LOL - dude I'd say you are trolling but you prove over and over again you are just a dope.

tax cuts don't really sunset. That is just one of the many political acts of theater that Washington engages in. They put in a sunset date, than everyone says see look the CBO score says it isnt to bad.

Shortly before whatever the sunset date is, there is a 'crisis' were "millions of americans will see their taxes jump way up, if congress does not act!"

Next the tax cuts are renewed, in some big giant budget bill nobody reads. Anyone watching/reading the news in the last 30 years with fourth grade comprehension level KNOWS this.

Delete those and I'll go another 10%.

I agree with you entirely except the 'only people' part.

They macro trends work or at least will ultimately work as you describe but in any economic reorganization you are going have some groups that make gains and others that fall behind. There is a segment of the population that I suspect isn't really trying to exploit the wage gap so to speak but also isn't sure their corner of the labor market is as impacted by foreign participants or trade as others. They rightly wonder if they are going to experience inflation on the expense side they don't see on the income and asset portions of their personal balance sheets.

There is large part of the population who are not really clear on precisely how their particular household situation really maps on macro trade decoupling trends, and that understandable. Anyone who really thinks they know is either in an politically hot-topic industry where there are clear an immediate consequences or is probably over confident. A lot of folks especially your middle class suburbanite, thinks "I am pretty comfortable, my family has the things we need maybe I don't want to upset the apple cart at least not right now even if what the America first people are saying makes sense."

That is the thing here, and Conservatives need to be very careful in articulating this tariff argument. Democrats are doing a good job making people think it is all about today or next year. Conservatives need to start clarifying this isnt about being able to afford personal iPads for both little Timmy and Sally today, its about Timmy and Sally have real opportunities 20 years from now, and not being served up some BS like 'learn to code' while they fill out paper work for SNAP.

If people think this is going to be entirely pain free, they are wrong. We have to do this out of place of patriotism and nationalistic interest, not greed.

Some of the at is cultural, some is education but a lot of it just selection bias I expect.

Most companies are going to outsource their first and second lines of support not the stuff that requires technical ability and deep knowledge about systems or decision making authority to resolve. Not that you can't or that some don't but the simple-er basic customer service tasks are obviously the easiest thing to throw over the wall to some third party.

My point is frustrating as it is, I don't think agents are to blame in most cases. You can't expect someone who has not access or authority to do anything other than click a few buttons in some service portal to not stick to a script. It does them and you no good for them to start offering or giving advice they can't effect.

The goal never had anything to do with CO2 emissions. The goal is authoritarian control by the technocracy. It is about making it impossible for anyone but the elite to live in anything but some some burtalist high rise or be tethered to farm equipment they maintain. "They" don't want normies being able to assemble etc, or have the degree of independence to reject a policy but voting with their feet.

They do happen.

Some friends of mine recently lost their house to fire. the fire department is pretty sure it started with a Li battery pack that overcharged.

Remember last year we were reading how NYC wanted to restrict e-bikes because the batteries lead to apartment fires.

I am saying all Li battery devices are dangerous they are not, but there is a lot of cheap imported crap out there that has very little regulation on charging if any and usually nothing to protect from excessive current draw for any reason.

Li chemistry batteries certainly do pose a greater fire risk when haphazardly shoved into circuits and physical housing with no real engineering as compared to older chemistries like PbS04. There is enough anecdotal evidence to make that clear.

Yeah but lets also recognize that Android SUCKS, it SUCKS hard.

You need a lot better hardware to deliver the same experience, on Android, especially in terms of memory.

I guess the sugar water thing is a reference to Scully having been CEO at Pepsi and than latter apple during its struggling period. Trying to make some claim about phones being marketed increasingly as consumable products rather than hardgoods and...

The whole thing is really forced and seems like a writer who had a few to many convinced themselves they had a good idea for an article, wrote half of it, probably realized it was crap the next day, but figured they could clean it up drive a few clicks with it anyway.

Liquidation of the Navy would be stupid, that is about the most useful of the armed forces.

We should probably get rid of the Army, we don't realistically face a land war, and we don't need an airforce. Naval aviation is probably quite adequate for defense.

If we dumped NATO membership and stopped playing team America world police, reducing our role to keeping international waters safe for shipping and commerce. We could ensure own security by getting out neuclear weapons treaties and making certain we have enough missiles with MIRV tech ready to go on the launch pads and an aggressive re-assertion of the first-strike-policy, nobody would ever threaten the territorial US and we could save a ton money.

Yeah but let's be perfectly honest here, while there were bad actors like IBM before, there was some restraint provided by investors, or at least the desire to no scare them away or face shareholder driven ousting of the board etc.

