It’s an import tax on imported goods.

I’m the CEO of the Orange Company, an American company. I sell oranges for $1. It’s the winter and Florida has no oranges for me to sell. So I call up a business in South America and have them send me oranges, $1 million of oranges.

The Orange Company pays them $1 million. When the oranges arrive in the US, the US Federal government charges me a 10% tariff on my imported oranges - $100k. The Orange Company pays the US government a 10% tariff, or $100k, for importing $1 million of oranges.

I then sell my oranges to American consumers. Because my cost of goods went up, I can’t sell for $1 anymore. So I pass on the 10% increase in orange cost to my customers by selling oranges for $1.10.

That’s what a tariff is, how it works, and how it is effectively a sales tax.

My humble experience so far: https://kcross.engineering/blogs/matrixandmautrix/

Biggest thing so far is “go slow on federation”. Large federated servers are where you get into trouble with resource requirements and needing to spin up workers, etc. Small, private servers are relatively easy.

My humble experience so far: https://kcross.engineering/blogs/matrixandmautrix/

Biggest thing so far is “go slow on federation”. Large federated servers are where you get into trouble with resource requirements and needing to spin up workers, etc. Small, private servers are relatively easy.

I’m messaging Facebook users over Matrix via the bridge.

I can try to write some stuff up, it’s not super complex. Core requirement for my setup is Docker + a domain. I recommend Linux host but you can make Docker Desktop work.

Let me write some stuff down this week.

I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.

Yea I’m gonna do zfs or something when I get set up properly again. I’ve got 2 16TB HDDs and Storage Spaces won’t let me pull a drive out :v

I think I’m gonna have to make a new Storage Space and slowly grow that one and shrink the other as I basically shift the extra storage budget between the two until the data is on just one of my drives without redundancy, and then I’ll pull that drive, dual boot Ubuntu or something, format, get everything prepared, and then mount, copy, start services, and then go back and kill the old storage spaces and then never run Windows for anything meaningful again.

I need to migrate off Docker Desktop for Windows and Storage Spaces but I fear the process will be difficult due to my data volume and the stupidity of Windows. I should never have gone Windows, but I wanted to use Steam Big Picture off the media PC and didn’t want to deal with getting that functional on Linux.

But Docker Desktop for Windows keeps crashing WSL and bricking the network devices randomly, and also continuously grows memory consumption until the machine reboots. Piece of shit.

I grew up in Vermont and I live in Canada now. Please don’t make me go back, lol.

Maybe. Russia currently has the upper hand sadly, but if Zelenskyy trades 30 day pause (appearance of victory for Trump and a short reprieve for UKR) for resuming intel sharing and some US aid that may be a net win for UKR. Really depends on what comes along with the deal - what has UKR agreed to give up to get this ceasefire?

There’s also the fact that that money isn’t strictly money “wasted” - you can effectively double dip by using the funds to buy domestic or allied materials, essentially just circulating the money around your economy and creating defense-related jobs. Not that you wanna go full MIC but it’s not like Europe is gonna be flushing 800B down the drain.

Thanks Obama (and Merkel)

If only there was a punishment for Crimea…

Costco has a great Colombian whole bean that they sail from Colombia to Quebec where it’s roasted and packaged. Cafe William’s Sailboat coffee. We love it. We’ll be buying it exclusively now!

What’s really funny about Trump winning Latino votes in Florida is that when surveyed, they went Trump for “the economy”. So… my comment stands.

But yes as a Canadian, the results of the US election and the performance of the Democratic party are things I’ll personally need to “look in the mirror” about.

Alternatively, I can appreciate how dumb American voters are, as 70 million of them vote to actively make their lives much worse. <3

Guy making $8/hr: the economy is better now

I was just in Göcek and Ankara and I had some wildly interesting interactions with locals when they asked me how I liked Turkey.

“I like it, very beautiful country, lovely people, great food.”

“So you’d move here?”

“Uh… perhaps not”

“So you don’t like Turkey”

👀

lol

These are the “right by accident” people that make it so hard to have meaningful discussions.

You’re absolutely correct and we shouldn’t ignore genuine acts of antisemitism just because Israel’s government is doing terrible things.

That’s not true. Tankies love to shit on the US for “meddling” in Africa when a lot of the time its providing funding and weapons for regimes where the opponents are funded by Russia/Wagner/China. Depending on which way the wind blows, the US is either “overthrowing a legitimate regime” or “restoring the democratic process”.

It’s a no win. Africa is too weak to stabilize by itself after centuries of meddling, and if the US goes hands-off, Russia and China will just economically enslave them via predatory loans, like how neoliberal policies economically enslaved South/Central America to the US. I’d trust the US installed people for their own populace over Chinese/Russia installed people, given the respective human rights records of all involved.

Anyways, while 2003 onwards was a huge fuck up and absolutely abhorrent, Desert Shield/Storm was incredibly justified defending an ally under armed occupation and still gets shit on by Tankies.

One man’s humanitarian mission to shut down a warlord is another man’s mission to overthrow a regime and install US-friendly government.

As I mentioned, “from a store policies perspective”. The shrinkage isn’t worth the liability and risk for Walmart.

They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen, though (from a store policy perspective). There’s a reason all these stores train employees “observe don’t interfere”.