TheDrink [he/him]

One major issue for Sledder here is that since Tesla started Cybertruck deliveries, the starting price for his vehicle has significantly fallen…That further lowers the starting price to $70,500.

My man found out the hard way about depreciation. All my life people have said never to buy a new car because it loses 20% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot. If you really want to drive new cars the best way to do it is lease and change every couple of years (this is still not financially sound, just better than buying new).

That is an effect, it also increases the relative value of debts which isn’t great, but the negative impacts of those is less than the potential positive impact of reducing the relative cost of living. Really what you’ve got to focus on if you’re a government trying to manage deflation is a) capital flight and b) wage reduction, because the biggest negatives are seen if investment gets pulled out of the economy and the positives aren’t realized if people’s wages don’t stay the same.

the rate of price growth has slowed substantially since hitting a high in 2022.

If the American economy is doing so good, how did Trump manage a clean sweep?

Right in that quote, the best thing they can say about our economy is not that it’s getting better, but that it’s not getting worse as quickly as it was two years ago.

Socialists of all types have been saying this for ages and explaining all the ways you could do it without succumbing to a deflationary spiral, but I’m sure libs will take this as evidence that Xi doesn’t understand econ 101 and that he’s ruining China.

my first thought was brainrot terminology, but after thinking about it for a bit I’m gonna go with “Gamergate” (level 3 please)

I broke 1500 in Star Fox 64 once and I’ve never been able to do it since.

They call that the Peter Principle, and there’s at least one Ig Nobel Prize winning study which found that it’s better to randomly promote people rather than promote based on job performance.

My experience (USA) mirrors yours until high school, which is when we were allowed to just stand up and walk out when we needed to. Kids who abused the privilege were dealt with on a case by case basis.

Surprised I haven’t heard Lisa! The humor is super dark so I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it’s one of the best RPGs ever made.

Probably the floor of an airport. Everything was closed and the chairs weren’t an option, so I just picked a spot on the floor and used my bag as a pillow for about six hours before I got woken up by the morning cleaning people.

The traditional conception is that ghosts aren’t really sentient creatures, but a phenomenon that souls can get stuck in instead of going to the afterlife. There’s symbolism there - a ghost is an echo of a person, much like memories of them or the effects they had on the world. There’s also a bit of Christian moralizing - a “good” person doesn’t stick around because they are eager to join God in heaven, while a “bad” person clings to their earthly life and possessions even if they are only capably of doing so in a greatly diminished state.

The modern conception of a ghost where it’s a fully realized person who can just kinda go through walls is an anthropomorphized and secular version of the ghosts that were invented by the Victorians.

holy shit. So a big part of the ceasefire deal is for the Lebanese Army to move into southern Lebanon and take over from Hezbollah - is Israel’s goal to get the Lebanese Army to move into range of their artillery so that they can shoot them and escalate the war further?

THE INK ISN’T EVEN DRY

We literally impeached him for threatening to not send weapons there for the civil war that ended up exploding into the full scale invasion.

Ah yes, the impeachment that accomplished so much and is extremely relevant.

I don’t care what Trump said or would have preferred, under his administration our government continued to fuel and escalate tensions in the region when we should have been pushing Ukraine to implement Minsk II and end the civil war. Maybe you could classify it as a mistake on his part instead of malice that he didn’t stop the arms shipments even though he really wanted to, but people are still liable for mistakes.

you know we genocided an entire continent of people, right? And continue to?

I literally cited an episode from that genocide as my reasoning for Jackson being the worst president.

wtf is bad about anti-Soviet foreign policy

The Soviets wanted deescalation after WW2, and supported self determination for liberated countries including Korea, Vietnam, Greece and Italy. Whatever you think of communism, the American policy of “containment” is directly and indisputably responsible for the suppression of democracy in dozens of countries and wars which killed tens of millions of people all because some of those people would have elected communist and socialist leaders we didn’t like.

Andrew Jackson and it’s not even close. Not to downplay the horrible crimes committed by many of our other presidents but I don’t think anything rises to the level of the Trail of Tears.

Remove Jackson from the running and it’s a more interesting conversation, however thinking about it reveals just how interconnected all of this stuff is. While the current genocide is occurring under Biden, we can’t forget that the conditions that lead to Oct 7 were created under Trump. For that matter so were the conditions that lead to the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

I think the worst in my lifetime by a mile is Dubya, but while his wars were massive and consequential we can’t forget that George Senior also killed scores of people in Iraq, and Clinton carried out the sanctions regime that killed scores more. Clinton was also the one who broke Labor’s influence within the Democratic Party - but it was Obama who was swept into power on the promise of a working class revolution only to smother it in its crib.

But yeah my top two are Jackson and Dubya but beyond that I’m not sure there are a lot of crimes in the history of America’s presidency.

Also if you pool the Americium from 100 detectors together they become pretty dangerous.

that link