spongebue

Especially in the last month or so I've been noticing how uninspiring technology has been. I used to love seeing whatever the gadget of the season was at Target while my mom shopped. Now it's all... Phone cords, and um, printer ink cartridges. The same wireless speakers we bought years ago. Nothing about it is cool anymore!

It doesn’t matter if he considered the conditions because he can’t force them to stop exploiting their workforce

Sure he can. Or at least use it as a tool to help curb it. Anyone with the authority to exercise tariffs (in this case, that turned out to be the issue, but aside from that) can say that x industry in y country is exploiting their workers and products related to that industry is subject to whatever tariff they choose to implement. They may even use their powers (if only advocacy here) to help those affected. Thing is, Trump doesn't give two shits about any of that, so if any progress is made in the areas in which you're concerned it's out of dumb luck and nothing else.

If Trump's message is to be trusted, he wants to make deals and have more people buy from us, meaning global consumption might shift (assuming deals are made and all) but certainly not go down

for me it is a moral imperative that we stop mass consumption of goods produced by people in abhorrent conditions

Yes, I'd love to see a decrease in the cheap utter crap we are producing/consuming on this planet, and of course I'm all for humans being treated properly. But blanket tariffs with no apparent consideration of how people are generally treated in those countries (only how we are tariffed) won't encourage anyone to solve that.

I would argue that mangoes aren’t a necessity to your diet, you can replace them with fruits that do grow in the US

It was a flipping example. There are plenty of fruits you can replace that with. And in the winter we have hardly any fresh produce and have to rely on, for example, Chile (which has its summer conveniently during our winter. Yay geography). IIRC a ton of the world's garlic comes from China. Could we survive on our own locally-produced food alone? Perhaps. Would we have the same variety we enjoy today? Probably not. Year round? Almost certainly not. Can it all be done as quickly as these tariffs are implemented? Fuck to the no!

Our economy has progressed from manufacturing to the tertiary sector just as it moved on from mining and agriculture (primary sector) over a century ago.

Not only that, but the way these were implemented is such a big component that can't be glossed over. We need food - that's included too? Just how quickly do you think we can get mangoes growing in Wisconsin for us to eat here in America? And if you want to bring up the ridiculousness of that idea... Exactly.

His Bluesky is also a delight

Someone on my local Nextdoor needed to know how much her tree was leaning. She took a photo and overlaid a protractor and it was actually pretty resourceful.

Then she asked people to check the angle. You see, the protector was aligned with the ground, so a perfectly upright tree would be 90°. The tree was at the 65° mark. Damn near everyone said it was a 65° lean, when it was really 25° off from the 90° it should be.

I can't remember how it came up exactly, but she said she looked up if a tree should be 90° on Google, and Google said that would mean it's fallen over. I reminded her that Google's AI suggested glue to get cheese to stick to pizza and encouraged an ounce of critical thinking, asking where the tree would sit in her picture if it were at 90°. She went off about how math isn't her strength, that I'm being condescending (ok, maybe a little but holy crap don't take Google's word for this stuff!) and I think eventually blocked me after a few attempts to explain that she did not have a 65° lean and a tree would be 90° from the ground if everything were perfect.

The future sucks, and it's only going to get worse.

I was thinking an art museum/gallery/etc may be a great counter! But a museum would be most vetted.

Ohhhh that makes sense. I mean, I hate it but it makes sense.

Also, how the eff was Trump able to fire the Librarian of Congress? Like, why couldn't she have just said "On behalf of President who?" And kept at it?

I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there's some refreshing "back to basics" feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.

In my current job I've been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!

At 6 years old, you hardly understand how the world works. People generally realize that and act accordingly.

If anyone is getting divorced from something a 6-year-old did, either your parents don't understand that (not your fault) or there was something much bigger going on already (not your fault) and whatever you did was the straw that broke the camel's back (still not your fault, given the grace needed with a SIX-YEAR-OLD!)

If someone else said to you what you were saying to us, would you agree that "yeah, you must have been 'born bad'* - that sucks"? And hold them to that same standard? Probably not. Don't do it to yourself

* that's not a thing, by the way

Not as familiar with that one. But he didn't explicitly say he sent him up there to rig the machines in his favor. Just that he knows the systems and was there. The meaning is left ambiguous. One could make a not-crazy argument that he meant Elon was keeping the machines from getting hacked.

To be clear, Trump is a piece of shit, he lost 2020, and I feel dirty speaking up for him. But here's the thing: if there was fraud, it needs to be settled in court. That was the case in 2020 when virtually every court ruling was against Trump, and it's the case now when nobody has even bothered to bring it up (it's not like there isn't any overlap between "people who know what he said" and "people who would bring on a suit"). If we're going to make these claims, they need to be damn solid - otherwise it just makes us look bad when there are PLENTY of solid things about Trump's piece-of-shitness we could be bringing up instead.