Reminds me that someone posted a 1950s "the future of travel" video, and it was all retro futuristic cars doing 200 mph on almost totally empty highways.

One major issue for Sledder here is that since Tesla started Cybertruck deliveries, the starting price for his vehicle has significantly fallen...That further lowers the starting price to $70,500.

My man found out the hard way about depreciation. All my life people have said never to buy a new car because it loses 20% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot. If you really want to drive new cars the best way to do it is lease and change every couple of years (this is still not financially sound, just better than buying new).

That is an effect, it also increases the relative value of debts which isn't great, but the negative impacts of those is less than the potential positive impact of reducing the relative cost of living. Really what you've got to focus on if you're a government trying to manage deflation is a) capital flight and b) wage reduction, because the biggest negatives are seen if investment gets pulled out of the economy and the positives aren't realized if people's wages don't stay the same.

the rate of price growth has slowed substantially since hitting a high in 2022.

If the American economy is doing so good, how did Trump manage a clean sweep?

Right in that quote, the best thing they can say about our economy is not that it's getting better, but that it's not getting worse as quickly as it was two years ago.

Socialists of all types have been saying this for ages and explaining all the ways you could do it without succumbing to a deflationary spiral, but I'm sure libs will take this as evidence that Xi doesn't understand econ 101 and that he's ruining China.

a linux distro for extreme beginners in tech and elderly people

Android on a tablet.

They call that the Peter Principle, and there's at least one Ig Nobel Prize winning study which found that it's better to randomly promote people rather than promote based on job performance.

This is pretty clearly interference from the judge. The guy who ran the bankruptcy auction has a ton of experience with this stuff and there is no reason to think he wasn't impartial or that he didn't get the best price for everything. Jones' lawyers are just kicking the can down the road and delaying for as long as they can.

The traditional conception is that ghosts aren't really sentient creatures, but a phenomenon that souls can get stuck in instead of going to the afterlife. There's symbolism there - a ghost is an echo of a person, much like memories of them or the effects they had on the world. There's also a bit of Christian moralizing - a "good" person doesn't stick around because they are eager to join God in heaven, while a "bad" person clings to their earthly life and possessions even if they are only capably of doing so in a greatly diminished state.

The modern conception of a ghost where it's a fully realized person who can just kinda go through walls is an anthropomorphized and secular version of the ghosts that were invented by the Victorians.

THE INK ISN'T EVEN DRY

wtf is bad about anti-Soviet foreign policy

The Soviets wanted deescalation after WW2, and supported self determination for liberated countries including Korea, Vietnam, Greece and Italy. Whatever you think of communism, the American policy of "containment" is directly and indisputably responsible for the suppression of democracy in dozens of countries and wars which killed tens of millions of people all because some of those people would have elected communist and socialist leaders we didn't like.

Andrew Jackson and it's not even close. Not to downplay the horrible crimes committed by many of our other presidents but I don't think anything rises to the level of the Trail of Tears.

Remove Jackson from the running and it's a more interesting conversation, however thinking about it reveals just how interconnected all of this stuff is. While the current genocide is occurring under Biden, we can't forget that the conditions that lead to Oct 7 were created under Trump. For that matter so were the conditions that lead to the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

I think the worst in my lifetime by a mile is Dubya, but while his wars were massive and consequential we can't forget that George Senior also killed scores of people in Iraq, and Clinton carried out the sanctions regime that killed scores more. Clinton was also the one who broke Labor's influence within the Democratic Party - but it was Obama who was swept into power on the promise of a working class revolution only to smother it in its crib.

But yeah my top two are Jackson and Dubya but beyond that I'm not sure there are a lot of crimes in the history of America's presidency.