Build a wall and make the Goron pay for it!

Ideally, we would have avoided all this risk, but we didn’t, and for the time being, the best self-care for most of us is to keep in mind scenarios that may play out to reduce harm. Infighting has long been a normal to happen when the GOP asserts itself, so it’s not crazy to imagine it being ultimately the block for attempts to dismantle some of the political structure (the powerful players know how to play this game, and are hopefully worried enough about losing that power in any big change that they will work to protect the mechanisms currently in play).

Professors? You must mean those librul elites. I do my own research!

The point is if they do not care, they wouldn’t even bother to pretend. He’d just stay in office or run again.

The dance of running as VP doesn’t make any sense as either they don’t care and it’s not necessary, or they do care and that’s not a loophole that exists.

Besides, IIRC Kanye and Trump had a falling out over a suggestion that Trump would take a backseat to Kanye in a campaign. Trump won’t settle for even the appearance of ‘second place’.

You claimed that you would be the last to defend him, then defended him? Like what?

4D chess move, now no one else can defend him because he already called ‘last’.

I’ve had limited experience with slack, but the whole way conversations map to workspaces at least got to be confusing to me, and I would have liked an experience based on me as a user, rather than having my user span workspaces and have to juggle them to figure out how to talk to whoever I’m supposed to talk to at the time.

For me “it just works” doesn’t ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won’t let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.

Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.

The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn’t important and it’s the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of ‘Teams’ conversations.

In my company, I’ve been added to about 70 Teams and it’s pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that’s the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.

When going cross-organization, it’s a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company ‘security’ policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).

Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it’s own annoyances.

I would say LLMs specifically are in that ball park. Things like machine vision have been boringly productive and relatively un hyped.

There’s certainly some utility to LLMs, but it’s hard to see through all the crazy over estimations and being shoved everywhere by grifters.

Then he just gets to sell a whole new batch of 48 merch and get even more money… That would really show him?

Note I was referring to the author of the article. He like a lot of other conservatives are probably worried that whole they “won”, it’s really all about Trump and they are trying to think on how to protect their agenda in the face of that precarious reality.

Just remember that reversing the procedure is not a guarantee, should you think you will change your mind later. Other options are more flexible and also protect from things other than pregnancy, which are also undesirable outcomes.

They can’t keep up that sort of lie for too long without the mask slipping. So it’s a good idea to require a fair amount of together time before considering being intimate.

Especially the people who would be worth avoiding wouldn’t have the patience and feel very entitled, so they are less likely to stick around for an early dating period.

If what you think is accurate, then I’ll take ridicule for overreacting if it means Trump’s actual administration thinks it’s too terrible to touch as a result.

If everyone says that PJ2025 or anything resembling it is so terrible it can only be considered a troll bogeyman and should never be implemented for real, I’d take that.

Truth is, they didn’t write up over 900 pages of this crap and produce a bunch of training videos just to ‘troll’. They meant it. Now if, hypothetically, they are no longer ‘in’ with Trump and their ambitions are scuttled and they are trying to make lemonade out of it by extracting liberal tears over nothing, then sure, let them have those liberal tears and laugh about it so long as that stays the hell out of reality. I sincerely hope you are right, but even then, keep up the awareness and ‘overreacting’ to keep it as an unacceptable joke instead of what it was meant to be.

I frankly think that while Bernie should be right, he’s not. His strategy would have also failed, though I’d rather that have been the attempt.

Simple fact of the matter is that out of 10 major countries with elections this year, all the incumbents lost. Didn’t matter whether they were left or right or whatever, they lost. Democrats were doomed by being the incumbents at a time when just so many are unhappy with how things currently are, and people are eager to change everything for a shot. Between having the pandemic become endemic everywhere, economies struggling to digest the massive COVID stimulus, supply chains still off due to both recovering from shutdowns and war, and just the overall situation in Ukraine and Gaza, there’s a lot for people to want a change of course, and they don’t know specifically how this all could get fixed.

Even if they went all-in on more leftist policies, most voters won’t see beyond the ‘D’ and know ‘D’ is what we had today, therefore ‘R’ must be attached to the answer. A critical mass of the electorate either can not or will not critically consider the respective platforms and instead just decide based on ‘keep the same’ or ‘change course’.

