Lmao 35% of the country loves this shit, 15% are on the fence whether it’s bad or not, and 50% dislike it but a lot of those don’t dislike it enough to actually do anything about it.

Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.

This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.

I may legitimately lose my supposedly magical and highly important American manufacturing job because of this shit and these dumbasses think that this is all a genius move that will finally Make America Great Again. Everyone else I know who works in manufacturing is feeling the same way. One of my coworkers is mildly Trumpy and was talking about how he thinks it’s a negotiation tactic and was shocked when I said I think the people in charge are just legit stupid and think tariffs will magically make things better in their own right. He didn’t have anything to offer as a rebuttal he just seemed surprised that anyone would think Trump isn’t a turbo genius who is secretly making 5000 IQ negotiation moves.

Let’s put it like this- Skyrim is as old now as Final Fantasy VII was when it came out. If you had asked me then if Final Fantasy VII was an old game when Skyrim came out, I’d have said yeah.

There are no truly successful talks with Trump. Even if you make a deal he’ll decide he doesn’t like it next week.

The historical Arians were a pretty diverse group, much like the early Christian church in general. Arius, the person whose teachings the Arians were named after, was North African, and there were Arians throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

FYI “Aryan” is the word you’re looking for. “Arian” is an early Christian sect decried as heretical in the later Roman Empire

Trump thinks inelastic demand is when people want non-stretchy pants. I think he legitimately thinks this will happen and is just stupid.

It kind of fell apart when Trump lost in 2020 and Q (a.k.a. Ron Watkins) stopped posting after Jan 6. QAnon style beliefs are pretty mainstream in conservative circles now, but QAnon as an organized set of beliefs kind of fell apart without continuous revelation from Q himself. It’s kind of funny, Q actually posted again a couple years after and nobody really cared because they had sort of moved on. The QAA podcast (formerly QAnon Anonymous) put forth a theory that QAnon arose as a way to explain why Trump wasn’t actually making America great again even though he was president, and so it’s possible that it will come back in the second president. I think it’s definitely possible.

Yeah you can see this by the stock market bump from his election to his inauguration that investors largely believed it would be a good thing, and then he actually became president and started doing stuff and it immediately went back to normal, and now he’s just destroying the entire economy doing shit he said he was going to do and business people are all surprised Pikachu about it. No sympathy for them. The only people in America who deserve any sympathy are the ~1/3 of the American people who did literally anything to try to prevent this. Fuck the 1/3 who voted for Trump and fuck the 1/3 that became politically disengaged enough to not do anything even more. This is a corrupt and vile country and we deserve everything we’re getting.

“Man if it’s this bad under Trump imagine how bad it would have been under Kamala!” Or “At least we kept men out of women’s sports!” I think people who think this will impact Trump’s popularity at all with his core base are delusional and haven’t been to a Trump district. These people will never abandon him. Their devotion to Trump is like a religion. Even if Trump said Christianity is a false religion and all the Christians are stupid for voting for him a decent number of these morons would keep supporting him because everyone is a Trump whisperer and everything he says that they like is true and everything he says that they don’t like is a joke or trolling. There is no God but Trump, and Fox is His Prophet.

I think it’s worse than that. I think he legitimately thinks this is a good idea, and the sycophants that surround him are too afraid to oppose him.

I think the reason it’s not 100% is that Trump could say “lol jk guys I’m not actually going to destroy the world economy to own the libs” or Congress could theoretically stop it (lol) but yeah I think it’s probably optimistic because even if the tariffs don’t go into effect the chaos caused by them is already happening. I work in chemical manufacturing and the outlook seems very bleak, but most of my coworkers are Trumpists so they’re just in denial about how bad it’s going to be while management is tiptoeing around the fact that they’re already laying people off because of Trump’s expected antics.

Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.