mtutiger

He's come a long way from the 'Holler, that one lol

The byproduct of all of this is that he's made us all cynical. These guys just all suck, they're all corrupt, there's no truth so might as well just put on my foam finger and root for my guy. It's pure unadultered nihilism. I remember saying something to this effect to Melody (on the last iteration of the board), but all the cynicism and all the defenses that hinge on saying "they're all like that" is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you expect nothing from your government, nothing is all you are ever going to get. I don't know what to do about that.... I truly believe that most Americans, on an individual level, are better than our current government. Not enough, but a majority anyway. And while I understand all the political science reasons for why he won in 2024, he's governing how he campaigned, and anyone who was really listening to the campaign should have ****ing known better.

A real test for the Ds here.... make him go ahead with it.

In a more sane world, he'd be 25th'd out of there... just seems like he's decomposing in real time

The thing is that, politically, so much of how people view the economy runs off of vibes anyway... and like Biden before him (who never could outrun 9% inflation in 2022 despite many good jobs reports), his vibes are in the toilet. Also similar to COVID as well.... people built an impression of him, and he never did outrun it (even with Operation Warp Speed and some other successes).

There's, very correctly, a ton of concern coming out of this about Trump cooking and / or juking the numbers to make things look good for his political concerns (I'll leave those for the other thread), but the reality is that businesses need reliable data in order to make decisions that are in their strategic/fiduciary best interests. Trump, by doing this, is basically undermining the basis of the data going forward. Just adds yet another level of uncertainty to an environment that he's already injected a bunch of uncertainty into.

Sounds about right.... it's been over 10 years since I've been in San Diego, but it's about as safe and desirable a major city as there is in this country.

I will hand it to Ohio in that the Ohio Turnpike service plazas are lightyears better than the new ones they built on the Indiana Toll Road...

The Don apparently is taking over labor statistics now, so I'm sure the cooking will get worse.

I would be surprised if Louisville didn't have a higher murder rate than San Diego....

It was dumb then, and this is dumb now. Personally I'd prefer a society where stupid culture war **** was less pervasive and didn't matter more than material consequences as it pertains to society, but here we are. And while you can blame the influencers, the media that blows the stuff out of proportion and the consumers of said media who eat it up bear as much or more responsibility for why it keeps happening.

For what it's worth, the only reason I've heard about the outrage over the ad is because of people complaining about the outrage over the ad. I don't claim to be the most up-to-date person on pop culture, but I get the sense that this is a case of a small non-representative amount of outrage being blown up into something bigger by people on the right and the Nate Silver / Matt Yglesias types who act like Twitter is real life. So having said all of that, what exactly am I supposed to do about it? What steps can I, person who isn't raging over Sydney Sweeney and hadn't heard about said controversy until RW influencers lost their **** about it, supposed to do to ensure other people don't react to said things?

1.) Those are massive revisions downard 2.) No wonder Americans have bad vibes about the economy

Certainly cannot understand why we are supposed to just accept Paramount's framing given the obvious conflict of interest at hand

"It's Liberation Day... Again..."

As always, his actions fail the basic "how is he making your life any better" test.

Really they got two solid BP arms once Sewald gets healthy... I wish they would have gotten a bat, but I think they did fine. Could have been better, but they did fine with the needs they had

There are legitimate questions around land use, I know we've had cases where villages near where we live have intervened in areas which are agricultural in nature but could be developed for future subdivisions and housing for instance. But at the same time, we have seen instances of people complaining when these developments are happening on land that it isn't conducive to farming as well, and that just strikes me as people signaling their politics more than any actual legitimate complaints. Good example is that we had an announcement in the village I live in about a month ago of a solar farm development on a swampy piece of land with land that has seen farm activity in the past but isn't necessarily the most ideal for it (zoned Industrial, adjacent to the Illinois River/I&M Canal). And not only is the company coming in to develop the solar farm, they are also funding the reconstruction of a road that had been abandoned for 15 years that would provide a better connection for some residents to access the town adjacent (Morris, IL) and vice versa. Despite the obvious benefits of this development both in terms of tax revenue, energy generation and reconstruction of a village/county road connection being paid for by the development, the usual people on Facebook still whined and cried about it.

Worth noting that listening to the radio this morning, I heard another car dealership hawking "tariff free" deals.... months after Liberation Day This is the kinda stuff that I'm talking about....

Conservatives will argue (not totally incorrectly) that mainstream media leans left and is adversarial toward Trump, but it's pretty clear there is a Sam and Ralph dynamic to it. (ie. The old Looney Tunes cartoon where they'd punch in, go at each other, and clock out at the end of the episode) At the end of the day, Trump drives ratings and makes the media a lot of money... Conventional politicians don't. Hard to ignore when evaluating how the media covers him

Case in point: the trade deals he's cut being framed as "wins" despite the end result of you and I having to pay more for goods. The thing dogging Trump is that "Liberation Day" cemented the idea with the public that tariffs are bad for consumers and make things more expensive, and given that tariffs are a big part of his political identity, as well as his subsequent actions, the public largely has negative vibes toward him on the issues. Not hard to figure out. The media or column inches or what have you matter less than his own actions. Which have even chaotic and incoherent from the jump on trade

I understand his numbers, but given that he's already wildly unpopular on the issue of tariffs, I don't know that I agree with the premise that more columns about tariffs is going to further drive down his approval ratings... it stands to reason that you have to wedge him on other issues. Whether that's Epstein, immigration, detention camps, etc. Or perhaps weave a broader narrative from all of these issues into one cohesive message. Either way, even if it isn't top of mind for most Americans, I don't think it's helpful to Trump... and it plays into some broader narratives that are exemplified by things like tariffs, such as that he's all about the billionaires and not about the average American.

Unironically yes