Indeed. I have absolutely no way of knowing anything for certain.

I’m just screaming into the void from this hellscape we call Earth.

See? This. This is why I don’t trust my safety to electronic systems. The fancy computer controlled locks and latches are great when they work. When they don’t, shit like this happens.

At least most cars still have a physical connection between the door handle and the locking mechanism. Not Tesla, for no good goddamned reason.

I’d bet that channel “members” don’t get ads for that channel regardless of premium status.

IMO, Google made premium, almost nobody bought it. So they went after adblockers, hoping that people would get premium to get rid of the ads. People most just Adblock harder.

While this is happening, one exec is peering over the fence at twitch. Where they only way to get away from ads without a pretty good Adblock, is to subscribe to the individual creator.

So they make “memberships” to channels a thing.

Almost nobody buys that either. So they go… What if, even if someone is premium, we give them ads, unless they’re a channel member.

Genius.

Paying to block ads per creator/channel/whatever, is a special level of bullshit that twitch has always had.

The system is working as expected. The companies are trying to find the best way to extract the most value from you using their platform.

I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.

Buckle up, because they’re doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It’s already begun. There’s a “new” Outlook. FML.

That’s certainly a possibility.

I would argue that we’re both right depending on what the widget is.

(Assuming the price is changed to be proportional and appropriate for the product) Something like a grocery item is more prone to my thought, and something that has generational differences, such as a laptop or something, will likely follow your theory more closely.

I think a lot of this will still be tied to price elasticity. If the price is very elastic then the former system would be more likely. Drop the price so you can push more units (and overall, profit goes up), where things that are far less elastic, say, an iPhone, would tend to simply continue to increase like the latter system you describe.

At the end of the day, both are horrid, terrible, and very very common. So I’ll finish by saying: no matter what happens, people are going to be getting massively fucked, and corporations will post record profits yet again.

Fuck corporations.

Me? I’m basically driven snow over here. Plenty of people who live here aren’t though. I like those people. They’re different. I like different.

Oh, they’ll go down… But it won’t be nearly as much as it went up to cover the tariff.

What I’m thinking is, let’s say a widget is $100, tariffs go in at, say 5%. So it should cost $105, but the price increases to $110. People cry bloody murder, but ultimately they “need” the widget so they buy it. Tariffs go away, yay, the price is dropped, it’s now $107.99

that’s what I’m thinking.

Let’s be reasonable here.

Won’t work, they yell “fake news” then bury their heads in the sand like they always do.

I don’t mean to imply the US should go back to manufacturing their own goods like they had to before global trade was economical.

I hope the point I’m making is that the people like Trump, mostly aggressive capitalists, are significantly in favor of these trends, and adding tariffs to imported goods will harm the businesses that the tariff is intended to protect.

Sales will drop because most goods are simply more price elastic than that. Cost goes up, sales drop, and overall you lose profits. When costs go up, alternative products are supposed to take up the business you lost by raising prices.

Though, to be fair, that price elasticity model is broken. Most product types have been agglutinated into a couple of large companies in an oligopoly, so all brands of that kind of product raise prices to match all the other brands. With no other competition in the market, consumers have the “choice” of paying more for the same thing, or not buying it.

In any case, the entire economy has been so thoroughly fucked by corporations that is just a money printing machine for the ultra rich to get richer.

I’ve depressed myself now. I’m gonna go.

I’m not American, but tariffs to fix import issues is pretty stupid.

This is the capitalist dream, export all the production of the goods you use daily to third world countries, who will have shit labor practices like the US used to have when slavery was a thing (and bluntly, for quite a while afterwards), so that the boots-on-the-ground laborers that produce everything are either treated like slaves or literally are slaves, then import the raw material to be manufactured into whatever you’re selling in the US, so you can slap a “made in the USA” sticker on your shit to enhance sales and charge more. Meanwhile “made in the USA” doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that there’s no imported goods going into the manufacturing process to make that thing, just that you took raw materials (from wherever) and made this thing in the USA.

Tariffs unduly harm end consumers, pretty much everything we buy and own is, or has components that are, imported shit.

