Not sure if serious. Recession is almost certain, and the only fiscal “stimulus” that’s likely to come is tax cuts. Will probably turn into a depression. But even the Great Depression had a huge amount of fiscal stimulus and progressive reforms to help get out of it. Not to mention, the crashing of the economy appears to be purposeful:

He tariffed countries with no people and trade deficits of thousands of dollars, and tariffed Ukraine.

We live in a capitalist society (unfortunately). Rich people hoard their capital during recessions, which means fewer job openings. I graduated HS during the 2008 recession, and it took me 6 months of applying everywhere I could to get a temp job in a factory paying minimum wage (and no benefits or any job security at all, of course). It was literally hard to get a job at McDonald’s or Wendy’s. IIRC, it took nearly both of Obama’s two terms for the job market to recover to what it was. So yeah, you may be able to find a job after a lot of hunting, but everyone’s so desperate they’ll accept anything. The way things are going with deregulation and all that, I wouldn’t be surprised if company-towns make a comeback (which, incidentally, is kind of like the corporate city-states people like Peter Thiel, who worked with Musk and groomed JD Vance, openly talk about).

I think a lot of them are ideological psychos. Saw an interview with Forbes magazine founder, and he’s giddy about these tariffs because he thinks they’ll enable tax cuts. I don’t think he cares if his shares tank or whatever, as long as he doesn’t have money “taken away” from him to help the poors.

Meh, I think it’s fine and good for countries to specialize and be dependent on each other. Keeps the peace through mutually assured economic destruction. Global upticks in isolationism preceded the World Wars. Also, it just makes sense, because different countries have different resources, and their populations are differently skilled.

He wants to use tariffs (which act like a flat-tax) to lower income tax on the rich. There’s speculation he’s also doing something like the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which involves devaluing the dollar (causing inflation). If wages don’t rise with the inflation (which they don’t want), US labor will be more competitive, so people can work in factory jobs with pay analogous to current Chinese factory workers.

Yeah, almost seems like it. I am convinced they are at least doing something like the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” to devalue the dollar, unseat the USD as the global reserve currency, inflate debt away, and make wages low enough and people desperate enough so more manufacturing is viable in the US again.

Everyone in the presidential line of succession are monsters. The entire government is being reshaped into a totalitarian state. A full revolution or counter-coup is needed. I don’t see a revolutionary movement being organized any time soon. Maybe if we get into Great Depression-like conditions. I think the amount of surveillance, well-developed counter-intelligence tactics, and power of the state in modern America would still make a revolution very hard to pull off though. I suppose extremely popular mass civil disobedience could also bring everything to a halt and make the US ungovernable; not sure what would actually happen to the government though.

It’s not really speculation that they want to weaken the dollar and dethrone it as the world’s reserve currency; it’s in Project 2025. Stated goal is to transition the US back to a manufacturing-heavy economy, instead of service, tech, finance, etc. Probably won’t work well, but that’s what they’re trying to do.

Didn’t mean to paint entire religions. It was just a convenient way to differentiate the 2 people I was talking about, and to imply where their motivations may come from. I’ve known plenty of less right-wing Catholics and Protestants. I am an anti-theist though, and think religion does more harm than good.

Yeah, these people are ignorant of and don’t care about civics. The ignorance of the one guy surprised me, because they went to a decent college, but didn’t even know what gerrymandering was. They are un-american, IMO.

I know a couple life-long Republicans I sometimes briefly talk about politics with (one family, one acquaintance). Neither of them like Trump, but like the idea around Project 2025. One is an evangelical Christian, the other is a Catholic.

The Catholic strongly believes government should be run like a business, and the president should be like a CEO, so he should be able to fire everyone and replace them, if needed, with workers that will execute his plans. He’s also an anti-abortion, and tough-on-crime/immigration type. However, he strongly disapproves of Trump seemingly being pro-Russian now, Trump and his cabinet’s personal lives (he’s always strangely fixated on people’s personal lives, in a moral sense, for some reason), the take-over of the FBI and CIA, and the tariffs hurting his stock portfolio.

The evangelical Christian just doesn’t like Trump as a person, and doesn’t like Russia. He’s a just-world-hypothesis, small government, women are subservient, pro-business type; but also low/lower-middle-class, and has needed, and will need the social services he opposes. I guess his opinions are pretty similar to the Catholic’s, just a little more extreme on the social side, and supports policies that have always hurt him. I mean, Republican policies hurt the (fairly wealthy) Catholic too, but at least they get to say their taxes are lower and there’s less red-tape.

I bought a used PSVR2 recently for playing Gran Turismo, but was surprised how cool the gunplay is in some games, so have mostly been playing Resident Evil 4 (which I already had from buying a collection of used games, but never played).

I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this.

The same investors that poured (and are still pouring) billions into crypto, and invested in sub-prime loans and valued pets.com at $300M? I don’t see any way the companies will be able to recoup the costs of their investment in “AI” datacenters (i.e. the $500B Stargate or $80B Microsoft; probably upwards of a trillion dollars globally invested in these data-centers).

If your tax dollars are being used to fund the unjustifiable murder of innocent people

🌏🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀

Not a Republican. I assume Trump is making backroom personal deals to get the world’s politicians and businesses to bribe him in some way. Aligns with how he seems to operate with everything else.

IDK, ketamine is kinda similar to alcohol; more psychedelic. As someone who has always struggled with depression and has done ketamine, it does seem like it would be a good fast-acting, but short half-life anti-depressant (the afterglow lasts well after the buzz). Never knew anyone who abused it habitually, long term. Heard it messes up your bladder.

Ever since I switched to GrapheneOS, Vanadium has been working well. Never had a problem with Firefox + ublock, or Librewolf (except with a corporate intranet webapp that specifically required users to use Chrome).

Yeah, idk what the other guy was talking about. But, I’ve ridden with someone that apparently got dependent on that automatic braking feature. He “used” something like 5 times during a 1.5 hour trip.

Not sure about the insurance thing. Dunno if they had insurance to cover that. I know home insurance doesn’t cover arson. I know of a factory owner that burned down his factory and tried to make it look like an electrical failure because his insurance apparently didn’t cover arson. I remember a dealership and all its cars burned up during the BLM protests, and the owner claimed he didn’t have insurance.