Will it stimulate the downturn in shipping demand by making it harder to get work as the USA pushes itself and the rest of the world into recession.

They can’t admit it because it’s an echo chamber. Trump tells them what they want to hear. They feel smarter for being validated by the president so they ignore the nagging voice that things aren’t going to plan because the only possible explanation is NOT that they were wrong and don’t understand these complex issues, but that even though they can’t see the full picture, they were right. Then all the other people in the same position agree that 4D chess is being played and they all voted a smart vote and the endorphins flood their brain again

I have to take him at his word. If he thinks it is going well, that means the chaos is what he wants.

He is either gaming the stock market for profit, or trying to harm the world economy.

The very slim possibility is that he is being told by others with an agenda that things are working as planned.

The relevance is, when you visit Norway now, you’ll have to buy their tourism through the tax, so there won’t be any point in buying imported tourism from another country as you’ll already have more than enough. Pretty clever really.

Anyway imported tourism is never quite the same as getting it locally. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Profit like a motherfucker day.

You think he doesn’t have someone buying the stocks he tanked just before his announcement.

“The US separation of powers, a cornerstone of the Constitution, divides governmental authority into three distinct branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – with each branch having specific powers and responsibilities, preventing any one branch from becoming too powerful”

If the president is responsible for appointing judges, then the judiciary is not and never was a separate power. While it required a rather unlikely series of deaths and retirements, in close proximity, the judiciary is under trump’s control because he has control of the supreme Court having appointed several.

They should have told him if it’s about principles not money, if he is “retiring” then he’ll no longer need his “salary” so he can choose between his allowance and royal accommodation and the pension.

Of course it’s about money. It always is. He is just another entitled wanker who thinks he “deserves” while others “take”.

I thought trump didn’t like taxes?

And does it grant you immunity from accidentally being deported? Or intentionally for that matter ?

I was having this thought myself but am not familiar enough with international trade to know. It seems to me that bringing down trade barriers outside the US allows coutries to more easily find alternative trade partners to fill the void left by abandoning us ones. It also strengthens the effect on America because they won’t be able to hold as many businesses hostage.

According to a post I found on that shitty alien site, An AAA game has to sell 10 million copies to break even around 6 months ago. That means at $70 dollars each. They can cost $700 million to make, market and distribute. The money has to typically be recouped within a certain time frame to keep the lights on and invest in the next 700 mil project. The successful games also have to carry the weight of the failures too, so you probably aren’t getting that bad a deal.

I’m not saying the price isn’t inflated, just that it can cost a lot more than you might think to make this stuff, and it’s all on a gamble that it will sell.

I remember buying mortal kombat ii on the megadrive/genesis with saved up pocket money for £45 ($58). That was in 1994, I think I maxed out at about 10 games. I’m seeing assassins creed shadows on the xbox at £56.99 ($74) today (ignoring online digital shops because they didn’t exist in 1994.) So in 31 years inflation on the price of a premium video game has been 0.75% annually vs 2.5% for all goods and that has resulted in a small 20% increase in the price over 30 years.

Closest link I could find to back up the inflation rate. If games increased in price Inline with inflation, they’d cost about £96 ($123) today.

Games have always been expensive, but less so now than 30 years ago.

P.s. If I don’t ignore online digital shops, I can actually get it cheaper the that 1994 price. Only £40 ($51). I mean come on its not like suddenly we have a bad deal on video games. Also if it really bothers you stop buying games at launch. I rarely spend more than a third of those prices now just by waiting a year or two.

All you need to do to not need the chlorine wash is to not treat the animals so badly that they shit all over each other due to lack of space. Improve their welfare improve the product, but no. Dollars come first.

I did not mean the toddler thing as a insult, but as an analysis. I genuinely think he can only think in straight lines. Any complexity escapes him. While I agree on the dictator stuff, I do think when he implemented a tariff it’s because he thinks that it will either result in businesses setting up in America, or foreign companies paying. I think he thinks it is a genius move and that he has not thought through all of the possibilities. So although saying he thinks like a toddler like an insult, I didn’t mean it like that. And I will also point out there is a difference between saying he is acting like a toddler to saying he thinks like a toddler.

Boycott Mercedes anyone??

The man thinks like a toddler. “If I put tariffs on goods from other countries, other countries will have to pay to do business here and America will become rich, we are the biggest market so they have to live with what we demand”

He doesn’t think the rest of the world can stand without them or he doesn’t think that reciprocal tariffs will hurt America as bad as they hurt us.

