I’m like not 100% sure what floor traders even do

They stopped being a thing back in the '00s. Floor trading is all done by algorithms now. Specifically, the High Frequency Trading algorithms, that perpetually scan trading indexes and place orders in anticipation of arbitrage opportunities.

You’ve got a few people on the floor who function as IT and tweak the algorithms as necessary when they encounter bugs. But that guy is more likely freaking because his API is bugging out than because of any change in equity values.

Public services will sky rocket in 2025!

Elon Musk laughing

No they won’t.

Look at Cuba. Now look at the US. Now look at Cuba again.

Okay, now image Cuba but without the public health care, housing, jobs programs, and mass transit.

the alternative is to lay down, let Russia take the country

That’s a foregone conclusion if Trump can strong arm Ukraine into elections and Zelenskyy gets washed (as looks increasingly likely given how unpopular he’s become). Then control tilts back to a bunch of Russia-friendly Ukrainian business goons more interested in doing deals than fighting over turf.

How many poorly equipped press-ganged infantrymen want to die for Ihor Kolomoisky’s vision of a future Ukraine?

I was responding to your original premise, that “Germans never stopped being Nazis” - and you know it.

Germany’s post-World War II government was riddled with former Nazis

For a more than 20 years fter World War II, nearly 100 former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party held high-ranking positions in the West German Justice Ministry, according to a German government report.

From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.

Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.

…

The prevalence of former Nazi officials in the ministry allowed them to shield one another from post-war justice and to carry over some Nazi policies, like discrimination against gays, into the West German government.

One lawyer who helped craft discriminatory laws barring marriages between Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi regime held a top family-law position in the post-World War II Justice Ministry, according to The Local.

“The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister who presented the report Monday, according to AFP.

The infiltration of the post-war West German government by former Nazis was not limited to the Justice Ministry. A report released late last year found that between 1949 and 1970, 54% of Interior Ministry staffers were former Nazi Party members, and that 8% of them had served in the Nazi Interior Ministry, which at one point was run by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

How can Germany “deport” an EU citizen?

Have a half-dozen men with guns grab the person, shove them into the back of a squad car, drive them to a jail, make them wait in the jail until transport can be arranged, drag them to a plane, force them onto the plane, fly the plane to an Israeli-occupied territory, kick the person out of the plane into the hands of some genocidal Israeli lunatics, and leave.

Is there any way for them to block an EU citizen from coming back into Germany?

Tear up their travel documents, for starters. Sending them to a country where they are at extreme risk of permanent arrest, torture, and execution also works.

More Ukrainian conscripts, obviously. Just keep throwing out waves of them until the Russian front line breaks.

Same folks screaming and crying about Tankies censoring all their “Commemorative Tienamen Square” posts out here slapping the “BANNED” button on people posting direct quotes from a living President or a sitting Senator.

I guess Real Liberal Democracy has simply never been tried

I really don’t love it

#Retvrn

Damn, you think sales are bad now? Wait until we get another recession.

But Cuba is also not on the list

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306859/us-imports-by-commodity-from-russia/

It does look like we import about $3B/year. Mostly fertilizers, which make up 1/3 of total imports, and some raw metals and a bit of heavy machinery. But that’s minuscule beside our trade balances with the top of his tariff list - China, the EU, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and India. We do $20B/year with tiny little South Korea, as a point of comparison. We bring in $6B/year from South Africa.

To my knowledge, we don’t import Russian vodka in any significant quantity. Anything “Russian” branded is typically imported from one of the neighboring states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania. Red Army Vodka, for instance, is from a Polish company.

Embracing the Ultra-Nationalist Paleocon wing of the Republican Party and stuffing your administration with goldbugs and Silicon Valley anarcho-capitalists?

Why does an American President consuming American Propaganda and regurgitating a uniquely American public policy at the behest of his wealthiest American peers and hooting white-nationalist proles waving American flags get flagged as Russian?

Obama was pretty decent no?

How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.

As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.

Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.

…

Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.

The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).

I really want to say Bush’s useless Trillion dollar wars are worse than this.

I would say Bush’s bailout of the O&G sector in '01 and the Financial Sector in '08 laid the seeds for worse social and ecological conditions over the subsequent two decades. Similarly, NAFTA and the subsequent midwestern de-industrialization was nightmarish for US industry and Mexican agriculture.

These blunders set us up to need international trade. What’s crazy about Trump’s tariffs is that he’s not addressing the underlying infrastructure problems or the crushing post-Great Recession debt traps. He’s just squeezing at the point of the supply chain in order to punish American industry and labor for adapting to the sabotaged economic landscape of the neoliberal era.

It is the economic equivalent of kicking a guy in the kidneys after he’s already been laid out on the ground.

The US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of the last decade. We aren’t tariffing them because we aren’t trading with them.

We also aren’t tariffing Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea, for the same reasons.

Neoliberals were. But the backlash to even guys as hard-right as Vivek suggests tolerance for the any amount of diversity is plunging.

The basic graphing technology used by AI is the same pioneered by Alta Vista and optimized by Google years later. We’ve added a layer of abstraction through user I/O, such that you get a formalized text response encapsulating results rather than a series of links containing related search terms. But the methodology used to harvest, hash, and sort results is still all rooted in graph theory.

The difference between then and now is that back then you’d search “Horse” in Alta Vista and getting a dozen links ranging from ranches and vet clinics to anime and porn. Now, you get a text blob that tries to synthesize all the information in those sources down to a few paragraphs of relevant text.

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

Then I’d ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we’ve got an AI that’s built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it’s just as likely they’re ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

That’s sort of the problem with AI. There’s no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that’s already inelegant and resource intensive).

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

The problem is less that we don’t know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don’t know either. They’re fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don’t even know if they’ve got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.