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.
As if she would… She will just do what she do best, just not for Epstein, but for mr president himself, I fear…
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.
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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!
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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
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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.
Next 3.5 years if we are lucky.
The last 6 months have been the longest decade of my life.
You won’t ever need to vote again
*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.
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.
Unrelated, welcome to Lemmy.
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Where are the Trump-Epstein files?
Release the Epstein files.
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.
Bingo, this is just a way of raising taxes on the poor without “raising taxes”.
CPUs are so expensive, I guess I’ll buy a good old US made abacus instead!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Release the Epstein files
I agree, but I think we should amend this phrase.
Release the UNREDACTED Epstein files
Americans won‘t own anything and they‘ll be happy.
Oh boy, another distraction
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.
Yes, we all know the most successful economic endeavors are funded by taxpayers. Then leeches come in to steal the profits from the public and useful idiots are all-to-proud to support them.
Just look at how Iceland has the cheapest electricity on the planet; it’s because they built their infrastructure using public money without an incentive to maximize profit.
That’s not what I’m implying.
TSMC would not have thrived if it was purely nationalized, and could have easily collapsed into capitalist hell.
For the processor fab business, specifically, the ideal conditions seem to be some kind of bastardized hybrid. Samsung and China Semi are not far from ‘hybrids’ either, while the corpses of pure extremes (GloFo, Intel, the Soviet’s and modern Russia’s computing efforts, DARPA projects, other pure government efforts and some RISC ones) are littered everywhere.
Intel was heading towards a state-supported hybrid, but apparently not anymore (and is now barreling into capitalist collapse).
The other part of what I’m saying is this does not necessarily apply to, say, the hotel business like Trump is channeling, where short term maneuvering and branding pay off more. Nor engergy generation, which is different too (and probably should be nationalized in such a geothermal-heavy place like Iceland).
In which nation is energy generation not using vast natural resources at huge initial outlay where companies have a boner for monopolising or cartels and exploiting scarcity to drive up prices?
Side note: DARPA’s TCP/IP networky thing seems to have had some future in it!
In lighter news he’s 78 with congestive heart failure, obvious mental decline, incontinence and obesity
Yea, but he’s also aware of his limited time left. Hence he’s rushing this. Fuck him
get that AI bubble a-poppin
Looks like books are back on the menu, boys.
How do I download one of those?
Ebooks are awesome.