Meanwhile, in political circles, everyone is talking like the specifics and strategies made this huge difference or that huge difference and what it means, when the fact is likely that this result was pretty much a given no matter what.

Well, Trump specifically may not try because the risk/reward isn’t really good for him.

As it stands, he gets to declare an unambiguous “victory” where he won at life. He got to be president with ultimately a clean sweep of the swing states and the popular vote and served as many terms as he is allowed to serve. Thanks to the rules, he doesn’t need to compete again, and he can stop even pretending to work after 4 years.

Meanwhile, a push to establish him as “dictator for life” might at best buy him another few years in office before his health will fail. Such an effort comes with high risk, of him going down in history as more of a “bad man”, of personal risk for being targeted by violence.

Now JD Vance might be game to make a go of it, he’s got decades left in the tank. Of course broadly speaking there’s a balance of power, with those currently in power relatively comfortable knowing that the vote serves as a nice way to get pushed out of office before people get pissed enough to put you in real physical danger. Plenty of opportunities to be self-serving with a pretty safe retirement should things start going awry. Fanaticism can drive people to go further, but I would like to think a pragmatic person with a sense of self-interest can see the value in a peaceful voting out versus having those same millions of people losing their political voice.

Oh he did. My only hope at this point is that he is just so self-centered he meant he didn’t care about their voting anymore because he personally could never run again.

At least from a personal perspective, I wouldn’t be surprised if he would be ok with closing his legacy having “won the game” by serving as president as long as he was allowed to serve with an overwhelming electoral victory.

He may not care about Trump’s specific presidency, as much as he wants some conservative economic policy in general to maybe endure. This means he would want a republican house, senate, and presidency even after Trump’s second term concludes, and really doesn’t like the idea of going too hard core and the fallout causing a loss of that influence as early as 2027 in the mid terms.

Well, if goods become even more expensive, and wages fail to improve or get worse, then people tend to notice that more than the spin.

Sure you have very loud passionate politically active people who are game for “their team” to win no matter what and will listen to anything to rationalize their position and reject anything that disagrees, but a lot of folks are just looking at their personal circumstance and deciding if they think it’s bad or not and voting either to continue or change, without a whole lot of consideration of what either side says will work or why things are the way they are, they just know “keep it going” or “change it out”.

Well, a scenario is that he cuts taxes and applies massive tariffs, resulting in a huge regressive expense paid the most by the poorest. That he lets companies be more sociopathic toward their workers and says “screw you” to anyone that needs welfare.

The end result if 2 years sees even more expensive bills and less safe employment and less recourse when the employment screws them over would be an electorate that demands him out and takes it out on the house and senate races. Perhaps to the point where they could remove him from office, and maybe even Vance too, and have a Democratic president finish out his term.

So his point is simply that while he pursues republican economic policy, which I suspect the author agrees with broadly, to take it easy and make sure he doesn’t piss everyone off in the process.

That summary was a bit misleading compared to the linked summary.

“What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net,”

The conservative economist is not saying that he shouldn’t have tax cuts and maybe some deregulation, is that he shouldn’t screw the pooch for swing voters in the process.

As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes,

As an example, I heard a MAGA politician on the radio the other day. Admittedly it didn’t sound like anyone “hooked in” to Trump’s circle, but I suspect his rhetoric was consistent. The interviewer put to him a question like “given how divisive things are, what do you hope Trump will do to be a good leader for all the nation, including those that didn’t vote for him?”. The response was that Trump won, therefore, there’s no mandate to do anything for the losing voters, and the mandate was simple to do whatever Trump wants to do.

Further, Don Jr. said a key facet for anyone in Trump’s administration is that there must be no one who would dare think themselves smarter than the president. Only yes men allowed.

Ultimately, people need to feel like they have viable livelihoods with a return to relatively affordable goods, and they need to see that within 2 years or else the house and senate will be hard blue come 2027. Of course, there’s always the potential for dismantling the democracy, but the economist would probably think that would be disastrous for stability, and a grave threat to everything including economic concerns. So best outcome for him, as a conservative economist, is somehow making the electorate willingly want to keep the republicans, and he knows that Trump listening only to himself and hard core sycophants is not a recipe to make the electorate happy.