“No one in my generation had autism”

Sure thing. Uncle Barry, who collects every issue of Mechanics Monthly, and has spent over $10,000 on his model train set that is a perfect scale recreation of King’s Cross Station, is completely neurotypical.

Yes, people do get “weird” when you literally call them “evil”.

“I don’t like the way that drinking alcohol is seen as a neccessary component of socialising in our society.” <-- Completely reasonable statement, even as someone who drinks I agree wholeheartedly. North America in particular has a serious problem with a lack of third spaces that aren’t bars or other places that serve alcohol.

“Alcohol is evil” <-- Absolutely deranged thing to say, deserves to be down voted into oblivion. I cannot even begin to imagine what would possess someone to willingly share this thought with the universe.

Damn. Fucking. Right. Bud.

Same bud

Then why were they allowed at PP’s very tightly controlled press events? No one gets into those without being very carefully vetted.

Judging by how Americans vote, this guy will be president within the next twenty years.

Pro-tip: If you marry said friend, they have to seat you together anyway.

It depends on the seller. Generally if they’re set up to do business properly in the US, yes, they’ll take off things like tariffs and fees, because if they don’t it just tends to result in pissed off customers who refuse to pay the tariffs and then charge back on their credit card when they don’t receive their goods. It just makes more sense to handle all that on the customer’s behalf. Happy customers buy more things. When in doubt you need to contact their customer service and ask.

So the way this works is the importer of record pays the tariff when it gets to the US port.

So, scenario 1, you buy a product from an American company that imports either the whole product or some part of it from China. The American company pays the tariff and then decides how much of that to add to their costs.

Scenario 2, you buy from a Chinese seller that ships to the US like Temu. In these cases generally the seller is the importer of record, so they pay all applicable tariffs on your behalf, but in order to do so they’ll add it to your bill along with the shipping.

Scenario 3, you buy from a company in China that ships directly to you without acting as an importer. There are a bunch of options for this where you basically order stuff direct from manufacturers, and it seems like it’s going to be way cheaper because there are no tariffs or other import fees. But in reality what happens here is you are now the importer of record. There’s two ways this will play out; the government will either hold the item at the port of entry until you pay the fees, or it’ll arrive and then you’ll get a bill for the fees later. This can be really dangerous because you can end paying a whole lot more than you expected to.

1. As others have said, you’re not likely to find Trump stans on Lemmy.
2. There’s really very little to debate. The tariffs are patently absurd, and every serious person agrees on this. Anyone capable of actually formulating a structured debate is incapable of defending them. It’s a paradoxical request.

The thing is, there are individual aspects of the tariff situation that could, theoretically, be defended, but the sum collective cannot because each aspect undercuts the others.

The simplest way to see this is to examine the three contradictory explanations that the administration has offered for why the tariffs are being applied:

1. They are intended to repatriate manufacturing back to the US
2. They are intended to be a bargaining tool to force other countries to treat the US more fairly in trade matters (presumably resulting the elimination of these “tariffs and unfair practices” that they claim other countries are applying to the US).
3. They are intended to be a new source of revenue, funding tax cuts in perpetuity.

Suppose 1 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to return manufacturing to the US, they have to be permanent, or at least very long term. No company is going to spend 4 years building a factory just to avoid a tariff that won’t be around in 4 years time. But if the tariffs are permanent, then they cannot be used as a bargaining tool, because the bargaining process has to conclude with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced in order to win concessions from the other side. And if the tariffs are supposed to move manufacturing back to the US and address the trade imbalance, they cannot serve as a long-term source of revenue, because eventually (the theory goes) those companies will produce everything in the US, meaning they won’t be paying tariffs.

Now suppose 2 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to be a bargaining tool then the bargaining has to end with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced. In this scenario, the tariffs will not result in repatriating manufacturing, and they will not serve as a source of long-term income for the reasons we just discussed.

And of course, if 3 is true, the same problems apply. If the tariffs are to be a source of long-term income then the current trade imbalances have to remain. If manufacturing repatriates, the income dries up. If deals are struck in return for removing the tariffs, the income dries up.

Tariffs can, when applied thoughtfully and with care, serve as a tool to help achieve any one of those three goals. They cannot solve any of those problems on their own;

• You cannot fund a government entirely on tariffs, the US tried that for a long time and it proved to be a bad idea because international trade is worth so much more to your economy
• You cannot move manufacturing home with tariffs alone, you need to also invest in supporting the infrastructure, training and other supports needed (which is exactly what Biden was doing with the CHIPS act that Trump shit-canned)
• You cannot use tariffs effectively as a tool for negotiation when you apply them to the entire planet at the same time, thus pitting yourself alone against everyone else.

And they certainly cannot solve all three of them together.

