EDIT: As fate would have it…

I just got back from a PT appointment.

… The driver (local charity service for the broken and broke)…

Yep. She was from Iowa.

We got to talkin’, I told her about my (former, before being goddamned maimed) line of work.

I had to… spend most of the conversation explaining that software development… and IT… generally refer to completely different things and require significantly different skill sets.

But uh, she was very cheerful and upbeat, with meaningless folksy aphorisms applied wildly out of context, to go along with a bafflingly out of touch assesment of how easy it will be for such a bright young man to find a job. (I am 35.)

… What a world.

I can’t really tell too much of the … specifics of your business from what you’ve said, and that may be intentional on your part, which is entirely reasonable, don’t want to doxx yourself…

…but hey, as long as you are at least being realistic with your employees and not promising things you can’t actually promise, you have both my sympathy and empathy.

… I am not even sure you aren’t just a sole proprietorship, given that you never use ‘we’ and always use ‘I’ and ‘the business’ interchangeably.

But I must caution:

Fortunately, I have a good relationship with my supplier, and parts of these orders are going to sit on the shelf with my name on them to be picked up in the near future, helping push out my cost.

I have never met a small business owner who does not say they have a good relationship with their supplier, unless they are actively suing them, or just about to do so.

Usually its more like ‘great’ or ‘outstanding’, or ‘rock solid’ if they really have 5 to 10 year plus history with them, with either 0 hiccups, or very good communication when hiccups are or are about to occur.

… Good luck.

…

I used to do executive level reporting and analysis for a fairly major international logistics middle man coordinator.

I can only imagine my old office now, everyone running around with their hair disheveled, fielding non stop phones ringing off the hook.

Like uh…

https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3dca7b6?wgt_ref=USDHSCBP_WIDGET_2

That is the ‘de minimis’ exception, for individual orders of less than $800 being exempt from tariffs… which was how SHEIN and Temu and Alibaba/express… sent the US cheap consumer (and also many industrial) goods directly from manufacturers in PRC/HK … this is the closure of that exception or loophole, formally, in the CBP customs rules.

Thats all now at a 120% tariff, so your 40 dollar youtuber plushie is now… 88 dollars.

Starting June 1st, up to 200%, or 120 dollars.

I’ve seen reports that basically everything on SHEIN has roughly tripled in price already, as of this weekend.

… Everyone who has a dropshipping side gig, or merch store or some kind of ‘i use tiktok to sell scented candles i picked out the scents for and designed the container’… yeah thats all pretty much done now.

Fucking yeeeeeehaaaaw, this gonna be a wild ride.

… There are a lot of domain specific, contextually distinct ways one could interperet what you just said.

Could you be more precise?

I can think of at least two, totally different, practically opposite in meaning, ways of interpreting your comment, off the top of my head.

Oh, sure, a 23 yo intern and some VC bro fuckwad yeah, ok, yep, no security clearances whatsoever but fuck it, they just have Q clearance level access now, they just have SIPRnet access, their own accounts.

We already know other members of Elon’s parade of imbeciles at DOGE can’t even fucking figure out how to not expose their own remote logins to other government systems, and they’ve been getting those accounts hijacked by IP addresses in fucking Moscow already.

What could possibly go wrong?

DOGE continues to be the grandest scale, most insane, ongoing ‘cybersecurity event’/‘treason’ in history.

If anyone other than these fucks, in this exact situation, were doing this, they’d be getting black bagged by people who don’t exist and sent to facilities that don’t exist… possibly to many seperate facilities, at the same time, in many pieces.

I don’t even know what to say other than to drop into Tom Clancy lingo and say these fascist morons are actual clear and present dangers that warrant sending the guys that you’d send to go after the Rainbow Six guys if one of them goes rogue.

This is the Garry’s Mod version of GMan waltzing and trapezing into Black Mesa with a hoard of T posing Kleiners with physguns stuck in their crotches flailing about behind him, and then giving the two Kleiners that didn’t accidentally kill themselves by flinging props around, giving two of them just direct access, personal, remote log ins to, uh, the trunk lines set aside for for only secret, top secret, and all kinds of compartmentalized classifications levels of info.

Gman’s employers could be mapping out the network as we speak, spreading out laterally and trying to figure out ways to embed themselves with persistent presence.

jfc.

Oh weird, I misread that as public being skeptical of the idea of Elon’s life expectancy projecting forward beyond Q4 2025.

Hah!

What a silly mistake I made!

Because confirmation bias is a superior substitute to basic research, how else would one inform themselves about the world?

