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Cake day: October 6th, 2024

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  • It got the ‘trendy buzzword treatment’. There was a time when people were using it pretty heavily to describe professionals with specific skillsets and expertise sent to foreign (usually emerging) markets where hiring locals might be spotty. There was a time when, if an expat asked a local where expats hung out, the locals would interpret it as them asking where the foreign professionals would hang out, and usually they’d all talk shop/share experiences, that kind of thing.

    There are of course multiple definitions but the corporate world started flinging it around like such. If you were chosen to be an expat you were basically ‘A team’ material - smart, reliable, trusted with a generous amount of autonomy, that kind of thing.

    But it conveyed some sort of prestige, like ‘entrepreneur’. Now lots of people use it loosely as a colloquialism to describe anyone from a dyed-in-the-wool immigrant to someone who took a 6 month sabbatical to have an extended vacation on a sunny beach







  • It’ll implode but there are much larger elephants in the room - geopolitical dumbassery and the suddenly transient nature of the CHIPS Act are two biggies.

    Third, high flying growth, blue sky darlings, they’re flaky. In a downturn growth is worth 0 fucking dollars, throw that shit in a dumpster and rotate into staples. People can push off a phone upgrade or new TV and cut down on subscriptions, but they’ll always need Pampers.

    The thing propping up AI and semis is an arms race between those high flying tech companies, so this whole thing is even more prone to imploding than tech itself, since a ton of revenue comes from tech. Sensitive sector supported by an already sensitive sector. House of cards with NVDA sitting right at the tippy top. Apple, Facebook, those kinds of companies, when they start trimming back it’s over.

    But, it’s one of those things that is anyone’s guess. When you think it’s not even possible for everything to still have steam one of the big guys like TSMC posts some really delightful earnings and it gets another second wind, for the 29th time.

    Definitely a house of cards tho, and suddenly a lot more precarious because suddenly nobody knows how policy will affect the industry or the market as a whole

    They say shipping is the bellwhether of the economy and there’s a lot of truth to that. I think semis are now the bellwhether of growth. Sit back and watch the change in the wind



  • I actually blocked most of those groups but one was some climate community on another instance. There was a post where someone asked what they could do personally to help prevent climate change, and it was full of political theory as a response.

    Someone said they actively boycott Starbucks because the CEO flies a jet in order to commute to Seattle to California, and if the government won’t do anything they felt like the least they can do is just commit to never giving them and their lobbyists a single penny ever again.

    And they were downvoted to like -20 and had a dozen people attacking them over shifting the blame from the corporations to the working class by framing it in such a way that the working class should have any responsibility for the actions of the corporation. It was like watching a bunch of picketers calling someone a scab.

    And I’m just reading it like “what the fuck guys, you’re sitting around discussing political strategies that have so far done absolutely nothing, they’re doing something, they have a point, the lobbyists make the laws, so defunding the lobbyists does make a lot of sense. He’s flying in a jet to work because people give him money, helllLLLOOOooo.”

    Someone even went so far as to argue that a lot of people need to go to Starbucks because they might need a quiet space to study or hang out, so I jumped in pointing out that most municipalities have a library at the minimum, and people were fine before coffee shops were everywhere, and I got downvoted and jumped on by half a dozen people for not understanding the plight of others.

    Homeless people need somewhere to go, so I’m an asshole for suggesting that other people could go to Starbucks less? Beats the hell out of me

    In some climate forum, for no reason other than to win a stupid internet argument over the responsibility of emissions, everyone began defending the necessity of Starbucks of all things. Seriously. And at the same time, consumers shouldn’t have to endure hardships for the climate because they should instead focus on affecting policy, in order for places like Starbucks to change, because they’re fucking horrible. In my mind I was just like “well are corporations good or bad, or at the moment are they just convenient as both in order to use that person as a punching bag?” but noped right out.

    It was basically a rat’s nest of tangled up incongruent statements that all led back to ‘fuck that person for saying they make a very small effort to do something towards a corporation as opposed to attempting to reshape politics’

    So yeah, shit like that.

    Maybe a simple “while I disagree with A due to B, it does have some merit because of C. But in my opinion I think D is more effective, and if you’d like to learn more about D, here are some resources! :)”


  • A lot of communities on Lemmy have a ‘scene kid’ subculture and they will just harass people right off the platform for not being true enough to the cause, despite being for the cause.

    You got a bunch of raindrops. They want to become a hurricane. They simply need a warm breeze but shit blows sideways instead. The corners of Lemmy where movements could be happening are basically mosh pits

    I’m not trying to argue with you or correct you or anything, just pointing out why this is bad, how it shouldn’t be as it is, but it’s on deaf ears to the people I’m lamenting about. And you’re correct, a 2nd Reddit would suck, but Lemmy could be better if those people were being better.

    If there’s anything anyone mad about anything in the world should know, by know, don’t attack people on the same team, welcome them in






  • It’s baked into the US Constitution and the framers intentionally made it difficult to ratify amendments to prevent it from being changed frequently on whims (the Constitution should ideally be able to weather any change in the breeze). He could but he’d need 2/3rds of both House and Senate to vote in favor in order to proceed, so he’d need those to be in session to vote, and then ratification is even messier, I think 2/3 or 3/4 of state legislatures need to vote in favor of ratification. Bunch of hurdles that require not only getting all these groups in a room, but also to have well over a majority vote in favor.

    And we all know Marlie Tator Greene would be screaming the whole damn time, so snowball’s chance in hell basically



  • I’m hoping. Last trade war, Trump basically rolled out of bed one morning and decided to try it on China as some temporary transient thing in order to convey that the US has a lot of leverage (and it blew up in our faces), which is an entirely different beast than unilateral tariffs as part of fiscal policy. I have no clue how much it’d cost to just subsidize everything in perpetuity but I hope it isn’t some ridiculous sum.

    He’ll probably do something like allowing us to sell semiconductors to foreign nations in exchange for dropping tariffs on agricultural exports which is also really fucking boneheaded. The art of the deal, giving away the only shit that has lots of value for us. China outpacing the US in tech is something Europe wouldn’t want, but if we cut ties with Europe they’d probably warm up to China and we’d become a really big insular nation that can’t even sustain its economy as is


  • We’re already net exporter of petroleum but they’re intending to carve up our parks and stuff, even though we won’t be able to sell it for more than the cost of producing it. Everyone will slam us with tariffs and go to other countries for their fix, and it’ll be cheaper than bottled water for us.

    The idiots who don’t understand what a pronoun is and are terrified of their kids learning about them in English class will have cheap gas, but their kids will endure a literal hell for it.

    And they’ll think Trump’s doing a good job for all of it, blame some totally unrelated shit for our interest rate being at 25%


  • Tariffs will not only erase the middle class but also erase our topsoil like it’s 1924 all over again if farmers aren’t subsidized and everything is left to go fallow. In terms of dollars we’re pretty even in terms of agricultural imports and exports, but in terms of acreage… We push a shitload of soy, corn, and wheat. We’re more than a little fucked in lots of ways if we’re hit with retaliatory tariffs, but the biggest one is if farmers don’t have any reason to plant crops and don’t have any money to do it, we’re doomed for dustbowl days.

    Don’t even get me started on water, fluoride is one thing but if they start removing a lot of other stuff like phosphate and permanganate the entire country’s municipal water supply will be as bad as Flint MI.

    I’m hoping Trump doesn’t pull off 95% of the stuff he talked about due to unbridled incompetence because if he still manages to pull off 80% of it we’re gonna be fucked