Oh no….is a red hurricane coming?
We still haven’t recovered from the red tsunamis in 2020 and 2022….say it ain’t so!

Republicans have already FAILED to raise the ceiling on time and are now playing chicken with the economy while also wrestling over who gets to drive the party…and not one has any idea of where you want to go yet or even how to drive (there’s absolutely no plan for what they want, just “spending cuts” which they think is SECRET code for “end social security and Medicare”)

Republicans printed 1/4 of every dollar circulating today under Trump out of thin air…actually worse, printed money as the economy was contracting as never seen before. Make more dollars without something of value to back them/you make each dollar worth less. Simple enough for even you to grasp….that’s called inflation.

Republicans totally failed at anything related to the pandemic, public health, economic, transportation, shortages, fighting against gouging, by every measure an “F-“.
Republicans pumped money in through their unregulated PPP loans and other unregulated easily defrauded programs they then defrauded by making up fake companies, taking millions, getting repayment amnesty, and buying Lamborghinis and mansions with the cash in many cases. MTG took huge sums she didn’t repay for one, then bemoaned student debt amnesty as a giveaway.

Rep(uglicans) ARE the fault of this mess as you so elegantly put it.

So apparently Trump’s final (secret) move in office was to erase the “red flags” on 2.7 million PPP loans that would have caused the recipients to be investigated, and most would have been forced to return the money. All loans over $2 million had red flags erased, apparently the smaller loans didn’t get the same treatment, the most common red flag was that the companies didn’t exist in February 2020. (They were created on paper to defraud the PPP loan process set up by Trump’s administration with no oversight intentionally to allow fraud.)

$190 BILLION worth of flagged >$2 million loans to millionaires he demanded not be investigated for obvious fraud and instead be totally forgiven.

Kinda puts a damper on the “we can’t afford student loan forgiveness” of loans in the tens of thousands to the needy when we can afford fraudulent millionaire loan forgiveness of loans in the millions to millionaires, and tax giveaways to them in the millions at the same time.

More Republican crime covered up by Trump. Another $190 BILLION handed to millionaire crooks by their public spokesman….after $2 TRILLION in tax breaks.

In case you missed it, Trump’s Proud Boys are pleading guilty to seditious conspiracy, admitting they were attempting a coup for Trump at his direction and with some direct assistance and communication directly from highest ranking members of his administration (Stone, Giuliani, secret service agents) that knew what they were doing ahead of time.
They stood back and stood by until Trump called them to help with his coup. That’s treason. All parties complicit in the conspiracy are guilty too…that includes Trump and his family.
The sentence for treason is death. America may soon inherit a number of deep in debt golf courses! (Unless some nut with high powered guns they shouldn’t have takes matters into their own hands)

You get a tank! YOU get a tank! YOU get a tank! EVERYBODY gets a tank!
Your move, Oprah. Russia is ahead on giveaway points right now.


*quality news…more please.

I got it via my Bethesda.Net Launcher's free copy from last year or so with its free giveaway. Not bad, but I prefer the third party enhancement mods. Hopefully, people will mod this one too. I do like the free addons since I never played them. Eww, that Quake 64 is so blurry.

Also, LGR's Clint played it on his old school CRT monitor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlZzcYbQ_ZI !

Today's new lie....the Trump campaign put out a snapchat add claiming to offer a giveaway of Trump swag and $10 cash for free, just pay 69¢ shipping cost that must be paid by credit card, but hidden in the tome of microscopic small print is the truth, you are signing up for the Trump4President2020 Club.” Members are automatically billed $142 every month, with no option for a refund." Hardly "free"....not just 69¢...Another Trump scam in a long long line of nothing but Trump scams.

This is your hero, @bobknight33...conning his own supporters out of their money again using the craziest of scam tactics....again. That's what he thinks of you, you're a rube who's money he can steal, because you aren't smart enough to see the scam.

Oh, well her name is a bit of a giveaway it's Esmée Kramer.

