You’re not going to get an answer, at least not one based on logical tangible reality. If there was one it would have been addended to the comment to support the accusation to actually try and make a convincing argument in good faith. This is not that. The assumption is that you will know exactly what they’re talking about and upvote blindly in solidarity, sort of like a dog whistle, signaling to those who also listen to same right wing propaganda.

I know this exact same kind of comment by instinct because many years ago I too left those kinds of comments when I was an insufferable alt right assclown, and you will see it everywhere on any subject in any place where right wingers start showing up - the YouTube comment sections of certain channels, certain subreddits, all over Facebook, or god forbid you have ever bore witness to one of the most deplorable dregs of the internet: news article comment sections, when they were still a thing.

I actually wrote most of this out before looking at the profile because I was so confident, and after doing so for due diligence, I can confirm my suspicions. And if you unfortunately are forced to spend any time around right wingers, this kind of thing is common in their daily conversation. I shit you not I once heard someone blame an intermittent power outage on “the globalists”, and the others nodded their head in solidarity of outrage with zero evidence. It was a connection issue from the complex to the power lines, a transformer that needed to be replaced, as clarified by the utility company an hour later.

China has nukes, a gargantuan military with no other purpose than to fight back, and the internal cohesion to resist the pressure. Canada has a much smaller military spread out much further, a much higher dependence on US specific trade simply by nature of physical infrastructure, and an unfortunately not insignificant percent of the population in the central provinces who would probably side with the US. It’s not anbout fighting back, it’s all about who is easier to bully, where friends mean nothing because everyone’s worth is determined by how much he can exploit them and the leverage the us has over them.

It doesn’t really matter what happens with nato, trump is technically commander in chief of the armed forces and just the chaos alone of the first few hours and days is where it makes all the difference. Jan 6 for example would have looked a whole lot different under a different sitting president where the national guard and military were sent in when they should have been, because as it was, disaster was minutes and tens of feet away that day.

Kevlar musk

I just block and report as spam any spam text messages I get and any calls that get marked as scam likely. It was terrible before the election because I live in a swing county in a swing state and I think everyone was just mass spamming every number in the area code, but since then I haven’t really gotten much, maybe one errant text every 2 or 3 weeks. Which is much better than it was last spring and summer when the amount started picking up for me.

On one hand I am certainly inclined to believe that all the shrieking they did last time about dominion and rigged votes was projection as usual and their own justification to do it this time. But on the other, I am perhaps more likely to believe that a 78 year old on the precipice of dementia and who has a very clear and prolific history of being a fucking moron just confused it with Musk being a tech bro and his scheme of paying millions of dollars for votes in PA that was actually technically just a glorified lottery but that clearly was intended to pay for votes, which was actually argued to not be a lottery because the whole thing was rigged itself to pay out to right wing influencers. That might also explain why and how musk seems to have his ear and influence over his stances and what he says.

I would like to believe the former, but unfortunately I think the latter is more likely and that trump did actually win by the margin he did because so many people are so stupid. Because it would have had to be a nationwide hack to change the totals in nearly every state, versus just another gaffe from the non stop geyser of verbal diarrhea.

Give that amount of money to anyone with the most basic of simple financial management and they wouldn’t have to work a day in their entire life while living a very decent life. Almost $2M at 5% growth, below the total historical performance of the stock market, is $100,000 per year for doing nothing except sitting on money. Any amount of that which is reinvested compounds exponentially.

Never underestimate propaganda’s ability to make people believe contradictory messages simultaneously. They’ll just choose to believe whatever suits their immediate argument then flip without a single care of consistency. Don’t bother questioning it either because every excuse and justification and conspiracy theory in the book will come up and failing that, belligerence and aggression until you either back down or go away so as not to make them challenge their irrational beliefs.

I could list out dozens but just the most common: government is both weak and ineffective yet pulls the strings of society in the background, the west is both weak and should just appease Russia because they won’t win yet is propping up Ukraine and presents an existential threat to Russia that supposedly justifies invasion, states should decide their own laws but not on issues they want to force onto others like abortion among many.

And how you live. Good luck getting out of poverty with a terrible credit score, that you probably got because you were poor to begin with and living is expensive. Can’t get a loan to buy a car to drive to a better job, and can’t buy a house to build your assets and are instead forced to piss it away to a landlord in order to build their assets. That alone limits your employment opportunities and is an active drain on the amount of money you are able to save up, which compounds over time and creates societal castes of sorts - those who can accumulate capital and those who exist to serve them. And sure you can live on scraps for a decade and probably fight your way up as you crawl out of it, but it’s the fact that so many are forced to live like this that makes it crazy to believe that credit score isn’t already a social credit system.

