I don’t doubt the reputation of the writer or his general knowledge of economics…

But this is coping. The Trump administration is trying to wave their hands around and create a giant fuss for people like us and this writer to speculate on and create debates and panels to think about… while he and his people simply walk out of the white house with the treasury and all the inside investment opportunities they will ever want.

He’s just making chaos, plain and simple. These ideas about his master plan to disrupt the world’s reliance on the US dollar? Distraction and coping.

I agree this administration is more clever than we give them credit for, but any house thief can step up their game and pull of a heist when they set their mind to it, it’s not some kind of magic skill. If anything, I think it’s harmful to assume Trump is at all smart or has a plan because this makes a lot more assumptions than the most simple answer which is almost always the correct determination. He is making a mess because his ONLY plan is to make you think he has a plan. He does this with literally everything he says or announces, why would anyone think this is different? This is EXACTLY the fucking delusion I was railing against in another comment. There is no plan. Nobody is coming. Stop thinking others are smarter than you or have a backup plan.

My evidence? We’ve done all this fucking before, this is part 2 of a failure of a presidency. He didn’t change the world before, he won’t here. (Other than diminishing the US role in geopolitics so Russia can take center stage, all he really wants right now)

Reminder also, that the electric grid is more complicated than this. We in America won’t lose power if he flips a switch, instead our municipality will be forced to purchase power from other sources. You won’t be inconvenienced, you will just have to pay more.

Save for maybe full-scale nuclear war, the end result of every possible action by this administration and the people responding to them will ALL have the effect of making each of us pay more. This is the plan, this is why they’re doing it, they’re trying to drain the wealth of the average American so we become like any other developing nation with a massive population living in shanties and a wealthy elite who control everything and have no limitations to what they can do, because all the governing systems and oversight has been stripped. This is the plan, it’s not particularly clever, but it works fantastically well, just ask every other nation that’s been toppled from within by obnoxious authoritarians. America is not immune.

Our only real hope here is that they move too fast and make people uncomfortable enough that people start rallying sooner than later. The ousting always comes, the worry is that it will be too late to save democracy and all the myriads of systems that have maintained a functional nation for a couple centuries.

Those are just terrible employees who likely have such a sedentary way of working that they serve the same dozen clients every week and feel put out by anyone they don’t know.

Go back and fucking do it again. Seriously.

Punish them for not handling their goddamn job like professionals. In fact, when you go back to do it again, casually mention that you’ll be writing the branch manager and you’re glad they’re able to go to such lengths for you. I am not even kidding, they’re being passive-aggressive by performing this big act and deserve to lose even more of their time and patience. You don’t owe them anything, much less an explanation, you pay all their paychecks. You’re the person who has the money, they should be falling over themselves to make sure you, the guy with the money, is taken care of and secure. Their entire business model depends on making people feel comfortable leaving their money with them. You’re the boss.

Well he might seriously get us into a literal war with our neighbors, but it’s not because he gives a shit about politics or international anything. He’s doing a cash-grab right now with and for his donors and sponsors and his family. He is not serious about anything he says because he’s not telling anyone what his actual motivations are.

Serious in this context doesn’t mean “not joking” but rather means “with a real intention of affecting political change.”

Years of propaganda showing fetuses as fully developed babies with like, wives and families at home waiting for them to be born. This is why they’re trying to crush science and reason, because it points out flaws in their emotional arguments. Emotional arguments that were spawned by people manipulating them for decades, the original purpose long since forgotten, so that now it’s just “culture” among conservatives to view other people’s pregnancies this way.

The wildest glimpse into our human failings of reason is on full display with the right though, because they have ZERO qualms about getting their own abortions. When they do it, it’s different. It’s a clump of cells or an unthinking organism when it’s them.

He’s using serious channels and conventions to deliver deeply unserious ultimatums in order to consolidate attention and create confusion. He will do the same exact thing as the tariffs if it gets to a point of actual mobilization.

“Trump withdraws troops from Canadian border for fifth time this month”

And while everyone is reeling and scared and wondering what the fuck will happen tomorrow, Elon and his little cronies are literally hauling cash out the back door.

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Now if only an AI could actually find the square root of anything. They can’t do math, at least the models I’ve tried. I am aware that if they could do math, it would be a big deal, but really if it can’t analyze the actual content in my work files then it’s useless to me. It’s good at finding mathematical answers by putting in what you expect to get from 120 X 15.5, but doesn’t actually know the difference between 1860 and a picture of Judy Hopps in lingerie, and would be equally satisfied giving you one as the other.

I have a note scrawled on a torn piece of notepad paper, stained now, wrinkled from being folded and unfolded, kept and tucked away, found, thrown away, dug back out of the trash and kept again.

I wrote it in the depths of despair, one night after self-medicating with everything I could find and nothing worked, after trying to sleep and sleep not coming, after walking in circles around the block, after creating a new manifesto for my future and then throwing it away because it was hopeless. Then I had a brief glimmer of positivity, a small glint of appreciation for just sitting there breathing, because I know the alternative, because I have seen too much death.

Note just says “It doesn’t matter what you do with it, just being alive is enough.”

It’s impossible to “waste” your life, it’s impossible to “waste” time. Even if that time is spent miserable, struggling, or in absolute sedentary escape from reality. You are alive, you are breathing, you are experiencing things. That’s all the universe wants from you, is for you to experience it in some capacity. It’s the only reason you’re here. You need the universe, the universe needs you, they don’t exist without each other and even if you’re just mindlessly scrolling the internet from under the covers of the bed you haven’t left in three days, you are alive, you are experiencing the full force of human “aliveness” even if you’re sad, scared, uncertain or in pain. You’re here to experience it because at some point, it will all be about to end, and nothing you did will be any more or less relevant to your present moment. You will only want your present moment to continue, you will want that more than anything imaginable, you will long for your depression, your blankets, your dirty jacket and your phone. Just one more minute, just one more chance to see something or feel something.