Doesn't walk like a puppy but also the shape of the head and muzzle size is a giveaway that it's not a border collie pup and probably a chihuahua or similar.

Doesn't look at all like a border collie pup to me.

Love it. Brings back memories of Dead Giveaway.

I would have thought the little foot prints in the dust would have been a giveaway, but hey, I guess the eyesight isn't what it used to be.

I don't trust Israel, not even a little bit....with good reason....and it's not my video.

Btw, you should look into what the word "literally" means, or learn to count, because there were literally 8 words in the first identification message, and it's just one of many. 8 words are all you need to hear them identify the ship.

Specifically jamming American military frequencies and international distress frequencies is a dead giveaway they knew who they were shooting at.....as if the recordings of the identification weren't enough.

Opening fire on lifeboats is another war crime.

Yeah, that doesn't sound like weed. No doubt, edibles can be powerful and I've definitely eaten some high doses that resulted in near inability to move & audio hallucinations/distortions. But, this sounds like he went through what they call ego-death, which is reliably found in moderate to high doses of psychedelics - "geometries from other Universes", in the void remembering that you had only dreamed that you were a human alongside extreme time dilation that feel infinite or like an eternity - are dead giveaways (pardon the pun). DMT is the best, of course. Get's one there in seconds and back in 10 minutes... instead of hours and hours....

It sounded like a provocation of the dowtrodden displaced natives and their allies every time to me.
It also sounded like the end of middle east peace process, which is the reason all previous presidents didn't follow through. I guess all that nonsense about Iran being months from a nuke was just that, nonsense, or they wouldn't consider this unless they want Israel to be nuked.

Edit: chances are, he won't follow through because his advisors will explain what a horrible idea it is, and what a giveaway of a major bargaining chip for absolutely nothing in return but trouble.
Nobody knew middle east peace was so complicated!

Ha! I often ask FizzBuzz in interviews if I have a hint that someone's blowing smoke. Often, they'll whiteboard a solution which is a giveaway that they've rehearsed this one (going straight to mod 15 instead of mucking around with 3 and 5 first), but that's no big deal. Where people usually utterly fail is when I ask them how they'd test it.

The vast majority of people end up saying that they'd run it and examine the output or something stupid; relatively few go straight to a unit test, and of those that do, even fewer immediately see that they have to refactor the simple solution to separate application from logic from presentation.

I do agree that unilateral disarmament is a difficult thing to achieve, but there are other arguments as to why it should be pursued. I am sure we agree on a lot of things on this subject, but let me at least put the other side out there:

1. America as the over achieving nation in the world has a duty to lead by example. How can the country with the largest nuclear arsenal expect other countries to start the process that we all signed up to? Hey France, why didn't you get rid of your 87 nukes? Well America, why haven't you touched that pile of 500? (making up numbers here to illustrate the point)

2. The US isn't worried about Best Korea nuking them because they would need a staging platform and a functional ballistic missile. They can be launched from subs, but NK isn't really your worry there. The most developed nations are the concern, and if you could get an agreement it could happen, with peacekeepers and mutually open inspections, and pressure on smaller countries to abide or be trade embargoed to stop them (which the west does/has done already). Unlikely as things are right now, i agree.

3. We have ageing equipment housing extremely dangerous explosives. They require a huge amount of maintenance and whatnot, costing billions. The UK has to replace their system soon to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. Imagine what kind of alternative modern anti-nuclear defence system we could develop using all that money and all our technology? That way we could be safe from nukes without using nukes and it would cost less in the long run.

Also if you claim your weapons as part of a defence, it's a bit of a giveaway that you're bullshitting if you then go off around the world antagonising other countries, knowing that they can't really fight back. So i think in fairness we should crack open that self-defence argument and see what percentage of it is referring to "a good offence".

Having said all that, binning all the US nukes overnight wouldn't be a great idea. The UK would be less of a target and safer without nukes imo, but the US would probably make the world a lot safer just by having less.

