alt Hacker NewsIt's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.
If you think this is smart then you may as well go around clubbing old ladies over their heads, as long as you don't get caught it's like free money right?
The alternative is not to forbid companies from selling those rights, the alternative is to undo this deal and pay the whole amount back to those that originally forked it over and who needed to sell these 'rights' in order to keep their companies alive.
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>It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.
Where's the extortion? The "it's a nice shop you got there..." racket only works if you can strongly influence whether the damages occur (ie. you tell your goons to attack the shop, or not). So far as I can tell however, that's not the case, because Trump wanted the tariffs to stay, and was sad that they got revoked. Going back to the mob analogy, it would be like if the mob boss asked for protection money, the goons didn't damage the shop, the mob boss was sad that the shop didn't get damaged, and then went to to find some other way to damage the shop (ie. section 122 tariffs).
Self-dealing by someone connected to the state, yes. Extortion, no.
It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.
How is it extortion? They could have gotten a different deal from anybody else or no deal at all. Nobody was twisting there arm or forcing them to deal with this one company to sell their tariff claims.