Passive investing - has been the major contributor to the "whatever brings asset growth or enables dividends to the shareholders this quarter" vision of fiduciary responsibility and corporate governance should look like mentality.

When the people who buying stocks directly controlled/picked what companies they bought there was an incentive to be good state/national/world citizen. Now that it is all 401k money and buy/hold/sell decisions are made by algorithm or a handful of fund managers evaluated solely on the returns the generate, that is not the case. Management at most firms does not give a hoot about anyone's opinion other than institutional investors.

I think the 401k and the abstraction of money management into target date funds and broad asset classes has deeply hurt if not outright severed the relationship between American capitalism and American Democracy.

The result is most of nation has at least some of their money invested in companies who engage in practices they would find despicable - that is warped. Worse they have no easy way to shift those assets elsewhere.

An unsupportable claim if ever I have seen one.

The problem the GPP ignores is that when it comes to forest ecology and wildlife, well a lot of the things people want to do lower greenhouse emissions are pretty bad for what forests most need to be successful and healthy, that is large unbroken acreages.

Every 100 ft wide miles long path you bulldoze thru a forest for powerlines to your new solar or wind facility does a hell of lot more harm than a little CO2 increase. People need to recognize just how incompatible it all is.

Reality is the only answer to more power where we actually need it, that is "environmentally friendly" is neuclear, and that we also know is economically ruinous. It is simply to costly to maintain, secure, and handle the end of life phase. In the event of an accident the harm is so concentrated and so long term is cannot be resolved with local resources. It is a solution that only works in a few parts of the world really.

Two things will actually save us:
1) Peak population
2) efficent, relatively clean oil/gas extraction and use.

It does not seem like Shatner is exactly butt hurt about it either, he is just stating the facts about what he got paid, for what and what he did not get paid for.

The fact is he took the job for agreed upon compensation, and he did so at a time when residuals were not the norm. The industry changed after. Reality is had Star Trek been made a few years later he'd probably a much wealthier man. That is true of a lot of financial success and failure, its an accident of timing.

If you had a good job and cash on hand in 2k8/9 you could have bought real-estate cheap and be selling now making fantastic gains. On the other hand if you happened to have bought in say 2003 and found you really needed to move in 2008 that probably hurt a lot...

Similar thing, there are handful of new-er restaurants in town that appear outwardly to be quite a success. They have exactly the same format/formula and are in the same physical buildings as the ones that failed during pandemic.

While I generally believe in the self-made man, that cream rises to the top etc, I can also recognize that how meteoric that rise is, can depend a lot of being in the right place at the right moment.

Masking as a policy was stupid because everyone in healthcare reasonably should have known that telling a public with no training to mask was going to lead to mostly terribly in effective masking, because ALL of them had to be trained to use masks properly and they knew most of the public was not so trained.

Masks may not have been stupid but requiring the public to do it certainly was!

Ditto for the vaccines, all they did was make people feel like they were suddenly invincible again. People got the jab and went back to their old habits of zero precaution, like not washing hands frequently and sharing drinking containers etc. Why because officials and media absolutely did lead them to believe it was near perfect protection.

All that ignores the moral travesty to trampling everyone's 1A, and 4A rights. Which should also be viewed as unacceptable. This time it was a health crisis but we now have a public conditioned to accept crisis as a justification for just about anything. The current administration is using a legitimate security crisis to justify a lot of very possibly extra constitutional enforcement actions. Speaking as someone who absolutely favors the general effort toward mass deportation and illegal aliens (of all stripes) I still do worry about the way ICE is grabbing people off the street. Its is PAINFULLY evident to me that justifications used for COVID lock downs, mask mandates, etc are different veneer on pretty much the same arguments that were used to support grabbing any light brown person walking thru a Home Depot parking lot, and other 'papers please' policies. Hey some of you guys might be illegals so in the name of safety we care going to search everyone at your peacefully assembly, its fundamentally not different then hey all of you in this Church are subject to arrest and forbiden to gather because someone might carry COIVD>

My general response to every who support the lockdowns and mask policies and now tries to lecture me about civil rights is this. Well you did not stand up for mine because you were scared of a cold, so I am not standing up for yours now FUCK OFF>

two things they do have that substantial housing investment. That is super important.

The other thing is they don't have much for raining days with that. Suppose the total a car. Easy to do these days, with the repair costs on modern cars. The delta between what insurance pays and what a new car (even a used one) likely costs could easily be 10k.

Add a few medical events and desire for life improving equipment / treatments not covered, a major home repairs like needing a new fridge, dishwasher, HVAC or water tank that isn't a homeowners claim or does not hit the deductible and you could draw that 200k down pretty quickly.

I am not saying they will have problems, but it would not take to long a bad luck streak to go from comfortable to just scraping by with only 200k in savings.