The prices for tech on Taobao in China and in the US are nearly identical for the vast majority of tech items. So much is excluded from the tariffs that it’s silly they even exist on paper. There are indeed some newer items only available there, but they’re rarely on the affordable end of pricing.

Laptops and computer hardware in particular surprise me. I was hoping to get a new Huawei or Xiaomi laptop the last time I was in China since I got my parents a Huawei I’ve been jealous of in the US several years before they were banned. Absolutely nothing I could find on Taobao or in store was comparable value even to computers from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

I (unfortunately) live in Texas and haven’t noticed any presence like what it appears they have in Minneapolis.

Of course we also have Republicans top to bottom in our government, so we’re probably a “good” city. Which is ironic because we (Dallas) voted in a Democrat Mayor, but he announced he was changing to be Republican a few weeks after his term began.

If they actually backtracked they’d remove ICE from Minneapolis and move them to Texas. If they’re seriously concerned about the Southern border as they claim there’s no reason they’d start in Minneapolis.

I’ve used these in San Francisco and Colorado Springs. You press a button to open the door, then once inside another button to lock it. You then have up to 5 minutes to do your business before the door will open again iirc. Toilet paper is carefully rationed out and dispensed. Once you are done and leave the door will close behind you and sprayers pop out pretty much everywhere, washing down every single surface. Sometimes the toilet also folds up for a more thorough cleaning of the seat. This means they’re always a little wet inside, but also remarkably clean. SF in particular really impressed me with these, I expected them to be absolutely disgusting and tried my best to avoid them until I had no choice. The US needs public toilets, and assuming the maintenance costs are low enough the self cleaning ones really aren’t as bad as an unattended public toilet sounds on the surface.

I mean that planning a presidential campaign takes years, years which they didn’t have. And beyond the time required to plan and refine the campaign messaging, the candidate needs time to train how to answer questions following it. They had no choice but to reuse all of Biden’s preparation for these, and even then it still looked hastily done.

The “Harris” campaign was a continuation of Biden’s ongoing campaign under a new candidate. They never had a chance to set their own messaging nor policy priorities. And although I too doubt it would have ultimately stopped Trump, it certainly would have allowed them to try to target younger demographics with their policy.

I also fear that the Democratic party’s takeaway from the whole ordeal may be that America is not yet ready for a woman president. But any candidate would have lost under Harris’s circumstances. And Hillary was just a terrible candidate. Yet because those are the only two woman candidates we’ve had for President and both lost horribly, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion here that those are related.

Throughout Biden’s whole term it was a big question if he’d run again. It being a question at all should have made the answer a clear NO. Harris never had a fair chance at a campaign because of this despite being in my opinion one of the better Democrat candidates we’ve had in recent history. Obviously she’s not as liberal as most Democrats would like nowadays, but when the alternative is an openly corrupt billionaire con artist I’ll vote for the mainstream Democrat candidate every time.

I suspect that they’d be more hands off than you may expect (if they chose to keep that IP at all). The sovereign wealth fund is first and foremost interested in growing their investment value. And this has only been further cemented as MBS has continued to stripped wahabists of power to the point that they have almost no state involvement anymore.

What do you even do in a situation like this? You can’t get to shelter in any reasonable amount of time and whether you’re in the unit or on the balcony you’re dead if your building is struck.

Thank you for clarifying that this removes the requirement to spend the money where it was allocated. This answers my question and could indeed be worse than a shutdown.

So although passing this budget was obviously terrible, how is it worse than no budget at all? No budget followed by a government shutdown would be the ideal case for Trump and Elon to take yet more power from Congress. The Democrats aren’t in any good position of power right now so expecting the budget to include any of their priorities is unrealistic.

Let’s just hope that we don’t use that position to terrorize other nations further than we already have

Unfortunately that’s not how a large portion of the population sees it. To many the economy a president inherits matters more than the state they leave it in.

I wish they’d book Four Seasons Landscaping again. That was hilarious, a good indicator of the chaos and incompetence which followed.

Brain worms for everyone!

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. All retirement planning I’ve done is based on the assumption that SSA won’t be around by the time I retire. The fact that we can’t even remove the taxable maximum to retain some degree of financial solvency is proof enough.

I think the most likely course of action is that we will get some portion of our contributions back, but not the full amount. I just hope that they don’t raise the retirement age so much to try to retain the illusion of being able to get a full payout. I’d rather get a fraction of my contributions back at 67 than need to risk living to a much older age but receiving full benefits.

Yes