n00bdragon 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (614) comment rss

  • On the post: The DEA Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization That’s Trying To Kill Children

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2026 @ 01:01pm

    Classic DEA. Walk some guns. Walk some pills. Criminals are hard to catch when you don't create them yourself and doing a little dirty smuggling on the side is so much easier when you can paper over the whole thing as a """"sting"""" operation.

  • On the post: JD Vance Brags About Being Able To Do Lots Of Watergates, Compares Himself To Nixon

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 30 Jun, 2026 @ 08:48pm

    He's right in another sense as well. Watergate wouldn't even last 12 hours today because the Trump administration does that every day before breakfast. Say what you want about Nixon, at least he still had the vestigial thread of shame to resign. He didn't try to pull a coup or have his own vice president murdered. I think Vance knows Trump would (quite literally) stab him in the back if it came down to it, but is making a calculated gamble that someone will succeed in taking down Tangerine Jesus and leave him with the presidency if only he can belch forth the required amount of nonsense until that day. I think he's an idiot who does a disservice to his country and the human race in general with that idea but there it is.

  • On the post: The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2026 @ 03:57pm

    Hold my beer. Gonna start a new Age Estimation as a Service company. The service rolls 7d20, drops the highest two results and guesses that to be your age. It can correctly select the age of anyone online, no matter how cryptic their attempt to fool the system, and better yet it's way more than 75% likely to get your age correct within +/-10 years in two guesses. And, best of all, it can charge the lowest cost to websites because it's algorithm is so inexpensive to run. It's fast. It's accurate. It's cheap. What's not to love?

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2026 @ 05:53am

    I don't take their word for it, but I do accept that if what they allege is true then there's an actual case there. They tried that case and I'm willing to accept the jury's verdict. That's the reason juries exist, to check the government's work and make sure they aren't just making shit up. Either the jury system works or it doesn't. Which is it?

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2026 @ 05:48am

    Once again... I am not in any way defending the sentencing. I too think the sentence is outrageous. How many times would you like me to write it on the blackboard that the sentence does not fit the crime? But the nuance is that there is a choice between getting off scot free and thirty years in prison. Did you read the link though? Because I'm not sure you did. Here, let me help you out. Items 33 and 34 (page 12). Rueda asked Sanchez to have her car towed away from its location parked outside the house of the guy with all the guns then go to her house and "whatever you need to do, move whatever you need to move at the house". You could make a case that it's telling someone to go hide or destroy evidence. Is that thirty years behind bars bad? NO, but it is, in fact, a crime.

    especially when an actual seditious terrorist only got 22 years and didn’t serve even a quarter of that before his pardon?
    Justice is not comparative. Just because someone else unjustly gets away with a crime is not a carte blanche to commit unlimited chaos and mayhem. I'm not defending Trump pardoning the insurrectionists. I think that's one of the most flagrant and disgusting acts of misjustice in living memory. What more do you want me to say about it? But continuing the compare the results of that to this is irrelevant. Believe it or not, some people oppose Trumpism primarily because of the chaos, criminality, incompetence, cruelty, and grift of it all, and the answer to that, the state of the world we wish to move things towards is one with less chaos, criminality, incompetence, cruelty, and grift. People like Maricela Rueda are not helping when they do stuff like this.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 04:27pm

    Thad comin' in hot with that no nuance, only rage take. Quelle surprise. Please. Be better than that.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 04:26pm

    A bunch of people with body armor come crawling out of the brush at midnight. A muddy longarm is found in the brush. Another muddy longarm is found in someone's car. Use some common sense.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 04:24pm

    There are absolutely details being left out. I tried to provide some above.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 04:23pm

    Go check out the link provided and think about that some more, please. You're a smart guy Stephen. There is some nuance to be had here.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 04:22pm

    Go read the link. That's why I provided it. Or you can sit here and make an opinion based on nothing but your own feels if you want. If what was alleged in the criminal complaint was proven in court... yeah, that guy needs to do some time. Thirty years is absurd but he may certainly have done something criminal.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 02:17pm

    Because if you’re going to play that game
    What game, exactly, do you think I am playing? I already said the sentences were indefensible. My only point is that these people are hardly innocent bystanders swept up in the actions of "one bad apple". I don't think they deserve the punishment they got but they deserve punishment of some kind.

  • On the post: He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2026 @ 01:37pm

    https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/media/1407136/dl?inline Whatever you want to make out of the sentencing (I do agree it was beyond extreme), and however much you think they were overcharged (I think they were), the evidence paints a very unsympathetic picture of what was going on that night. It was most definitely a bit more than some harmless protesting.

