• @[email protected]
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    589 hours ago

    Maybe it’s because I took economics as far back as high school, but even just from reading high school history books I knew what a Tariff was. How the FUCK did they not know that?

    I am also willing to bet that they will eventually blame the democrats for breaking the system, as they always do.

    • TooManyFoods
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      33 hours ago

      Maybe thr PA education system didn’t include things like the great depression

    • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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      6 hours ago

      One thing that fascinates me is that Trump’s definition of tariffs seems more like the definition of kickbacks.

      As he was (is?) a landlord, he may also think of it as seeking rent, like how malls get rent from the stores inside.

      • LustyArgonianMana
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        75 hours ago

        As a foreign asset, I think Trump is just actively performing a proxy war to drain the US of money, power, and resources for Russia. If you think he’s going to be doing anything else - lol.

        • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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          25 hours ago

          It can be both. Lying is more convincing when it’s felt as truth by the liar.

        • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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          2 hours ago

          Extracting rent can be seen as private taxation. He’s not a “career politician”, so I’m trying to understand how he’d see it from the private realm.

          An entry fee, a toll, a tax, a rent - whatever. In the end, the cost will be added to the products going in. It’s not a usual tariff, but the outcome is the same. Maybe he thinks that this trickery helps avoid problems with “free trade” conventions.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 hours ago

      There’s a fair portion of people 21+ that have difficulty playing blackjack because they can’t add to 21. Last night I was asked by a grown man what 9+1+3 is.

      You’d be surprised how incompetent some people are.

      • @dejected_warp_core
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        5 hours ago

        Holy shit. I never put this together.

        Last time I was at a casino I kept asking myself: who honestly thinks any of this is a good idea, or thinks that any of these are “games” in the conventional sense? Now I know.

        Edit: I have also been confronted with people that simply cannot do addition, period. It’s wild.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 hours ago

          Funny you should mention a casino. Remember when Donald Trump bankrupted multiple casinos? That is actually quite impressive given how often casinos attract people even during recessions as they get stressed and desperate.

        • @[email protected]
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          4 hours ago

          The quickest and easiest way to win at a casino is not to buy in, don’t play. You’ve got the right idea!

      • @[email protected]
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        54 hours ago

        Even if you’re competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who’s unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I’ve been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you’d use in daily life is a different “muscle” to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)

        I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling if I didn’t have a good foundation to be starting from

        • @[email protected]
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          34 hours ago

          You aren’t alone. Historically before calculators were common, engineers and mathematicians would actually have books with basic arithmetic answers already done, or they would hire people (usually women) called ‘computers’ (no joke, that’s what the term was used for before computers as we know it were invented) to do the basic calculations for mathematicians so they can focus on the more complicated stuff.

          So even a highly talented mathematician from the 1910s and 1920s would still struggle as you do.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 hour ago

            This is only tangentially related, but I’m reminded of a thing from Plato where he was complaining that communicating through writing was a bad way of doing philosophy. His concerns weren’t just around communicating ideas between people; he was even opposed to writing as an introspective tool to help a person think through their ideas, or make notes to come back to.

            "And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

            • Plato, “Phaedrus” ^([citation needed])

            It’s interesting because I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong about the skill atrophy angle of it. It’s just a question of to what extent we need those memory skills in the modern era.

      • @[email protected]
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        177 hours ago

        I worked in customer service for 7 years. I am aware… so very aware…

        To give you an idea, when I worked for Verizon mobile, it was a few times a week that I came across a client who did not know how to hang up their cellphone calls. No joke. It took such a while to get them off the hook it wasn’t funny. And if you ask me why I wouldn’t hang up on them, it was because Verizon had a strict no hang-up policy. You were not allowed to hang up on a client no matter what. It was grounds for immediate termination.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 hours ago

        Math anxiety is real tbf, I can add that up real fast without the pressure of someone looking at me waiting for me to solve it, but the second another person is watching I can’t even think about the math I just obsess about how I should be solving it faster and how they now think I’m dumb because instead of doing the math I’m thinking about this bullshit and it’s taken 10 whole seconds which is a lot longer than it sounds…