I've been thinking that reason must prevail for nigh on a decade and while there have been moments where it seems to, overall I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic at the moment. I have been told that "degrowth" (for the purpose of slowing climate change) is the most unpopular policy imaginable, but it seems like we are taking a stab at it for different reasons. Perhaps that unpopularity will have some effect; it does seem (both anecdotally for me and in some data that I've seen) that swing voters are already regretting their decision.
> Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers – when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists' furthest imaginings – when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work – you could be damned sure about what would follow. Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.
I think I was born an old curmudgeon because I've essentially always felt this way. That said, Spotify got me to subscribe at least for a bit because I could not match its catalog and convenience. I also try and keep a FLAC archive of all music I might want, but some things just don't exist on other mediums these days.
Unfortunately I was seduced by the iPod years ago. I ripped then sold mine and the ex-wife's CD collection totalling some 1800 albums years ago. Then went streaming and as about 99% of that was covered, deleted it all because I couldn't be bothered to manage it all.
I wish was that old curmudgeon you mention back then!
My coworkers and I have been discussing how to prepare our company for tariffs since last November. I didn't realize that we were smarter than then smartest businessmen. Perhaps that is no great feat.
Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.
But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was.
But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
> But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it.
The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.)
Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”
April Fools seems like a relic of a happier time in the tech world. That said, I've found myself following /r/SBCGaming on Reddit recently and they had a decent one today with their game of the month, announcing that a historically terrible game (Superman 64) had been selected.
I've suspected for awhile now that the most easily automated job would be upper management.