This but unironically.

DOW Chemical could have shut this down with a few Trumpcoin purchases.

How would they bring this new plane up to that standard

Spoilers: They absolutely will not be bringing this death trap up to the current plane’s standards.

This will either site on a tarmac largely forgotten about for four years, at which point Trump will try and off-load it (if he hasn’t completely forgotten he owns it). Or it’ll become one of those “never going to be finished” government vanity projects that becomes an excuse to write blank checks to Boeing for billing statements littered with “Headlight Fluid: $4k, Crank Shaft Lengthening Service: $20k” line items.

Absolute best case scenario, someone in the administration actually tries to fly in this thing before the term is complete. And we all get to laugh (or cry, depending on who it lands on) on reading the consequences.

It seems that they’re just trying to appease a stupid man who thinks like a dodgy car salesman, and thus is happy to accept big dumb bribes

That’s who Americans believe is best able to run our country. We have been kicking and screaming for the last 40 years to have the US run like a business. And what other business best exemplifies the US than Used Car Dealership?

Literally the only chemicals any Republicans seem to care about regulating are flouride, progestin, and estradiol.

Cyanide, mercury, and benzene are all fair game.

I think the “why can you concentrate on video games?” thing is really missing the whole point of TV as a medium. The sight/sound combo, particularly with bright colors and crisp volume and lots of rapid movements (graphics, camera work, etc) is explicitly designed to grab and hold your attention.

Asking why a TV/game can hold your attention but casual conversation / dry educational instruction cannot is like asking why you got here faster on a car than by hiking with a broken leg. Or asking why you can eat a gallon of ice cream or a bucket of fried chicken, but shy away from canned spinach. Like, ffs, that’s the whole reason the thing exists.

I often find myself in restaurants or bars, forcing myself back to focus on the people I’m there with even when the TV playing in the background is showing something I viscerally do not want to watch. It can be total slop, but I’m still drawn to it, because it is bright and loud and attention-demanding.

Video games adding a kinetic aspect only amplify the problem. Now you’re “juggling” an extra thing (manual control inputs). And the fun is that the sights/sounds/engagement all point you in the same direction - often with a gameplay loop that provides stimulus reward on continuous interaction. Normal life doesn’t provide that. Perhaps it shouldn’t, because the sensation overload can (and often does, via F2P games) be so easily exploited.

Like, people will call this neurodivergent but this is literally how all brains work.

The neurodivergence is in failing to read the social queues of your dad, who was clearly very invested in talking to you about the carnival.

But what is the cost of housing?

Land, labor, and materials.

Where do the materials come from to build the housing?

Via natural deposits of resources.

Where does the labor come from to build the housing?

Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.

And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market?

No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay.

Again, no. That’s not how public housing is allocated or valued.

And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.

On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect “Slum Clearance” in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.

We’re happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.

Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world.

It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.

Damn. Can’t believe a media company would be driven by greed.

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I’m sorry, did you say Netflix is going to be pirated aggressively for the few shows that aren’t complete slop?

That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay

It has to do with what one is capable of paying, which plays into willingness.

Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

Extortion is an extension of monopoly pricing. If you can threaten someone’s access to a necessary good/service, then you are functionally extorting them.

That’s before you get into cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

As an alternative to renting in a hostile rental environment sure.

But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment.

If you need to threaten someone’s health or safety to extract payment, it isn’t willing.

I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity

:-/

Okay, sure.

Traditionally, a business without clients is called a hobby.

It’s weird to think that Linux causes Autism, rather than to believe that Autism caused Linux.

I have yet to meet a furry or trans IT person IRL.

Visit any comic or anime convension and you’ll find the former in spades.

As to the later, idk. I’ve got three cousins who came out as Trans in the last five years or so.

There’s definitely been a thaw around sex and gender over the last twenty years, and I can’t help notice a certain number of “butch lesbians” and “sis men” just saying “fuck it, I’m the other gender and straight” and going all the way.

Or is bullying a bigger issue there maybe?

Bullying certainly. But also there hasn’t been a large and active transgender community until fairly recently. People coming to terms with what being transgender means and how to self-actualize it wasn’t possible in the homophobic atmosphere of the 20th century.

We’ll see how long this revolution survives in the current century. Germany also had a boom/bust of transgenderism in the 1920s. Hopefully, Trumpism/Starmerism isn’t a bell weather for that kind of reactionary reversal.

someone is willing to pay is the sum total of what a business gets income from

Except credit changes the math on that significantly. You aren’t constrained by your income, but by your risk of default (and even then… glances 2008-ward) Then you can afford to buy more by paying a higher interest rate.

the capitalist marketplace, is 100% correlated to income willingly given vs cost of obtaining that income

“Willingly” is doing a lot of lifting, given the degree to which fraud, extortion, and price gouging play a roll in the national economy.

What shocks me about much of the U.S. economy is how much is spent on marketing, promotion, advertising, and sales. 0% value derived from such activity, but frequently over half the cost of things that are purchased in the U.S. is sunk in promotion.

Promotion (and deception and intimidation) drives sales. They create the illusion of scarcity and transform luxury into necessity.

They add perceived value among the unwitting and create implicit value through absence of harm.

something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it

That’s a naive short-term approach to valuation.

Real value has to be measured in some kind of revenue generation, or - at least - cost mitigation. Otherwise what you’re describing isn’t value but expense.

the willing buyer is the key to the whole valuation equation

The willing buyer is the key to perceived value. But suckering someone doesn’t increase the utility of what you sold them.

Every registered voter can say Elon deserves to be in jail and guys like Merrick Garland will just kinda drag their heels, wave their hands, and insist there’s nothing to prosecute him on.

Meanwhile, we still have people in Guantanamo Bay from 20 years ago who have never stood trial.

Haha. Yeah. Stupid Republican voters.

shuffles feet through the tattered remains of all the liberal broken promises

Yeah, Trump’s making America great by killing white collar industries

True(ish).

and offering factory jobs

Flatly false.

I started my own company because I was sick of it.

I’m genuinely curious to hear how you’ve found it easier to land clients than employers. In my experience, you really need a good in with a bigger firm if you’re going to have any hope of launching a business. Unless your old employer is jettisoning their contracts as quickly as they jettison their staff, that can be tricky.