That includes Jack Hughes, who scored the winning goal for Team USA and said the first person he thought of after scoring was Megan Keller—only to laugh along as the president insulted her team.

They don’t care. They don’t care because they’re arrogant and self absorbed, and they think that’s what makes a man. They think manliness is being uncaring and cocky. They think masculinity means just being a dick. And you know, it’s pretty common for young men to think that way. It’s kind of a young man thing. But, we’re supposed to grow out of that. Unfortunately, far, far too many men in our society today never do grow out of it. They stay immature, arrogant and dickish their whole lives. And now we’ve got a whole generation of men who think that’s ok, who think that’s how men are always supposed to act.

“People are so negative about things,” he continued. “I think everyone in that locker room knows how much we support them, how proud we are of them and we know the same way we feel about them, they feel about us.”

I’m sure he believes that, but I doubt he’s talked to a single member of the women’s team to hear their opinions on the matter. I doubt he cares.

It just goes to show the huge gender disconnect in this country. Trump is a white man’s president, and these white men can’t understand why everyone else is so mad at them. They are seriously lacking insight.

And I’m saying this as a white man. Not all of us are on board with this, but I can’t seem to explain to some of my fellow white men why they need to make some changes to how they view things. Again, they lack insight and I don’t know how to get them to open their damn eyes. I’ve kinda just stopped trying, and I just don’t talk to them about it anymore.

Edit: idk if it’s right to say Trump is a white man’s president, necessarily, because it’s not all white men and it’s not only white men, even if it is mostly white men. But, I do think it’s right to say that Trump is the president of people who have a certain attitude about manhood or masculinity. He’s the president for people who think they’re just inherently superior to everyone else. He’s the president for people who don’t care about anyone else. He’s the president for selfish, narcissistic people, and in this country a lot of white men are that way, unfortunately.

It is a scientific fact that Tennessee has the worst drivers. Not my state, btw.

Even leaving out the exploitation, there will always be goods and services that it’s more economical to import than to produce locally. Attempts at autarky always fail.

I’m not necessarily advocating for total reshoring. I don’t think it’s necessary. However, as I said, globalization led to its own problems. We saw during the pandemic how fragile complex global supply chains can be. Plus, there’s a certain amount of autonomy lost when a country is dependent on another country for some vital resource or product. That’s a great way for an independent country to become a vassal state.

Almost everyone wants more than they can afford. That’s probably constant, and is probably a consequence of human nature. But inflation isn’t constant. So I don’t buy that explanation.

You are clearly unfamiliar with Japan in the 90s. Despite falling prices, Japanese consumers didn’t go out and spend mindlessly. They saved, causing prolonged deflation. It got so bad they had to make savings rates negative to try and get people to spend the money the government was printing instead of saving it.

Insatiable consumption is a cultural thing, not necessarily “human nature.” Here in the US where I am, the culture of endless consumption has been carefully, deliberately cultivated over generations. Here, if you put money in someone’s hands, generally they will spend it, that’s true, not save it like the Japanese did. But clearly not every country is like the US.

And not every person is that way, either. Here in the US there are people who aren’t so loose with their money. Or at least there were. My grandparents lived through the Great depression and they were quite thrifty, regardless of what the Federal Reserve’s policies were at any given time.

But it isn’t just my explanation. That’s just how it works. Supply and demand determines price. Prices go up when demand outpaces supply. The amount of money in the money supply can influence that, because, as we’ve established, under many circumstances at least, if people have money to spend they will try to spend it. But central banks rarely just print money and hand it to people. When they do, yeah, that can definitely be a recipe for runaway inflation.

Care to share your thoughts on why such high persistent inflation is everywhere if not due to the ever expanding money supply?

There’s no denying that inflation is persistent, and that’s by design. Because money is created through debt, and the debt has to be paid back at interest, there’s no way that would be possible without persistent inflation. Hence why the Fed has an annual inflation target of 2% (which is admittedly completely arbitrary).

But the real driver of inflation is simply supply and demand. Prices go up when there is greater demand for products and services than there is supply of products and services to meet that demand. Disruptions to the global supply chain during the pandemic led to a supply demand imbalance and thus higher inflation. Trump’s tariffs have contributed to a recent higher than target inflation, as well.

However, there are also systemic problems that have contributed to higher inflation, and they come down to US capitalism just generally failing.

