Given that the dollar has lost ~10% of its value since the start of the year, that's good... Right?

Easy, be a low-wage worker. Their gains outpaced inflation since COVID.

Or, even easier, just be a capital owner, instead of a wagie. (/s)

Which is relevant when you're defending against Ocean's 11 or the Mossad, but for the other 99.999% of us, the lock is there to keep a bored teenager or a meth junkie out.

Or, more realistically, to convince an insurer that we've made a token effort to keep them out.

This is exactly the point.

The lock is there to keep the honest people out AND leave a trace that someone came in forcibly when they want to do so.

Which is why stuff like bump keying those stupid flat-keyed American locks is so scary because it requires almost zero skill and leaves very little traces.

Unless an expert takes apart the lock investigating for traces, there's no way to tell it was opened without a key.

It absolutely is, and it's complete ass covering from an administration that utterly failed in its primary duty - putting Trump in prison.

Nice to see the people who fucked it up isolated from the consequences of his second term. (/s)

If you think this is wrong, please, I implore you to do something about it.

Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.

Arguing over whether half or a third are okay with this is splitting hairs anytime that isn't an election (where these margins matter).

That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.

> The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative

That's not the explanation. He overperforms among middle and upper-middle incomes.

Lower and higher incomes lean blue. (Despite the lower ones being the ones truly 'losing the economic game'.)

The motivation of the voters becomes a lot more understandable when you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

This congress and POTUS is, in fact, a good representation of their values, and they aren't ashamed of it.

(You could have given them that benefit in 2016, and somewhat in 2020, but definitely not in 2024.)

Sadly that's the conclusion I've had to come to recently. I wanted to have hope in my fellow Americans, just attributing their choices to being poorly informed or just foolish, but, no, they're just as mean and greedy as he is. They like watching people suffer, and now that they've had their first taste of cruelty, they want more, more, more. They'll be that way long after Trump is gone. They're just mean-spirited assholes. It sucks.

Chess is an abstract proxy for a wargame, but is not in itself a wargame.

'Abstract' is somewhere on the chess side of the spectrum between Go and moving miniature battle tanks around and flipping to page 237 of Appendix E to look up how much water the average Italian soldier needed to boil his pasta in the Tobruk campaign.

As an aside, I have a slightly masochistic desire to implement an online-playable version of Campaign for North Africa. It bothers me that they can credibly claim there is no documented case of someone finishing the game.

Or SpaceX owning Twitter, or the president owning Truth Social?

Or Amazon owning the Washington Post.

Amazon doesn't own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does. I'm not sure if this makes the situation worse or better.

Or journalists everywhere shaping stories to their own biases.

almost like ... journalistic integrity and ... maybe less monopoly ... are good things

that is not the same.

Sure they are. They’re both just people using whatever power they have to shape the narrative.

on the one hand you have the owner dictating his political bias to all his employees/journalists. on the other hand you have a person/journalist interpreting reality through their own political bias. what's the difference? in the first case the medium would only report biased in one direction, in the second case it'd report roughly split around the percentages of the (journalistic) population, e.g. 60% this, 40% that.