Last updated 2021-10-11 09:35:18

[mr_squiddle]

Well, I'll fix that. Sorta. Kinda.

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[mr_squiddle]

Seen on the Media Matters For Asterisk feed: "A Project 2025 contributor is pushing tariff policies that would reignite inflation."

Tariffs restore, perhaps incompletely, the price points that would apply to goods if they were made domestically. The extra money, however, goes not to domestic workers, who might spend it and thereby notionally encourage prices to rise, but to the federal government, which removes it from the money supply. That's DEflationary, not inflationary.

[mr_squiddle]

Apropos of nothing, it seems that the Texas winter blackouts were basically engineered for profit. The right-wing blogger I hereby codename Chris Cat-Bit blamed them on liberalism, specifically something something fossil fuels, but has now hidden those posts. He hides a lot of his posts after a while, and has admitted to doing so, even though the only reason to do it is, rather obviously, to avoid being called out on being wrong.
Chris, incidentally, bailed from his income-tax-free state because of climate change that isn't happening, and the insurance premium rises that are due, not to climate change as the companies involved seem to think, but corruption (for profit, i.e. capitalism); this comes to mind because I just read something to the effect that the income-tax-free state he left the first one for has just legalized the exact same type of corruption explicitly.

[mr_squiddle]

Reproduction rates are falling in developed countries. Why? It's not because sensible people look at a dark future and say No; the kind of people who do that bred themselves out of the genome long ago. Nature throws babies at the hostile future in the hopes that some will survive: most of those baby turtles swimming out to sea will be eaten or otherwise lost to hostile conditions; the Bachs had 20 children and only half survived their parents; the number of Bach descendants alive today is estimated as between zero and eight. But when conditions become so good that the babies become their own competition, Nature says, nah. (Cf the famous study that built the ideal environment for rats.)