Capitalists want to invest their capital where they think they will make the highest profit and get the highest possible return on their investment. The theory is that this should result in capital flowing to productive endeavors that generate a sufficient supply of the goods and services that are most in demand, but that doesn’t necessarily happen. Capitalists aren’t in the business of meeting consumer demand, they’re in the business of maximizing their profits, and often those two things are incongruous. And that’s why it’s so hard to keep inflation under control. Domestic producers are simply not producing enough of the goods and services to meet demand, because doing so just isn’t profitable enough for them, and that’s creating an imbalance, where demand constantly outpaces supply, causing prices to go up too fast.

The Fed could address this by raising rates, tightening the money supply, reducing demand and causing a recession. That’s one way, but almost no one wants that. The other, better way to address higher than target inflation is to get the damn greedy capitalists to stop prioritizing their own maximum profits and start producing the quality, affordable products and services that people actually want.

We were able to mask many of the negative impacts of greedy capitalists running everything for some decades thanks to globalization. We couldn’t get our capitalist scumbags to produce enough quality, affordable products and services domestically to meet domestic consumer demand, because doing so wasn’t profitable enough for them, so we let them go overseas to produce stuff, where taxes were lower, regulations were minimal, and the workers were extremely poor and thus dirt cheap. That worked for a while. It made it possible for some things to remain relatively affordable, even get much cheaper in some cases, while maximizing profits for the greedy scumbug capitalists. But, globalization was a one time deal, and it came with its own problems, so now there’s a big push to reshore a lot of our production. But the greedy scumbug capitalists won’t produce domestically because they can’t make the profits they want making products and services people want to buy at prices people want to pay. So there just isn’t enough domestic supply being produced to meet demand.

An example would be cars. Making low margin, affordable mass market vehicles just isn’t profitable enough for the greedy scumbug capitalists, even if it is what most consumers want, so instead they make higher margin, lower volume luxury vehicles. This has driven up the average cost of vehicles.

Inflation will remain persistently high so long as the supply of affordable products and services is insufficient to meet consumer demand.

This whole debate is completely moot. We continue to have it because people still do not understand how fiat currencies work. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer. The Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. And I’m not talking about actually printing physical dollars or minting coins, I’m talking about going into a computer and typing in some numbers and, boom, money is created. The VAST majority of transactions these days do not involve any physical currency. That’s why the physical currency in circulation is significantly less than the total money that’s out there. Today, money is numbers on a computer, and we can create an infinite amount of it.

But, I know, inflation. I know. People still think that modern monetary theory is unrealistic because it would cause runaway inflation. But, modern monetary theory isn’t a theory, it’s just how money works in the 21st century. People are creating money all.the.time. and it’s not just central banks. Do you know how many crypto currencies have been created on various block chains? Millions. Millions of coins, worth trillions of dollars. But that’s just crypto, and crypto is NOTHING compared to fiat currencies, like the dollar.

I said the Federal Reserve creates its own money, and that’s true, but most of the dollar creation doesn’t actually happen at the Federal Reserve. Banks create money everyday. Every time a bank creates a new loan, they are creating money. Out of nothing. I know, people will swear up and down that banks aren’t creating the money, they’re lending out depositors money, but that’s not true. It used to be kind of, sort of true, if you squinted and looked at it just right, back when we had fractional reserve banking. Banks used to be required to hold SOME depositors money in reserves, but it was a ridiculously small amount, like 5% to 10%. As of 2020, the Federal Reserve lowered the reserve requirement to 0%, and it ain’t going back up. There’s no need for it to. Banks don’t use the money in your savings account to make loans, they just create the dang money. Banks make a loan and disperse the loan proceeds without taking the money from anywhere. Again, they don’t take the money from your savings and give it to the borrower, they just create the money. The borrower has the loan proceeds and you still have the money in your savings account that you can withdraw at any time.

That is how our monetary system works. We use debt to create money, and we use interest rates to control inflation. That works well enough for funding profit making organizations. The idea is the business will borrow the money to fund their business, with the expectation that they will generate enough revenue from their business operations to repay the money, with interest. As long as the business generates enough revenue to repay the loan, it all works ok. But this system DOES NOT WORK FOR PUBLIC SERVICES. If a public entity provides a public service, but does not charge for that service (or doesn’t charge enough), that public entity cannot repay a loan. When we force public entities to borrow money to pay for public services, we doom those public entities to taking on debt that they have no means of repaying. We could tax to repay the loans, but why do that when we could just tax to pay for the public services in the first place? Why? Because people don’t like paying taxes, that’s why. So we force public institutions into borrowing money to pay for public services, money they can’t repay WITHOUT RAISING TAXES! (or charging fees for the service, but if you have to charge a fee for a public service, it’s not really a public service, it’s just a service for those who can pay) It’s complete nonsense.

