What if, and I'm just spitballing here, the news media barely covered this and certainly didn't cover the corruption angle at all because the news media is now completely owned by billionaires like something like literally 90% of the news media is owned by billionaires.

So almost nobody hears about this and then the news cycle eats the attention of anyone who does and we all just move on and forget about it. Does that work for you?

In project 2025 they call it shock and awe. Everything is a distraction from the previous terrible thing Trump did and everything Trump does next is a distraction from whatever he's doing at the time. Meanwhile the economy is continuously collapsing due to mismanagement so you're too busy trying to keep your head above water to care about anything else.

Then you mix in a little voter suppression and the fact that a billionaire Trump sycophant just bought the company that controls all of our voting machines and maybe do a few hundred billion dollars of propaganda right before the election and Bob's your uncle Trump gets a third term or at least JD Vance gets his term.

Then we had 25% unemployment, world war III takes off and goes nuclear and we Fermi paradox ourselves. I don't think the billionaires are planning on that last one but I don't think they are thinking any of this through either. They're just too busy trying to set themselves up as feudal Kings.

Taiwan is China. They're the same people.

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

This is conservative/right wing agitprop clickbait bullshit of the absolute lowest quality.

no, social media is not creating debt laden people low wages and monopolies raising prices is.

Fuck what a particularly nasty piece of clickbait. But you got me I clicked it and I commented so you win I guess.

When the species of super intelligent raccoons or beavers take over from us after we drive ourselves to Extinction through sheer stupidity I wonder what they will think of this crap.

That's a very western-centric view. China imports a large range of products extensively, including western produce and finished goods. Examples include: specialist electrical and mechnical goods, especially for manufacturing their exports and for medical/scientific/power generation use; oil and gas; grain and soy beans; prestige western cars, mostly European; plus significant quantities of various ores, minerals, and other raw materials... They do have a significant trade surplus, but it's nothing like as vast your comment implies.

Regardless, it might just be a database entry of some numbers, but don't just sit on it but rather convert it into things like government gilts and bonds - "Treasury Securities", in US parlance. Still a database entry, but one that turns that fiat piece of coloured paper into a way to help out an ally, or into a notional lever they could pull to disrupt the economy of the bonds they hold; dump a large number of the bonds, and watch the economy in question take a dive as inflation spirals upwards. Yes, the book value of the rest of their holding goes down too, but that's still a better use of the money than just torching the virtual equivalent of a pile of coloured paper sat in a warehouse, Joker style.

As of September, China is currently the third largest foreign holder of US T-Bills ($700.5b), after Japan ($1189.3b) and the UK ($865.0b), then you're rapidly into the long tail with Canada in 4th place at a "mere" $475.8b. That's quite a lot of influence, should they choose to use (read "burn") it.

No, it was no different with the US. This is an irrelevant story for the whole world outside of the US, because they have been living in this reality for 75+ years. The only nation who is feeling a new pain is the US.

Correct, the problem is that China is acting more like the US now. Which is more of a problem for the US than for other nations, because we have been taking advantage of our unique status to increase our standard of living at other nations' expense, and that will now be harder. You have it backwards about who should be worried about it. My guess is out of some misplaced feeling of hypocrisy.

It seems that way because you see headlines that they had such and such multimillion dollar fine levied but they appeal and don't pay the fine or it gets reduced to a tiny fraction of the profits from the illegal behavior. But funny thing the news media never seems to cover that...

I know of companies that literally have a classification system where they figure out which laws they can break. You will be shocked to find that the laws that affect rich people are generally in the list of ones they can't break while the laws that affect you are in the list of laws they can break...

Even under Biden it was difficult to get consumer protection laws enforced and the fines actually levied and paid and now the Trump is president worst case scenario you buy a little bit of trump coin and the problem gets solved.

The problem is we can't sustain this many billionaires let alone the number who want to be trillionaires.

And we can't take the billionaire's money away because if you try a bunch of old people who grew up on Cold war propaganda are convinced you're going to break into their house and steal their toothbrush. And anyway those billionaires earned it because if they didn't God wouldn't have blessed them /s

Now do USPS.

Paper mail is a waste of time except when it isn't, and for those times pay for FexEx!

so was my last speeding ticket.

The fines should be set high enough to so that the activity that results in them isn't more profitable than doing whatever the law says is the right thing. 400k is probably enough that it would have been better for the company to have given existing part time works a handful of additional hours a week to update price labels across the state.

Fines are not suppose to be excessively punitive or ruinous. If someone was really behaving outrageously or with real criminal intent we have have jails for that. This is that though, anyone who has been in Dollar General knows managements 'vision' how can we do the absolute minimum require to operate a retails store, right down to the bear florescent (maybe led in some newer facilities) tubes for over head light.

hows that again? AC

Lack of regulation - Nope they are getting fined because there are regulations.

Lack of enforcement - Nope they got audited thousands of times and fined!

Now you could argue they were not fined enough, I guess but clearly there is a regulation and clearly the regulators are checking up!

I live 'out in the county', that is dollar store country.

The typical Dollar General is a 60k foot store - sometimes bigger, and there are NEVER more than two employees working. Which means one person on the register and one other person to do any re-shelving, stock keeping, pricing, etc.

No way they are getting all that done.

A CEO doesn't get paid for any of the work AI does. CEOs collect information from other executives, peers, consultants, and the media and make decisions. LLMs can disrupt the work of consultants, the media, and the employees feeding information to executives, but it's horrible at making good decisions that can be trusted.

In fairness, since some of the claims are that AI will replace all jobs, even massive disruption such as replacing 10% of the workforce is still a very big deal. I'll be surprised if we don't reduce our call center staff by at least 50% in the next 3 years, and AI chat/voice bots is a small portion of that projection. That is mostly from AI agents assisting call center agents and assisting product managers to find ways to improve human agent UX.

LLMs were capable of doing all of this in early 2024, and have only gotten better since then. We weren't having success with nano/flash models in 2024 but we have been moving to those models for most use cases in late 2025 (reducing LLM costs by 80%).