Let's be honest here, the amount of nukes we have is preposterous. No one could possibly have any reason to use that many, the potential for absolute worldwide devastation is far too high to need that many - you could potentially finish the world off in a nuclear winter, according to the average figures given, in about 100 'small' nukes. Not 100 each per country, but 100 total worldwide.

And remember, that doesn't mean you can use 90 and be safe. The figure 100 was enough to likely cause a global famine by causing temperature drops leading to crop failures. That doesn't account for extinction of animals and the devastation of the natural balance (which would lead to our eventual extinction) which can be wildly unpredictable. You could shoot 40 at a country, win the conflict, and cause the starvation of millions+ in your own (and other) countries for the next 20 odd years..... or worse.

@radx @enoch @eric3579

For one thing, give the executive or legislative power over the printing press in a crisis and they will not willingly give that power up and end up abusing it. For another, if you're simply printing money to spend then you depreciate and inflate your currency commensurately, at least in the long term. Relying heavily on this is the kind of thing that Venezuela does. There's a reason that governments instead take on their fiscal spending as debt. On that I would say, I've also become much more skeptical of fiscal stimulus in general but particularly in corrections or recessions. I'm okay with automatic stabilizers (unemployment benefits, the largely limitless kind with strings attached we have here in Australia) but not so much direct fiscal stimulus.

The fundamental issue to me is large, even extremely large fiscal spending will not affect business confidence levels of economic conditions. There is some fiscal multiplier effects (the multiple of the effect on national income over the spending injection by the government) but the worse economic conditions are, the lower this will be. Also, yes with say infrastructure spending, you're creating immediate jobs. Problem is these are in no way permanent jobs and simply pushes the can down the road on them finding new employment. Better to provide unemployment benefits and training to get them into a more permanent job faster.

Also large bouts of spending (again to use infrastructure as an example) tends to be hugely wasteful. Good projects require appraisals, consultation and careful planning. The notion of handfuls of 'shovel ready' projects is a political myth. You can instead span it out but then you don't get the mooted fiscal boost. In fact I would argue infrastructure spending is never appropriate as fiscal stimulus. It should be in a constant, planned process of improvement irrespective of business cycles or downturns. The US stimulus under Obama was largely long term spending projects like this as giveaways to the states. There is little evidence it eased the recovery or altered behaviour though. Many states simply enacted the same civic projects they would have otherwise and used this money instead of issuing debt like they would have otherwise - effectively they saved on interest.

So what are the alternatives then? The government here in Australia also heavily spent on roads, home subsidies and schools but notably also gave all income earners a cash deposit of AUD $300-950. The latter is probably the closest you can get to a pure fiscal stimulus - immediately cash to spend, injected not into banks than might save it but given particularly to low / medium income earners most likely to spend it. Again what we saw is that it hardly altered consumer / household behaviour. Many saved it, many spent it on large one off purchases (e.g. TVs, in which case most of that value was transferred overseas). So we gave a dollop of cash as stimulus to the global economy of which Australia is a drop in the ocean. Basically my attitude is, if you maintain good infrastructure, effective education systems, adequate but efficient regulation, reasonable tax rates, and importantly competitive markets, the best way to get through a crisis is to let the market stabilize by itself. Provide assistance and retraining to workers who lose their jobs by all means, but don't expect government spending to be some kind of savior.

I agree on the inflation aspect of your post. There were certainly no shortage of self-declared monetarists buying up gold in anticipation of high inflation, but as you say dollops of cash in the economy are meaningless if they are idle and the economy under capacity. The question now with unemployment in the US at 5.5% whether capacity is finally pushing LRAS levels. Probably not, participation rate is low and falling, and the unemployment rate is woefully underrepresenting forced part timers. Also as you mention the dip in oil will temper prices on the input cost side. The Fed certainly seems to think so and has started tightening rates but as so much commentary in the investing world is saying, this may turn out to be a mistake and they may end up having to reverse course.