This whole thing is especially ridiculous at the Federal level. Because, again, the Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. Do you know how much the US Treasury Department owes the Federal Reserve? $4.5 trillion dollars. We have to tax people to get dollars to payoff debt, in dollars, that we owe to the institution that creates dollars. How fucking stupid is that?

There is absolutely no reason why the Federal Reserve couldn’t just create money and give it to the Treasury Department to use to fund all government services. I don’t see any reason why this would cause significant inflation. But if it did, we could raise taxes. Not to fund public services, but to control the amount of money in the money supply to keep inflation under control. But I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t just continue to use interest rates to serve that purpose. Again, when a business borrows money, it has to repay that loan at interest. During periods of higher inflation, raise rates, raising the cost of borrowing, businesses borrow less, less money creation is happening at banks, inflation slows down. And because none of this would affect public services, because public services would be funded without debt or taxes, higher rates don’t have to mean governments taking on expensive debt that they will have no way of repaying.

Intentionally so.

Trump wants to stay in power, by any means necessary, legal, ethical or otherwise. Usually otherwise. His main motivation for this is simply his massive ego.

Many different groups want to help him stay in power, so he can remain a useful idiot for them. Most of these groups just want the usual corruption stuff. They just want to use Trump to try and get rich. But some have more ideological goals: White supremacy, expanding the US empire and strengthening US global hegemony, neoliberalism/right wing libertarianism/anarcho capitalism, techno feudalism, White Christian nationalism, and others. Some, like China and Russia, want Trump to stay in power because they know he will continue to weaken the US, and they want to see the US weakened, if not eventually collapse (honestly, I’m fairly sympathetic to this one).

Hey man, nice shot.

It’s fairly straightforward: they don’t want restrictions placed on their rights to own and carry a gun, but they absolutely want restrictions placed on the rights of their political enemies.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

• Karl Marx

I love the smell of napalm in the morning

Everyone in here saying, “why don’t you stand up to him, Dems?”

Guys, the Democrats don’t do that. I don’t think they even know how to do that. The whole concept is so alien to them you might as well be asking them to surf the rings of Saturn. No, no, the Democrats don’t stand up to rich and powerful people, they gargle their balls. They can get those things so deep in their donor holes that they can tickle the scrot with their uvulas.

If you’re looking for the Dems to stand up to Trump, you’re barking up the wrong tree, friends.

they will complain that MSO, Photoshop, Premiere doesn’t work

That’s true. They will. But maybe if enough users switch to SteamOS, Adobe, and other software developers might port their software to it. That’s really the only hope for widespread Linux desktop adoption.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe more people will be willing to endure a learning curve for the freedom and openness of Linux, but I think that path to widespread Linux adoption would take a long time, if it happens at all.

Yeah, one more with the name recognition, like you mentioned. People don’t know what Silverblue is, they don’t know what an immutable distribution is, and, frankly, I don’t think they’re interested in learning. But they know Steam. Sad, perhaps, but true.

there are already a lot of immutable Linux distros

Exactly. There are a lot, and that’s confusing for most people. The fact that people have so many choices makes them less likely to switch. Most people want ease, simplicity and convenience.

Linux will really take off when Valve finally releases the desktop version of SteamOS.

The national guard is a reservist group for the Federal military. There’s way too much Federal involvement. No, new, independent state militias would need to be formed.

The Republican party is a terrorist organization. They have to be stopped. We have to wrestle power away from them by any means necessary. If we do not succeed, if the Republicans are able to seize total, permanent control of the Federal government, secession will be our only other option.

Edit: it may be necessary for states to establish their own militaries, completely separate from the Federal government. It might be time for the 2nd amendment’s true purpose to be realized.

You know things are changing when the Wall Street Journal starts sounding Marxist.

I’m sure it’s true for some women. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most working women were either married or in a committed relationship. Plus, a lot of households have two incomes out of necessity. Both partners need to work full time just to make ends meet.