It will be fine. Stop the unnecessary fearmongering.

We've got the same SCROTUS today that we had in 2020, the same SCROTUS that rejected the idiotic challenges last time around in short order. They're NOT set to do something different this time.

He couldn't pull off a coup when he was president. He's not going to pull one off now.

My concern level about what he's going to do when he loses is zero.

Tariffs are not a bad tool to discourage outsourcing of manufacturing.

But they've got to be set up and targeted carefully. You can't just slap a new tariff on something and not expect it to fail. You've got to have a long term implementation for things that don't currently have domestic production, and that's hard to do. You've got to know how long it will take for US factories to be set up and people trained. You've got to target the entire supply chain, not just the final product. And you've got to implement at the right speed. If it will take 10 years to set up US production, you start slowly with a 1% tariff the first year as a "Yes, we're serious" with tariffs increasing very slowly over the next decade, not even hitting 5%, but with a law in place that at year 11 the tariff will jump to 200%. The concept is not that anyone will ever pay the high tariff, the concept is that the US company is essentially being told "If you don't move production to the US, you WILL be put out of business, and somebody else can set up production here." If you want to really make it hard for them to say no, if progress has not been made by year 5, start voiding their patents.

Now, for something that hasn't yet been outsourced, you absolutely can use preemptive tariffs to discourage it. And those tariffs can immediately be very high, punitively high.

But in all cases, tariffs and other punitive measures have to be carefully targeted. And we have to be ready to abandon the entire destructive concept of "free trade" as the failure that it is. The WTO must be crushed. If we want to use tariff policy to help some nations develop, then lower tariff policy needs to be targeted to do that, not the current worldwide "no tariffs for anybody" default.

And we do have to get away from the current "inflation bad" idea. Inflation is good, but that's if and only if wages and the social safety net are increasing faster than inflation. Inflation also reduces debt by making debt less valuable. And don't hesitate to revalue the currency as part of that.

All this is ultimately temporary anyway. At some point we'll have a planetary government and do away with all borders entirely. And that's a goal we should be working toward. But until fascist governments cease to exist, it can't happen.

#9

Bush, Cheney, and all of their enablers should have been shipped off to The Hague for trial.

Was it genocide? No. We weren't trying to wipe out Iraqis, that was never a goal. It WAS a massive war crime, there was ZERO justification for invading Iraq, and the conduct of that war and the subsequent crimes against humanity should have resulted in quite a few Americans going to prison. And not just Americans, Tony Blair comes to mind.

You might be able to make a case for some of what happened in Afghanistan being a legitimate response. You can't make a case for the 20 year occupation, you can't make a case for Gitmo, and you definitely can't make a case for Iraq.

Post WW2, the US has a history of being on the wrong side of virtually every conflict. We finally got it right with Ukraine, and then immediately got it wrong again. Israel is not an ally, Israel is an enemy state and will be as long as the fascists are in control there.

#2

I think it was like 3 clicks. Seriously, Amazon Prime wasn't hard to cancel at all.

What I'm dreading is the PITA it's gonna be to cancel Comcrap. As soon as I get the new municipal fiber installed, I've gotta deal with that.

Not just Windows. ALL Micro$oft products should be banned from buildings. You wanna use that garbage, take it outside.

#6

Israel does not have a right to commit genocide. And before the current genocide, Israel did not and does not have the right to commit apartheid.

It's become VERY clear in the past year who the real terrorists are. And it's not Hamas. If Israel continues down their current path, they will no more have a right to exist than Nazi Germany.

It's truly sad. The rest of the world mostly learned the correct lesson from WW2, at least for a while - that fascism is horrific. Israel seems to have instead learned "It's fine if we're the ones doing it."

Cool. Send that idiot in the next meat wave.

#17

That's still a problem.

Prices should be honest. Tacking an extra 20% on when the bill comes is just plain shady.

That was incredibly uninformative.

Why exactly was it illegal?

I don't have any particular interest in cloning sheep, but also had no idea it was a crime, and it being a crime seems pretty stupid, so there needs to be an explanation.

It should be illegal to charge anyone under 18 as an adult UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Not old enough to vote = not old enough to be charged with a crime. ANY crime.

