That's kind of scary when you think about it. Corporations are abandoning the general consumer in favor of the top 10% or so.

Even for something as simple as entertainment it's becoming unobtainable. TVs are still cheap but I can't imagine that'll last forever.

There was a guy who runs casinos in Las Vegas commenting on why Las Vegas seemed so empty and he said that it didn't matter because he can make more off of one high roller dropping $2 million dollars on a gambling spree then all the middle class moms and dads in the country.

It's another sign of the American middle class just plain going away. The people at the top have had enough of capitalism. They don't like being dependent on us filthy customers.

"Bill Clinton at least got the family leave act passed."

He also signed the TCA which brought us the dominance of Fox and Sinclair. And also the welfare reform act that brought us the work requirement for SNAP. Fuck that fucking fuck.

Other companies do sell hardware with everything soldered, but they also sell hardware which is not like that, like apple USED to do. Claiming they are the same is nonsense.

We request crap. It's made in Asia and when it breaks we send it back to Asia. They take it because we pay them to take it.

It's people paying to move crap around all the way down.

The majority of tariff costs have not been passed on the consumers, companies have been eating them. American companies not foreign companies.

There's two reasons for this. First Trump's national sales tax was anticipated and companies bought up supply in advance. They have run out of that supply and Christmas is going to be very very expensive. Not just toys but everything. Because Trump put a sales tax on all the things you buy and all the things that companies you do business with by.

Now that the backlog of supply is exhausted companies are going to gradually start passing those costs on to you and making you pay Trump's national sales tax.

The key word there is gradually. They don't want sticker shock or Price shock because they don't want to anger the orange toddler. Trump has repeatedly abused his powers and needs to be impeached and removed from office but we can't do that because we aren't a functioning democracy anymore. Freaking out about trans girls killed the constitution. Funny it's such a stupid thing that it when the British could not...

Companies will try to sneak in some price increases here and there too. Just like when gas prices go up because of OPEC. Basically when gas is $5 a gallon you can tag on an extra 20 or 30 cents and people don't notice at the same way as one gas is a dollar a gallon.

Currently all of the inflation above 2% is caused by Trump's tariffs though. And if it wasn't for Trump we would be in for a solid economy for the next 4 years.

But billionaire tax cuts don't pay for themselves. You do.

What did you expect from a man with 28 credible rape accusations and 34 felony convictions? And I know what you expected. You're tired of having to be respectful to queer folk, maybe even to certain other minorities. Trump can have your house and your 401k and your children's future so long as you don't have to be nice to people you think are beneath you.

You made a devil's bargain with a man who literally said he's going to hell. Bad things are going to happen now and you can't stop them and they're going to happen to you personally

if you have investments, which can then employ people, you're not hoarding money. Your money has been employed so that it can circulate and do work.

Great. Do that, on the same site only.

The population continues to grow so yeah by definition Trump is going to get more black votes than any president in history.

The economy was in the toilet and frustratingly for some reason Biden and Harris didn't do anything about price collusion around eggs and other groceries. Combine that with widespread voter suppression and Democrat districts and blammo you've got another term of trump.

Don't get me wrong the black community thanks to poverty is heavily religious and that kind of religion encourages a particularly nasty strain of homophobia which the Republican party has been effectively exploiting for quite some time.

But the intense racism means that even with a bit of homophobia they picked up from the various forms of propaganda floating around they still aren't on the Trump train let alone Republicans.

And that homophobia is really only a factor with the older blacks. Young people simply do not give a shit.

Sadly older here is anyone over 50. It's amazing just how much you and people like you will give up so that you don't have to look at a trans girl. Literally you're going to give up your houses and your retirements and your health care and everything because you're having a massive panic attack.

For decades high tier engineers from in demand Fields would be snapped up by the big players to prevent them from working for competitors regardless of whether or not those big companies had anything for them to do. Nvidia was particularly bad about that starving AMD of engineers.

It's basically a very effective way to prevent competition when you have unlimited money from another line of business.

These crazy hiring sprees were specifically designed to starve startups and other companies of potential workers that could allow them to compete. It's a tactic the tech industry has been using for ages because when a new tech hits there are never enough engineers and because for some of the new tech like this the math is so complex that it can take decades for there to be enough. Sometimes like in the case of GPU development there never is.

