Oh, to be clear, I don’t think the US has been dethroned on the world stage in terms of being the largest single elephant in the room. It’s just that the weight between the US elephant and all the other elephants (combined) has evened out quite a lot.
These tariffs might well do a lot to swing that even further.
They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.
It’s possible…someday…maybe…
Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.
He failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans
The only thing harder to do is to fail at selling sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 recession
which he also did
Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.
Let’s just say this happens a lot in my house.
I need to get on that, I guess.
125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.
Oh, absolutely. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.”
An app for a toilet is a stupid idea, full stop.
They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.
Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.
I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.
I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).
In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
more sanitary
Foot pedal flush really needs to become a thing.
I’ve been saying this for ages. Even as someone who’s more-or-less against the current implementation of AI, I think people who truly believe in AI should be fighting the hardest against bad uses of it. It gives AI a worse black eye every time something like this happens.
I’m pretty sure the science says it’s more like 20-30. I know personally, if I try to work more than about 40-ish hours in a week, the time comes out of the following week without me even trying. A task that took two hours in a 45-hour “crunch” week will end up taking three when I don’t have to crunch. And if I keep up the crunch for too long, I start making a lot of mistakes.
I’m mostly just frustrated that the best option has now become merely the lesser evil.
I’m also an American. And I am frankly livid about the tariffs.