I didn’t think you were, I was more saying that the loss of many of those jobs that had been outsourced in the pursuit of cheap stuff means that, even if Trump’s proposed tariffs were effective at bringing those jobs back, it might not matter because they would still cost more than most residents of the US would be able to afford. At least, with current working conditions, many of these goods would simply cost more than people would be willing to pay, as we’ve been collectively conditioned to want as much stuff as possible, as cheap as possible. Domestic production of so many goods would require a drastic shift in consumer habits to even have a chance at being viable in the long term, but they absolutely couldn’t do the sort of volume that places like China has and be able to sell at a profit, barring the implementation of Chinese-style working conditions.

nor the desire to build their own shit

I would say that we’ve also largely lost the means to afford stuff built here, in large part as a consequence of our endless pursuit of cheap crap while scraping the bottom of the barrel with outsourcing. Even if you want to buy domestically-made goods, since we’ve lost so many of those good union jobs, especially in manufacturing, we no longer have the means to pay what it costs to make such a product with American workers. Especially if people intend to continue with their current consumerist trends.

I’m making $20/hour at the moment. If I want to buy American, union-made shoes, it’ll run me $400 a pair, on the lower end. I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a pair of work boots, a pair of regular shoes for wearing out and about, and a pair of dress shoes, which at that low end will run me 37.5% of my monthly gross pay. Now do the same for domestically produced clothing, and you’ve probably run up a bill of several month’s pay, just to have enough outfits to last you a single week, leaving aside coats, seasonal clothing, or formal attire. We’re either going to have to sharply curtail our purchasing and focus on buying a smaller amount of goods meant to last as long as possibly, or the sadly more likely scenario, we’ll see the establishment of domestic sweatshops to fuel the consumerist impulses of what remains of the middle class and up. Whether we’ll just go even more insane in our treatment of the poor here, or use prison labor and undocumented migrants “pending” deportation in these sweatshops remains to be seen, but Americans have demonstrated we shortsightedly value our ability to accumulate cheap trash over anything else.

I’d love to be proven wrong, and see a growth of strong unions and domestic production leading to a resurgence in American craftsmanship again, but the current environment is less than amenable to this outcome, to put it mildly.

Parks and libraries, sure, but the rest pretty much all cost money around me. Art spaces are largely monetized, outside of maybe a free night a week, for a limited amount of time before closing that doesn’t include access to all exhibits. Community/rec centers host events and charge money for most of them now, since I guess younger generations aren’t becoming members in large enough numbers to make things self-sustaining otherwise. Churches have the disadvantage of being churches. Sure, you can technically hang out in them for free, so long as you don’t mind constant religious services, which kind of comes with the territory on that one.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

Not every opinion you disagree with can just be dismissed as bots. The idea of blue MAGA is a perfectly legit criticism of the same dumbasses who months ago were screaming “VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO! BIDEN IS PERFECTLY MENTALLY COMPETENT AND THE GREATEST CANDIDATE TO EVER RUN, AND IF YOU SAY OTHERWISE, YOU’RE A CRYPTO-REPUBLICAN WHO REALLY WANTS TRUMP TO WIN!” whenever anyone expressed even the mildest criticism of the Democratic platform or reservations about Biden’s ability to win the election.

Lemmy, particularly lemmy.world, is full of blue MAGA nonces who read a post saying, “I’ll hold my nose and vote for Harris, but I really wish she would change her stance on X” and reply, “Now isn’t the time for this divisive rhetoric, I can tell you’re a Russian shill who wants Trump to win.”

Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it’s hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but “enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children,” is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Sure, if it’s one person. Where I used to live, the nearest park would have multiple groups engaged in loudness wars, each upping their volume in response to the others, so nobody could enjoy the park. Public spaces shouldn’t be held hostage by assholes who don’t understand how to behave in public, to the detriment of everyone else.

As far as what to do, it would be nice if the existing rules would be enforced that prohibit this behavior, but people cry racism for being told off for bringing a massive speaker to blast merengue and dembow in the park and somehow find support, rather than people asking why they’re blasting any type of music in the park to begin with.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.

The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.

Also, not everyone that is good at a job has the personality to be in management. I’ve found myself in several management roles before I realized I absolutely hate being responsible for other peoples’ work and am just not cut out for it.

Even if English is your first language, it’s not always easy to maintain your composure when talking about a topic you’re emotionally invested in or under a lot of stress about. I would take a different stance about a driver that drops f bombs every other word, but this prudishness about occasional profanity is silly.

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

Are you in licensed dispensaries? Pretty much all the ones I’ve been to, the edible options are 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg. My other thought, are you sure you aren’t looking at the THC content of the whole container? I have some 10mg chocolates in the freezer, but dead center on the lid’s label is “100mg THC”, then underneath and in a much smaller font, “per bottle.” I’ve noticed that on a lot of packaging, as well as dispensary websites, they choose to list stupid big numbers by just listing the overall content, and not what you would get per unit.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance.

With a few caveats, yes. At least with the insurance I had last year when I hit the max for the first time, it has to be both deemed medically necessary to do, and be in network. Just because you hit your annual out-of-pocket max doesn’t mean you can get free cosmetic surgery, for example. Out of network treatment also had a separate annual max, so if I saw the wrong specialist or went to the wrong hospital during an emergency, I could still have gotten hit with another $10,000 in bills before that kicked in. And finally, I learned that there are actually annual maximums for certain types of treatment. In my case, I have an autoimmune condition and my doctor wanted me to get blood work done for it every 3 months. In their boundless wisdom, my insurance decided I shouldn’t need blood work more than three times a year, and I got a $1,700 bill for going over the annual limit for such care.

The limitlessness of their wisdom and beneficence is matched only by my pettiness, so I had the pleasure of having my first colonoscopy and an endoscopy the day after Christmas because my gastro said there was a tiny possibility of me having a problem more serious than hemorrhoids and I knew those assholes would have to pay for it, since they pre-authorized it, which added a few grand to what they had to pay for the year.

Yeah, my experience has been that a lot of countries whose residents tell me racism is an American problem and we should stop trying to project it onto other societies happen to live in countries with huge problems with it that just aren’t explicitly spoken about in the same terms.

I had a Brazilian friend tell me race is not all that important in Brazil and that he’s tired of Americans assuming it is. I periodically have to ask him, “Do you read Brazilian news, bro?” and send some links that make it blatantly obvious that racism is alive and well down there.

You also just get people who have bought into very pervasive attitudes in countries that justify/explain away racism when it’s encountered.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.

"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.

Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."

Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.

Time to go take the Browns to the Super Bowl.

• SMT III Nocturne
• SMT Strange Journey Redux
• Grandia I

The Shin Megami Tensei games have some replayability between multiple routes, NG+ and coming up with the perfect team. Grandia is just one of the first jrpgs I really got in to, and I still love the characters today.