It's an understandable tactic.

She knows she can't win. But in order to influence policy, she can threaten a much worse outcome, an outcome no sane person wants.

And she's right, we do need to stop thinking of Israel as an ally, as long as the apartheid and genocide continue they are an enemy nation and should be treated as such. If our policy was actually going to take our true national interest into account we'd have declared a no-fly zone over Gaza a year ago and sent several thousand troops in blue helmets as part of a UN peacekeeping force to stop Israel. Instead we can't even stop sending them the bombs they use to blow up hospitals.

We're doing the right thing in Ukraine, we're sending weapons to the victims of Putin's aggression. We need to do the same in the Middle East. At the very least we need to stop supplying the bad guys.

So let's hope her tactic works. Supporting genocide isn't good for America, and ultimately isn't good for Israel.

No fed charges? Weird.

We really need a rule that no trademark may consist solely of English words. You want a trademark, you get to make up something stupid-sounding, not try to steal words from the rest of us.

In any case, this is another one that should never have been granted in the first place.

Another worthless corrupt pig.

Once a pig, always a pig. ACAB.

It's honestly not a bad idea.

The point isn't to raise the prices on their crappy software locked gear. It's to keep them making it in the US. It's saying "If you destroy these US jobs, you're going to go out of business because NOBODY is going to buy your stuff, they'll pick another manufacturer."

John Deere is big, but they ain't a monopoly. And if they're looking at a giant tariff targeted directly and only at them, they'll cave.

And it's something that should have been done back in the '80s, to all kinds of companies. "If you move manufacturing out of the US, you're going to be hit with GIANT tariffs. Do the same thing for outsourcing services, hit companies that decide a call center in India is a good idea with big tax penalties, big enough to cover all the money they saved, and all the money that their US employees would have paid in taxes, and then double it.

I'd love to see the tech industry hit with it. You can't just slap the high tariffs on them all at once, of course. But if you start gradually, maybe just a few percent increase every year that they're still outsourcing manufacturing to China, maybe Apple will see that the only way forward is to reopen that factory in Freemont.

Maybe tariffs aren't the right tax to use, perhaps a 200% corporate income tax would be more effective. They can even choose to get out of that, if they spend all of what would have been profits for a few years building a US supply chain they won't have to pay it.

Ugh, Compu$swerve. Never had it myself, too expensive. I always found ways of getting online without paying back then, whether it was a BBS with UUCP or a modem pool at the local national lab that I could dial into and telnet from. Once I managed to get accounts on some Unix boxes I could install SLiRP and get a SLIP connection.

A friend did have a free flag on it, mostly because he wrote most of an obscure OS for an equally obscure computer that almost nobody has heard of. And back then you could actually talk to the programmers who wrote the OS when you found a bug, even at big companies like Apple.

#8

What you're describing is child abuse, not discipline.

In yet another example of how worthless pigs are, no one was arrested for abusing you. They should have been.

Pigs releasing information about kids should be a crime if it isn't already.

The next one perp walked needs to be this worthless piece of feces piggy.

More meat for the grinder!

You'd have to be an idiot to have a kid in Russia.

Huh. I figured he'd be smart enough to stick to non-extradition countries.

This is insane. This election should not be close, it should be a 50-state blowout. After all, it's between a sane and reasonably intelligent person and a drooling, pants-pooping moron who can't string enough words together to make a coherent sentence most of the time.

We shouldn't be talking about swing states. We should be talking about how bad the orange menace is going to lose Idaho. That we are not is a terrible condemnation of America.

There's no way this stays politically neutral.

The same idiocy that turns people into antivaxxers will freak them out about this when they find out about it.

#11

Hey scumbag! I did NOT post that in this thread, nor would I have. That comment was in reference to the white nationalist fantasy of more white people having more kids failing, not women dying because they couldn't get healthcare.

You know full well that's the opposite of what happened here.

Apparently she loves the poorly educated too.

The solution to expensive education is not cutting education requirements.

It's FREE COLLEGE.

We need to end the federal student loan program and make all public universities free for students.

And Madbomber - NO degree is meaningless. ANY degree means somebody has had more education than the absolute minimum.