You get to experience all of that right now, you can stretch it out, you can appreciate the small, stupid things in your life right now. It doesn’t matter if your life doesn’t look like someone else’s, what matters is you’re living it.

It’s almost like corporations took over the internet, monetized it, and deployed every possible tool to convert it into an addicting advertising platform without any regulations or standards, driving up social contention, misinformation and propaganda because the more rage you can instill in the population the more “engagement” everything will get.

Be sure to hang onto your bags of new socks and underwear, if you accidentally dropped those someone might get ahold of them and feel human comfort and hygiene and we wouldn’t want THAT getting out into the population.

Legal measures against pitbulls often are rooted in redline type bills to continue to create laws that punish particular races or ethnicities.

Pit Bulls were and are often used for underground dog fights, and thus became associated with gangs and inner-city crime. That’s a ridiculously small portion of pit bull owners, but laws about pit bulls give one more tool for cops to over-police black and hispanic neighborhoods in particular.

I don’t really have an opinion on pit bulls, I’ve owned dogs, wolves and many animals and I do believe different breeds have different personalities and genetic influences, it would be ridiculous to deny it because WE MADE THEM THIS WAY, so yes, pitties and german shepherds and many others can easily be raised wrong and come out dangerous compared to say, golden retrievers or other “gentle” breeds that are going to be a lot more passive even when raised wrong. These are preconditions, they are influences. But the problem is with lack of education about how to raise animals, puppy mills and overbreeding, poor training, and the handful of irresponsible and abusive owners who fuck up everything for the rest of us.

I hate it here.

edit: not sorry at all if reasonable and nuanced facts make you angry for some reason. That’s a skill issue. Learn more. Go outside, meet people, make some friends. This is an oddly triggering issue to some people, you need to learn to breath and think. I don’t care how sweet your dog is or if you got bit once, if you have deeply emotional opinions on this in either direction, congratulations, you’re being manipulated.

I will genuinely be surprised if he survives his entire term, much less make it to their planned third-term.

The problem is that the eyeliner-clad, couchfucker-in-chief isn’t going to make things much better. At least he doesn’t have the cult of personality behind him, and he may fail a lot, but he’s also the bigger puppet more easily pushed around by Wormtongue Musk.

I don’t know why you’re getting pushback and downvotes on this, it’s factual.

Have we ALSO lost track of facts people? Are we the same as the ones who made this all go to shit, unable to separate facts from feelings? USA isn’t just “a superpower” it’s THE superpower, it’s the wealthiest nation on earth with a military force larger and more advanced than all other nations put together. What do you call that?

THIS is why it’s such a huge deal that we all fucking let the dumbest, evilest people in the world take the controls. Are you really just so nihilistic and self-obsessed that you’re willing to discard the largest and most powerful democracy on earth because you feel jaded and cynical because “America bad?”

Dude, clean your room. Seriously, this is our home, this is where we live. LETS FIX IT.

I am also in the US and horribly disappointed in how our population let the world’s stupidest and vilest people manipulate them into giving over control. I really had high hopes for America, democracies are really our best hope for the future.

But now I just want it to accelerate, we need the shit to really hit the fan so our population wakes up and realizes who the real enemies are, the putins and musks and trumps and millers and bannons… they are the beasts that stalk us in the modern age and need to be put down or taken away and the only way this will happen is enough people become uncomfortable enough that they forget the narratives and storylines that manipulate us so easily.

In a span of ten years, I lost two parents, a sibling, another sibling was committed and never recovered, nearly lost my partner of 20 years and she ended up in a coma for a month, as a result I lost our shared business, lost my car as a result, then two pets died, then lost my house. Set to all this was Donald Fucking Trump being elected twice, a rampaging virulent epidemic that half the people didn’t believe was real, and nazis coming back and genocides becoming fashionable again, and violent anti-science groups forming across the world.

It’s reeaaallly hard to not think that there’s something deeply wrong with the world. Particularly after growing up in the 80’s and 90’s when our biggest cultural upset was Ellen coming out on TV guide.

Maybe if we all concentrate hard enough we can will our reality back on track and make this happen. Somewhere around 2016 someone at CERN started a new experiment and ever since we’ve been in the wrong universe, through concerted efforts of enough of Earth’s latent psychics maybe we can push this world back towards the correct timeline.

Or maybe make things worse.

The less succinct version is that she was considered one of the OG progressive youtubers who gained a huge following and as a result has garnered a LOT of harassment over the years she was running. (Keep in mind she was at peak of her youtube career around the time of “Gamergate”) When she directed mild criticism towards the Disney movie “Raya and the Last Dragon” and how it was derivative of Avatar, I can’t remember the details but something about the way she made the comparison set her up to be attacked by online chuds pretending to be concerned progressives attacking her for being “anti-asian.”

Lindsay Ellis was a champion of equality and diversity and the details were infuriatingly minor and stupid (which is why I can’t even remember it) but it was just the final straw and her mental health couldn’t handle any more threats, attacks and condemnations and she left Youtube other than doing some guest bits with other old-time Breadtubers and she still does work on Nebula.

I fully get how even if you make a widely praised and well-received work, you will tend to fixate on the negative reviews the most, but this was the end of a long-term campaign to bully her off the internet and we can’t expect every content creator to have inhuman thick skin. That said, I wish she would have just got off Twitter and kept making content, we could use her more than ever.

Lindsay Ellise, before the internet’s most worthless people drove her off youtube, made a very good video talking about the trope of women and their monster partners in media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YesMWAxqJ60

Lindsay Ellise did an entire video about girls and monsters. Worth watching.