The “breakthrough” being that in return for Trump scaling back the new US tariffs, China has agreed to scale back their new tariffs.

So America started a fight, realised they couldn’t win, and then started begging for a return to status quo. And they’re hailing this climb down as a breakthrough.

Do not read about screw worms if you value your sleep. Nasty little fuckers.

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And the sad irony is that if he actually asked the Dems to help him get this through Congress, they’d probably agree. But he’s such an unbelievably terrible deal maker that he can’t actually do that.

I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

the United States has a massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit, so the President declared a national emergency and imposed tariffs, and we’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us to work toward resolving that national emergency.”

This is, for the record, an admission that the tariffs were declared under false pretenses.

Who are definitely real people and not his sock puppet accounts.

Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.

For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.

And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.

Yeah, that’s a block for me too. Anyone that susceptible to easily disproven propaganda has nothing meaningful to contribute.

I think more people need to understand that the doctrine is called that because it is fucking ancient. The first known example of a habeus doctrine comes from the 12th century. It massively predates everything in the US Constitution. It is one of the most fundamental personal rights ever.

And that’s because without it, every other right is meaningless.

It doesn’t matter what you have or haven’t done. If your detention cannot be challenged, then the government no longer has to prove a crime. They just have to arrest you for whatever made up reason they like, and that’s it, you’re fucked.

And, this part is really important… It does not matter if they say it’s “Only for enemy combatants / evil gang members / pedophiles” or whatever, because the government can just accuse you of being one of those things. The fact that you’re not is irrelevant, because you don’t have the right to challenge their accusation.

This is why due process matters. This is why everyone gets due process, because the second you decide that there is any kind of person who doesn’t deserve due process, the government just has to accuse you of being that type of person, and then they can do whatever they want to you.

What made those jobs great for the middle class wasn’t the fact that they were blue collar manufacturing jobs, it was the fact that they were unionized.

Unions and high top tax brackets built the American middle middle class between the fourties and the eighties. Yes, offshoring allows companies to seek lower wages elsewhere, but the solution to that is not sweatshops at home. You need to start by building up strong labour rights and investing in education and infrastructure, which drive investment in job growth. Stop trying to regain all the jobs you lost and work and improving the jobs you have.

Yes, leftists have been warning about globalisation for decades, and they’re right, but lets not pretend that what Trump is doing is even in the same continent as a solution.

“Corrupt reasons” is actually giving him too much credit. He’s tearing up everything Biden did because Biden did it. He did the same thing with as much of Obama’s legislative agenda as he could.

It’s pure pettiness. He can’t allow his predecessors to have a legacy. His ego cannot afford it.

So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:

• Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition
• Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space
• Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS
• Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS
• Only War - You’re guardsmen, you do war stuff.

Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.

Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.

It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.

Yeah, “someone said it on Bluesky” isn’t exactly a great foundation for an article.

What little I know of MtA lore is nuts. Canonically, the Technomancers (who are basically the Illuminati) faked the moon landing to convince the world that the moon (actually Arcadia, realm of the Fae) is nothing but a dead rock in space. By doing so they leveraged the power of mass unconscious belief to distort reality to actually make Arcadia nothing but a dead rock in space.

Actually, it’s fairly likely that the UK is getting the better end of this deal.

First off, the UK is a net importer from the US already. So there’s no reason for Trump to even be chasing after them for a deal in the first place. This whole thing is supposed to be about wiping out the US’ trade deficits, but the US already runs a surplus with the UK. So why is this their first big “success”?

Second, the UK have been desparately trying to write new free trade agreements since 2016 and Brexit. They’ve been trying to hammer something out with the US for years, but neither side could agree on terms.

It’s very likely that what happened here is Trump needed a win, heard that the UK were eager to make a deal, and just told his underlings to get it done (this idiot can’t make it through a security briefing unless they break out the crayons, there’s no way he actually reads these deals), and with the sudden urgency from the White House the UK were able to get through some terms the US had previously resisted.

Of course, it’s possible the UK got ripped here as well. Like I said, they’re badly in need of new trade partners after they fucked their sweet deal with the EU. But the fact that they haven’t signed anything with the US previously, despite the urgency, strongly suggests that what they were being offered before wasn’t good enough.

East Coast is a good choice too, especially if OP is trying to get away from a hostile political environment. Alberta isn’t exactly much of a step up from the US right now.

Yes… The AI bubble. Which is definitely still a thing. Definitely.

• tugs nervously at collar *

This theory comes up every now and then, and they always refuse to answer what happens to your manpower when you shift to cheap, disposable weapons.

Because the answer, of course, is that those cheap, disposable weapons need cheap, disposable humans to operate them.

That’s what this is advocating for; human wave tactics.

This whole argument was litigated multiple times over, long before drones became a thing, and the expensive hardware approach keeps coming out on top. Tanks got taken out by anti-tank guns, so we developed better tanks and better tactics. Planes got taken out by missiles, so we developed better planes and better tactics. The same thing is already happening with drones.

Yeah, that episode felt weird and forced. It really didn’t seem to fit the overall flow of the season.