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[TempAcc]

Calm your wishful thinking, the world isn't going to explode just yet, we're still some 3 years off from that.

[Kot]

Today is 11/9 (or if you use reasonable calendar, 9/11). Ironic.
Also, heh, they disabled the comments, but the dude is keeping his word and the "new" title will stay like this forever.

[Reelya]

It'll be interesting how Trump's business sense works out as President. One big difference between being a CEO vs President is externalities.

i.e a CEO can take actions to get a "bigger slice of the pie", even when said actions also shrink the entire pie, and come out ahead. e.g. say I own a toll road then decide I can jack up the toll to make more money. Now I have more money, but traffic is decreased, so every other business along that road is now losing money, potentially even more money than I made through the action of raising the toll.

A CEO doesn't need to worry about what economic effect his actions have on people around him while a President does. e.g. sacking government workers "saves money" the same as sacking corporate workers. Except those same workers can now turn around and claim unemployment benefits from their ex-employer, and the government loses out any revenue/savings that accrued from the economic input that their paycheck / job was creating.

[Max™]

Either that or (more likely) illegal voting occured in favour of Hillary Clinton.

...you're kidding right?

Is a Scooby Doo caricature of a villain the best you can imagine for your opponents?

"Yeah, she probably cheated, but she's too much of a fuckup to do it right, prolly on her period or something. Good thing too or else we wouldnt'a won! I bet she screwed up and had them machines tally extry votes, but tha votes was fer Trump, ha ha!"

Tell me you're kidding, or you just didn't think through how absurd it actually sounds to say something like that.

[Neonivek]

I am reminded of Nixon who cheated to win an election...

But he was going to win anyway.

[RedKing]

I'm gonna take some time to process everything offline, guys. I'll be back to B12 eventually. Hopefully.

Take care, everyone.

[Max™]

Peace out for now RK.

I am reminded of Nixon who cheated to win an election...

But he was going to win anyway.

The scariest thing about Nixon was when he pulled off his Scooby Doo villain Nixon mask to reveal it was Nixon the whole time. _Arrrroooooo

[Frumple]

Cheers, RK. Stay safe.

Since apparently what happened is that, when all of the many "first world" countries transitioned from manufacturing economies to service economies, they didn't actually bring those former manufacturing workers into the service economy. They just let them suffer and be miserable for several decades and didn't expect much of it.

Part of the continued amazing bullshit about all this is that people continue to believe this. In spite of decades of democrat attempts to bring relief and better options to those workers, even in the face of them repeatedly spurning said attempts and an incessant republican campaign to sabotage them. You literally have a party that has been trying for as long as I've been alive to make sure these folks have a better life and better options, but apparently none of that ever happened. There was no education initiatives, no attempts at improving housing conditions and transport so they could move to an area with better possibilities or at least make it easier for something to come to them, no cornerstone of the platform dedicated to trying to make sure these folks were healthier and happier than the vagrancies of their birth and location left them. No attempts to improve the infrastructure what hopes those folks had hinged on pretty strongly. None of the thousand and one other things the left wing of our government has been doing and trying to do for years upon years. None of that happened. It's been party policy and constantly attempted implementation on pretty much all goddamn levels for longer than most of us have been alive, but somehow these suffering workers have been ignored.

I mean, hell, I understand why some people continue to say that. What they didn't do was bring the exact same jobs back in even greater numbers, mostly due to that whole "completely fucking impossible" thing. But somehow people keep coming to the conclusion they didn't try anything else. That some huge chunk of the dem related headlines that weren't the latest line of vacuous bullshit for all my life haven't been about democrat initiatives to help and help uplift the downtrodden and down on their luck, to bring life to areas rotting out as the country's economy irreversibly changed or at least help what life was there move. I've literally spent chunks of my life either volunteering or helping folks doing the work of getting this shit implemented on a local level, but apparently I was suffering under a massive bloody hallucination for years of my life. Apparently the literal weeks upon weeks of raw hours my mother spent writing grants, implementing and managing what the funding from them allowed for, trying to bring what succor to this hellhole of a state she can didn't happen. Apparently all the people she's worked with, and the ones they've worked with, who have been constantly undercut by republican politics and policies, and for whom D support was about the only chance they had to keep doing what they were doing, never existed. The people both myself and all those people have talked to from one end of the country to the other doing the same sodding thing? Fever dreams.

Somehow. Kinda' wish I had known a couple decades ago so I didn't waste time and effort trying be a decent human being.

