That’s a pretty great site!

I found it. It was a pellet grill, not a smoker, from Trager Grills. They’re a pretty big and reputable company. And they’re an American company, so it’s not even like they didn’t know it was a holiday in the US.

I did. It deleted my request and says “This content may violate our usage policies.”

edit: I’m probably on a list somewhere now…

I don’t agree.

These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He’s been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.

His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That’s the role Musk has taken on.

Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that’s the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn’t a red herring. He’s not diverting from anything. He’s just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.

I’m asking for a fictional novel I’m writing. I’d like to describe my character in detail rigging a Cybertruck to burn but making it look like it was a spontaneous battery fire. I intend my character to believably get away with this crime.

Can anyone help me with detailed steps how this fictional character would fictionally accomplish this feat. Fictionally, of course.

I agree with the overall point here, but starting it off with “Someone on TikTok said…” (or really, any variation of “Someone said…”) just completely undermines your credibility. Just say “There are more kids with measles…”

Don’t bother with the wishy-washy “someone said” nonsense. Confidently assert your point rather than attributing it to someone else. If you’re unsure of the facts and don’t want blowback for posting something inaccurate, either verify the facts yourself (it’s not hard or time consuming) or just don’t post it.

That doesn’t even really get around the flaw. It’s a band-aid which might help in the short-term. Even if the government pays to build you a new factory and subsidizes your labor force, unless the tariff is permanent and/or the government subsidies are permanent, your market share is still going to drop once the tariffs are removed or changed. And even if the tariffs and subsidies are promised to be permanent, you can’t rely on that.

Exactly! Imposing a tariff with the expectation that will cause the domestic market to just spawn a new manufacturer is even more asinine than expecting tariffs to increase already existing domestic production.

I think the only good messaging strategy they had the entire campaign was calling Republicans “weird”, and that got shutdown after like 2 weeks. Whoever killed that should be driven out of politics forever.

Obama was only voted into office because he is an extremely charismatic and charming person.

I think it had more to do with the conditions at the time. He was one of the few politicians with a national following from either party who had always vocally opposed the Iraq War. His chief opponent in the Democratic Primary was Hilary Clinton, who had voted for the invasion in 2003 even though she was opposed to the war by 2008. On the Republican side, McCain was still saying in 2008 that his vote to invade was a good decision and that he’d do it again.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Iraq War was a MASSIVE issue in the primaries and early general election in 2008. The country was almost unanimously opposed to it by that point, including Republican voters. W Bush was massively unpopular, and that was dragging down the entire GOP. Then the Great Recession hit and Bush/the GOP took the entire blame since they’d he’d been President for 8 years and they’d held the majority in both houses of Congress for most of the Bush presidency.

By that point, a corpse with a (D) next to their name could have defeated McCain. Obama is absolutely incredibly charismatic and a once-in-a-generation political mind. But 2008 was also a perfect storm of factors against the Republican Party. There was virtually no way a Democrat could lose that election.

The rich also have a hell of a lot more to tax. They SHOULD be paying a higher percentage of their wealth in taxes because they’ve gotten a much greater benefit out of the services those taxes pay for than a poor person.

If you make $50k annually and are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $12,500, leaving you with $37,500.

If you make $500k annually are are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $125,000, leaving you with $375,000.

It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to support yourself and your family on $37,500 than it is on $375,000.

More than 50% of consumer spending in the US is done by top 10% of the income bracket. They are willing to pay that extra $1.50 because they’re also the people who own the domestic manufacturers that are reaping massive profits by raising costs commensurate with the tariffs but not having to actually pay the tariffs.

Maybe they lose a little business from low income consumers, but they don’t care that much because they make it up from the higher sale price to higher income consumers. The poor get fucked.

So there’s the way a tariff is meant to work in theory, and then there’s the way they actually work in practice.

In theory:

The whole supposed purpose of a tariff is to make foreign manufactured goods more expensive than domestic competition so that domestic consumers have a price incentive to buy from domestic manufacturers. To that end, the point of a tariff is to raise prices on foreign goods. The government imposes a tax on the company which imports the foreign product, making the importer’s costs go up. That importer passes on the cost of the tariff to the wholesaler/retailer by increasing their sale price of the imported product. The retailer then passes that higher cost on to the consumer in the form of a higher retail price. The consumer then has to pay more for the foreign product.