Facebook absolutely has the money to keep those 600 engineers around. The fact that they are willing to let them go tells me that they aren't afraid of them working for competitors and that tells me that they aren't afraid of competitors.

They don't plan to let us vote again*, so they don't care who they alienate.

* They could of course do scam elections like they do in Russia, to pacify dumbshits

It doesn't matter where you are, hoarding while others do not have enough is evil, and hoarding cash (the wealthy currently have unprecedented cash reserves) exacerbates that. We need currency to circulate in order for the economy to function, so we print more money, and therefore the currency hoarders literally cause inflation. We keep hearing about the "job creators" but currency hoarders are job preventers.

With that said, none of that is relevant to whether the EU has the right to use lawsuits to break antitrust which is not monopoly-related. Insisting that only monopolies are relevant to laws which prevent anticompetitive actions in marketplaces is ignorant at best and therefore your focus on monopolies is likewise. But I don't believe you're that ignorant, which makes it seem more like malice.

Having nuclear in the mix is one thing, and "therefore we need to build more nuclear power" is something else. When we started building nuclear plants they arguably made sense, now building more definitely doesn't as we have cleaner alternatives.

In the past they wouldn't risk firing that many engineers because they would end up at potential competitors. Facebook has already figured out they can either run those competitors out of business or make back room deals with them if they are one of the big guys.

What annoys me as we all grew up with TV and movies telling us how bad corporations are and if you learn how bad they really are in the real world it's actually worse than TVs and movies make it out to be.

And despite all that it takes almost nothing for people to become pro corporate ass wipes. A few moral panics. Violent video games or trans girls in sports or dei woke or whatever the fuck they're calling political correctness today and blammo we all forget corporations are overpowered and evil as long as they protect us from the big scary whatever.

It's almost as if deregulating our news media so that it can be owned by two people was a bad idea

Yeah you do. Because America and our ruling class spread its influence everywhere.

You are one more term of trump away from becoming a vassal state of america. I'm not saying that to get a rise out of you I'm saying that because that's what's about to happen.

My country is about to destroy what we call the voting rights act. When that happens the Republican party is likely to get a super majority in our lower legislative chamber. What we call the House of Representatives.

The supreme Court is already completely under the control of our most extreme right wing lunatics.

In theory the Senate should be able to stop the worst of it but again voter suppression is out of control and the Republicans are likely to gain a supermajority soon.

Unless we get very lucky and Trump dies, which given his family history he probably isn't going to, then he will run for a third term and he will win. Our constitution does not allow it but our supreme Court could care less and they decide what's in the Constitution.

When that happens America officially becomes a failing empire and the first thing of failing empire does is invade other nations in order to loop them and fill the coffers that are emptied by corruption and incompetence.

Now would be a good time for your nation and the nations of Europe and South America to come together and defend America from the Russian bot networks that made all this possible but that you can't do that.

The rich and powerful in your country think that is America collapses they will be able to rise. It's an extremely dangerous game given the risk of invasion from American military but rich people often have unwarranted confidence in their abilities. Basically nothing bad has ever happened in their lives so they can't imagine anything bad happening...

This is all pretty well backed by historic president and it's moving along exactly the way any historian would expect.

Again with some help from the rest of the world to kick out the Russians and maybe push back against our billionaire class we probably could save democracy but I don't think your ruling elite is going to allow that.

The problem is what I just said is also fucking crazy that even though if you actually look into it you will find it is happening it's not something you're willing to believe.

So you will come up with another thought terminating cliche to help you cope with your collapsing civilization and the imminent threat of American invasion.

Welcome to the United States.

I mean that literally. They think he is the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Another third of the country thinks he's just a fucking monster and a fascist. We call these people right.

The remaining 1/3 just want somebody to make the price of eggs and rent go down and they literally do not give a shit what happens to anyone or anything as long as that happens. They are just barely making it day by day and they're very close to collapsing.

It's like the old saying, you are always closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire.

That one third knows it and they are trying their best to put somebody in office who will fix their economy they just keep fucking it up. They are also unfortunately more than willing to give up democracy and frankly the lives of other people to get those cheap eggs and cheap rent. Not because they're overly cruel or greedy but because homelessness in America is terrifying and they're staring down that barrel