But there will be some people who assume that if a Federal employee is handcuffed/arrested/forced out, that they must have done something wrong.

I think you are making a mistake in assuming that publically resigning is “avoiding doing something”.

I never assumed that, I agree that public resignations are good - or at the very least, appropriate.

You suggested that some people may see an arrest and assume the worst. That is always a possibility. In fact, it is an inevitability that someone will assume the worst of anything you do. That is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing something - anything - in general.

It’s a common mistake that you should avoid doing something because someone somewhere might take it the wrong way.

The narrative will be twisted, the lies will be spread, the propaganda will work. None of that is a reason to stop fighting, because none of that stops happening when you stop fighting, and very few of those people would have joined your side anyway.

Make them arrest you. Make them explain why. Sue them in court. Make them explain why again under oath.

We’re not dealing with the OG Nazis, who meticulously recorded their evil for the world to see. We’re dealing with new age Nazis, who set their national security messages to delete automatically and like to pretend that the FOIA doesn’t exist.

Use every tool at your disposal to slow them down, document their crimes, and cause Good Trouble.

If we can never have any choice other than a 2 party system of Republican and Democrat, maybe we could at least start having something like a mixed cabinet, so that the policies and mandates being created are more representative of different ideas on different issues instead of any single ideology.

I genuinely don’t mean to be snarky here, I promise. I’m sorry to say that you’re literally reinventing congress. The executive branch has become so bloated and overpowered that it sounds reasonable to hold elections for the Cabinet, because it is a group of people that write the policies of the US government. But that just further entrenches the Executive as the central source of power and policy.

The more appropriate and democratic (and more likely to succeed) response is to dramatically downsize the power of the presidency. The only reason Trump is able to do so much damage is because Congress gave the presidency in general most of that power and now specifically refuses to take it away from a senile criminal narcissist.

The executive has only grown so large because the parties constantly use the Presidency as a scapegoat and a sledgehammer when it should be a figurehead and a scalpel.

I don’t think they’d be able to control the narrative at all if done correctly.

If you get ahead of the firing, notify the news, and force them to trespass you, this headline could instead say “Trump handcuffs/arrests/forces out IRS Acting Commisioner for refusing to hand over taxpayer data to ICE”

Eventually, he vanished when his WiFi connection abruptly cut out and ended the stream

He didn’t and it didn’t. He experienced lag, but he stopped playing before his character died on screen. He could have very likely survived if he continued any movement input. The stream didn’t cut out abruptly, his video remained clear and he spoke before ending it manually.

He was upset about the incoming messages and used the lag as an excuse to log off. He was willing to blame his own product rather than spend one more moment on camera. He’s a weak little man who craves the validation of gamers and internet strangers and absolutely cannot handle being bullied.

Great points! And these price increases aren’t just important for the consumers. Profit margins are thin enough as it is. Entire businesses will close because they simply can’t afford to continue operating.

A sudden 10-100% increase in cost of materials will cripple the very industries these tariffs are supposed to “protect”!

Just because someone died AND had covid doesn’t necessarily mean they died from covid, but that’s what they were doing. That was a fact. It’s just a matter of how many.

Just because someone survived a covid infection AND died 6 months later doesn’t necessarily mean they survived covid, but that’s what they were doing. That was a fact. It’s just a matter of how many.

Patients’ bodies and lives were ruined by covid, but they technically “survived” long enough to test negative.

Their heart, brain, and/or lungs never fully recovered. They never returned to their original body weight. Many of them never even got out of bed again.

They died slow, agonizing deaths, in isolated wards.

Many of them never understood why.

Many of their doctors would list their cause of death as “heart failure” or “stroke”.

That was a fact.

It’s just a matter of how many.

This has happened before. The stock market is irrational and volatile, and a bounce back does not mean the economy will be okay. It won’t. The administration’s own sources that “justify” and “calculate” their tariffs confirms that it will only hurt the US economy.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of its numbers. But it got it wrong. Very wrong. I disagree fundamentally with the government’s trade policy and approach.

Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Jenny Tang and I studied the tariffs placed on Chinese exports in 2018 and 2019. (This is the “Cavallo et al.” reference in the government’s methodology.) We found that tariffs of, say, 20 percent caused domestic importers to pay nearly 19 percent more. This represents a pass-through into import prices of about 95 percent, which is the value I would have plugged into the government’s tariff formula. In simple terms, that implies that the price paid for U.S. imports would rise almost as much as the tariff rate.

[…] Wednesday’s reciprocal tariffs will bring average tariff rates to their highest level in over 100 years. Their breadth is striking, hitting large economies such as China and Europe, and also small developing and emerging-market countries including Jordan and Zambia. And despite being billed as a “do unto others” trade policy, they are not calculated in line with the Bible’s golden rule.

I would strongly prefer that the policy and methodology be scrapped entirely. But barring that, the administration should divide its results by four.

Emphasis mine. https://web.archive.org/web/20250408161636/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-tariff-math-formula.html

We don’t even understand what caused the incomprehensibly fast rate of expansion after the Big Bang known as “cosmic inflation”, but basically JWST has confirmed that the rate of acceleration of the universe is, itself, accelerating beyond our models. Everything, everywhere since 0.01 quectoseconds¹ after the Big Bang has always moved faster than we could predict, and we don’t why!

