You could go birdwatching or do some gardening or pick up litter or go for a walk or just sit in a chair somewhere nice, but nope, you decided to huff diesel fumes and tire particulates while unable to hear yourself think because you believe we aren't genociding hard enough or something. Bring back the rain and the darkness, fair weather is wasted on the US.

In what I'm sure is a huge shock to everyone here, no, you can't avoid ingesting microplastics through the power of personal responsibility and not microwaving your soup in a Tupperware container.

Now being able to correctly pray to the God in Silicon is just part of the standard job description, or you can build your own digital Ourobouros by using "AI" to design your prompts for you.

It's all just sound and fury signifying nothing's stock continues to rise

Some US-based companies have long been flirting with the possibility of extracting metallic nodules from the deep sea in order to fill the gap in rare earths. The nodules form when metals precipitate out of cold ocean water and have high-purity concentrations of valuable minerals. They grow extremely slowly, at an estimated rate of a few millimeters every million years. Their role in ocean ecology is poorly understood, but they're thought to provide habitats for the animals that live there, playing an indirect role in carbon sequestration in marine sediment.

Up until now, the fact that they're two to four miles below the surface and in international waters has kept them safe, but Trump is now rumored to be drafting an executive order to encourage their extraction and stockpiling.

There is no environmentally friendly way to extract the nodules; it's enormously destructive. The nodules have been forming pretty much since the dawn of multicelleular life. It would take so long for them to form again that it might as well be never. The fact that these minerals would form a stockpile so the US can continue to build weapons when it inevitably starts a war to enrich a handful of decaying industrialists is just the shit cherry on top.

I just posted the below as a comment but I figured I'd start a thread, too, because I'm curious and I feel like a week of obsessive news reading hasn't really shed any clarity on anything.

Now that China has refused to back down from Trump's escalation, I'm wondering how Trump is going to wiggle out of this one. He can announce a 90 day pause with some lie about how China begged him to come to the table to save face domestically, but that maneuver might not actually bring China to negotiations. China seems to be in "never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake" mode and I don't see them responding to something like a temporary pause.

The pro tariff crowd seems to be thinking that China will go into a recession before the US does, so the US will win the game of chicken, but China probably has more options for responding to a recession, especially given the fact that the government isn't a bunch of idiotic, bumbling aristocrats and the flight from the US bond market has continued. No one is going to want to lend us the money it'll take to weather a serious downturn given the fact that we're run by crazy people.

So, assuming Trump is made to see the warning lights again, what does he ask for? He has jiu-jitsu'd himself into a no-win position because reshoring all of the manufacturing that left four decades ago is a nonstarter. I guess he could demand that China agrees to import a certain amount of US goods to lower the trade deficit, but they made that offer last time and then immediately ignored it because why wouldn't they? It's unenforceable because any retaliatory action the US could take brings us right back here. So what is a non-idiotic offer to China to get talks started? What will their opening demands be?

Talk about selective − and revealing − outrage.

But where was the same moral fury five years ago, when tens of millions of Americans were forced out of work during the COVID-19 pandemic? Those ordinary Americans were denied the same sympathy and support that the left has bestowed on laid-off government workers.

I was serving as a Wisconsin state senator when the pandemic hit in March 2020, and from the start, I was shocked by the utter lack of concern that liberal leaders showed to everyday Americans. If only those Americans had worked for the federal government. Then, perhaps, the left would have taken their side. Democrats defend government inefficiency

The moment Trump began the layoffs, Democrats sprang to bureaucrats’ defense. They told us that slimming down bloated agencies is unconstitutional.

The left also claims that Trump is slashing jobs that America and the world can’t do without.

And they've doubled down on their insulting attitude toward regular people.

"TeslaTakedown" protests against Elon Musk at Tesla showrooms have been on the rise since Musk started the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Where’s the concern for the people who depend on Tesla for their paychecks? They’re ignored by liberal politicians, who are far more concerned with bureaucrats who are dependent on taxpayers.

In "Animal Farm," George Orwell wrote that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Democrats and the news media look at Americans in the same way. They talk a big game about protecting the working class, but they choose to protect federal workers who on average are paid much higher and receive much better benefits than most other Americans.

You’ll excuse me if I, like most people, don’t share the left’s outrage that the country’s longtime overlords are finally the ones losing their jobs.