pivot_root

Ew, capitalism. That diaper could have been put to good use as fertilizer instead.

In what world can one country dictate the laws of another country without there being a war?

We are talking about a country that demands regulatory concessions in foreign countries, beyond those of which are afforded to said countries' domestic businesses.

I was curious about that whole "Canada doesn't want US banks" thing that started in the beginning of our deranged trade war, and it's really stupid. Opening a bank there is oh so hard for our poor widdle conglomerate banks because... stricter regulations and an unwillingness to make 35% of their Canadian subsidiary publicly owned.

That's it. Their banks have to follow the same rules, and Trump thinks that's unfair for us.

School in a red state... isn't that just home"school"ing? Picture still applies, though.

Considering past policies, probably something about not leaving a negative comment until you've truly listened to the "victim" and empathize with them

the lobby group for JM Smucker and other big food manufacturers warned against "overly broad and sweeping tariffs" that might end up making it more expensive to import ingredients like cocoa, which are not made in the US.

"I don't necessarily want the current administration to say, well, we'll impose a tariff," Tom Madrecki, the group's vice president of supply chain resiliency, said at a recent forum about tariffs, hosted by Farmers for Free Trade.

"It's this careful balance between yes, I want you to take an America First trade policy and action to counter unfair trade policies abroad... but maybe not quite in that way."

If you're going to demand tariffs that increase prices to harm competition but not yourself, go fuck yourselves. The only thing that benefits is the company's profit margins, while consumers are forced to pay more because you raise your own prices to match.

In general, I agree with your conclusion. In this specific case with DOGE, I would argue otherwise.

Elon is overconfident about things he shouldn't be (which is everything) and not cautious about anything. With a LLM being dumb as hell and confidently wrong, that's actually not any worse than what we have now. If it somehow manages to be cautious about anything at all, it's an honest to goodness improvement.

otherwise, I'm out of the question.

You say that like there will be a choice to opt out. If the US goes to WW3, the draft and mandatory service are coming back with it.

I fully expect them to celebrate launch day by taking a sledgehammer to the old machine like that scene from Office Space. All I can say is that I really hope the SSA has been virtualizing their old COBOL applications and not running them on an ancient mainframe.

Between this and the other instances of Elon's AI correctly calling a duck a duck (or rather, a Nazi a Nazi and a disinformation spreader a disinformation spreader), Elon might be able to replace himself with Grok as the head of DOGE and see significant improvements almost overnight.

They also paid for a study on how digital piracy affects profits and then buried it when the result showed that it didn't have a negative impact.

The EU cares about the EU and its wealth, not its citizens. It's still a big step up over the land of the free-to-sell-its-citizens-wellbeing-to-the-corporations, though.

Ah, but you see: that's somebody else's problem. He's not going to be the sucker left dealing with an unmaintainable pile of brittle slop, so it's totally fine /s

Oh look, even more proof he has no idea what he's doing.

These systems are so ancient that their bugs and edge cases are expected behaviors for downstream services and applications. Properly replacing it would take years of effort, testing, validation, and communication... and this numbnuts is going to have his college interns quickly replace it by "vibe coding" something into existence with AI and flipping a switch.

I expect the goal is to break it so badly that they can justify getting rid of social security as a whole, but if I take it at face value as DOGE trying to make things more "efficient"... that change is going to cause so many problems that it would cost a magnitude more to fix the damage they did than just leaving it the fuck alone.