The reason you haven't felt the worst of the tariffs and the worst of that national sales tax is company's stocked up before Trump's taxes went into effect.

Those stocks are now depleted and they are gradually shifting those costs on to you. They have already said repeatedly in various news articles that they intend to do it slowly so as to not create price shock.

Basically it's boiling a frog only the frog is smart enough to jump out of the hot water. We're getting boiled alive because half of us are too busy freaking out over trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest and the other half somehow inexplicably believe that the Republican party is better for the economy despite their entire lives directly witnessing the opposite.

Was guaranteed to put us into a recession and that means Mass layoffs.

But mostly Trump's tariffs.

I mean that. We have pretty solid numbers that without Trump's tariffs inflation would be 2%. At 2% inflation we would be getting rapid cuts to interest rates that would create a boom in the economy. Meanwhile Trump has pulled back tens of billions of dollars of funding from Congress that he is illegally withholding from States and he has chased away about 60 billion dollars in tourist dollars with his ice thugs.

I know people don't like hearing it but Donald Trump really is destroying the economy and you are going to start feeling it soon. We are up to a 93% chance of recession.

If you are retired he is also heavily deregulated Wall Street and the systems that prevent your savings from being looted and he is in the process of eliminating the Medicare Gap programs that you use to pay for your health care so that you can enjoy socialized medicine and escape the real American healthcare system.

People have not really realized just how much fucking damage Donald Trump is doing and the heritage foundation who are behind all of this shit.

The thing I think people don't understand is that economies are large and it can take a while for the damage to filter down across the whole system. Plus we here have mostly been pretty well off and done pretty well compared to the rest of the country.

But you cannot break as many fundamental systems as Trump without it affecting basically everyone except the very very wealthy. If you have less than 100 million dollars in your bank account then you are not untouchable.

There's a little bit of jobs of course mixed into that 30k which will be replaced by AI albeit probably very poorly.

But the majority of this is the recession that instituting a national sales tax while putting crooks and thieves in charge of everything was inevitably going to cause.

Oh Jesus fuck look at me I'm explaining. And as we all know from Saint Reagan if you're explaining, you're losing.

While also holding on to that sweet sweet 30% cut they get of every single software and DLC sale.

Basically they want what valve has but they don't want to be valve. They don't for example want to create a user and developer friendly platform run by a guy that everybody trusts not to stab them in the back.

So basically the next Xbox is going to probably cost at least $700 or $800 maybe more. Because Microsoft doesn't want to lose money or even break even on the hardware.

But they are counting on people not being able to figure out how to install steam. Which might work with a lot of console gamers.

As for me the reason I am a PC gamer is that I get good value from the hardware. I can do all my PC stuff and I spend about $400 every 5 years on a new CPU motherboard and RAM and about,... Well it used to be about $100 on a new GPU every two and a half to three years but that's out the window.

The crazy cost of modern video cards is what's changing my calculus. At a minimum I've got to spend $400 to get something worth upgrading from my ancient GTX 1080. Which itself was bought used for $150.

So I'm looking at about $1,000 every 5 years to play games on my computer now. Microsoft has to beat that price at a minimum.

There is one hard part Microsoft is going to have which is if they go full PC they lose the ability to write to bare metal which they do periodically and even for the people who don't they lose the really really advanced automatic resolution scaling that the consoles have.

Both the Xbox and the PlayStation will dynamically scale the resolution whereas with PC you usually have to set a hard resolution scale option.

PC cards have this with dlss and FRS but they don't seem to work as well as on the consoles. Not entirely sure why but it's how the PS5 and the xbone have been able to stay competitive even though they're running what's basically a GTX 2080.

We will have to see. There's also the possibility that Microsoft will still slightly subsidize the hardware or that they might get a better deal from AMD then I can buying my own GPU.

I know the 8060 looks pretty impressive but AMD only puts it on super high-end hardware meant for AI workstations so it's kind of pointless because you've got something that has 4060 to 4070 level performance but comes on a $2,000 desktop or a 2500 laptop and at that point I can buy something with a 5060 or even a 5070 that's going to run rings around it.

And finally the question is will the bootloader on Microsoft's hardware be unlocked so I can install Linux if I want to. I'm too lazy to do it right now but when does 11 sucks so hard that I would be tempted. I'm still on Windows 10

Nothing makes me feel older than watching some hockey games from the early 00's and seeing how awful the picture quality looks. Not even that long ago...

I wouldn't say 4k is a gimmick but do agree we've already surpassed "peak display" for most use cases.

At my old house I installed a 1080p projector and built a roughly 130" screen to project it on. After 4 or 5 years I upgraded to a 4k projector and definitely saw a difference but nothing like the jump going from 480 to 1080.

I use 4k monitors for work because I can have multiple windows open at once.

No desire to ever go up to 8k.

