American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

GOOGLE AI on tariffs

Pass-through rate: The speed at which businesses pass on costs to consumers depends on whether they expect tariffs to be temporary or long-lasting.
Many firms initially absorb the higher costs, but as the year progressed and tariffs appeared more permanent, the pass-through rate to consumers increased.
One study found that importers and non-importers alike planned to pass through about half of their cost increases by August 2025, a jump from earlier in the year.
Affected goods: Price increases are not uniform across all products.
Heavily impacted: Apparel and leather products have been especially hard-hit, with short-run price increases projected to be between 28% and 40%. Other heavily impacted goods include furniture, autos and auto parts, and household appliances.
Less impacted: Other items, like books and certain electronic devices, have seen smaller price effects.

Absorbing costs: Through the first half of the year, U.S. businesses reportedly absorbed much of the escalating tariff costs to avoid immediate price shocks to consumers, though this compressed their profit margins.
Uneven impact on trade: Tariffs have led to volatile trade volumes throughout the year, with businesses importing more ahead of implementation and then experiencing a subsequent drop. In the long run, the Yale Budget Lab projects a persistent reduction in both real imports and exports.

[Brian Peacock]

GOOGLE AI on tariffs
...

viewtopic.php?p=1981416#p1981416

[Tero]

I have found it of some help. I asked it how one bought and sold land in the year 1000 in Europe. Or Even england.

Substitution, not outright sale: The main way land was transferred was through a process of substitution where a new tenant took over the original obligations, but the land remained under the same lord.
Legal changes: The Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290 was a key development that allowed for the transfer of land by substitution, though feudal obligations remained.

[pErvinalia]

But AI is regularly wrong at present.

[JimC]

Even if AI gives a correct answer 95% of the time, the fact of even a small number of unpredictable errors makes it hard to trust its output.

[Tero]

I avtually like Google AI giving some guess about historical times. A guess is better than reading a page by real historians with no conclusion.

I'd like to know, however, if a man claiming to cut drug prices 600% has a measurable IQ.

[Tero]

AI takes jobs. People left mowing and packaging and delivering.

rbreich
40m
Amazon announced plans to lay off 14,000 employees as it looks to invest more in AI.
Wall Street cheered the news, sending Amazon stock prices higher.
This will boost Amazon's CEO pay and bolster Jeff Bezos's net worth, which is now $250 billion.
The system is rigged.

[Svartalf]

makes me almost regret being customer with them... unfortunately, what I get from them, I have absolutely no idea how to get from any other source.

[L'Emmerdeur]

I enjoy Abby Zimet's rants on Common Dreams but I'm not sure whether I've ever posted some of her stuff here. On the '12 year olds' hypothesis/meme:

We know the awful, the stupid, the cruel goes on, but we’re heartened by the birth of “a new unified theory of American reality” to help explain the darkness. It’s called, “Everyone is twelve now.” Suddenly, we get it: the right’s puerile idiocy, pointless vengeful assaults on law and decency, poop-bombing and racism, staggeringly simplistic solutions to issues like, “Let’s arrest everyone” and “Why don’t we just blow them up?” At 12, they learned to slap nasty names on anything they didn’t like; now, they still do.

What one grateful patriot calls “the most important political thread of our time” came from one Patrick Cosmos, a musician and frequent Bluesky user who goes by @veryimportant.lawyer. All we know about him is that his moment of snarky political clarity swiftly spread across much of social media - an irony unto itself given that many attribute the current Infantilization of right-wing discourse, at least in part, to a scattershot Internet that gives an instant platform to the most vicious and pea-brained among us. Still, many argue the notion those in power never got past being 12-year-old, emotionally stunted losers deeply resonates in a grim cultural moment of conservative ascendance that feeds on ignorance, bullying, fear and lack of critical thinking.

Opening the door to this moment of unashamed intellectual regression was, of course, the orange cretin who rode down his fake golden escalator and into our nightmares by proclaiming the way to solve the complex, longtime, political and moral issue of illegal immigration was to build a big wall across the southern border of an entire country - a dumb, mean, juvenile, sadistic “solution” on a par with last week’s video abomination in which, ever more demented despite his glorious “person, woman, man, camera, TV” recitation, he acted out dropping a planeload of shit on millions of Americans who oppose him, because he’s a sociopathic 8-year-old, not yet 12, whose only response to any challenge is to sneer, “Oh yeah? I want to. Watch this.”