  • On the post: ‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2026 @ 05:14am

    Defamation in the US is very hard to prove in court. You need to show that the speaker knowingly said a false thing with the express intent of hurting you in some way. Simple lies or fraud don't rise to that level.

  • On the post: ICE: We Don’t Have A Database Of ICE Protesters, Just A Database Of People Who Are *Probably* ICE Protesters

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2026 @ 06:59am

    Negate Habeas Corpus With This One Neat Trick

    Your honor, we did not detain John Doe. We detained a person we think might be John Doe but we haven't yet done anything to verify his identity (and have no plans to).

  • On the post: You Have Less Than A Week To Tell The FCC That Carr’s Censorial Attack On ABC Is Nonsense

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2026 @ 05:29am

    Lemme put it this way. If you write your opinion of Brendan Carr on a sheet of notebook paper, crumple it into a ball, and throw it over your neighbor's fence, you will have vastly increased the reach and value of your opinions. Instead of sitting at your computer angrily typing a letter into the void, go talk to someone, anyone. Do one better and convince someone who hasn't voted in the past to go vote. Writing public feedback letters to the FCC is nearly useless in the best of administrations. Now it is quite literally useless. The practical value is not almost zero. It is zero.

  • On the post: You Have Less Than A Week To Tell The FCC That Carr’s Censorial Attack On ABC Is Nonsense

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2026 @ 04:24pm

    Because check and balance after check and balance has become weak kneed and vulnerable to graft and intimidation.

  • On the post: You Have Less Than A Week To Tell The FCC That Carr’s Censorial Attack On ABC Is Nonsense

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2026 @ 01:39pm

    So... you're asking people to write letters that will absolutely be ignored and which, even if they weren't, would be buried under a pile snowdrift of artificial spam? On the off chance that future generations will decide to sift through the hay stack of garbage to find needles of indignation and do what exactly? Sorry, that doesn't sound like a good use of my time or anyone else's. This isn't "participating in the process". There's no process to be participating in here. If you don't have at least a briefcase full of cash or a hot stock tip the very best you're doing is pissing in the wind and at worst you're legitimizing this nonsense and wearing out effort that could be better spent literally anywhere else.

  • On the post: Xbox: A Mess, Moving Back To Exclusivity Deals, & The Layoffs Microsoft Promised Wouldn’t Happen

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2026 @ 05:10am

    Maybe they'll finally sell some of the inactive IPs they are committed to never using again to someone who will? Nah. Who am I kidding? Xbox and the entire PC business can die in a ditch and Microsoft will become a 100% "the company that makes copilot" centuries before they sell IP of any sort to anyone for any price.

  • On the post: The SpaceX IPO Sends Elon Musk And Trump’s Starlink Cronyism Into The Thermosphere

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 16 Jun, 2026 @ 02:34pm

    while the investors walk out with whatever profits they could get over time
    What profits? SpaceX is never going to pay a dividend. You must make a profit to pay dividends. Unless Donald Trump literally hands control of the US treasury to SpaceX this company will never turn a profit. It is like rolling a fully-loaded mile-long freight train full of bricks down a runway and expecting it to spontaneously take off. If you just mean investors riding the hype and selling to other rubes investors then sure, I guess. A sucker is born every minute, but holy fuck. I suppose some congratulations are in order for Mr. Musk. He has somehow, improbably, managed to sell some terminally stupid idiots a bridge.

  • On the post: The SpaceX IPO Sends Elon Musk And Trump’s Starlink Cronyism Into The Thermosphere

    n00bdragon ( profile ), 16 Jun, 2026 @ 07:40am

    It's telling that you deep dive on why Starlink's dreams of becoming a major telecom are silly. It's not even that Starlink can't scale. Even if it did, even if you waved the magic pixie dust of rewriting reality to a universe where Starlink was as big and profitable as... say, Verizon, SpaceX still would make no financial sense. Starlink, as the only profit earning arm of SpaceX, earned between 4-4.6B in revenue the last two quarters. Verizon earns a pretty consistent 34B per quarter. So we have one company with a -90% profit margin and a Tuesday morning P/E of *snirk*... -288 vs the entrenched telecom oligopoly with a profit margin of 14% and a P/E of 11.47. Even if you assume that Starlink were able to scale perfectly, it will never make the kind of money that Verizon is and it will never erase the massive plethora of boondoggles that the SpaceX umbrella contains. This is a company that cannot possibly be profitable, ever, and yet it has a valuation six times over 14 times that of Verizon. Investors should ask themselves if they really think SpaceX is going to be multiple times more valuable than the entire US telecom sector. This is smelling more and more like the South Sea Company all over again.

Next >>