The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Noodles]

Meanwhile, Target is now on Life Support for bending to Fascism.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion

Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it's lost.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Isabeau]

Nice to see an Ex (vice but still) speaking out with anger and passion.

little vid here:

Keith Edwards (@keithedwards.bsky.social)

Al gore is pissed off and I’m here for it

bsky.app

Al Gore compares Trump administration to Nazi Germany-Politico

Speaking at an event at the start of San Francisco’s Climate Week, Gore said the Trump administration was “trying to create their own preferred version of reality” to achieve their sweeping objectives similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s and ‘40s.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

The problem is that people have been comparing anything and everything they don't like to Hitler for so long that doing so no longer has any impact.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I just saw JD Vance referred to as The Grim Veeper on Threads, and now I'm dying!

 

[Essence Lumin]

The problem is that people have been comparing anything and everything they don't like to Hitler for so long that doing so no longer has any impact.

aka Godwin's Law

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Here's a piece of American toy manufacturer Molson Hart about the problems you're facing when trying to bring manufacturing back to America. He's giving 14 (!) reasons why bringing back manufacturing to America will fail, so quite a long read.

Money quote: "Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines, they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It’s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world’s, even with tariffs.

So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there many countries with wages lower than China’s. It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today."

Other reasons given are weak industrial supply chain, lack of infrastructure required to manufacture stuff, many Americans would just hate manufacturing due to the work situation and pressure.

His outlook is also grim what happens when America continues with tariffs: China will just move on, and it would be the end of America's participation in globalization, making many things more expensive in daily life.

His idea on how to bring manufacturing actually back to America: "First, the United States must fix basic problems which reduce the effectiveness of our labor. For example, everyone needs to be able to graduate with the ability to do basic mathematics. American healthcare is way too expensive and it needs to be fixed if the United States wants to be competitive with global labor. I’m not saying healthcare should be socialized or switched to a completely private system, but whatever we’re doing now clearly is not working, and it needs to be fixed.

We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric."

America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back — Molson Hart

On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again”. These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opp

www.molsonhart.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Link to Guardian article

 

[Noodles]

Here's a piece of American toy manufacturer Molson Hart about the problems you're facing when trying to bring manufacturing back to America. He's giving 14 (!) reasons why bringing back manufacturing to America will fail, so quite a long read.

I plan to read this, and it seems well put for sure.

I want to say, he probably knows all this very well given his company.

Everything I have seen in the fallout of these tariffs, toys seem like they are probably being hit the worst, and everything happening in that whole world is a strange canary in the coal mine for what is to come for other industries.

I have seen at least 3, and there are probably some I missed, 3 sites that sell collectible toys sent out notices that they are simply, no longer taking orders form US companies. And they are bigger companies in this area, the most recent I have seen being Goodsmile, who make basically half the anime related figures out there (Bandai making the other half).

There have been a lot of reports of smaller sellers that are basically, at this point, probably going to close within a month, even if things were fully reversed. The supply chain for these companies has been fucked beyond repair at this point and they already run on tiny margins.

Plus, the average cost per item has already been rising and hurting collectors for the last few years, these tariffs are going to and in some cases already have made things much much worse. Arguably one of the most popular lines, Hasbro's Marvel Legends, has already slowly gone from $20-$25, are now going up for pre order at $30+, basically overnight, for example.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Link to Guardian article

Whoa. That was quite a stark read. Really puts a face to what this country is going through.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

The problem is that people have been comparing anything and everything they don't like to Hitler for so long that doing so no longer has any impact.

Oh, it has an impact.... Which is that they're now taking pride in the comparison and standing united behind it with a defiant "so what, you can't stop us!" attitude.

 

[Beebo Brink]

We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

The house that I'm living in was built in the 1890s, in a neighborhood called Boomtown. It was -- and still is -- a working-class neighborhood that sprang up almost overnight to house the workers for various manufacturing industries, from textile mills to brickworks. All gone, of course. Now this area is overwhelmingly elderly couples who have owned homes here their whole lives and younger families who rent from the slumlords who bought up all the property from the even older people who have died. Drugs are rampant, as is poverty. Most of those renters are paying with vouchers from social assistance services.

We're a large town (just on the verge of enough population to qualify as a city) in a state that is largely rural and very poor. Even though we're within a (long) commute distance from a major metro area, it's difficult to entice businesses to locate here for many of the reasons the OP listed. About ten years ago a new distribution center opened up on the outskirts of town, but hiring enough workers was challenging. Too many people failed the mandatory drug tests. The roads are poorly maintained, electrical brownouts are not uncommon, there's limited funds for winter snow removal.

Our local schools are better than in other parts of the state, but they're still not good, so it's hard to persuade families to move here. The best and brightest workers can make more money in any of the states surrounding us, so they move out or commute to those jobs. I'm a case in point: I bought my house here because the prices were lower (we're childless so the school quality was irrelevant), but I worked in another state until I retired.

We're like a microcosm of what is wrong with the entire country.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

The house that I'm living in was built in the 1890s, in a neighborhood called Boomtown. It was -- and still is -- a working-class neighborhood that sprang up almost overnight to house the workers for various manufacturing industries, from textile mills to brickworks. All gone, of course. Now this area is overwhelmingly elderly couples who have owned homes here their whole lives and younger families who rent from the slumlords who bought up all the property from the even older people who have died. Drugs are rampant, as is poverty. Most of those renters are paying with vouchers from social assistance services.

