was trying to end a war and achieve peace? He should be immediately impeached and tried for treason.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like Trump might be colluding with Israel and the UAE based on your standards, via the peace agreement that Trump brokered.

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I hope you can acknowledge that all of what you are saying is innuendo. In fact, it is normal for Presidential campaigns to discuss foreign policy with various foreign governments.

What is not normal is for a presidential campaign to pay for foreign disinformation, nor is it normal for a presidential campaign to spy on its rival campaign.

“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then Candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election”
-Senator Marco Rubio, Chairmen, Senate Intelligence Committee 

Andrew Weissman, who was likely the one actually running the investigation, was very aggressive in pursuing prosecutions. Further the Mueller report was full of innuendo.

I can assure you that if there was evidence of collusion, Trump would have been promptly impeached for it. Instead the Democrats waited until someone from intelligence agencies were willing to work with Democrats to impeach Trump over a perfect phone call.

They found no evidence that the Trump Campaign collided or conspired with the Russian government.

There are many foreign governments that try to interfere with our elections, just as the US government interferes with other foreign elections. Remember when Obama said the UK would “go to the back of the queue” for trade deals if they voted for Brexit? Unless you are investigating *all* instances of election interference, you are cherry-picking facts to produce propaganda.

No, Russia didn’t get Trump elected with $100k worth of Facebook ads that were mostly shown after the election. Multiple billions of dollars were spent on advertising in the 2016 election cycle.

I thought I only had 10 years to move away from the coast? Obama even is trying to help people who need to leave the coast by buying a house on the water. This is why Michelle Obama is so oppressed, she is being forced to live in a multimillion dollar mansion on the water that will flood in a dozen years, while trying to satisfy her obligations under a Netflix deal estimated to be worth 9 figures, all for doing nothing other than divide the country apart over 8 years. 

Yes Clapper should be in jail for his lies he made under oath regarding Snowden and others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama spy agencies did the same thing to the Romney campaign as they did to the Trump campaign, or worse.

I guess the concept of self governance isn’t for everyone, or something you believe in.

During my time here, I have given out many hundreds of merits, more than some merit sources. It would be nice to be able to spend more merit, but that is a different matter.

When I send merit, I am highlighting the post, I am signaling to others that I believe you should read the post because it is useful, insightful, helpful, or there was a lot of effort put into it.

Assuming that all sMerit is sent every month, and assuming there is no sMerit at the beginning of the month, the total merit sent will be one less than double the total source merit available, if everyone receives an even number amount of merit. In practice less will be spent because not everyone spends all their sMerit and some people have an off number of merit.

Edit
Fixed. Thanks.

It is rare for Presidents to make pardons in general before elections, especially controversial pardons. So I don’t see this happening before whenever the election is settled.

I can see Snowden getting a Trump pardon though.

In March 2013, James Clapper was asked in congressional testimony if the NSA mass collected information on Americans and he responded the NSA doesn’t “wittingly” collect data on Americans in mass. source. Being that the head of the NSA was lying about the program under oath, there were few options for a whistleblower to expose the program and allow the public to make their own conclusions on the program. This is very similar to how the Trump campaign was spied on by the Obama administration spy agencies, so I think the situation will resonate with Trump.

Providing financial services to third world countries are difficult because of the very small amounts of money involved that will often not result in meaningful profits for anyone for someone in a first world country doing business.

LN may make some inroads into third world countries that are relatively wealthy, but I would see its primary user base to be those in developed world conducting high volume transactions.

Altcoins have been subject to 51%-type attacks with increasing frequency as of recently. This means that for most altcoins, waiting 60 minutes (equivalent to 6 bitcoin confirmations in terms of blocks found), when the altcoin gets the target rate of confirmations, will not give the same level of confidence that it will not be reversed. 

I have noticed that many, or maybe most people base their trust lists based more on personal interactions than business interactions. This has resulted in the sone of the most ‘trusted’ people not being businessmen. It also gives cover to people to keep others on their trust lists who have questionable ethics.

You are free to highlight those who have LFC on their trust lists, but I think you are wasting your time and won’t achieve anything other than cause stress for yourself. LFC seems to be a nice enough guy and appears to love bitcoin, which I can appreciate. This is true even if I condemn what he did in this case.

I hope everyone will just move on. As in nearly all disputes involving the trust system, no one appears to be willing to even acknowledge those with opposing views could possibly be in the right.