America was safest under Clinton with budget surpluses to boot.

My wife wanted a switch for her birthday since my son is getting older and wants to spend more time playing games. So we waited on the Switch 2 Direct announcement and it was clearly just a cash grab. Even the hardware demo “game” is a digital purchase. The Chat button only works with a subscription. €90,- for a Mario Kart game and expensive upgrades for games you already own.

So Steamdeck it is, the OLED model is a bit pricey, but i’ve only been hearing good things. And it wil run emulators which is an added boon.

Just hire your own crew, undo their work, send them the bill and the fine.

They have these values tied to their identity, their ego. It’s hard to change that. Hard to admit you were wrong if being wrong means having to become someone else.

This is also a problem on the left though.

Long long time ago someone wrote on Reddit that the best post-apocalyptic place to stay would just be a small town. With a dentist, a doctor, farmers and builders. Where everybody knows each other. The interdependence of skill and need for cooperation would keep the peace.

None of the countries is going to back down. Because the all know the minute they do, the more shit Trump is going to pull. At this point it’s basically extortion.

English is too engrained. Even if the US falls down to some impoverished dictatorship. English will remain. The cost of switching now is just too great.

The cybertruck doesn’t pass a multitude of safety regulations. And is therefore not street legal in the EU. But there are ways around that by directly importing it from the US. The Dodge Ram is not street legal in the EU either but has been making use of an importing loophole to get on the streets.

Tesla stock was enormously overpriced anyway. The product is not that good or worth that much. In the very beginning there was a lot of disrupting the incumbents. For better or worse. Now it’s all worse.

They literally can’t. The US has only 1(!) rare earth refinery for instance. And only 3 copper smelters. China isn’t just cheaper, and that advantage is going away as well anyway, but it also developed enormous amounts of capabilities and expertise in the last 20 years that no once can match.

And even if that’s the goal, slapping giant tariffs across the board is not going to help. Some of these industries take years if not decades to develop, specifically educated staff and billions of dollars worth of investments.

Not anymore, but at the time it came out it was.

That’s why I think your being naïve. Backed by science, sure. But the link between autism and vaccines was also backed by science. Despite it being false. And who is funding the science? And who is deciding what get’s published? And who is peer reviewing it?

Science is a messy human process. And can be misappropriated by those in power.

That’s probly 1 million job vacancies that regular Americans don’t want to fill. What was the point of this again?

That’s very naïve. Right now even doctors in Texas are letting young women die, knowingly, because they’re not allowed to save them because it’s not a disease but a dead fetus that’s killing them. Which they are not allowed to remove.

To prevent those bad choices infringing on others is why Germany has those rules in place.

“I could make the “bad choice” to play bumper cars on the freeway” Sure, but with your logic the solution to that would be to force everyone to take the bus instead.

I agree with you for the most part. But seeing the current trend of right-wing governments and felons becoming presidents. I’m not sure if I’ll be alive to see that day.

The point is that forcing vaccines is also opening the gates to other things you might not want.

My bleach example was meant to illustrate that a government could decide substance X was safe, even if the science disagrees. And by law you would be forced to get it injected.

Careful there.

Whilst the measles vaccine is safe and beneficial. Who knows what a future government might want to inject into it’s citizens. Not that long ago a leader of a certain country suggested injecting bleach to cure Covid. If you give the government the power to force you to inject vaccines, you also give them the power to inject anything else. The downside of freedom is also the freedom to make bad choices.

When the Dutch police was looking to replace it’s standard handgun, the new candidate could carry twice the number of bullets. It was rejected not because they didn’t need that many bullets. But that an potential unfriendly Dutch government in the future would not possess even more lethality to apply on the citizenry.

But US companies cannot make everything in the US. The industrial base was off-shored. And on-shoring means automation to be cost-effective. Which is not going to produce tons of blue collar jobs. And that is even without tariffs.

Want to build electronics? China is somewhere in your supply chain, meaning costs will go up. Want to make a camera? Oops, the rare earths you need to add to the camera lens are not available in the US.

And who is going to buy all this US made stuff? Because all exports are taxed as well.

If the government wants to bring back industry, be more self-reliant. You do so by subsidizing certain industries, tweak tariffs on specific goods, removing red tape for the construction of specialized factories which play a key part in supply chains. Not just put tariffs on everything and everyone and hope for the best. This is how the great depression started.

In Germany if there is an measles outbreak. Unvaccinated kids aren’t allowed into day cares or schools. Much to the dismay of their parents who have to stay at home instead of work. But this of course is protecting the other kids, and the unvaccinated kids themselves and is the best thing they can do in the circumstances. Minimize exposure, minimize the number of victims.

Meanwhile those parents cry foul and consider it pressure from the government to force them to vaccinate.

The internet has been ‘app-ified’. For many, if not most, people the internet is a collection of apps. Mail, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. The time of webrings, forums and indexes are long gone.

Sometimes I feel blessed to have been around when the internet was like the wild west, everything open to everyone. Now gatekeepers are everywhere. Your success on-line determined by the algos from multi-billion dollar companies.