But the chances of both of them croaking in the next 6 months are very low.

The way Biden looked with a simple cough? And with the physical burden a continuous high stakes campaign puts on a candidate?

Wouldn’t even be the first time a President campaigned himself into an early grave. Harrison, Taylor, Harding, and FDR all leap to mind.

Biden has the whole US government at his back, highly trained and motivated to not let the sitting US president die.

All the SS agents in the world can’t save you from COVID

No one is ignoring the problems…

The volume of cope on this forum is obscene

Youre doing Lincoln a disservice.

True

And Washington too.

Nah, fuck him he sucked.

Obama was by far the best US president in recent history and maybe ever.

If you ignore public policy and just fixate on optics, maybe.

he was coherent afterwards

He was reported coherent as soon as he was off camera.

Biden or trump WILL be the next president.

Both are over the mean life expectancy, neither is in particularly great health, and it’s another six months until the inauguration.

Will do. Thank you.

Once the thing that’s never going to happen happens…

A shame the electoral college voters won’t feel the same way

I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.

Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.

One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.

Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.

To fight this, your suggestion is…… to do nothing.

Honestly, doing nothing by way of a General Strike would have a much more powerful impact on the political system than watching the poll results roll in from your gerrymandered district and disenfranchised neighborhood.

I wish more people would consider Walks-Outs, Sick-Outs, and Administrative Lock-Outs as tools of political change.

Again, I agree, but my comment was about automobiles.

Nearly 40% of Honda’s automobile production took place in China in the last financial year.

Honda would continue to keep its supply chain in China for the domestic market in the world’s second-largest economy while building a separate one for markets outside of China, the Sankei said. It did not say where it got the information.

That’s not “pulling out of China”. That’s a sign of Chinese domestic automobile consumption rising.

Biden has expanded Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to include more imports.

I haven’t seen much to suggest he’s enforcing it. These laws are consistently toothless, in the same way more and more of our regulatory system is toothless.

What’s the over-under on Trump winning in 2024 and the US holding federal elections on 2026?

I’m ready to place an extremely large wager.

It’s the age old problem of a wise despot.

When you’re governing wisely, there is no need to be despotic. Conflicts and contradictions necessitate a large militant police state to keep the lower class in line. But when you’ve got generous surpluses and a rising quality of life, people are generally happy and easy to govern.

Sadly, the Biden administration has done nothing to halt the deluge of anti-LGBTQ+ laws sweeping the nation at the state and local level.

Project 2025 is already being rolled out. And we’ve seen Democrats willing to compromise on chunks of it (the TikTok ban jammed through the House as a condition of Ukraine military funding) even from the majority. As disenfranchisement rates surge in purple-red states, we’re going to see Republicans grow bolder and Democrats more desperate to appeal to the shrinking pool of centrist voters.

Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living

I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.

Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.

Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.

Large professional centrally planned economies do a better job of managing scarce resources than a pack of ill-informed and uncoordinated Wall Street Lemmings.

They’ve since been pulling out of China

Firstly, no they haven’t. US trade with China has only ever increased year-over-year going back to the 1960s.

Secondly, our hunger for cheap labor is sending us to penal colonies across the rest of the Pacific Rim. This isn’t something that began or ended with a single factory in a single country.

Many nations are cracking down on imports related to Uyghur labor.

They’re not. The business is just being laundered through front companies.

Upon the review of the ASPI report, Skechers said it contacted senior management at Luzhou prior to conducting two additional audits of the factory — none of which revealed any indications of forced labor. Luzhou, however, did confirm that members of the Uyghur ethnic group did comprise a portion of its workforce but were employed under compliant terms and conditions.

Shoving thumbs in my ears and saying “I don’t see the non-compliance, its all fine actually!” and letting the provisions go completely unenforced.

And that’s before you get into direct sales through Ali Baba and Temu

There are plenty of automobiles manufactured in the US, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and the UK

And they’re all complicit. BMW, Volkswagon, Jaguar Land Rover all source parts from China.

In fact, the entire US supply chain is reliant on Chinese parts.

Earlier this month, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) said it would be temporarily halting production at a plant in Kragujevac, Serbia due to a lack of parts from China, while Hyundai and Renault have done the same in South Korea.

You can whitewash your supply chain by slapping an western label on Chinese parts. But this isn’t demonstrating any kind of concern for labor rights or ethical insourcing. FFS, we won’t even let Volkswagon plants in Tennessee unionize.

Nevermind Uyghur slave labor. Americans can’t even bargain for better salaries. Its too much for our fragile economy to handle.