Most microchips, a large amount of the food we eat, most electronics, pretty much everything you’ll find at a dollar general, etc (the list is very very long)… all imported in whole or in part.

Hell, there was a time that it was more economical to have your raw materials, even if they’re mined/harvested/produced in the USA, shipped overseas for assembly by slave labor, then shipped back for sale to the US public, than to have it assembled inside the US. Much of that is still true. The US neither has the manufacturing capacity, nor the desire to build their own shit. The only time that’s not the economical option is for large cost (and scale, either in size or money) items, like housing or vehicles. Assembly generally happens in the country/landmass where the vehicle will be sold and used. Even a company like Toyota, a Japanese brand, will have assembly plants in the USA for cars sold in the USA, because that’s cheaper than importing hundreds of vehicles. For everything else, it’s generally cheaper to assemble it outside of the country and import the final product.

You think process are high now? Wait until the tariff wars really kick off.

No company is going to accept the costs of tariffs and be okay with that eating their profits, they’re passing that cost into consumers, because we’re the saps that are still going to buy it.

When the tariffs come down, and they will eventually, prices will drop, but not to where they were from before the tariffs. Companies will continue to post record profits, justifying not giving raises because tariffs, and wages will remain stagnant. We’ll earn less, while they rob is for more than they already do.

The worst part is that when the tariffs are lifted, we’ll thank them for lowering the prices by buying more of their shit. We’ll be grateful for the opportunity to pay even more into their profit margins.

Congratulations, you’re experiencing late stage capitalism. The system is working as intended. You are poor, you remain poor, barely able to scratch out a living, while your owners profit more and more off of your hard work, and you get to thank them for that opportunity.

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Technically, we don’t need raw sugar for our diet at all. So technically correct?

We also don’t need any sugar substitutes, like HFCS, but you can find that or sugar, in the ingredients list of pretty much all processed foods.

Yay capitalism!

Fact is, HFCS is cheaper. I haven’t checked the entirety of it’s supply chain to figure out why, but it is cheaper.

If sugar was the same cost, they wouldn’t have switched to HFCS in the first place (why mess with your successful product for no gain?). Fact of the matter is that HFCS is saving them money. It might be pennies per bottle, but when you’re moving 10M bottles of soda, those pennies turn into dividends, literally.

You mean, so-called shit hole countries?

As a Canadian, I’m curious if we’re considered a “shit hole country” to these fucks.

Foreign slave plantations.

… Not that slave plantations anywhere makes it better, but the fact that it’s foreign will mean that not only is the labor mainly performed by slaves, but we’re also paying a premium because it’s imported goods. Double jeopardy.

Yay capitalism!

Fun fact, most LED displays will only display a very specific wavelength of light for each primary color, if you can isolate the specific values of red, green, and blue, that the sphere uses in the LEDs in its displays, and get tint/filters for those wavelength ranges, you can effectively “tint” the windows where the sphere would be nearly impossible to see, while almost everything else would be fairly clear.

Almost all other light is broad spectrum, so even a single color item would reflect a much larger range of wavelengths than what the sphere produces, which may make red/green/blue objects less bright through the window, but they will still be observable, while the sphere is basically just black.

I don’t think any of his kids have the charisma to follow in his footsteps.

One thing that I can say Trump does not lack is charisma. I have not seen the same from any of his offspring.

Charisma alone, a good leader does not make; but in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing Trump has in spades.

I could see California and BC getting together and starting their own country. The entire West coast would just be one, very liberal, nation.

I’m still amazed at climate deniers. You see the evidence year over year, how can you not fucking see it?

10 years ago (or thereabouts) we had snow in my area so severe that most things were shut down. People couldn’t get out of their driveways.

I had to go out after the snowfall and it took more than an hour to dig my car out enough to leave.

Last year, we had maybe two snowfalls, and there was snow on the ground for less than one hour all winter.

The changes year over year are small, but over 10+ years? It’s an entirely different planet. IDK why some people are so blind to that. WTF.

I have such a hard time believing that this brain rot is infecting Canada. I do not doubt anything you’ve said is true, it’s still hard to believe.