activescott's Notes

Public notes from activescott

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Monday, November 3, 2025

The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: Nuanced opinions are compressed into viral slogans; attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices; algorithms love conflict, inspiration, outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11.

One worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them. Polls show that the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is too liberal increased sharply between 2012 and 2024. The percentage of voters saying the Republican Party is too conservative fell during that same period. Even the violence and corruption of Trump’s second administration have not fully closed the gap: A September poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 54 percent of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal and 49 percent thought the Republican Party was too conservative.

But what happened over the past 15 years is that the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right. For all the talk of what the Democratic Party should learn from Sanders and Mamdani, there should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Manchin or Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Sarah McBride. The party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement.

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His primary win was a spectacular repudiation of the pollsters, who with glossy charts and graphs try to induce the public to consent to middle-of-the-road, incrementalist politicians who give up before the negotiations have even started. Meanwhile? The median age of first-time homebuyers has soared from 33 years old during the pandemic to 38 in 2024. If that’s pragmatism, is it any surprise that no one’s interested? “It’s not about money, it’s about will,” Mamdani told Stewart.

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  • 90K volunteers on his campaign!

Politics is not something that you have, it's something that you do.

It's an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we've talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare, these are not just slogans. These are commitments. And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you're living through. And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.

It's not about money, it's about will.

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“Trump’s Take” is a real-time financial tracker documenting the cash and gifts that President Donald Trump and his family have received by selling the presidency. For our purposes, the family includes President Trump, Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump, hereafter referred to collectively as the “Trump family,” but excludes Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Trump has made most of the cash by launching his own crypto ventures—reversing his outspoken, skeptical stance on crypto—while aggressively deregulating the industry. Trump takes a cut in cash from the trades and sales of the family’s coins and tokens along with stablecoin interest. The “take” is the cash he has received calculated in real time, based on actual trading activity and stablecoin interest. It can only go up. We have also added the value of the gifts, legal settlements, and the income from Melania Trump’s documentary paid directly to Trump or to his presidential library.

Due to the complex nature of these earnings, which are channeled through multiple financial vehicles, our calculations are constantly being updated and refined. A comprehensive methodology detailing the determination of the Trump family’s crypto income is available here.

We have excluded income from assets Trump had before his November 2024 election victory—including real estate, hotels, licensing deals, and more—even though their value has inarguably increased as a result of his election. We made one notable exception by including income from his first crypto venture, World Liberty Financial Inc. (WLFI). WLFI launched in September 2024, and nearly all of the income from this venture was made after his election in November of the same year.

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It’s not that the Trumps are the first to leverage the presidency for profit. Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, promoted Billy Beer—and took money from the Libyans. Richard Nixon had his brother Donald’s phone tapped amid concerns about business dealings. Hunter Biden received more than $1 million for artwork of questionable quality. But no first family has used the office to make as much money as Donald Trump’s.

Crypto is the big driver, but additional funds have come from advising right-wing companies in America and partnering with cash-rich firms overseas, especially in the Middle East. Family members who never had significant fortunes of their own—Eric, Don Jr., Barron and Melania—have accumulated tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars. All told, the family (including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner) is now worth an estimated $10 billion, having nearly doubled its net worth since last year’s election.

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Your stopover in the United Arab Emirates, where you will reportedly seal a deal relaxing export controls on sensitive U.S. technology, is poised to showcase this new level of grifting – and it will come directly at the expense of U.S. national security.

You and your family are financially tied to World Liberty Financial (WLF), a crypto venture that recently launched the stablecoin USD1.3 In March, prior to the official launch of USD1, your crypto assets – including WLF holdings and your $TRUMP meme coin –accounted for nearly 40 percent of your total assets.4 Your holdings in WLF have clearly expanded your wealth since you took office and will only further expand it as USD1 issuance grows.

On May 1, Eric Trump and the son of your Special Envoy Steve Witkoff announced that Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX will use USD1 to complete a $2 billion dollar transaction with cryptoexchange Binance. 5 In selecting USD1, the Emirati-backed fund will likely pay hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction fees, and WLF will be able to reap returns on any investments it makes with the $2 billion deposit. In essence, WLF – and you and your family by extension – are receiving a cut of this deal.

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Ford’s electric pickup has been America’s best-seller for quite some time, but digging deeper into the numbers reveals why Ford chose gas and hybrid trucks to bring in higher profits. The company sold 10,005 F-150 Lightning EVs in the third quarter, a healthy 39.7% increase year-over-year, but nowhere near the 207,732 F-Series trucks sold during the same period.

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“For larger retail, electric utilities, the economics are unresolvable,” Farley said. “These customers have very demanding use cases for an electric vehicle. They tow, they go off-road, they take long road trips. These vehicles have worse aerodynamics and they're very heavy, which means very large and expensive batteries.”

A Ford spokesperson later clarified to InsideEVs that Farley was specifically referring to large, customer-focused "utility" vehicles—SUVs like the Ford Expedition and so on. Despite some setbacks and the cancellation of its large three-row SUV, Ford is far from done with EVs, however. The automaker is planning a midsize all-electric truck that is a kind of quasi-F-150 Lightning successor; a family of from-the-ground-up EVs on its so-called "skunkworks" platform; and a broadened series of electrified vehicles, including hybrids and extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs), which Farley elaborated on during the call.

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I see trees of green Red roses too I see them bloom For me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world

I see skies of blue And clouds of white The bright blessed day The dark sacred night And I think to myself What a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow So pretty in the sky Are also on the faces Of people going by I see friends shaking hands Saying, "How do you do?" They're really saying "I love you"

I hear babies cry I watch them grow They'll learn much more Than I'll never know And I think to myself What a wonderful world

Yes, I think to myself What a wonderful world

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Sunday, November 2, 2025

Turn key on (do not start), turn radio/AC/fan off, set parking brake. Turn key off. Turn key on (do not start), wait until air bag light goes out, wait 3-5 seconds, then buckle and unbuckle the seat belt 4 times, ending with it unbuckled, wait for seatbelt light to flash and then stay on, then buckle and unbuckle one more time. That's it !! You can drive it around the block with your seatbelt unbuckled and the warning on the screen will stay on, but NO CHIME !!

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Saturday, November 1, 2025

the biggest takeaway was Trump’s willingness to add sanctions to those imposed under the Biden administration.

“This is the first set of sanctions from President Trump after he returned to the White House,” said Weafer. “And the fear now is that now that he’s broken, kind of like the seal, as it were, that if he is dissatisfied with any progress with Russia going forward, then he may come with more and more damaging sanctions.”

“So many of these measures have been implemented too slowly and ... a little bit at a time so that Russia has had time to adapt and to prepare and to prevent and to react,” Perrotta Berlin said.

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