What’s interesting about this is that Ghislaine Maxwell just got a transfer to a cushy facility in exchange for what is likely to be heavily coached testimony about how Donald Trump totally didn’t rape children.
My hope is that he signs the pardon before she testifies, and then she burns him down on the stand.
Why would he pardon her? Prison is sheer hell and she got a huge upgrade. Fuck around and they can take that back. They got all the leverage they need without the screams of outrage a pardon would bring.
Prison really is not that bad - especially federal prison. It’s boring but if you are poor, so is regular life. Don’t pay rent, don’t pay for health care, get 3 square meals that are about as shitty as shelter food. The gang violence stuff is pretty easy to avoid overall - again, especially in federal prison. State prisons are crappier in most states.
How much prison time have you served in state and federal prisons, if I may ask?
Forgive me for asking, it’s just to judge how much direct experience you have with what you’re claiming to be knowledgeable on.
There are sadly a lot of people in the Internet who would say such things without ever having actually experienced them firsthand, and it’s important we educate ourselves on the difference. Thanks!
Not going to go into to detail as this is a public forum but I have years of experience, yes.
I think calling it “hell” is a bit silly. It’s only hell if you are a loud mouth idiot who can’t stop getting into drama. Is being out with a good job better, yes. But TV and the news dramatize it drastically. You basically sit around and read / watch TV most of the time in medium security. I think most people would be surprised how much less terrible it is than it’s hyped to be. If I had to choose prison or being incredibly poor / homeless - I’d choose prison.
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She would not survive that.
Even better
Sure, but she knows it as well, and I doubt she’d risk her life thusly.
Yeah :(
I think shalafi’s right though; keeping her in rich comfortable prison is how they’re going to control her
I read those news in a way that she’s now in a low risk facility with plenty of other people around who might casually remove a witness, rather than stuck in isolation in a max security prison where every ‘suicide’ would be met with public outrage.
he really is the dumbest motherfucker on the planet
You mean extortionist
Release the Epstein files.
Every time somebody says this it always makes me think of the scientist from the expanse.
We should definitely release those files it would be really helpful.
“There was a button. I pushed it.” Where’s Holden when you need him?
Conservatives are 100% onboard with a felon rapist pedo skyrocketing our cost of living while destroying our global reputation.
If anyone is still unsure if conservatives are traitors to our nation, now is the time to pinch yourself and wake up.
I wouldn’t call them traitors but they do embody everything else that makes a person horrible! If you’re a republican I seriously hope you get bad allergi s diarrhea and stuck in traffic at the same time, no sun if your car windows get stuck up too.
Traitors to the constitution, traitors to democracy, traitors to free and fair elections, traitors to the founding fathers, traitors to the people and even traitors to the union and the flag. What were you waiting for them to betray before you call them traitors?
I’m going to tariff Trump a dollar every time his stupid face pops up in my feeds.
Well that’s entirely the posters fault.
They’re really fanatic in wanting to post every stupid thing he says or does (which is daily).
As if there isn’t any real news out there.Damn you will become reallyvwealthy dude!
What do you mean “likely pushing up cost of electronics”. That is the literal point of a tariff, to push the prices up and make competing goods more appealing to consumers. The only way it doesnt raise prices is if importers just eat the cost, which they will almost certainly not do and, frankly, shouldn’t do.
In the US the point of tarrifs is to tax the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich.
CPUs are so expensive, I guess I’ll buy a good old US made abacus instead!
Damn, if only we had some bill that would increase manufacturing of chips domestically. It would be foolish to cancel such a bill while also creating a tariff. How will people favor domestic manufacturing without that manufacturing existing? Surely the president would never do that.
Now to figure out how to play Doom on it.
Every American needs to be forced to learn the components of a supply and demand diagram.
I’ll throw in the “well actually” here so no one gets wrapped around the axle — the true point of tariffs are to boost domestic business at the expense of weakening foreign sales. The scales tipped in favor of domestic businesses should be advantageous and arguably a good strategy in some circumstances …in a vacuum. That’s the “well actually” and it’s worth nothing in 2025 because all advantage is nullified if those domestic businesses lack the skill and resources to produce said goods. The industries currently targeted by tariffs are so huge and complex that domestic businesses stand zero chance (even with tariffs) in place to replicate the technology, supply chain, and workforce that would be able to stand competitively toe-to-toe with the global market.
So it’s entirely a tax on Americans by another name, and for zero gain.
In this case there are no competing domestic products though, or few enough as makes little difference. This is just taxation with extra steps.
Yes, I did mean in the ideal sense, there is a functional purpose for raising the prices of foreign goods IF there is a domestic alternative you wish to boost or expand. But the mechanism for the benefit, IF(big if) there is one, is the increase in price. Tariff (ideally) equals targetted price increases. Saying tariffs might raise prices is like saying stabbing you might wound you. I might have a good reason for wounding you, I might not, but the wounding will happen as a direct consequences of my stabbing you, regardless.
The important won’t eat the costs because there’s literally no reason for them to do that.
The tariffs don’t actually upset shipping companies, they literally do not care. They continue to sell the product at exactly the same prices it always cost, once it arrives in a US port, that’s the end of the transaction as far as they are concerned, since the tariffs apply after that, they are irrelevant.
Release the Epstein files
I agree, but I think we should amend this phrase.
Release the UNREDACTED Epstein files
I want it in audiobook format. Read by Will Wheaton.
Excuse me? LeVar Burton is still alive.
All the dangers they tell us about being over weight and eating like shit, and this mother fucker is still clinging to life like an 80s action hero clings to the underside of a helicopter at the climax of the movie. Come on clogged arteries, do something!
The truth is most human maladies are combination of environment and viruses. The two thing our current administration refuses to do anything about.
i mean, he probably has access to world-class healthcare.
one also has to wonder how often he uses that healthcare without public disclosure.
