They never have been before. MAYBE they are now. Or he just gave himself a tariff exemption. 🙃

Has he always charged $50 for this shit, or is that due to his own tariffs?

Model 3 was my next car for years. Now it’s the Ioniq 6. I’m just so grateful that we are only now able to plan a car purchase this year, and not in the last 2 or 3 years where we would now be stuck in a Tesla.

An expensive, scattershot-style experiment I guess. It’s certainly… a choice. But you’re right I’m sure.

I’m glad to see Mandalorian getting a film for sure. And in the course of this discussion, I have discovered Skeleton Crew and if it’s a Mando spinoff, I’ll certainly have to watch that now.

Yeah, precisely. That’s what this would be, built into your headphone case. You never have one without the other.

I mean, this wouldn’t be all that stupid imo. Add some Apple watch functionality like fitness detection and easy syncing between phone and iPod Nano Buds, this would be a solid addition to a runner’s arsenal leaving no need to carry your $1000 phone on a run. Suppose you could use your watch for that and leave the case at home though. But more options aren’t a bad thing, not everyone has or wants a watch.

Dammit - two comments and someone already beat me to it.

I could swear that Disney had learned a lesson about flooding the market with MCU content - and they’ve cut back substantially to focus on quality over quantity. But given this, I guess it was Marvel Studios that took the lesson, and Lucas Film decided to take the opposite approach. 😶‍🌫️

I sure hope the rest of the world was as steadfast, although China was uniquely in a position to stand up to a bully, especially this particular bully… Not every country is able to withstand a prolonged trade war if it were to come to that. All the other countries he claims came to him but he refused to name… I hope he made them ALL up.

Accidentally mixing metaphors here… But it’s like the idiot looked around the prison yard on his first day and picked Ser Gregor Clegane as his target, and then predictably got his head caved in because he fancies himself an Oberyn but he’s actually just Reek.

I certainly agree with you here - all of the fascists of history were HIGHLY effective leaders that actually got shit done. The people lived with it because they did what they said they would do. Instead, this disfunctional band of morons can’t seem to get a single thing done without a cavalcade of unforced errors and fuck ups.

Oops, we deported the wrong guy. Oops, we fired the folks managing our nuclear arsenal. Oops, we fired ATC during a preexisting ATC shortage. Oops, we sent a letter to Harvard earlier than we meant to, and forced our own hand. Oops, tariffs tanked the world economy, they’re paused! No wait, they’re back on now! Paused again! Well, we’ll make an exception for semiconductors though. Except we never said that? No exception! And now oops, someone caught us exfiltrating all government secrets and data to Russia.

This is the source of my own hope. They’re so incompetent and so stupid, execute every plan so poorly… that I find it hard to believe that the American people can ignore it for much longer. Even his racist, Nazi base can’t ignore him ruining their lives too.

There’s also the claim that it was sent too early, so regardless of what the error was, these were going to be the demands all along. They were just moving much slower in the discussion prior to the letter being sent. A wise attempt to boil the frog, and then somebody moved the pot over a rocket engine.

It looks stupid on the surface, but I’m concerned it’ll be used as a fake justification to drop nukes on China.

I love your optimism here, but it’s naive to believe that after everything that the president has done to date that is blatantly illegal and he has no authority to do that he will not somehow coopt the National Guard under some bullshit 200 year old law that was never meant to give him this power. Or fuck laws - he has shown his entire career a complete disregard for them and thinks he is completely unbound by the law - and he just does it anyways. Republicans in congress have proven over the last 3 months that they’ll happily cede the power their constituents entrusted them with to their dictator. What makes you think he won’t make the governors bend to his will? Republican first, then by force for the rest.

I think the one thing you’re missing is the American lies. The dehumanization of the opposition. The propaganda. I don’t think that the whole country will fall for it like they did with Bush, and it’s not like we have a MORE charismatic leader to sell it this time. But AI generated content and bots selling the lies are unfortunately going to convince a lot of people, we’re already seeing it. With a leader that is trying to litigate what higher institutions teach and destroying the public education system, the longer that this wears on, the dumber and dumber the electorate becomes. Military leaders not kissing the leader’s ring are already being removed from their posts to be replaced with sycophants.

I hope you’re right that there would be rebellion from within the military, and without. Otherwise, we have no friends left and every country on the planet has is justified in rising to the challenge to crush our new axis powers.

It won’t hit all at once for a lot of different reasons. Retailers’ back stock is not subject to tariff because it has already been imported. Raw material lead times for products assembled in the US will be longer than products imported ready for store shelves. Apple recently made the news for importing planefuls of iPhones the weekend before the tariff was applied. Smaller businesses won’t be able to do stuff like that, but big corporations will have likely done similar things to soften/slow price increases. And, until additional duties go into effect worldwide, lots of companies had already diversified their manufacturing out of China for US-bound products because of the already existing tariffs from Trump’s first term.

But once the companies have to pay the higher price, so will we all.

Given that the show is taking the piss out of mega churches, and Christianity period - I think this show should be right up your alley. Honestly, you’ll probably have a decent idea of how you’re feeling after watching the opening scene. It might be the best opening scene to a show ever. So many shows take a season to warm up, not this one.

Little did they know that they threw a layer of radium on your ceiling. Oops!

Definitely, at least with this Dell laptop circa 2007 - I didn’t want to cause a fire and iirc, the battery was already trashed at its EOL. Pulling the battery at least let me power on the laptop without any risk from having the battery inserted.

I’m moving soon and was packing up my office closet. Found my old college laptop and figured I better make sure nothing was stored on it before I tossed it. Pulled the removable battery (‼️⁉️) out and plugged in the power adapter. I couldn’t believe that it started Windows XP off of spinning rust faster than any modern device I own. They really don’t make them like they used to.

Yep. And all of my grocery stores locally have it - either in the bakery or just on the cookie aisle proper, as well as the newish (5 years?) vanilla or chocolate sandwich cookies.