You’re supposed to lie. Because everyone who is not a true believer in the cause - of the product, the company, the industry, the economy, capitalism, whatever it may be, is also lying. Because the whole system depends on everyone going along with it, otherwise it all falls apart. That you have to slave away at your shitty job with shitty managers so that one day you can become the manager and be shitty because it happened to you, all in service of the exploitation of natural resources and people and society to make line go up and make the people who managed to step on the most amount people on their way to the top that much richer.

I can’t believe people are out here raw dogging their TV’s operating system. To me it’s as strange as buying just a monitor for your desktop PC and wondering why your $80 computer injects ads everywhere and sells every scrap of data you give it. I haven’t owned a full sized TV in over a decade, and before that my dad always used an Apple TV and before that a dish network DVR so I always assumed it was the norm to buy some external input device, because I literally have not lived any other way.

Usually the stove and dryer are natural gas too

I specifically looked it up just to be sure, John Deere does have multiple factories in China and a good amount of their website wording includes “assembled in USA”, sort of like cars and appliances and a lot of things, usually to get around existing tariffs and import duties. They do also have factories in Germany, Mexico, india, and of course multiple in the USA, but I kept it simple for the sake of the explanation, because China also does produce a lot of soybeans as well.

It’s way, way more than that. Specialization and comparative advantage underpins the entire globalized economy which is the only way to allow us to get more for the same amount of labor. Without it, we simply regress. US farmers grow soybeans so that Chinese manufactures can make the tractors to allow the US farmers to grow the soybeans, and that only works with free trade. And in this scenario there is no one else making a tractor for anywhere near the same cost, and no one else who can grow such a large volume of soybeans, otherwise the trade probably wouldn’t be happening in the first place. And so the alternative is that both countries have to make both independently. And that is more expensive without the efficiencies of economy of scale, more expensive because of lower supply because we don’t have the capacity to produce that many tractors and China can’t grow that many soybeans, and more expensive because of the infrastructure costs being duplicated and spread out over less units.

And so we both end up with less tractors and less food that are more expensive. Now add in petrochemical fertilizers imported from Canada, steel and coal for the metal used in the tractor imported from Australia, all the industries that support them also getting caught into this, and where every one of those companies is tied into their regional, national, and the global economy. And that is just for tractors and soybeans.

We trade for almost everything. And every single item that we trade, we do so because it is cheaper than making it ourselves. Tariffs are an artificial tax on efficiency, and we are literally less prosperous with them in place. Some things are a matter of national security, of not allowing a foreign government leverage over your society, but we’re talking about his genius plan to put tariffs on literally fucking everything - soybeans and tractors, but also clothing, toys, electronics, appliances, vehicles, on and on and on. And a tariff on it will increase the price, because that is just how economics works.

Thanks for the advice, Kristi Noem.

The sad part is that I would hesitate to even call it a social program either - it’s the bare fucking minimum. It’s just taking the money that you paid into it and paying it back out to you later in life. It provides some financial structure and stability to those who otherwise would not have it, and that’s important, sure. But considering that this is height of our vital government social programs, then the bar is already so pathetically low. This is fighting to keep the scraps when private industry is already milking us for healthcare, education, public transit, utilities, etc, etc, etc, and it’s pitiful that we have to fight to even keep this.

Because heat pumps are popular now, and the government is helping people pay for them through inflation reduction act rebates. So they can jack up the price and price gouge the shit out of us, because they know they can and know that they will get away with it. And I bet they were never popular because the same people selling home AC units also sell gas powered furnaces for home heating. So they charge you for two appliances and two installations, with two maintenance calls every time something goes wrong and two upgrade cycles. But now that they come as one unit, they still have to find some way to return more money to shareholders than last quarter so the price goes up.

I just got whole home AC replaced with a heat pump with an integrated furnace backup because it can get very cold here, and also had all my baseboard heaters ripped out. Perfectly fine in the winter and it has freed up at least 1/4 of all my walls to have stuff right up against them if I so choose, but really annoyed that the whole thing costed $20k when it could and should have been built this way 60 years ago. Not to mention all the inefficiency of burning gas for heat when heat pumps move more energy than they consume, multiplied across decades for nearly every building on the planet.

Not only has it already been done, but it happened for most android phones pretty much the model year or two after apple did it. Enough time to get all their snarky ads in, let apple take the heat, and adjust their plans to follow the business model exactly - push people away from included headphones and towards their own +$100 Bluetooth headphones.

And the thing is, I love Bluetooth headphones. I used to love wired but the convenience is just too hard to beat. But everyone is price gouging the shit out of them compared to what it costs to produce. Granted I run mine very hard at probably an average of 10-12 hours a day split between two pairs at work and home, and I got around 10,000 hours out of my AirPods 2 before they died so I definitely got my moneys worth. But I refuse to pay $100 when I can get a knock-off pair for $4 that sound 95% as good with surprisingly similar battery life.

I see that as offering services that people clearly use and value, and that the bills have to be paid somehow. So as long as proton can deliver the privacy and security features it promises, I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing an alternative when the only other options are built on monetizing your data.

Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.