In an America where “the only two speeds are gun and burger,” his knee-jerk, self-serving response was appealing ...

[source]

[Tero]

CBS gave up on news.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/cbs-news-layo ... dllfJVYvqT
News apparently does not make money. You have to turn it into entertainment. Like Fox.

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-31/ ... /105944438

"We're fighting fire with fire," California Governor Gavin Newsom said last month at an online campaign event in support of Proposition 50, also being referred to as the Election Rigging Response Act.

"We're not fighting with one hand tied behind our back."

Newsom's choice of metaphor feels appropriate amid a red-hot debate about the state of American democracy, as he campaigns for voters to approve a set of gerrymandered maps: maps drawn with the goal of gaining an advantage.

In this case, the goal is to hand the Democrats more seats in congress.

It's an audacious move to ask voters to tilt the election battleground in your favour, but recent polls indicate the proposition will most likely pass, including a CBS/YouGov poll which found 62 per cent support.

And it'll pass with Democrats claiming the moral high ground, because this is a tit-for-tat move, designed to neutralise Republicans who did much the same thing in Texas earlier this year.

"If Californians don't pass Prop 50 on November 4th, Donald Trump will rig the 2026 election and steal control of Congress," the Yes campaign's official website declares.

A 'race to the bottom'

Maps are ordinarily redrawn every 10 years after the census, but in July, Republicans launched an extraordinary mid-cycle bid to change Texas' map, notionally handing themselves up to five extra seats.

It improves Republican chances of maintaining control of the House of Representatives after next year's mid-term elections.

There is plainly no way to view the Republican manoeuvres in Texas as anything other than the people in power manipulating the rules of the game for the purposes of entrenching and growing their power.

They're not even pretending otherwise, given that President Donald Trump told CNBC in August that "We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas … and we are entitled to five more seats."

"It's not usual to have re-districting happen in the middle of a decade," UCLA law professor Richard Hasen says. "It does happen occasionally, but this is 100 per cent driven by Donald Trump's attempt to try to fight against what many people see as inevitable, which is Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives.

"It really is a race to the bottom."

The maps have passed, although they're now facing a court challenge, and the saga has triggered what feels like a widespread gerrymandering arms race. Missouri and North Carolina have also changed their districts, and Trump has pressured other Republican-run states, while Democratic governors have indicated an intent to do the same.

This, by the way, is all perfectly legal. The country has always had a decentralised election system that hands significant power to set the rules of the contest to officials at the state and county level, who are typically partisan.

When the Supreme Court ruled on it in 2019, it explicitly permitted states to gerrymander their congressional districts for the purposes of advantaging one side.

And so, an electoral system that implicitly permits shenanigans is now coming up against a highly polarised political culture, and politicians with an increasing penchant for shenanigans.

It makes political sense for Democrats, confronted with what they see as a real threat that they'd be shut out of power, and an undermining of their democracy, to respond in this way.

Not fighting fire with fire would seem to be tantamount to giving up.

But fires can easily jump containment lines.

If everyone is brandishing flames, it seems inevitable that someone will get burnt.

"At the very least, it undermines people's confidence that the rules are fair," Hasen says. "Everybody's being accused of rigging the election or cheating … I mean, the language is very heated."

What damage will be done to American democracy if an uncontrolled inferno breaks out?

This turns democracy into a sick joke...

[pErvinalia]

America is not a democracy, as Seth liked to bleat.

[JimC]

The key point is that gerrymandering systematically destroys the concept of every voter having the same impact on elections, and that this is done cynically, with an avowed intent to gain partisan advantage. I don't understand why more Americans are not outraged by this...

[pErvinalia]

I think part of the problem is that 50% of yanks don't vote. They're not politically engaged enough to even notice.

[JimC]

If you don't vote you surrender your ability to have at least some impact on the political landscape...