Also zeppo@lemmy.world. Not a lot of Zeppos out here.

  • 4 Posts
  • 531 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If Trump’s goal was really to bolster domestic manufacturing and other industries, I support that. The way he’s going about tariffs has been incredibly dumb though. One, he seems to think it’s a way to punish a country. It’s not clear why he’s picking the biggest fights with our allies, either. Claiming it’s about fentanyl and migrants is absurd. Then also, the admin has regularly lied about who pays tariffs and how they work. Trump also says incredibly stupid things like “once we have hundreds of billions in tariffs coming in, we’re going to be so rich”.

    And if he really wanted to encourage people to switch to domestic production, introducing them gradually would make more sense to give companies time to build factories and whatnot. But also they’re not going to make investments with no guarantee that the tariffs will be around d in 5 years. Also, there are some products that simply can’t be produced in the US because we don’t have the resources - why tax those? Such as fertilizers and lumber from canada? What’s the point? Why not just selectively tariff things for industries he wants to promote?

    So in real life it seems Trump is just harming consumers, picking fights with our allies, regressive shifting tax burdens, and wrecking the economy. Hmm.





  • I wish I could. It’s hard to get a community started on any new site where people have to make accounts and get in the habit of going there. The network effect is tough to overcome, too… people go where other people are, and then those places have content, and most people consume content, not create it. Also Reddit will ban you for promoting Lemmy, even through DMs.








  • I was commenting on pro sports and somewhat college athletics. Kids sports are cool imo except for how overly engaged and competitive the parents get about it.

    Sure, not everyone can play sports themselves. If they tried it more though, they’d be more likely to be able to. I’d bet the majority of sports fans are not unable to engage in athletic activity. I do realize that watching sports is also different than playing sports. That’s what I’m being critical of though.


  • I have long thought that there’s way too much emphasis placed on pro sports in society, but there are a few aspects to this. First, I agree that it inflames division and tribalism. I’ve had people act angry and want to start fights with me because they saw my license plate and grumbled something about football, or I was wearing a hat for some sports team I wasn’t even aware of and people were upset about it. The amount of attention and money spent on basically watching adult adults play little kid games is absurd. Incredible amounts of money are spent on stadiums and salaries.

    Still there are positive aspects. The competitive and high profile nature does propel people to exceptional feats of athleticism. The same goes for Olympic sports. Olympic stadiums are a bit of an excess, but there are benefits to international relations that come from the Olympic games. A question I have is as far as the Olympic it goes, what sports are not competitive? Even solo sports are done as a competition.

    But generally, my perspective is that if people are interested in sports, they should play them themselves. I don’t know why it would be so exciting to go watch someone else play basketball or something. You should just play basketball if you like it so much.




  • I get why the Republicans would be giving away money to wealthy people, since that’s basically their entire job, but I don’t get the rationale for why there would be a ‘dividend’ at all. Obviously, Elron’s cuts are intended to cripple the government, replace employees with loyalists, and prepare to replace government agencies with private companies, not anything about savings or efficiency, but why would the goal not be to balance the budget? Giving money back to taxpayers makes no sense as long as there is a budget deficit.