Unrelated, welcome to Lemmy.
It’s fucking tariff roulette again. And so it will be for the next 3.5 years. Stupid cunts. Remember to kick a republican in the nuts.
*capitalist
they ALL do this. they just market it differently. profits are at record highs and have been for YEARS. while working class people suffer and die.
Where are the Trump-Epstein files?
A bit of chip history: Taiwan Semiconductor (the current pseudo-monoply in cutting edge processor making) rose as Taiwan the country transitioned from a dictatorship to democracy.
They got state funding, and support for thier business as trade opened up. To simplify, it was like a mix of hyper free-trade capitalism and technocratic command economy/socialism no one on either end of political spectrum would like. And it worked! It’s still working.
The CHIPS act in the US was a baby step in that direction, which (even with Intel’s incredible corporate dysfunction) got me excited.
…And that is basically the opposite of what Trump is proposing.
Basically, take away Intel/Micron/IBM subsidies and tax the shit out of their existing overseas business. And deregulate them instead of directing them.
In other words, drain their capital, and give them free reign to think short term as their manufacturing circles the drain.
To be fair to Trump, most business people do not grasp how indescribably capital/research intense processor manufacturing is. Investment is in the many billions, planning takes decades and is extremely technical, and dependent on economic and research forecasts. They have to be forced to think long term, given truckloads of cash to do it, and not get derailed by quarterly earnings targets and cutting long-term projects on the vine for quick cash.
But still… this is like the worst thing he could have done, IMO.
CHIPS Act. Yet another major Biden win that gets overlooked in favor of shitting on him.
Biden did a lot of great stuff but the USA would rather live in a reality TV show from hell while marching towards authoritarianism apparently. Oh wait, they don’t understand any of that shit because half of them can’t fucking read.
It’s simultaneously a grift and a way to impose a flat sales tax all in one package.
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Republicans have been creaming their pants for years at the thought of imposing a regressive flat tax on all sales while doing away with income based taxation. This would forever shift the majority of the tax burden to the poor and middle class. Which is why we see Trump cutting taxes on the wealthy with his Big Ugly Bill and imposing a tariff as a way to tax the unwashed masses while simultaneously claiming he isn’t. Hopefully the courts strike down his power grab and force Congress to vote on Tariffs. The weasels will probably give it to them but at least we get to see Republicans go on record as voting for a tax increase.
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Trump has announced or will announce tariff exemptions that benefit large companies that have donated to him. Sometime later if he feels he needs more money he will announce a higher random tariff on the exempted goods and shake these corps down for more money/favors. All the while he can claim he is doing our industry a favor.
Never forget Trump is a grifting piece of shit who will always stick it to the little guy.
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Not Nvidia and not Apple. That’s so ridiculous. It will just increase the price of any electronics devices.
Oh boy, another distraction
Still about the Epstein list? Or is it now about the child abuse pastor?
Either way, Trump is a pedophile who is close friends with several other pedophiles. That’s the important part.
Wouldn’t this only affect goods manufactured in the USA? If a finished product containing chips from say, Europe, were to land on USA shores it would only have a 15% tariff right?
Why does trump hate American manufacturing?
It’s a tax of 100% on chips being imported to the USA, having been manufactured elsewhere. The idea is that it should force companies to set up their own chip manufacturing in the USA. But that’s expensive and slow to do, and requires a lot of specialized engineering talent, so US-based electronics companies will somehow have to survive through years of paying twice as much for the chips they build into their products. This will mean significant price increases for Americans buying electronics, as the unavoidable costs are passed on.
Expecting companies to build their own chip foundries and manufacture their own chips to avoid tariffs is as unrealistic as expecting poor people to singlehandedly use nuclear fission to create atoms from nothing to materialize into existence all the food they can’t afford. Even if these American “use AI for everything” megacorp regimes that can’t even write a mouse driver that’s under 1gb actually put their big swingin’ dicks back into their pants long enough to actually figure out how they could be efficient enough use the more achievable 90nm and 65nm chips, even that is so unachievable they’d never find a way to mass produce them affordably. Russia supposedly managed to diy their own 350nm chips which is barely even mid 90s Pentium 1 era bullshit and even that’s probably fake propaganda that, best case, followed some half successful low volume experiments in a lab.
The only purpose of this is to cause mass calamity and force people further into poverty while corporations have an excuse to make everything even more expensive without giving anything back to society in return.
He’s been trying to prevent the US from manufacturing their own chips, so that can’t be the real goal…
From that article:
The comments were Trump’s strongest criticism of the bipartisan CHIPS Act to date. “We don’t have to give them money,” Trump said, suggesting that avoiding new tariffs would be enough to convince them to build U.S. factories.
I think that, insofar as Trump has a coherent view, that’s it: he doesn’t want to give companies money to establish chip manufacturing in the USA, because he thinks it can be done instead by bullying them with tariffs so they are forced to fund it themselves if they want to stay in business.
I’m not saying that’s a wise view. There’s a good chance he just ends up creating more economic problems at home. And it’s in part driven by his desire to get revenge on Biden by undoing everything he did, rather than a rational appraisal of economics.
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!
I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.
Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US. Those chips can run more than $1k, while those Anbernic devices tend to run a couple hundred, so the small overhead would absolutely be worth being taxed at 15% instead of 100%.
Surely regulators have learned from the Ford Transit thing…
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.
The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US.
It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.
The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
Lol. That’s basically the same thing as I suggested for PC part swaps.
Thanks for the example. Let’s see what happens w/ the tariffs and how industry responds, because I highly doubt datacenters would be happy paying 2x for their parts.
The existing tariffs somehow exclude chips or phones/computers with chips in them. This would be a separate category, like metals.