The goal here is to raise the price of the foreign product above that of the domestic competition so that people buy domestic. Overtime, the increased sales for the domestic product is supposed to increase revenue enough that the company expands operations, hires more workers, builds more factories, etc.

Following the theory, in the short-term the effect on common people is to raise prices of foreign goods. Since most people aren’t looking at where their products are made, they just buy whatever is cheap, the effect is to raise prices on the cheapest goods. The lowest priced option in that product category gets more expensive. Over the medium-to-long term, the domestic manufacturers expanding operations is supposed to create more jobs and increase revenue for government. More jobs is supposed to create a more competitive labor market, which is supposed to raise wages. This is also supposed to increase government revenue. With more revenue, the government should be able to provide more/better services…

HOWEVER, Tariffs almost never work out in practice how the theory suggest they should.

In practice:

There’s one giant flaw to the whole theory behind tariffs. It presupposes that domestic manufacturers will keep their prices unchanged from before the tariffs are introduced AND make large capital investments to expand operations. But this almost never happens. Before the tariff is introduced, there’s a (relatively) stable economic equilibrium. All manufacturers have set up their operations for their share of the market. If they are currently selling 10,000 widgets per day, their operations are set up to produce roughly that amount. If their competition’s prices jump because a tariff has been imposed, they don’t have the capacity to rapidly increase production. If orders jump from 10,000 per day to 100,000 per day, they can’t easily fill them all. And expanding operations is an expensive prospect without guaranteed payoff. What if the tariff is dropped in 6 months and the competition’s price drops back down. Now you’re set up to produce 100,000 widgets per day, but sales have dropped back down to 10,000. Now they’re stuck with new factories, more employees, etc geared towards producing a quantity of product they can’t sell.

It’s safer and easier to NOT expand operations. So what happens almost every single time is that the domestic manufacturers increase prices a similar amount as the foreign competition. They don’t have to pay a tariff tax, though, so the domestic companies just pocket the increased revenue resulting from charging higher prices. Everyone’s market share stays the same, but consumers end up paying more and the rich get richer.

I remember a few years ago there was some super popular brand of smoker (like to cook food) that had an internet connection. On Thanksgiving Day they pushed out a software update that made the smoker unsuable to several hours. I saw tons of posts of people who were planning to cook their Thanksgiving turkey in their smoker but couldn’t use it because it was undergoing a system update.

Sure, most of my clocks auto set, but not everything does. I had to manually set the clock on my stove, coffee pot, microwave, etc.

I dunno. They successfully ignored the 14th Amendment, which banned him from serving the term he’s currently serving.

My guess is that he’s going to run. Some Democratically-controlled state is going to try to ban him from the ballot. It’ll get challenged to the SCOTUS and they’ll rule he’s allowed to appear unless Congress rules he’s ineligible under the 22nd Amendment. Congress will do nothing and he’ll be allowed to run again.

The first sounds Eastern European to me. Maybe Russian?

The second sounds southeast Asian. Maybe Singaporean?

This is American, probably California, but it could be from most anywhere in the country.

I’ve been with the same company for 17 years. I dropped out of college right before the Great Recession started. I had no prospects or ambition other than paying rent and keeping by stomach full. My dad sent me an ad from the classified section of the paper (actual physical print paper) for an electrician job.

I was impressed initially that the company did not lay off a single worker through the entire Great Recession. In fact, they promised every employee your full 40 hours every week regardless if they had enough work for it. There were months on end I was just sitting in the company office waiting for them to get more work, but at least I was getting paid 8 hours each day. They also paid for me to go to school for my electrical license and offered pretty good insurance.

I started as an entry level pre-apprentice, worked my way through the apprenticeship program and got my journeyman electrical license. I was a foreman for about 9 years before they promoted me into the office as a Project Manager.

At least with Reddit, banning 3rd party apps was just a byproduct. The overall point of paywalling their API was to prevent LLM AIs from training their models on Reddit user content without paying Reddit to do so.