I don't see how anything has changed in a meaningful way. George Bush "tortured some folks" and Obama assassinated US citizens abroad. The status quo is literal evil and Trump is behaving in accordance with the status quo.
If you don't see any distinctions beyond “there is some evil” vs. “there is no evil”, all of human history must seem to be a flat, undifferentiated blob to you.
That's why the future looks so bleak. Republicans support absolutely any amount of crime and corruption, because "some" crime and corruption has happened under Democrats. Meanwhile half of the rest of Americans wouldn't support Democrats because "some" crime is infinitely worse than "no crime" in their view. Criminals enjoy an absolutely stunning structural advantage in this country.
A website was taken down. This might technically violate some paperwork law, but the real problem is we don't actually prosecute war crimes/human rights violations. So what difference does it make if some website went down?
I recently bought a fancy muscle car with all that crap integrated into the infotainment system. I explained to the sales guy that I WANTED to keep this car for the rest of my life but was concerned that wouldn't be possible. In 10 years it may literally be impossible to find a phone that will connect via the USB/bluetooth to the infotainment system. We may all be using something completely different. Not to mention, no one will be manufacturing replacements for that infotainment system if it ever craps out.
You can go buy a 50 year old muscle car and upgrade the radio to something kind of modern. But that won't be possible with my car 50 years from now. It's too integrated.
The sales guy had clearly never considered this issue before.
> The sales guy had clearly never considered this issue before.
This seems to happen far too often. I've come to the conclusion that salespeople pretend this is the case on purpose, since it benefits them for you to believe that you're the exception.
I wonder how long it will be before the first EVs get bricked because the manufacturer doesn't want to ship software updates to the old hardware any more.
If it can happen to a $1500 phone or a $5k computer, I'm sure it will happen to a $20k car eventually.
Cash for clunkers destroyed mountains of cars which increased pollution and forced a bunch of people up the food chain with regard to competition for used cars.
The infotainment system on my car can make changes to the suspension. Can change from street to track mode and even has a launch mode I can initiate for starting a timed 0-60, etc.
I can also put the car into valet mode so it won’t go fast. If I forget the valet mode password I am told I have to buy a very expensive replacement because it can’t be unlocked by a dealer.
The rule of thumb is if something has a cost and persists over time it must have some benefit even if we don’t understand what that is. Otherwise, creatures not paying the cost will outcompete over time.
Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus.
They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.
We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.
You could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.
The US is quickly becoming something else than the core of the global economy. The signs have been there already: advanced chips are done somewhere else, manufacturing in general is done in other places as well. What we see now is the biggest companies hiring in other countries like India and employing AI instead of workers. The US population is becoming less and less relevant.
I agree the empire is in a very dangerous place because it has expanded the labor force more rapidly than it has expanded supply of jobs. This is an existential risk to the empire.
The elites have put themselves in a position where the two main options are the sentiment above or Luigi Mangione. It honestly scares me a bit what's coming.
> If the foreigners were positively contributing to the economy their economic output would create jobs as well.
They do—actually, by a massive margin compared to citizens born here—we just don't have the legal immigration framework set up to support this.
EDIT: I was unaware a "debate" was even happening, I was just clarifying that immigrants start businesses at a massively higher rate than birthright citizens do.
