Same. Not even sure what we’re talking about, but same.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, and I sit and have this and other similar conversations with my brother, and they always boil down to change. And it’s a devil you know kind of argument, but the devil we know (establishment politics) has whittled away at the middle class consistently since it’s explosion in the 1950s. And it’s more than just policy, but down more to things like interpretation of the constitution and separation of powers.

And so we are in for a wild ride, and the smart thing for Democrats to do would be to put up their own candidate who stands to be the antithesis of Trump, and not this amalgamation of populist ideals, but a platform for change across the board. I like AOC for that, but we won’t get that. We will get another establishment Democrat who tries to run on the same policies they just lost on, or whose platform is blanket undoing of Trump policy. The Democrats need to not be an anti-Trump party and instead be an actual progressive party.

Half the comments on any given post are a reproduction of some memeified response.

They are the party of status quo. Say what you want, but Trump will buck trends. Unfortunately, it’s just in all the wrongest possible ways. We needed someone with the combination of confidence and stupidity that Trump has, but stupidity for good.

I think that definitely sounds reasonable, and I think, if there’s any hope for these tariffs to actually meet their stated purpose, the government of the US would need to just say, if working conditions don’t meet the same standards, there will be additional tariffs. I think that’s exactly where tariffs ought to be applied, when some country takes advantage of, essentially, human rights. We don’t have the right to stop them, but we do have the right to tax their products for it, to the point it’s not worth it.

Obviously, that’s not how things will go.

That last part for sure resonates. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but our prices have been subsidized by substandard working conditions in China, there is no way around it. And all because large corporations wanted to make more money. And we, as consumers, shouted a resounded “hell yeah” to those Chinese suicides at Foxcon, because we wanted cheaper components and cheaper phones.

And so I basically don’t know how I feel about anything. I try to be more cognizant about what I buy, where it’s from, how it’s made, but the speed and ease, and basically not having to think, sometimes trumps those thoughts.

The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn’t meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we’ve been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it’s a comeuppance.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what’s going on.

Decade old specs for decade in the future price.

I have not looked beyond the front page of the link you shared here, and I don’t mean my criticism to be more than tongue in cheek, but oh boy, $2k for that is… Something.

I think the tariffs are going to make amazon’s business model suffer. Can’t say I like them, but when 90% of my search results are items with random all-caps names, I don’t think I’d buy them if they were 34% more expensive.

And this is perhaps me using the wrong term (translator v. interpreter), as I’m talking about speaking and not writing. I can never remember which is which, if there is a distinction.

I worked with a translator yesterday. She teaches courses, but she said she does translation because the money is good. I’ve worked with her for a while at this point, as well as dozens of other translators, on nearly a daily basis. They’re very much still in demand.

Yep, I interact with a couple different ones two or three times a week. I see them more than I used to.

It’s cool, I love Smedley as well, greatest Marine ever.

Yeah, I joined the Marines in 2009 and we were the first class at PI to do the Combat Fitness Test. But there’s that word again, and it ends up being another PFT. Even I could 300 the CFT and I was never a PFT stud, just pretty good. But neither tested my mettle like walking really far with a bunch of shit on my back or not sleeping.

Personally, fitness tests is a fitness test and has nothing to do with combat. I’ll always remember our company high PFT in SOI dropping out of the 25k hump. The guy who literally “set the standard” by being the fastest and doing the most pullups was on the ground saying he couldn’t walk. Nice kid, but toughness doesn’t necessarily equate with fitness.

And once I got to my unit I decided there were plenty of Marines who didn’t belong there, and that there were women who could probably outdo them. Of course, this warred with my desire to walk around in my silkies and make homoerotic jokes with my buddies, but perhaps that’s not the whole point.

Starring Cuba Gooding Junior Jr.

That’s great. I’m glad and I would love for it to be the case here. Legalization can, at the very least, open up the doors to the glories of capitalism as far as industries to help people with drug addiction, and presumably we’d get the benefits of good clean drugs and all that.

None of that has to do with smuggling fentanyl into a foreign country and your (deserved) deportation afterwards. Also has nothing to do with an administration who thinks it’s funny to post an AI generated image satirizing it. Both of those things are no-nos, in my uneducated opinion.

I’m all for drug legalization. It’s not legal, and trying to somehow justify someone coming to America to traffic in fentanyl, which is a straight up killer, is incredibly disingenuous. And Oregon decriminalized drugs and had to walk it back because it became a problem.

Like I said, I’m in favor of it, but that’s not what we are dealing with. Someone who crosses a border to sell a deadly drug isn’t out here to help people. And if some American rolls into Portugal and starts selling fentanyl, I can assure you it ends up in that person getting removed from Portugal.

Yeah lemme go to my local fentanyl shop. Because she trafficked fentanyl.

non-X link