conditional_soup @ conditional_soup @lemm.ee

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Some people with more money than they could ever spend might make less money than they otherwise would have in the medium term. In the long term, of course, it means nothing because climate collapse effectively makes wealth moot. But in the meanwhile, papa needs another three billion, so don't make us late for the plastic age collapse.

Holy crow, I did not know about that!

I wish unlimited failure on conservatives worldwide. May Trump cause conservatism to be snakebit for the rest of all time.

I appreciate it! I do, though it doesn't come up much anymore.

It's not that China's blocking shipping, it's that retailers aren't confident that they can move a product at whatever the previous cost of the product x 2.25 + other costs and profits was, right?

A lot of telescope parts are made in China, IIRC, so let's use them as an example. Celestron is based out of California, let's say they sell a scope for $1400 and it used to cost them $800 to get from China. That means that to make the same amount on each unit after the cost, they'd need to charge $800+(800*1.25)[the tariff]+(1400-800)[their margin on the product] for a total of $2400. Mind you, I have no idea how thick their margins really are, so I'm not going to comment on that. Now, my understanding of markets is that they sell at whatever they think the market can bear, so if they thought they could sell the scope at $2400, they already would have been. So, it makes sense to just not buy any telescopes just now, since if dingus wakes up tomorrow, declares victory in the trade war and declares tariffs woke, you'll be stuck with a bunch of product that will be basically impossible to move without taking a loss. This also gives you time to scrape up the capital to buy at the increased price if the tariffs don't drop. Eventually, though, you're either going to have to buy product at the higher price or close up shop.

So much to say that I'm a little surprised that there aren't at least some shipments coming of lower-cost higher-volume goods that might be better able to absorb the shock of the tariffs. The fact that there's just nothing coming our way is incredible to imagine. Is it because of the recent gouge-flation; companies have recently increased prices to the resistance point and they now know that there's zero wiggle room for passing those costs on to customers without suffering a loss in sales volume?

Oh shit, I can explain this. Kinda. I can't explain how we got to wallets implying gender, but this wallet looks like it's bigger and possibly has a zipper (just guessing by thickness). Apparently it's a thing for girl wallets to be dummy thic; I'd guess because a purse can carry more than a pocket can. Maybe that's how we got here?

Personal anecdote time, back when $20 meant something, I stuffed a $20 bill in my pocket and ended up losing it. My SO was rightfully pissed at me about it, because we could not afford to just lose $20. After a bit of talking it over, we arrived the the problem being that I just had too much shit in my little wallet, so we decided that the best way forward would be to get me a big, big wallet to hold all my shit. I actually got some light teasing about it at work, mostly from the Gen X folks, about it being a girl wallet (am cismale), but it didn't bother me because I'm not stupid and I've got other shit to worry about besides whether my wallet is apparently gender normative. And besides, the teasing honestly wasn't that bad, I took it affectionately and started saying "yeah, it's my MANifold"; a dumb joke that got a few chuckles, and that was basically the end of it. It's been over a decade and I still use giant fucking wallets to this day because they're really useful for carrying a bunch of stuff in an organized way.

Who fucking cares? Dude's going to be shipping citizens off to indefinite detention with no due process at 2% approval. He's probably going to suspend the midterms or something. We are not going to just stroll out of this through normal processes.

It's an anime sword, isn't it?

I think this is it, tbh. I have to constantly remind my kids that math isn't memorizing the answer, it's knowing how to look at a problem, follow the rules, and figure it out. And it always seems so very arbitrary to them, as it used to for me as well.

Wait a sec, the rizzler is a real person? I thought it was all just a bit.

Worth noting that a BUNCH of votes got disqualified thanks to distributed, local efforts by Republicans, and the effort was targeted. The article I read pointed out that black people got their votes tossed 900% more often than white people, for example.

Yes, 100%, I don't at all want to give the idea that no history was ever remembered, and I don't want to sound like I'm shitting on oral history either. I just... really wish someone had written some stuff down. There's so much that's lost to time because of the pandemics that swept the post contact world and all of colonization that followed.

