Trump is just reducing American consumption so we can hit our climate goals. Art of the deal strikes again! The winning never stops

Shipping stuff is cheap if you have alot of it for example

https://freightify.com/ship-containers/china puts a 40ft container at max $6000, which in practice can fit around 26000kg, so per kg you are paying around 26 cents per kg shipped. You would get even better deals I assume if you had contracts setup to do bulk business with freighters

Surely we can charge more than 1B

You can get Chinese prices if your citizens are willing to work like the Chinese, no one in the West will.

Autarky is also largely a degrowth argument, most Westerners already feel like they should consume even more so it’s impossible to win unless your voters fall for Donald Trump esque arguments. The modern Westerner lives one of the most opulent lives in the world history on the back of cheap third world labor.

edit: If you believe the Trump admin has a plan, they are trying to thread needle by devaluing the US Dollar just enough to incentivize manufacturing, but keeping it high enough that the average US consumer doesn’t feel the hit. They then leverage tariffs for preferential trade deals with other countries. I don’t think its really working but its the only way you could revitalize manufacturing in the west at this point

Maybe this is true at smaller companies or old ones but the wlb as you go up in tech usually just gets worse, Finance it like starts really bad in IB but gets passable as you go up (like 60 hours a week). Alot of this is inflated by time people just doing nothing but saying these directors are not stressed seems laughable. My mom was one and as a kid it was noticeable how much she was constantly stressed about work when she was at home or on the weekend (On the weeks she did not work over the weekends lmao). When she retired it was like night and day. Upper management is like Game of Thrones without all the death

You can argue that this is just a byproduct of Capitalism and top down hierarchies and alot of the work was not really work and we should tear it all down (I agree mostly). But your other solution is bottom up hierarchy (basically using representatives, I wouldn’t say running government is exactly chill???) or just no hierarchy (Only viable if we all live in self sufficient communes which is pretty based),

Also mentioning caffeine is kind of funny, thats like the tip of the iceberg, these execs and finance bros are all doing coke and meth or some other type of stimulant. All I do is design computer systems and yell at claude to code them faster. Obviously theirs alot worse jobs than being a exec its def on the upper end of the distribution, wouldn’t call it easy imo

I think Elon is kind of the exception he posts on twitter way too much to be doing any real work lmao. He’s essentially a brand guy and all his companies try to keep him away from the real work (I think he wanted the spaceX rocket to use Windows???)

its simply a federated powergrid

Fuck yeah this one, Trump is just pulling a Lelouch. How did I not see this 30D chess

Trump is actually playing 20D chess, by uniting the world against him and losing he will teach the world once again about the horrors of fascism

St. Donnie will die for our sins

edit: Isn’t this the plotline for an anime, I forgot which one

Don’t worry, to cover the risk the YUGEOIL act will be passed granting 0% interest subsidies to all oil companies that expand into Venezuela

Exxon will also after getting the subsidies buy a nice portion of DJT and trump coin at the same time, not sure why, CEO must just like the stock

bro did not text the signal group chat about his Venezuela plans before doing it damn

Europe is kind of just a retired United States, the pension scheme is the us defense budget

I forgot about the 90s but yeah good point. I never heard of “shock therapy” before but seems interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics) , seems like its a Retronym for describing IMF inspired market reforms. Good way to keep a country down :D

Weirdly if its actually just drug cartel assets (I doubt) this seems like smart way to increase Latino support? Most don’t have much good to say about the cartels (many leaving due to them). There own country seems to be bought out by them so Trump being this almost knight in shining armor seems like an interesting idea? Its actual effectiveness does not matter, perceptions rule all.

I think the upper middleclass-rich Democrats who lead the think tanks really haven’t internalized how conservative (I think this past decade they have slowly realized) alot of immigrant groups are, my family is full of people who honestly are more aligned conservative but the idea of republicans being a “white” party is what stops them. Trump essentially has to square the circle of a party of conservative immigrants, billionaires, libertarians, and neo-nazis

Power couple of the century

I mean they don’t call it the Century of humiliation for nothing lol. Yeah Russia doesn’t make sense though.