/s

What I’m suggesting is I am asking ChatGPT to validate my idea that all Filipinos have the same beliefs, wherever they are, almost as if their worldviews are entirely determined by their racial/ethnic origin.

Please stop and maybe read the things your write outloud before you post them…

… and you’d be wrong.

It does resemble a terrorist attack…

But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)…

They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, ‘suspect is well known to the department’… gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another … every month or other week.

At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says… that would require a political or ideological motivation.

The CoP … you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn’t. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with … seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.

If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.

Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just… very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.

Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.

Yeah… fingers crossed, I guess.

Historically speaking, basically, yes, the capitalist class essentially always sides with a nascent fascist movement as it is opposed to making any truly meaningful concessions to workers.

But it is important to note that fascism is, or arises from… an ostensible capitalist democracy … in decay.

It arises as a reaction to the over exploitation of the capitalists.

The fascists are always incompetent idiots at actually running anything, actual policy… beyond being brutally indimidating and violent bullies.

But! They promise growth and stability.

Morons believe them. Many of these morons… are the capitalists.

This works well for a while, but eventually, fascist mismanagement leads to the capitalists actually having a whole bunch of their businesses collapse, as the economy broadly suffers, or maybe its war time babyyyy and oh well turns out that its also bad to fund endless foreign invasions and/or be invaded yourself.

But, by then, its too late.

The capitalists sided with the fascists initially, to avoid structural concessions to workers… but now that everything is fucked, and/or dear leader / the party has some incomprehensible zany nonsense plan… well now the capitalists mostly get either outright or functionally nationalized, and lose even more than if they had just gone with the comparatively more minor concessions to workers.

Poison chalice.

Prisoner’s Dilemma, game theoretic suboptimal outcome, that humanity just keeps replicating with minor variations and new flavors.

… Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was…

America follows Seinfeld rules:

No hugging.

No learning.

… Larry David is even writing poignant political satire pieces just right in the New York Times now!

There was an episode of Comedians in Cars like a decade ago now, Jerry just muses something like… God, is NYC just gonna be nothing but corporate coffee shops and banks?

Yes. Yep. That is what happened.

Yeah, put super simply:

Minimize needed actual storage space and time a thing spends in storage… by relying on very frequent and consistent logistics.

Its very efficient in the sense of minimizing operating costs…

But it is also extremely fragile, a minor perturbation can fuck shit up for weeks or months.

… And we are getting… well basically the most major disruption in the history of JIT as a logistics paradigm.

Cost of living is too high, put it on credit.

Your alternative is starve now.

Either way, this is about to get a lot more bonkers in roughly the next 30 to 60 days as Just In Time delivery… kinda just, stops working, and grocery stores will have to both raise prices and ration items per customer per week to deal with shortages and try to minimize in-store injuries and deaths.

Go look up a compilations of black friday shopping stampedes.

Imagine that, but for groceries, every time a grocery store restocks… for the forseeable future.

Yep.

This means the 4th Amendment is dead.

Oh, any LE agency wants to search your house? Your car?

Uh, hrm, which very vaguely suspected migrants live in your building, your neighborhood?

2 miles away? Whatever, close enough.

Ok, now you’ve got ICE at your door, on the flimsiest evidence, connected in the flimsiest way, to a person suspected on a different set of flimsy evidence…

… And they are just searching your place because random guy may have been in the area, might have burgled you, whatever, who cares, we’ve got a warrant, lots of guns, do not interfere with our investigation.

This comm does actually have a rule that you are to replicate headlines precisely.

Have… have we all learned yet, by now, that basically 90% of managers and bosses are literally idiots who only understand buzzwords, vaguely, uselessly?

… Their jobs are easier to automate than ours.

Reminder that during Covid, Elon bought a bunch of CPAP machines (for sleep apnea), sent these to various hospitals, claimed he sent them ‘respirators’, and then claimed it was a conspiracy against him personally when hospitals told him ‘these are not respirators, they will not work, we cannot use them’.

Damn, that’s… quite the line up of Steam Deck related devs, shit.

Welp, I’m convinced.

That sounds very much like certain white trash family members in my family/extended family, and family of neighbor kids I grew up with.

Utterly shit people who have objectively fucked up or failed at nearly every opportunity ever presented to them, never seek out or attempt to create their own opportunities… but also somehow just infinitely smug and self confident about basically just random unremarkable nonsense details of their lives.

And of course, are never wrong about anything and are literally incapable of genuine introspection.