So they were kind of right I think if you had ideal circumstances. I had a VHS copy of Jurassic Park that was just amazing to watch the first two times. But it pretty quickly degraded and by the fourth watch you could noticeably see a loss of quality.

Early DVDs tended to be single-sided because they were expensive so they would heavily compress the video and it wouldn't come out all that much better. This was especially bad for anime where they would take a series that really should have been put out on 13 discs for two episodes per disc and then compress it down to five or six discs of a 26 episode series. Evangelion famously was one of the worst of the bunch and if you bought pirated DVDs you would get high quality Japanese rips that looked infinitely better.

Blu-ray changed that because you've got at least 25 gigs on a disk. Also by the time Blu-ray was out compression software had improved substantially.

I've got a couple of anime blu-rays they're on 2, 25 gig discs and they look fantastic because it's the equivalent of 11 single-sided DVDs and they were compressed with much higher quality software.

I guess what I'm saying is that under ideal circumstances hd wasn't that big of a jump but in the real world switching to it had huge practical consequences that resulted much much better quality.

The only company making software that could play them has exited the market because it was too difficult to implement the DRM the industry mandates. If you have a standalone player you literally have to hook it to the Internet so it can phone home and make sure you're not a filthy pirate every time you watch your movie.

Meanwhile the quality of 4K blu-rays has gone to shit because instead of doing skillful remasters they're running them through AI. It's one of the cases where if you used to do that work you lost your job for sure but you definitely shouldn't have. Meanwhile again if you're a consumer you're paying a premium for that 4K Blu-ray.

One of the grindhouse producers has a couple of goofy old movies I would like to buy but they only put them out on 4K and I'm not going to go to the trouble of tracking down a 4K player and paying an extra 20 bucks for the privilege for a goofy old movie that is not going to look great running at 4K because it wouldn't even look great running at 1080p...

The TV industry made a crazy amount of money during the switch to HD and they have been trying to replicate that for the last 20 years. It's frustrating because it makes it so much harder as a consumer for no particularly good reason.

And the replacement rate is 2.1 then if you just fix the economy then your population would start growing again.

The point I'm making is that the actual replacement rate appears to be closer to 2.7 based on real-world numbers and the speed at which population decline is happening.

If you Google 2.7 birth rate you will find articles describing it with links to the studies about it.

The 2.7 number isn't something I pulled out of my ass it's the only thing that explains the data.

So right now the premise is that if we just fix the economic issues population growth will continue but it looks like that's not the case.

If you want rapid population growth it looks like you need modern civilization without modern societies. You need women who don't have rights, or the ability to hold their own jobs or have bank accounts but you also need advanced medical Care and sanitation so those women don't die in pregnancy.

We had that for about 80 years and that's where the rapid population growth came from. I just don't think that you can sustain that. You are either going to get social improvements that grant women rights so they can choose when to have kids or you're going to have a breakdown in Civilization that takes away medical Care and sanitation and you go back to women dying in childbirth unable to breed more children.

I don't think the billionaires care because they are planning on replacing us with AI and robots and automation in general but there are still some policy makers who care

Seriously look it up.

China and India both have the same birthright problems as all the other countries that you are grouping under Western Civilization.

The idea of Western Civilization is something that was come up with by white supremacists. It was necessary to group groups of people with fair skin into a single banner of Western Civilization because there aren't enough fair skinned people to put up against darker skinned people in an utterly pointless race war that white supremacists use to maintain their power and prestige...

In the real world until it was politically and economically useful to do so the Irish and the Italians and the French and the Russians and the fair skinned Spaniards all hated each other, thought of themselves as completely separate from everyone else and would cheerfully engage in various forms of the exact same kind of pointless racism only using national borders instead of skin color.

I say this because the phrase Western Civilization is constraining your thinking.

If you want the best example of the pointlessness of grouping things by what is more or less skin color go watch the end of blazing saddles with the line about being okay with the n-word but not with the Irish.

Now to answer your inevitable question, why did European countries come up with gunpowder and industrialization and colonization and all that other fun stuff first, it's basically a happy accident of where certain trees grew that let them build big big ships that could be used to move large armies and large groups of people combined with land that could grow enough food to feed those people.

There's a hell of a lot more to it than that of course but a huge part of it was just happy accidents of geography.

Anyway you want to watch out for the phrase Western Civilization especially right now because like I said it's being used by white supremacists and nationalists and they want to rob you blind using old tricks.

[dad joke]
Q: What would Steve Jobs say if he were alive today?
A: Help! Someone get me out of this box! I’m not dead!
[/dad joke]

Until they're twenties. So if you start encouraging teenage pregnancy you're going to do a lot of damage down there and it's going to be counterproductive because they won't have more kids later on.