We're a large town (just on the verge of enough population to qualify as a city) in a state that is largely rural and very poor. Even though we're within a (long) commute distance from a major metro area, it's difficult to entice businesses to locate here for many of the reasons the OP listed. About ten years ago a new distribution center opened up on the outskirts of town, but hiring enough workers was challenging. Too many people failed the mandatory drug tests. The roads are poorly maintained, electrical brownouts are not uncommon, there's limited funds for winter snow removal.

Our local schools are better than in other parts of the state, but they're still not good, so it's hard to persuade families to move here. The best and brightest workers can make more money in any of the states surrounding us, so they move out or commute to those jobs. I'm a case in point: I bought my house here because the prices were lower (we're childless so the school quality was irrelevant), but I worked in another state until I retired.

We're like a microcosm of what is wrong with the entire country.

I think we need to stop pretending that we can revitalize every remote rural area. Many people would be much better off moving to bigger cities with more opportunity and more infrastructure. I also fully realize that my statement is much easier said than done. Relocating people still takes a lot of time and money, but I think anything is better than just waiting around for some magical policy to turn around small rural areas who's reason for existing has vanished (like whatever factory or mine caused the town to be built). I do feel bad for a lot of the rural people who really thought Trump would somehow revitalize their towns though.

It seems to me like there is a game going on in American politics where politicians pretend they can turn around rural America and rural Americans kind of know it's bullshit but nobody wants to just face the fact that the factories and mills etc are not coming back.

 

[Noodles]

I think we need to stop pretending that we can revitalize every remote rural area. Many people would be much better off moving to bigger cities with more opportunity and more infrastructure. I also fully realize that my statement is much easier said than done. Relocating people still takes a lot of time and money, but I think anything is better than just waiting around for some magical policy to turn around small rural areas who's reason for existing has vanished (like whatever factory or mine caused the town to be built). I do feel bad for a lot of the rural people who really thought Trump would somehow revitalize their towns though.

It seems to me like there is a game going on in American politics where politicians pretend they can turn around rural America and rural Americans kind of know it's bullshit but nobody wants to just face the fact that the factories and mills etc are not coming back.

They could always try turning their small towns into tourist traps.

https://www.bigthingssmalltown.com/

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I think we need to stop pretending that we can revitalize every remote rural area. Many people would be much better off moving to bigger cities with more opportunity and more infrastructure. I also fully realize that my statement is much easier said than done. Relocating people still takes a lot of time and money, but I think anything is better than just waiting around for some magical policy to turn around small rural areas who's reason for existing has vanished (like whatever factory or mine caused the town to be built). I do feel bad for a lot of the rural people who really thought Trump would somehow revitalize their towns though.

It seems to me like there is a game going on in American politics where politicians pretend they can turn around rural America and rural Americans kind of know it's bullshit but nobody wants to just face the fact that the factories and mills etc are not coming back.

We've long had that problem here in the UK. The fact of the matter is that towns and cities, like any other form of human organisation, change over time, and there are plenty of examples of places that grew and became prosperous because of the demands of particular local industries and, when those industries have declined or ceased to exist (e.g. coal mining in the UK, or many fishing ports) have suffered huge declines because, if you're not employed by those industries, or for a business that supplies those industries, there's not much point in living or doing business there.

The result is that the people who can relocate do, making it even more difficult to attract investment other than for poorly-paid unskilled labour in Amazon fulfilment centres and the like, leaving people who can't relocate for whatever reason.

The main political parties have been offering magic solutions for a generation or two now, none of which have worked. There probably are specific solutions tailored to individual towns, but these would need developing on a case-by-case basis, by people who understand the local area, its population, economy and needs. But turning back the clock to what the economy was like 50 years ago is simply fanciful.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

For a brief time it looked like Work from Home policies were going to help some of those communities. As long as they have the internet infrastructure, people could take advantage of cheap real estate and preferences for living in small communities.

I know of a number of communities in Arkansas that functioned as nurseries and retirement homes, with the bulk of the working age population relocating to cities and then coming to retire near family.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas Republican lawmakers urge Trump to reconsider denial of disaster relief - ABC News
I knew this would happen. Getting what she voted for. Karma is a bitch and so is Huckabee

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

No. Not. Nein. Nyet. Making certain groups register is how it started in Germany. This is leading nowhere good, and needs to be resisted at all costs.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Launch Autism Registry Using Private Health Records

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas Republican lawmakers urge Trump to reconsider denial of disaster relief - ABC News
I knew this would happen. Getting what she voted for. Karma is a bitch and so is Huckabee

there is a long, sad, pathetic history of republicans opposing disaster relief except for their own states. ...this lack of self awareness needs to be studied.

 

[Noodles]

For a brief time it looked like Work from Home policies were going to help some of those communities. As long as they have the internet infrastructure, people could take advantage of cheap real estate and preferences for living in small communities.

I know of a number of communities in Arkansas that functioned as nurseries and retirement homes, with the bulk of the working age population relocating to cities and then coming to retire near family.

Work from home really could be the real solution here, not in every case, and to some extent it would require some to accept a but more "effort" for some activities. But it spreads the need for housing out a lot, which helps with the stupid housing cost problem that cities have.

Also, one excuse I see a lot is, "There is much more to do in the city." but I wonder how often people Do those things. Is it worth paying 2-3x per month in rent to maybe go to some activity once a month? Take that savings and just get a nice hotel once a month, and still save money.