[Reelya]

Also the whole "they sent my job to China" thing is missing the point. That job was going to China whether or not an American company sent it there. If Americans had not done so, you'd now have Chinese company names on all the goods. Sure, keeping jobs in America longer would have allowed the American economy to be richer, and grown American wages more, but that would just have increase the cost differential between China and America. The alternative to sending American company jobs to China was for Chinese companies to directly compete in the US market, backed by Chinese labor costs vs American companies with their ever-rising American labor costs. The end result would be American companies collapsing and being bought out by Chinese owners.

This is also the real reason they tolerate things like "American multinational Corporation X registered to a post office box in Cayman Islands". Politicians might point at that and say they're going to crack down on loopholes, but the reality is that it's a competitive world, and other companies are free to do that even if one country stops their companies doing it. It's a matter of whether you want your own independent companies or want to be owned by other people's companies. You need to give your companies all the same breaks the foreign competitors get.

[martinuzz]

In response to the election outcome, Cuba has announced they will hold a 5-day military excercise, "to prepare for possible hostile actions"

[DJ]

There's also an option of setting ridiculous tariffs so no foreign goods are competitive. I'm sure other countries would've been thrilled about that :]

[pisskop]

I think we came out of this bad situation with the least bad resolution

[Phmcw]

Cheers, RK. Stay safe.

Since apparently what happened is that, when all of the many "first world" countries transitioned from manufacturing economies to service economies, they didn't actually bring those former manufacturing workers into the service economy. They just let them suffer and be miserable for several decades and didn't expect much of it.

Part of the continued amazing bullshit about all this is that people continue to believe this. In spite of decades of democrat attempts to bring relief and better options to those workers, even in the face of them repeatedly spurning said attempts and an incessant republican campaign to sabotage them. You literally have a party that has been trying for as long as I've been alive to make sure these folks have a better life and better options, but apparently none of that ever happened. There was no education initiatives, no attempts at improving housing conditions and transport so they could move to an area with better possibilities or at least make it easier for something to come to them, no cornerstone of the platform dedicated to trying to make sure these folks were healthier and happier than the vagrancies of their birth and location left them. No attempts to improve the infrastructure what hopes those folks had hinged on pretty strongly. None of the thousand and one other things the left wing of our government has been doing and trying to do for years upon years. None of that happened. It's been party policy and constantly attempted implementation on pretty much all goddamn levels for longer than most of us have been alive, but somehow these suffering workers have been ignored.

I mean, hell, I understand why some people continue to say that. What they didn't do was bring the exact same jobs back in even greater numbers, mostly due to that whole "completely fucking impossible" thing. But somehow people keep coming to the conclusion they didn't try anything else. That some huge chunk of the dem related headlines that weren't the latest line of vacuous bullshit for all my life haven't been about democrat initiatives to help and help uplift the downtrodden and down on their luck, to bring life to areas rotting out as the country's economy irreversibly changed or at least help what life was there move. I've literally spent chunks of my life either volunteering or helping folks doing the work of getting this shit implemented on a local level, but apparently I was suffering under a massive bloody hallucination for years of my life. Apparently the literal weeks upon weeks of raw hours my mother spent writing grants, implementing and managing what the funding from them allowed for, trying to bring what succor to this hellhole of a state she can didn't happen. Apparently all the people she's worked with, and the ones they've worked with, who have been constantly undercut by republican politics and policies, and for whom D support was about the only chance they had to keep doing what they were doing, never existed. The people both myself and all those people have talked to from one end of the country to the other doing the same sodding thing? Fever dreams.

Somehow. Kinda' wish I had known a couple decades ago so I didn't waste time and effort trying be a decent human being.

So you failed but you tried, and that was good enough? Well, it looks like some peoples disagreed with you... Enough to go from Obama to Trump.

Also putting Tariff in place, or straight up refusing to deal with a country that have anti-suicide windows in its factories was a possible solution...

[Reelya]

There's also an option of setting ridiculous tariffs so no foreign goods are competitive. I'm sure other countries would've been thrilled about that :]

Some other countries would have thought that was the best fucking news ever. Basically anyone else who buys the same things you do would love that. Trade isn't static after all, and there are many players.

Say Country X is importing item A, and makes a tariff so that they can make a company as well to make item A. The price then rises (that's what the tariff is for), and the market for item A in country X then contracts, due to supply/demand logic.

But what does foreign suppler Y do? They find they're selling less Item A than before. So they drop the price for everyone except Country X. Now you have the situation that Country X has rising Item A prices and lower demand, while every other country has falling Item A prices and rising demand. Country X now makes Item A, but they can't sell it because it's worth less overseas than before the tariff.

[Kot]

Oh my God someone just shown me this.