First every company has a cost to produce goods. Typically they cannot go below this. That means putting the tariffs on finished products means the only way non US companies can continue to sell in the USA AND pay the tariff, is to raise the price to the US buyer. If the buyer is the consumer then shit , things get more expensive. If the buyer is a manufacturer based in the USA buying components from abroad, then they have to spend more to built the product, I.e their cost goes up and, shit, things get more expensive. That means the consumer gets hurt or the USA business swallow some of the pain but ultimately both get hurt, because the cost of the goods may become prohibitively expensive reducing the demand. Manufacturing overhead increases as a result so either the company has to fire the newly idle staff or the price goes up. Price goes up and fewer sell again and it gets stuck in a death loop for the business unless it is an essential product that people have no choice but to pay for.

Now the other side of it is that he thinks that imposing the tariffs mean everyone in the USA will buy American and it will be good for American business. Except the USA doesn’t make everything it needs nor can it, at least in the short term. It is not simply a matter of switching suppliers to USA suppliers on the 5th of April. It is a matter of there being no alternative. Any prospective USA based supplier would have to set up a factory, tool up and gain experience in the manufacture of every tyoe of product all of which takes months if not years. Or foreign companies have to establish manufacturer at the cost of millions in a highly volatile country where the rules change on a daily basis. Also any company from overseas is at risk of having any employees who are not white Americans being detained or deported by ICE. Not what could be called a safe bet, or good investment Either way, by the time US suppliers come online the businesses that rely on those parts will very likely have gone under through the increased costs levied on them.

In the mean time, the world outside America is bigger. It will hurt us too, but I expect trade barriers to come down in the rest of the world and non-US manufacturers will be able to find alternative suppliers to the US ones they may currently use.

I was thinking devices like iPhones may become too expensive for people outside the US until I remembered they aren’t manufactured in America, but with all the boycotts which will be exacerbated by reciprocal tariffs, I expect business is going to become very hard for American companies outside the USA.

If I were an American company right now I would be seriously evaluating moving outside the USA. Losing the US market is less harmful than losing the ROTW markets.

At the end of the day, there is an arrogance in these tariffs that says the world needs American goods and services more than America needs the world’s goods and that we will cave before America. We all crave our McDonald’s and Coke and Netflix and Teslas so bad that we’ll give in and play by trumps rules. He thinks that there will be short term pain for long term gain for the USA, but I think it will be like that for the rest of the world and America is in for long term pain.

Ultimately America won’t be the biggest market very soon, because buying power is going to go off a cliff and I think for Americans, it’s going so stay down there. There will probably come a course correction in a few months time when the pain has become so bad for Americans that they demand heads roll. When that happens I don’t think the ROTW is going to just say all is forgiven and go back to how things were. More likely this will cause lasting damage to the US and it’s businesses and the rest of the world will adapt to avoid working with an unstable partner.

I’m not trying to be a nay-sayer, but what does this actually achieve?

He’s not disrupting a vote. He’s only talking. While I’m all for the Democrats doing something this doesn’t actually achieve much. Chick Schumer had a chance to actually disrupt this administration but he didn’t.

So I am genuinely asking, if the Democrats are not preventing the Trump administration from pushing bills through e.g if this were a fillibuster, how does this help?

You’ve clearly got an axe to grind so I’m gonna leave it here and let OP debate with you if they choose to

Culture can mean different things but the way I read the original post was that the culture being talked about was specifically the arts, and the main discussion about it was clearly censorship.

So the fact that Europe has a violent and bloody history is not relevant to the point that was being made. It is also a fact I don’t think anyone in Europe would want to deny either because if we ever forget the horrors of war we are doomed to sleep walk into another.

There is only a double standard in OPs post if they were trying to pretend Europe has never been violent, but they didn’t address that, they talked about aspects of censorship.

I think the point was more about the double standardz on violence in censorship than it was about whether each region actually is or had been violent. As a famous US show, South Park pointed out almost 30 years ago in 1998…

“horrific deplorable violence is ok as long as nobody says any naughty words”

I’m neither American nor Canadian , but I just wanted to offer up that the worry I think comes with age. When I was 9 the Berlin wall came down. Before that, there was a constant spectre of nuclear war hanging over the world thanks to the cold war. Our parents lived through those times presumably worrying while I as a child was blissfully unaware of what the cold war really meant. When I was 11 the gulf war started. Again I knew about it, but I didn’t really understand what terrorism was or what was happening in Iraq. Then in 2003 gulf War 2. I was a little more tuned in to politics by now, so I was a little more concerned about it but it was still something happening far away. By the time Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 I had a daughter. This time although it was a far away war, I was glued to updates, scared for the future of my daughter (and myself). I wonder if back when the cold war was going on if our parents were similarly worrying and freaking out when we weren’t looking.

I dont want to downplay the threat, but people have had the exact same thoughts and feelings we are having before and on those occasions it worked out, ok. Not for everyone of course but for the western world. That gives me faith that even though there are bad people doing bad things, humanity on the whole is good. Maybe there are peaks and troughs along the way, and maybe we are going through a trough right now, but I am hopeful that a self correction is coming that will start us climbing back up to a peak.