I pay to avoid ads on Amazon Prime… Now i have to endure unskippable ads every 10 minutes, and my annual fee is up over 50% since i started.

Fuck them. No matter what, these mercantilists will extract everything they can, and they will break any promise or contract they sign as soon as it bemefits them. We, however, cannot do the same.

The problem with these tariffs, implemented in this way, is that the less wealthy has to shoulder the shock and most of the loss of wealth, while the most wealthy solidify their place in society on several levels. The social balance of power further shifts toward the billionaires.

Tarriffs are better applied for protecting existing small and mid-size businesses in danger of being wiped out by huge foreign operations, and protecting industries that have national security roles.

The key here is they would be applied before we lose the capacity - not decades after we already adjusted to the loss.

On this side of the curve it is more productive to subsidize operations that can (re)build the capacity we seek. Biden’s work with TSMC was a prime example. This approach is less disruptive. Even then, targeted tarriffs can be productive.

We could have saved our solar industry. We decided to let China sell priduct at a loss until their competition went out of business or left because no profit could be achieved. This is where tariffs make sense.

Are most people in “the west” worse off today than they were 150 years ago? Are there fewer well functioning democracies than there were then? Has no minority group seen any improvement in their freedom? Has there been no improvement in how people interact with each other? No improvement in poverty?

Yes, of course. Capitalism is an economic framework. A good political framework is needed, just like i said for socialism. This is a failure of the U.S. political implementation not of capitalism as a system of commerce. I would never say capitalism is the answer to all social ills. Your statement feels like a way to say I am wrong, so if I misunderstood, sorry.

Profiteers foregoing the largest source of profit? Not likely.

Oh, like NAFTA!

His subordinates, who else?

It is authoritarian. Communist system devolve to authoritarianism because it is a natural progression (easy to do). Socialists can, but a good democratic political structure makes it harder.

He said Capitalism, not Corporate Capitalism. Pure, unfettered Capitalism leads to the same place facism, communism, and feudalism go.

The issue is “unfettered”. Regulations enforced upon the operation of the markets, maintained by rule of law, enables achievement of greater agency and success upon much larger parts of society.

People understand they can prosper from creating real value, which pushes society toward greater advancements to quality of life and enable more individual freedom than any prior economic and political system.

Kill the illness, not the patient.

Until you realize republicans are on a PR offensive against empathy. Litterally, not figuratively. I’m not speaking in metaphors.

I’m unaware of being in a trash-talk contest with anybody. Given that another “MasterBlaster” who is not me (on KBin) replied, I think this is a mistaken identity. In fact, this is the first time I’ve seen anybody else with the same handle as me.

Operate the gas tank? What new feature did they add that requires a container of liquid to be networked?

The only more masochist geeks are the Perl ones - especially the ones who entered the “most obfuscated code” contests.

Nah, too relevant, what with LUA, functional programming, currying, and AI, et. al. ;)

I did an AI robot arena bot in college using Lisp. That was interesting.

I see your VHDL, and raise with Prolog… or Postscript, similar paradigm.

The revenge!

It’s dark… you are eaten by a grue.

No. The proper term is GEEK. Needs are uncoordinated, awkward, have no fashion sense, and occasionally tape their broken glasses (or say sheepishly, “did I do that?”)

Geeks have in-depth, we’ll researched knowledge on topics that are obscure to the “mundanes”, have intellectual curiosity, and sometimes gain in wealth as a result. In many cases, they tend to make non-geeks (and geeks for other topics) completely befuddled. This sometimes results in insecurity on the part of non-geeks, which negatively impacts their social lives. On rare occasions, such geeks are so over the top smart that they transcend such petty attitudes (see: Neil deGrasse Tyson)

This gave me a chill, as it is reminiscent of a scene in the 1970 movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project”

“This is the voice of World Control”.

For me, a C# developer by trade, this is easily solved with a one command C# call. It’s possible you already have dotnet 6 or 8 on your distro as there are many C# Linux apps now.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/System.Text.Json/9.0.0-preview.4.24266.19