Absolutely, in a rapidly developing corrupt oligarchy, you’re going to see the people in power rapidly distill into two groups, the ideologically committed and the aspiring oligarchs, and I think you’re going to find the latter group is significantly larger than the former.
I’m increasingly convinced Democratic leadership is in on it.
That’s the American spirit that I, as a Canadian, want to see! It’s your country. Don’t let them take it!
Goodbye, Tesla, and good riddance. Some salutes will never be forgotten.
Speaking as a software developer, software developers should stick to their lane. There is plenty of stuff the very best software developers are stereotypically terrible at. “Programmer art” is a genuine phenomenon illustrating our lazy, half-baked efforts to create things that we are not expert at. Apparently, “Programmer politics” is another such area of non-expertise, because the tech bros ideas are a fucking stupid fantasy.
Well, if anyone wants to marry a Canadian, I’m single.
The Hilux is a perfect example of why tariffs won’t work the way Trump wants them to. The Hilux is not offered to the North American market because a retaliatory tariff applied over 60 years ago due to a trade dispute involving chicken (it is now known as “the chicken tax”) the original reasons for which are largely forgotten to modern consumers, yet the tariff has remained in place ever since. Rather than incentivizing the makers of trucks like the Hilux to move production to the US to bypass the tariff, instead the market for such trucks simply vanished, and manufacturers never bothered investing any effort to bring it back, because… why would they? There’s no profit in it for them.
The tariff hangs over the entire product category like a sword of damocles. Nobody will import them here, because they would need to be specially customized to meet domestic regulations and customers won’t pay for the tariff on the imports nevermind the redesign, so all they would be left with is a bunch of unsellable prototypes . And since there’s no way to test the viability of their products in the market, nobody can make a case to invest in building them here either, because the tariff could be gone tomorrow and they would instantly be put out of business by cheaper imports of the rich variety of light cargo vehicles used throughout the world. The tariff creates an insurmountable risk/reward mismatch that no sane company can ignore.
You can argue and nitpick about economics all you want, the proof is in the economy itself. If you think tariffs work, go ahead and buy a Toyota Hilux. I’ll wait. Some people have been waiting 60 years. It still hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to.
At least until they sneak it into VS Code’s telemetry. …only sort of joking.
Honestly I’ve been worrying for years that the only way the US is going to resolve this division and hostility within their country is by breaking up, possibly largely along red state/blue state lines, and hopefully not triggering a violent (or god forbid nuclear) civil war in the process.
But I can say as a Canadian, if it does come to that, and you guys can’t take back your country (which I really think you can, once you start to accept what is happening and accept that it’s gonna hurt and you dig your heels in anyway, I don’t think there’s anyone who will be able to take you down, not even Trump and crew), then we would be absolutely happy to quickly rebuild and strengthen our relationship with most of the blue states. And however you end up wanting to arrange yourselves in the end, we’ll work with that. And if you guys genuinely wanted our help, our resources, our logistical support, even our protection (what little we can provide), if things were to start looking like actual civil war, I’m sure we’d absolutely be willing to figure out what sort of arrangement is actually going to work. We’d have to at least initially discuss it as equals and as partners though, I don’t think we’d ask you or coerce you to give up your sovereignty, any more than we’d want you to take ours. But if the intention to join Canada was a popular attitude, I expect we’d be willing to consider it, probably after some cooling-off period though to make sure it’s not just a passing fad. The progressive parts of America are the parts we’ve always loved. If you guys come knocking on our door needing a couch to crash on we’re not going to ask how long you need to stay, we’re just going to go find pillows and blankets.
They’re not worse than the US, but they’re not better either. Two dictators don’t make a democracy, and they never will. Having a choice between two dictators is not a great choice to begin with, and we shouldn’t feel forced to choose the lesser of two evils.
Besides, there is already a beautiful and relatively prosperous economic union on the other side of the Atlantic that almost perfectly aligns with our values. They need us right now, and we need them, and I think we would be absolutely foolish to prioritize anything else at this time.
Nah, set it to broil for optimal results /s
Part of the reason the USA has gotten to this state is because we allow unverified sensationalist slop like this to get the public’s attention and be used against them. We’ve already seen 1 bullshit study linking vaccines and autism that is STILL being widely circulated and used to this day to convince people not only that vaccines are bad but that the whole GOVERNMENT is bad. Look at the results.
Now we’re going to convince people toothpaste is bad using the same quality of “independent research”?
I mean, it depends what you’re willing to call “research”.
The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
I’m not sure I would put this on the same level as a controlled, reproducible double-blind peer-reviewed study by Harvard and MIT published in a prestigious journal, but I’m sure it’s really close. /s
Edit: Ok, so people argue she’s at least a little legitimate, but why the fuck can’t we use actual scientific institutions anymore? We have a scientific method for a reason. Where’s the peer review? Where’s the people reproducing her results?
If the USA were still a sane country I would argue that SpaceX’s technology needs to be nationalized so it can be used responsibly for the advancement of humanity, especially the bulk of humanity still living on Earth, not in pursuit of profit and ownership of exoplanetary land grabs while polluting the skies and low-Earth orbit with trash.
Unfortunately in the current political reality it seems the opposite is happening, and SpaceX is going to corporatize the nation instead, and then move on to setting up the TechBros as the emperors of the solar system. I don’t think this is an accident, I think they saw the writing on the wall and realized they had to strike first.
Ugh, don’t give him any more reasons to attack Canada please.
That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.
Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.