MrMcGasion @ MrMcGasion @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

294

Joined

2 yr. ago

I also don't want to end up locked in, sinking in a lake, like Mitch McConnel's sister.

I feel you. But at the same time, I'm also afraid that as they dismantle the government, the brain drain from departing/retiring federal workers and knowledge about how the parts of government (for example the NIH or the NOAA/NWS) function on the day to day (including things like historical climate data) will be lost in the chaos. I'm not paying attention now, because I think it will be more important to pay attention in a month. I'm not sure I'll be able to handle it then either, but I don't want some of what we do have to be lost forever because some assholes didn't like it, and the rest of us thought they deserved it. Maybe they do deserve it, but the rest of us don't deserve to lose it forever either.

Musk is ketamine-addled, his puppet is dementia-riddled.

It's just all tied up in AI and crypto right now. Because everyone wants to get in on the next get-rich-quick scheme. Coked-up investors don't have the patience to stick it out and wait for a return, they've moved on to shiny new toys (that have very little chance of real growth or market viability) and are gutting and cutting the games industry to pay for it.

Unless they decide they can't trust any of us to operate their hotline and decide to run it on AI. Then it will sound like premium treatment, but will be about as useful as our poor schmuck hotlines are.

While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn't get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling "stable" distros.

I'm not sure getting rid of presidential pardons is right either. There are cases of provably innocent people on death row who have been saved from execution by presidential pardon because the justice system otherwise failed them. It's not a perfect system, and it has failed more than it has saved, but until we reform the justice system (and probably ban the death penalty) stopping presidential pardons is a terrible idea.

Not sure if this is at all what you are asking for, but here goes:

As to the first bit I won't provide as many sources as I'm not finding many that bring it all together in an understandable way, it's basic economics of supply and demand. Here's a video that explains some of the basics of supply, demand, and tariffs (it's a bit jargon-filled, but I'm not finding much that strikes a good balance between understandability and oversimplification: https://youtu.be/3pSysspeCxY

In addition to the usual supply and demand changes that Tariffs bring, throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s a lot of US manufacturing was moved out of the country, to countries with cheaper labor. Often physically transporting the production line equipment from the US to China where labor was cheaper. So in most of those instances, our local production capability was reduced, and getting it back will require rebuilding it from the ground up (which oftentimes takes years). And that's industries where we have the natural resources (and harvesting/mining facilities) to supply local manufacturing, where we have to spin those industries back up it could take longer.

Moving on to the trade leverage with China. I'll try not to get too bogged-down with the history, but the US is China's biggest "customer" in percentage of their exports bought. But considering our rivalry, they've been wanting to change this for years, and are making good progress in becoming less dependent on the US buying their exports. In 2004, the US bought 21% of China's exports https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/2004/Summarytext and in 2023, even though the US imported more from China than 20 years ago, we only bought ~15% of their exports https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports-by-country - we're still their largest trade partner, but they have done a lot of work to be less-dependent on US trade.

Along with this, there's also a bit of a rivalry between the G7 (America, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK) and BRICS (Brasil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). There's a lot of complicated geopolitics in this, but the part that's relevant to trade is that the GDP of those nations has now surpassed the G7 nations: Here is a graph comparing the GDP of the G7 to BRICS countries over time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS#/media/File:BRICS_AND_G7.svg Essentially China now has other friends, that go to a different school (and they're actually real). And their new friends have money, want what China's selling, and aren't as likely to try to tell China what to do.

With regard specifically to the US relationship with China there is this from Biden's Tariffs from 6 months ago which contrasts China's response now to their response in 2018 when we had more trade leverage. https://www.reuters.com/markets/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stronger-china-trolls-new-us-tariffs-2024-05-15/

Here is a more recent article where a Chinese official says the the tariffs will backfire on the US https://apnews.com/article/china-economy-tariffs-us-commerce-trump-843769cd7175011d8e34be32cc8d045f

On one hand, less dependence on Chinese manufacturing by the US might be a good thing (one example I've seen of this is as drone warfare becomes more common, the US being reliant on China manufacturing the batteries isn't ideal). But there's a smart way to go about it (things like the CHIPS act that incentivize industries to move manufacturing to the US). If we don't get manufacturing back before implementing tariffs we won't have enough local supply to meet demand and prices across the board will go up.

