That’s why I’ll never smoke crack.

Transcended the rectum, right into the colon.

Yeah, I need to remember if it was ginko or something else. I’m not the greatest rememberer, so I’ll go back and check the recording. Perhaps not natural meant not native, but I recall being surprised at the description. We shall see, always interesting.

Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.

I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.

I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.

And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.

Did the same for our cat, minus the meal, because she couldn’t eat. She hated trips to the vet, and it was honestly easier on both of us not having to go somewhere, and getting to be at home. Will do it again for the next cat, unless he just disappears one day.

I love two towns over from Manville, which was the asbestos capital of America, and I can unequivocally say those morons would vote to bring asbestos back if they could.

I think that definitely sounds reasonable, and I think, if there’s any hope for these tariffs to actually meet their stated purpose, the government of the US would need to just say, if working conditions don’t meet the same standards, there will be additional tariffs. I think that’s exactly where tariffs ought to be applied, when some country takes advantage of, essentially, human rights. We don’t have the right to stop them, but we do have the right to tax their products for it, to the point it’s not worth it.

Obviously, that’s not how things will go.

That last part for sure resonates. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but our prices have been subsidized by substandard working conditions in China, there is no way around it. And all because large corporations wanted to make more money. And we, as consumers, shouted a resounded “hell yeah” to those Chinese suicides at Foxcon, because we wanted cheaper components and cheaper phones.

And so I basically don’t know how I feel about anything. I try to be more cognizant about what I buy, where it’s from, how it’s made, but the speed and ease, and basically not having to think, sometimes trumps those thoughts.

The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn’t meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we’ve been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it’s a comeuppance.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what’s going on.

Decade old specs for decade in the future price.

I have not looked beyond the front page of the link you shared here, and I don’t mean my criticism to be more than tongue in cheek, but oh boy, $2k for that is… Something.

That’s great. I’m glad and I would love for it to be the case here. Legalization can, at the very least, open up the doors to the glories of capitalism as far as industries to help people with drug addiction, and presumably we’d get the benefits of good clean drugs and all that.

None of that has to do with smuggling fentanyl into a foreign country and your (deserved) deportation afterwards. Also has nothing to do with an administration who thinks it’s funny to post an AI generated image satirizing it. Both of those things are no-nos, in my uneducated opinion.

I’m all for drug legalization. It’s not legal, and trying to somehow justify someone coming to America to traffic in fentanyl, which is a straight up killer, is incredibly disingenuous. And Oregon decriminalized drugs and had to walk it back because it became a problem.

Like I said, I’m in favor of it, but that’s not what we are dealing with. Someone who crosses a border to sell a deadly drug isn’t out here to help people. And if some American rolls into Portugal and starts selling fentanyl, I can assure you it ends up in that person getting removed from Portugal.

Yeah lemme go to my local fentanyl shop. Because she trafficked fentanyl.

Yeah, my mom grew up in a house with her parents and a grandparent of two. And her cousin. That was the 60s and 70s. Guess we’re bringing it back!

I upvoted you on Lemmy for being on topic, but I downvoted you in my heart.

They like pineapple on pizza.

Nailed it on the head. I think also that you need to include that Canada’s relationship vis-a-vis trade with China will be affected by tariffs the US is placing on Canada, and same with Mexico. I think much of everything is from the viewpoint that China is a bigger problem than Russia at the moment. China is also recovering from some economic turmoil, and one way to do so includes expanding their reach, and so the intent is to limit China in other areas.

Makes life more exciting.

Ha, I should’ve mentioned that you definitely won’t. It seems to paint this damned if we do damned if we don’t picture. But it at least paints a picture, versus what can at times feel like this great big unknown. It may also shed some light on some of the motivations for what’s happening. I dunno.