The goddamn Trump Administration

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you mean Doug “subway fugitive, not-a-slave-to-fashion, bongo boy” Berman"?
ol’ punkin lips, himself?

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This is unlikely to happen. With so much pressure to find uses for Artificial Intelligence and so much automation, there won’t be enough jobs for everyone. To make matters worse, you can’t bring factories and factories from abroad in the blink of an eye.

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lol, yes!!

ETA: man, it took a long time for the origin of that to click (or clack) in my brain. I was trying to “hear” it in Peter Sagal’s voice and it just wouldn’t work.

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There is a business case for DEI, and presumably there is also a business case against canceling those policies.

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For what it’s worth (about one share of gormless in this stock market), …suspect that peter navarro’s ([wand_wiggle] → “Ron Vara”) scheme, which trump has utterly accepted, is indiscriminate tariffs as a means to shift yet even more (deficit reducing) taxes from the very rich to the middle-lower class; effectively a regressive tax. That is, i don’t think they care a bit if it “brings back industry” to the states - which it won’t. Of course, if trump can say that some country bent a knee to him as an extortion payment then that’s win-win. @#$!

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It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.

…except maybe the Supreme Court. Just wait.

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It seems they already deleted It.

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This line of thought reminds me so much of the 90s when call centers were the new sweatshops and there were articles and exposés and then a few years after those jobs moved to India and people started complaining about that and I’m like how do you not remember that just a few years ago we were complaining about how awful those jobs were, people doing them hated it, and why are you lamenting that we aren’t keeping the worst jobs in the U.S.

I mean I took a tour of the vice-grips factory when I was in grade school, and I don’t recall needing an adult to point out how crappy those jobs were and that it would be a good idea to avoid that, as good as those jobs would have been for rural Nebraska.

Same with the auto industry. I know there’s a bunch of people here from Michigan, where back in the day (I lived there 5 years) you couldn’t throw a rock down the street without hitting a dozen people related to the auto industry. And they all had stories. The right liked to blame workers fucking with cars for fun and being drunk on union protections, but maybe, just maybe, working a factory assembly line is boring soul sucking work.

All this rambling just for the point that let these jobs fall where they may, they aren’t worth fighting the equivalent of a nuclear war over. Especially as automation continues apace.

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A “sinkhole” is the perfect term.

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Hank Tough, Defective.

They’re all hoping to negotiate tariff exceptions with Trump, and don’t want to anger him.

Narrator voice: It won’t.

I don’t see how things can get anything but worse - what’s going on hasn’t fully sunk in, tariffs haven’t yet fully come into effect, counter-tariffs aren’t all decided (much less applied), Trump’s counter-counter tariffs could really screw things up, the effects of the tariffs aren’t all obvious, we’re going to see business failures (starting almost immediately) as the result of the tariffs, etc. In the medium and long-term, the market will continue to decline, precipitously. Right now, the market is still being downright optimistic.

It’s not going to happen, period. For a whole number of reasons that make it *impossible." (E.g. the US lacks the tool and die engineers required to build the factories and their machines in the first place, even if the tariffs were guaranteed long-term and the economic environment was stable - which they aren’t…) Americans being employed to assemble iPhones is a fantasy, which makes it weird that that’s the fantasy the MAGAts are excited about, because it’s not like those are even good jobs. Trumpworld is fantasizing about America being a low-wage, low-skill labor force, developing nation. (But their family and friends wouldn’t be part of this new America - they’d be the ones exploiting it.)

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As of about 20 minutes ago I lost all remaining respect for my boss and a senior coworker. Their commentary on the economy was “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” (and one of them literally said that “at least the eggs are cheaper now” and didn’t mean it ironically!).

These are engineers with doctorates. And they’re both immigrants.

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Medicine is supposed to make you feel better.

Unless you have cancer - which the economy didn’t have. So why is Trump injecting us with radiation and chemo?

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It’s why I don’t have much hope that Trump’s blundering will actually turn the public against him. People are incapable of getting it. People actively refuse to get it. There is no circumstance dire enough to penetrate their thick skulls. Ever.

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That’s such a stupid expression to begin with. An omelette is literally just a fried pile of broken eggs. If breaking eggs is a bad thing why would you ever want an omelette?

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A Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire said that when education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed will always be to be an oppressor.

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That is fucking depressing…

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