Bernie Sanders has long been an advocate against unrestricted free trade. There are many progressive economists who favour the careful use of tariffs as a way of preventing corporations from exploiting cheap international labour for profit while driving down domestic wages. Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay on this subject; https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/

There’s also Bessent’s plan to repatriate manufacturing by strong-arming the rest of the world into accepting deals where they peg their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing the US to devalue the dollar while maintaining it’s privileged position as the global reserve currency, which would in turn tend to shift the US trade balance more towards exports. But Bessent himself isn’t really a fan of using tariffs to achieve this, and any sane person would plan to go after a few countries at a time, not the whole planet. It’s also a bad plan anyway because once people see that you’re planning to devalue the currency you just pegged them to, they’ll probably just tear up those deals, because if you weren’t acting in good faith why should they? Also, devaluing the dollar, on its own, would likely do little to increase domestic manufacturing in the US. It would make existing US exports more attractive, but it wouldn’t create any kind of a serious case for investing in more manufacturing in the US. The US standard of living is still much, much higher than most of the places where companies can build these goods, which means its simply more expensive to do anything in the US. That only changes is you massively reduce the US standard of living, which isn’t exactly the big win anyone in MAGA wants, now is it?

The point being, yes, there are plenty of arguments for the use of tariffs, just like there are plenty of situations where a reasonable person might want a gun. That doesn’t then imply that it’s a good idea to shoot yourself in the foot. What Trump and his administration are doing with tariffs cannot be defended, because it simply does not make sense as a plan. It’s an incoherent, self-defeating hodge-podge of ideas that could only have resulted from many different warring factions trying to enact their own preferred plan while a mad-king at the centre of it all listens to anyone who salves his ego while having absolutely no comprehension of the realities of what he, or anyone around him, is trying to achieve.

More importantly, absolutely none of this has anything to do with China’s near monopoly on rare earth refinement. Rare earth minerals, even high density regions of them, exist all over the world. Digging them up is easy, but separating the actual minerals from the rest of the soil and rock is really hard. That’s the part that China is highly specialized in. No one needs to invade Greenland or fucking whatever to get access to rare earth minerals. The US can dig them up right there at home. What they need is to build out the refinement infrastructure. But they would prefer to outsource the extraction to other countries if they can because it involves strip mining vast swathes of land that could be used for other things.

Yes, but also please understand that registering to vote directly at the polling station is ridiculously easy. Even if you forgot to update your registration, go vote anyway, it’ll only take an extra few minutes.

Either way you do need ID to vote but what qualifies as ID is anything from an absolutely enormous list of options, including, if need be, just having someone else vouch for you.

See the full list here: https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=id&document=index&lang=e

Also of note;

• Polling places open several days ahead of the election.
• You can already - as in right now - go vote early at any elections Canada office.
• Your place of work is legally required to give you time off to vote if none of those other options work for you.

Please, please, please, do not get caught up in the Americanification of all online discourse. Voting in Canada is unbelievably easy.

Ah yes. It’s not that these idiots invested serious money into something called a “meme coin.” No, it’s all the other red flags they ignored that were the problem.

Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.

It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.

This is a neighbour to the “Shirley Exception”. Let’s call it the “Shirley Prerequisite.”

People will hear an idea they broadly like, and rather than actually examine how its going to be implemented, they’ll simply assume that it will be the way that they would implement it, because to them that’s obviously the only logical way to do it. Sometimes their way is the logical way, sometimes it isn’t, but the point is that they can’t get out of their head enough to consider any other possibility.

In this case, the possibility left unconsidered is that Trump is a fucking moron.

For the Chinese, this is an incredibly sensible way to respond, no question.

As a Canadian, I’m worried. This is only going to strengthen Trump’s case for giving the US direct access rate earth minerals through one sided deals in Ukraine, and by coercing or dominating Canada.

Granted, I assumed yearly, because this is apparently supposed to replace a yearly benefit that Greenland receives from Denmark.

Even if it is only one time, that’s still a lot of money that Trump seems to want to throw at something completely frivolous, rather than making a difference to the lives of Americans. Can’t see how that feels good for anyone who is struggling with the price of eggs.

Not even remotely. LLMs have failed to find any viable market fit.

The problem continues to be hallucinations and limited utility. This is compounded by the fact that LLMs are very expensive to run. The latter problem wouldn’t really be a problem if LLMs were truly capable of replacing a human employee, but they’re not. They’re just too unreliable for any serious enterprise grade application, and they’re too expensive for any low severity application.

For example, as a coding assistant, a lot of people quite like them. But as a replacement for a human coder, they’re a disaster. That means you still have to employ the expensive human, and you also have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for what amounts to a very cool search engine.

There are tonnes of frivolous applications where they work really well. The AI girlfriend stuff, for example. A chatbot that sexts you is a very sellable product, regardless of how icky it might seem to some people. But no one is going to pay over $200 / month for it (as an example, ChatGPT still doesn’t make a profit at their $200/month tier).

LLMs are too unreliable to make anything better than toys, but too expensive to sell as toys.

For anyone who voted for Trump because your cost of living is too high… How y’all feeling about this?

Trump wants to give everyone in Greenland $10k. Where’s your $10k? What the actual fuck has this guy done to help you out so far?

How is it that DOGE has to force your grandma to walk to an office for her social security because a phone line was too expensive, but Trump has money to throw $600m a year at this?

Interesting theory. Total absence of proof.

Does the theory fit the available facts? Yes.

Do the available facts prove the theory? Absolutely not.