manxu

Of course he would. It would be a massive shift of taxation towards the middle class and especially the lower classes, and on top of that, he personally gets to decide who gets to pay and who doesn’t; how much and when, and especially why or why not.

The agent who led the raid said his personal GPS led him to the wrong place.

Easy-peasy: add the GPS maker to the lawsuit and SCOTUS will know what to do to protect the job creator.

“They do not put this same effort behind, say, school shooters or people who shoot up concerts.”

I think the real question here is: how many lives were saved by insurance companies temporarily being scared into not ludicrously rejecting valid claims?

If it’s more than one, then Mangione played the trolley problem in real life and decided an outcome.

I sort of start having the sense that America will have a hard time finding buyers for its $5.7 trillion debt.

I think that’s exactly what David Hogg is doing with his primary challenges to moderate Democrats in safe blue seats. It makes no sense for one party to be moderately left when the other party is hard right, regardless of how toxic the political environment is going to be. If you only really have two parties, they have to both occupy the center (pre-1970) or both be somewhat ideological.

It’s funny how the magic trick actually works: you force companies to affix information to a product, the consumer reads and reacts to the information, and the company has to create products that satisfy the informed demand.

Looking at you, Apple and Samsung, removing features from your products simply to force your customers into an ever more closed ecosystem.

Sadly, nothing new. The vulnerability of io_uring has been well know for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_uring#Security

I thought that was the plan all along?

Honestly, everything you said may be true, but the only thing that matters is the last sentence :-)

a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade

It’s been around for 5 years, and this nutbag in Waukesha found it. I am pretty sure it wouldn’t have been hard for law enforcement to know what was going on, if they had been looking.

Generally speaking, the problem when you don’t repay your debt is not that other countries invade you, but that you don’t get any new loans.

If America can get a new currency, default on her debt, and at the same time manage a balanced budget, all is good. Otherwise, who’s going to come up with the loans required?

I fully agree with you on the current liquidity issues, and certainly on the loss of manufacturing competitiveness that comes with having reserve currency status.

My main economic concern with Trump’s policies is simply that “advanced” economies will never really be able to compete in the manufacturing field again. Trump should know - he is surrounded by the richest men in the world, and the only one that does any manufacturing at all, and only as a side gig is Musk. All the other ones only do digital and finance/investment.

I agree that Europe probably doesn’t want to get into that space at the moment. I am afraid Europe is pushed into doing a lot of things right now it didn’t and doesn’t want to do. The decision point would probably come if Trump’s tariffs are really just paused and start being enacted. Then Europe will have to massively increase its trade with other nations, which will also have to do the same thing, and then using USD becomes incredibly impractical, especially with the wild swings it is going to have if tariffs are re-enacted.

And, again, totally agreed. This will require a lot of changes, and they will be painful. It just feels like there aren’t a whole lot of alternatives.

I am confused by the article’s insistence that the Euro is not a viable alternative because it’s “one currency, 20 countries”. If anything, the sheer number of countries make sure that a single election is not going to affect financial and economic policies all that much - which is the main reason for the USD’s fall from grace right now.

I’ve heard it called, El Azkaban. Catchy.

They’re convinced everyone else in the world HAS to do business with us

That seems to be a widespread opinion amongst a lot of the international elite. Germany thought Putin was never going to risk war because it would kill his European fossil fuel revenue and destroy his economy.

Then Putin himself did the same thing, thinking he could starve Europe in a fossil fuel winter.

I think that’s the key. We attribute to them special qualities because we like to think in terms of cause and effect. But they all seem to have just been there at the right time with the right people and the right thing.

They show us there is nothing special about them every time they try to do something new and miserably fail. Think the money Meta spent on VR, or the way Musk alienated users and advertisers on Twitter.

We are basically beholden to lottery winners.

Million, not billion. But the 20% deductible probably means that insurers can’t get that money, because the way it’s stated they’d have to pay out more than 20% of their (total) premiums for coverage to begin.

Reminds me somewhat of when Paul Bremer, Bush Jr’s “vice-roy” in Iraq, decided to disband the Iraqi Army overnight, leaving tens of thousands of heavily armed Iraqis stranded without a job or source of income. IIRC, that’s how the Iraqi insurgency started.

2025 feels like a completely different century than 2016. Whatever reasoning there was for the UK to do its own thing then, it’s obsoleted by the new realization that the biggest partner and ally of both the EU and the UK seems to have lost interest in both.

I think that’s what the Cybertruck is for, to appeal to Conservatives. I live on the edge between blue and red counties, and down in red territory the Cybertrucks are everywhere. (Meaning I saw at least four different ones.)