“What the results still do not explain is why the universe appears to be expanding so fast! We can predict the expansion rate of the universe by observing its baby picture, the cosmic microwave background, and then employing our best model of how it grows up over time to tell us how fast the universe should be expanding today. The fact that the present measure of the expansion rate significantly exceeds the prediction is a now decade-long problem called “The Hubble Tension.”

1. Quecto, the smallest metric SI prefix, 1*10^-30, is still 100x too large to measure the time between the Big Bang and Cosmic Inflation.

Protests of any kind are great places to find like-minded individuals. People who believe in freedom as strongly as you do. Talk to others about ideas you have. Swap signal contacts. Make connections.

But I don’t think they actually care if people are in the streets since it doesn’t affect them at all.

If the public didn’t worry them, they wouldn’t invest so much money and effort militarizing police, villainizing protestors, manipulating the narrative, and black-bagging activists like Mahmoud Kahlil.

The illusion that the wealthy don’t care what the poor think is a part of the system working as designed. They want you to think they don’t care. They want you to think protesting is pointless.

They don’t want you to feel connected. They don’t want you to feel like you have a community around you that agrees with you and supports your cause. They don’t want you to stand in a crowd of tens of thousands and think “boy, there sure are a lot more of us than there are of them.”

Do whatever you can! Get in some Good Trouble.

Major price shocks do not cool down consumerism unfortunately. The culture doesn’t respond to economic swings that way. People just suffer.

Extremely well put. The individualism really is weird and terrible. The main character syndrome is part of what takes away the agency, I think… Like, we need to hear The Call To Adventure. We need The Plot to show up at our fucking house. We need to be The Person that Does The Thing in the Room Where It Happens. The Founding Father. It’s all or nothing. Either the thing we personally do somehow fixes the country, or we don’t do it at all.

Maybe we imagine that we can be the hero and shoot the bad guy and save the day. But we can’t imagine, like, Fixing Things. Deciding what the future holds. What would that even look like? Boldly waving a parchment in the air? When would everybody cheer for me in particular?

No, it doesn’t look like an individual. It looks like a crowd. It looks like people, outside, angry. I hope enough people see that in time.

Cheers to Good Trouble.

I know Trump is dumb. I know his administration is dumb. I still can’t fathom that someone is this stupid.

Oh but it can get more stupid, don’t you worry. The following is a quote from Trump’s Trade Representative, where they describe how the tariffs were calculated:

The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).*

What is this recent experience that the Trump administration learned from, you ask? Cavallo et al studied the impact of Trump’s tariff on China in 2018! What else did they find?

US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports as a result of the tariffs, while China’s was much less affected. The paper clearly shows American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else, and the Trump Administration “read” that paper and publically cited it as a source on a government website.

Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States… Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods… [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs

*Please note while prices remained stable in response to that one tariff, Cavallo did not suggest it was a generalizable fact. It’s not.

TL;DR:

• Research shows Trump’s 2018 tariff hurt US importers’ profit margins more than anyone else. They paid the cost (that time) to keep prices stable.
• It also shows China’s reciprocal tariffs hurt US exporters much more than it hurt China’s importers.
• The Trump administration legitimized this research when they cited it in their flawed reasoning that domestic prices always remain stable after tariffs (they don’t)

Thank you for the insightful contribution ‘PM_Your_Nudes_Please’!

Really though, you have my sympathies and you’re absolutely right. Of course tragedies and disabilities can break up marriages. It doesn’t necessarily mean that either spouse did anything wrong.

Anything that changes a person can change a relationship, and anything that changes a relationship can end the relationship.

Don’t sit and wait for better opportunities. Fuck the lists. Band together for some of Booker and Lewis’ Good Trouble. Get out on the streets. There are millions of people who are just as upset as you are, and every voice added to the crowd multiplies the reach.

Most of them are so isolated that chaos in the streets really wouldn’t change their lives or opinions

Emphasis mine. This has been said about every single ruling class ever. It has been proven wrong many times. The wealthy are afraid of the lower classes. Their lives depend on the status quo, and their lives change when the status quo changes. Otherwise they wouldn’t press so goddamn hard on the boot.

Except that this 4D chess move is not going to make the wealthy a fortune. Dismantling the global economy will only hurt, everyone, in the long-term. Including billionaires’ profits. Just the threat of tariffs is enough to do that damage. Whatever short-term gains anyone might make on a market dip are going to be completely washed out by the long-term losses of destabilizing international trade on a whim.

Even if it is “according to plan”, it’s a stupid fucking plan, and it won’t work.

He should just flashback to the first segment, “apologize” for taking it out of context, and quote the Dr’s “context” while holding a rusty canoe and waving his eyebrows suggestively at the camera

Seems like a formatting thing, thanks. I’ll stick to just inline hyperlinks instead of footnotes I think

This is nonsense that gets spread way too often. The wealthy benefited from Covid, but they did not benefit from the Great Depression. Billionaires are shortsighted hoarders who can’t help but screw themselves over in their race to the top end. They really are so fucking stupid and greedy that they will crash the economy by accident, AGAIN.