Shifting to buying more locally can work when there are local businesses that can ramp up production easily to meet demand, it doesn't work when there is no local production that can be easily expanded, or when there aren't enough local resources to supply local manufacturing (for example lithium for battery production)

Also, trade has been our leverage keeping China in check, we need their stuff, and they need our money, so we get along. If suddenly we say "we don't want your stuff anymore, and we're not giving you our money" they're gonna turn around and sell more to India, Russia, and Europe. They'll be fine, but we'll both lose our leverage and toilet our economy for at least a decade while we try to recover from shooting ourselves in the leg.

Quite a few of the other Primary candidates were/are even more unqualified. It's a valid point that a presidential candidate should be someone with experience (and the humility to accept that they don't have the experience). But if otherwise good people never put themselves out there as candidates because they don't feel like they have enough experience, we'll be stuck with more geriatric old men like Biden and Trump running things forever. At some point a little audacity to think "I work well under pressure, and I'm more qualified than half the other candidates, why not give it a shot" can be a good trait, at least it's getting out there and getting busy trying to make the world better rather than what most of us do in assuming someone more qualified will run and then being disappointed by our available choices.

Four with Trump, but in two years we might be able to flip the house and senate and make sure Donald's last 2 years in office are miserable.

You'd also need to repeat the experiment as a control (ideally still doing as much of the same things to account for other variables). For best accuracy you'd need the same group returning another day, going through the same boarding process without takeoff, and tracking the exact time between wanks.

Absolutely agree. I'm only talking about the fleeing the country part. Those of us who can stay are going to have to put in a lot of work, speaking out against fascism, protecting those who cannot flee, and being generally rebellious against tyranny.

If anything those of us who happen to not be directly in their crosshairs have a greater responsibility to speak out for the groups that are going to be targeted, because it could quickly get to a point where it's dangerous for those marginalized people to be as vocal. We cannot leave the most vulnerable to fight alone for their right to exist.

Technically it's not a full 55% of my countrymen, just 55% of the ones who bothered to vote. I'll admit that's not really a meaningful distinction though. Unfortunately, there's also more of us who want to leave than the rest of the world can reasonably handle. I hope as many marginalized people can get out, because it's going to be bad, especially for them. But those, like me, who are unlikely to be directly targeted due simply to being lucky enough to be born straight, white, men should probably leave those limited seats for those who truly need to leave.

They actually recently (within the last few months) agreed to join a larger grid. So that should be a bit less of a problem this year. It is Texas though, so there's always the chance they turn around and shoot themselves in the foot.

China needs us economically as much as we need them for manufacturing. Sure, we're trying to be more independent and make more domestically, and they are trying to be more independent economically through BRICS. Neither country is doing a very good job of attaining their goals of independence, but to keep up appearances both countries like to simultaneously pretend there's not a relationship and also that they are the top in the relationship.

The reality is both countries have some wealthy "oligarchs" who exploit workers and governments that mostly only work to benefit themselves and their oligarch friends. China will take out an oligarch here and there when they decide they're getting too powerful, and Americans get to elect some of our leaders, other than that we're not very different. Deep down both governments understand it would be political suicide to antagonize the other to the point meaningfully harming them. At least both current governments that is, Trump is probably too dumb to realize we need each other, so that's a potential wild card, but North Korea is almost certainly a bigger threat to both the US and China than we will to each other for decades.

I still use DDG as my "daily driver" (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven't yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I'd like, but it's nice to have as an option, and I'm never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

And then once your person wins, shout at them every day about the things that are important to you. Pester and annoy them so much that they are both motivated to do what you want just to get you to leave them alone, and also so they have support they can point to to convince their colleagues to join the cause. We'd be in a very different place if we had demanded getting rid of the Electoral College even 10 years ago, and a vastly different place if we had gotten that changed 25 years ago.

I know it's a lot of work to stay loud about political issues all the time, but if you don't use your voice, someone will take your silence as contentment and nothing will change.

The kind who never knew the world before he got into politics, and the kind who think the things he says are funny memes and want to sow chaos in a poll that doesn't have any real weight. If they had to be serious, more of them probably would be, but it's not unusual for kids to goof off and be chaotic when they know their voice doesn't have direct influence on anything that matters.

If it was just AliBaba drop shippers it would probably be better, but rather than drop-shipping they're basically a US based warehouse and distributor for drop-shippers to be able to sell their garbage with 2-day shipping.