This is another example of men not really knowing how ladies plumbing works. I only know because I watch entirely too many left-wing YouTube channels and they cover it all this extensively with the abortion debate here in America.

It is possible to force women to have children against their will. You don't have to do it without right rape you can just put them in a position where they don't really have any other options. Which is to a certain extent what you're suggestion would result in...

And that does seem to be what we're going to do. But the problem is that when you do stuff like that you usually collapse civilization while you're doing it and you lose all the medical care and prenatal care that keeps those women alive so your population growth still goes to shit.

We know it's the economy stupid. Just like Clinton said.

The problem is even beyond the economy it appears that women have a limited number of children they actually want to have because it's physically demanding to have children. I don't mean the raising them although there is that there is the whole giving birth to them thing.

I don't think this is something most men think about all that much. But every year children get bigger because we have all this prenatal care and that's a good thing for the health of the child but it means that the birth is a lot harder on the woman.

I mean most men do not know what a ectopic pregnancy is or why women need reproductive health care when they get them... So it's not surprising we have blind spots in these surveys.

The other problem is that we don't really fix the economic problems. Finland probably does a better job than most. But we are still asking people to be 100% responsible for a new baby all by themselves and giving them a few months of time off and a few thousand dollars.

Even in Finland that doesn't come close to covering the time and effort let alone the expense of having a kid.

To do that we would have to completely reorganize how our civilization works and that sure is shit isn't going to happen. For more reasons than I care to get into right now.

So you're not just looking at the difficulties of childbirth physically but we aren't really addressing the difficulties of having the kid after the fact.

And on top of all that children are basically just expensive pets now. In a modern economy it takes at least 22 years to raise a child to the point where they can be productive enough that they could be any use to the family at Large. You are simply going to need some advanced training because the kind of training you can get in 18 years of life on this planet is never going to come close to covering the costs coupled with the cost of keeping you alive past the age of 18.

Going back to the old days by the time a kid was 16 you could put them to work and they could make good money. But that was farm work and factory work that has long since been automated or in the case of the farm will work given over to borderline slaves.

To be productive enough to be useful to the family unit as a whole you are going to need some form of higher education. Just like if you go back a little bit further to be that productive you started to need high school and before that grade school.

If you actually look at the history of education and child rearing (another thing us men never think about) it's a history of needing increasingly large amounts of education and increasingly advanced education in order to keep up with the demands for productivity. And if you can't keep up then you're just a burden on everyone around you.

All of that makes kids like I said expensive pets and reduces the odds of having more of them. Instead of potentially retiring on the backs of your kids like you would in the old days you're probably going to be helping them out here and there as you age because they simply cannot be productive enough.

My kid for example has a bachelor's and I still hear and there have to help bail them out. Yes it's an in-demand field and yes they are fully employed.

If we get really lucky they will make it through a graduate degree that will last unlock enough money that they can live reliably on their own. But in my country those programs have been slashed and I think they're going to try and sneak in under grandfather clauses but I have no idea how that's going to turn out given how the Trump regime runs things...

To be fair things are a lot worse here in America than Finland but it's the same basic effect just to a lesser degree.

Looks like somebody needs a visit from an American aircraft carrier...

And even in the most advanced economies women poll at only wanting 2.6 kids.

It turns out the way our population was growing was we forced women to have children whether they wanted to or not. Basically rape marrying them.

It's not terribly hard to figure out why. The woman has to squeeze those kids out. So if you look at women who have a lot of kids except for a few oddballs it's all either women who are forced to do it because they're part of some twisted religious cult or it's extraordinarily wealthy women like Romney's wife who can basically focus entirely on having the kid and then have a nanny do all the really hard work of raising them.

The physical toll of actually having and raising a lot of kids is pretty brutal. A buddy of mine wanted a third kid and the wife vetoed it because she's the one that has to squeeze them out. Anecdotal but it matches the 2.6 above.

Even when you get a woman who wants to be a clown car like my old next door neighbor she topped out at five kids before the doctor said the next one was going to kill her.

We could of course do away with modern civilization and go back to forcing women to have children against their will, using a variety of little nasty tricks to mask that we are doing that. You know like that trad wife bullshit.

The trouble is doing that's going to require breaking down the parts of civilization that give us the sort of medical system that keeps those women alive so they can squeeze out five or six kids before kid number six or seven puts them in the grave.

I don't know if it's going to matter since the billionaires aren't planning on letting us have civilization anymore anyway so it seems likely that 99% of the population is going to be driven back into squalor and pre-industrial civilization. That's where all this AI automation is about. It's about dismantling the system of capitalism that forces billionaires to depend on us filthy consumers and workers.

But assuming the billionaire plans don't pan out the way they expect then the human race is going to have to figure something out to maintain our numbers. Maybe artificial wombs? But we are a hell of a long way off from that despite a few cool sci-fi-ish articles about it.