Thanks for the correction

Hold on, so let me get this straight, they're being arrested for interfering with a kidnapping? Because the officers were in plain clothes, did not identify themselves, and one of them was wearing a balaclava. Mf, you could be anybody. Fuck that. There's a number of states where, if you're being stopped, the officer must produce some kind of proof of their status as a law enforcement officer if asked. Ofc, that was before we were in the dictatorship. Now, cops get the choice between identifying themselves and possibly getting their family members to launch a GoFundMe page.

God dang aliens takin our bones I tell you what

Ehhhh, drones have meaningfully transformed the battlefield. It's why trench warfare came back; basically every inch of the battlefield is under constant surveillance. The instant a large number of people jump up out of a trench, some drone operator is talking to an artillery crew. You'd best believe that our intelligence and defense apparatus was taking extensive notes. Emphasis on was.

Well, no but actually yes. See the countless videos of people in Ukraine flying a DJI into a Russian airbase and just dropping fucking grenades on planes.

Also, consider:

• We already have military drones that are practically fully automated, and we had our first fully autonomous kill decision five years ago now.
• DARPA did some tests with an AI piloted fighter jet in 2022, it successfully killed all human enemy jets 5/5 times.
• The weakest part of an air superiority platform is the squishy meatbag flying it. Without having to worry about keeping a human alive, you can make air superiority fighters that are vastly more capable with high-g maneuvering and more compact air frames.

Now, Elon's not talking about air superiority drones, he's talking about drone swarms. Drone swarms ARE a real threat, but AFAIK they're more of an infrastructure threat in that they're usually worried about in the context of disabling ships, airports, etc. not individual fighter jets. For that, you get Vadim to tie a grenade to his DJI.

See the Breonna Taylor case or one of the many, many instances where dumbfuck no-knock raids got a cop put on GoFundMe. If the gun owner survives the encounter, they're likely to be prosecuted for not magically knowing the home invaders were cops, or not believing "Police! Police!" (because everyone knows only cops can shout that). The cops will definitely shoot back, though, and there's a high probability that the gun owner will not survive the initial encounter. Still, if enough cops get put on back window stickers, they'll start exercising some discretion.

Well, staying in the same location? I'm in the US, so... I'd probably try to get writing invented. To my knowledge, besides some of the Central American empires, there's no evidence or even claim of there having been any kind of writing or system for making information durable. I know there's a lot of clay here, I'm pretty sure we could bake clay tablets to store down information. There's also tule reeds here that were already being extensively used, and those could probably be made into a kind of paper as well. As to whether the people would accept that, I have no fucking idea at all; what we know of the California tribes suggests they were always semi-nomadic, but that's all very well into the post-contact period and much of what we know was written down by the Spanish while being the biggest bastards they possibly could to the locals. I dunno how useful record-keeping would be to a nomadic people. It's also entirely possible the people would be like "uh, yeah, we know how to write, dummy", and it was just lost in the multiple waves of pandemics.

I think probably something that -might- be achievable is figuring out glass. I'm mostly sure that if the native Americans had glass, we would have seen some sign of it in the archeological record by now. I'm sure some smarty pants is going to come along and tell me "you can't just throw sand in a kiln and make glass, you need a special kind of sand blah blah blah and here's 99 reasons why that won't work". Yeah, you're probably right, but I don't know any better, so I'd still definitely try. I also remember reading that clear glass was a thing figured out near Venice when they started adding grass ash or some shit to the sand, so I'd definitely experiment with that, too. Glass is just dead useful -and- pretty, so I'm fairly confident I'd get some acceptance that way.

I would say metal smithing, but the only metal deposits nearby that I know of are mercury and gold. You can't make nails and tools out of mercury and gold.

Also, maybe water wheels? To my knowledge, we have no record of native Americans using water wheels for work (I.e. grinding corn or acorns into flour). I think if I managed to put a basic water wheel together, I'd be pretty popular.