does howard lutnick remind anybody else of hank scorpio?

i'm just saying.

the economic theory being developed by trump is actually sarcastically called "fully automated luxury communism" by cynical post-leftists trying to grapple with the real-world consequences of superproduction within a capitalist mode of production, which isn't how it was supposed to happen. the capitalists were supposed to insist on artificial scarcity and empower us via employment, which would be their downfall. oops.

i'm in favour of reshoring superproduction, but we're supposed to get a guaranteed income out of it, not be told to go starve in the ditch. the proletariat of the future is supposed to be like me - overeducated due to emancipation from labour, and able to focus on esoteric art and literature, instead.

see, this is where you have to bring in some concept of eugenics. like, actually. not dumb racism, but some way to better the human race. so that communism doesn't become idiocracy.

let the robots do the work. great. but we have to have distributive justice. maybe it's not quite as rigorously held to marx as some would like, but we need some way for the masses to take advantage of this rather than be bludgeoned by it.

i didn't think it would happen until it did.

i've slept in a hotel the last three nights. that's it. i'm evicted.

i talked to the new case management judge on friday and he seemed perplexed. he didn't like what he was learning about the case and seemed to want to undo it but there's no precedent for this. if the court in the end rules a mistake was made, as one clearly was, i am not going to get the apartment back. rather, i'm going to get a giant payout for damages, which are now substantive.

there is some tentative preliminary evidence that the gross freaks followed me here, but i need to be careful before i start accusing anybody of anything, in context. i don't have a lease here.

i've seen a few apartments over the last few days and will see a few more this week. i need to get in some where immediately.

i've also finally converted my agptek mp4 player (running android 8) into a wifi phone using voip. it's basically a cell phone without a sim card so i have no network access but i'm able to make voip calls over wifi, if i'm in coverage. chances are pretty high nowadays that you're going to be close enough to a bank or fast food restaurant at almost all times, but i actually bought it because i wanted to be able to do things like scan qr codes. i am going to, for the first time, find myself carrying a cell-like device, even if it's actually a mp4 player running voip over wifi and not actually a cell phone.

i've been busy and i'm going to remain busy but the first order of business when i get this lease signed is redesigning computer setups and network paths.

this is all the more frustrating because i was and am still right and the court has to this point been wrong. it will work itself out in the end, but i've already suffered an extreme injustice, and the only solution at this point is monetary. it's something to look forward to, but the situation right now is pretty awful.

i don't know right now, in the end, if i'd rather go through the bullshit for a bigger payout or if i would have preferred to avoid all of this and not get compensated for the subsequent hardship. if i do end up with 20-30K in total damages, that is going to buy me a house and that will solve this problem of housing once and for all. i'll certainly be better off, at the cost of 2-3 years of torment and hell. it sort of doesn't matter; there's no longer a choice. this can't be undone, all they can do is pay me for it.

the liberals are massively ahead in the polls, but dilbert has repeatedly refused to work them, anyways. this is legitimately not acceptable in canadian politics, but it sort of doesn't matter because the damage is so far gone. unfortunately, dilbert has actually run in the centre to centre left of the windsor mayoral field, which has tended to be pro-business. there hasn't been a good replacement option.

if people were naive, they shouldn't be, and any lingering confusion about the mayor's politics should no longer exist.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/dilkens-voices-robocall-for-poilievre-rally-raising-questions-over-political-neutrality/

i'm telling you - market canadian dairy as growth hormone free in the states.

i don't know why they don't.

(some) people will pay a premium for it.

the houthis are in the middle of a volcanic field.

if we could trigger the volcanic flow, we could literally rain hellfire on them.

that would feel good.

this isn't quite what i'm imagining.

these bombs are like giant icepicks that use gravity to cut through a structure before detonating.

i actually think we should be able to put a robot on the tip of the bomb that excavates through the structure, so that it's less a question of using the physics of mass to smash your way through in a collision and more like throwing a dart at a mountain that can burrow it's way through it when it gets there like a giant metallic groundhog before letting it rip mid mountain.

i wonder if you could actually trigger an inactive volcano using the same mechanism. that would be pretty brutal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_buster

empires are sometimes conquered, and sometimes collapse.

more often, the empires that are the most stable and last the longest are eventually overrun by illegal immigration and taken over by barbarians. trump is a dolt, but he's basically right about this - the barbarians are our greatest real threat.

the ongoing barbarian houthi pestilence may justify r&d spending on new weapons designed to direct payloads underground. these weapons could also be used against hezbollah and eventually against iran. i'm imagining something launched by ship that lands at pinpoint precision and burrows into the ground before it detonates remotely. this would be well within our engineering capabilities to get a prototype for almost immediately.

that's right.

these are our enemies. they are barbarians, and we will need to fight them forever. there is no end to this war, and we have to fight it continually, with resolve, or they will destroy us.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/middleeast/us-airstrikes-yemen-houthis-may-be-relishing-them-intl/index.html

you're not going to hear this critique from the soft-left.

this article is not left wing, it's boiler-plate neoliberalism, pushing the idea that developing markets get better with foreign investment and more property rights. yuck.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/06/trumps-tariffs-may-be-perilous-for-small-heavily-indebted-countries-in-global-south

if you are a member of the trump administration (and somebody is reading this), and you do care about eradicating child labour, you have an opportunity here. this is in alignment with the administration's goals. the reordering of global trade could very well occur with global standards on child labour, if it is guided that way. it is your responsibility and opportunity to get that done.

this just in: kathy lee gifford is organizing a major protest against trump's trade policy, with a million wive march planned to descend on the capital.

the 50% import tax on goods from vietnam and india might be frightening to people that base their profits on child labour, but there's an upside to that. these are not countries that even import raw materials to north america, their export economy is almost solely designed around the exploitation of child labour.

i would rather see punishing taxes levied on an economy that relies on child labour than free trade with them.

that's not what anybody in trump's administration is thinking, except maybe tulsi gabbard. sometimes you can see unintended upsides in the policies of opponents.

inflation aside, if the us dollar survives that, this might not land badly, after it explodes.

these tariffs are probably the biggest threat to the greenback since the nixon shock.

from what i can tell, trump isn't fundamentally altering anything in the relative trade balances. he put steep tariffs on almost all of east asia, and also put steep tariffs on europe. he put lower tariffs on canada, mexico and most of latin america. that would means that north and south america remain preferred trading partners, relatively speaking.

it's really just a giant, huge consumption tax hike.

and it should result in subsequent giant, huge inflationary effects, although it remains to be seen if it can remain localized in america or not. canada is inevitably going to get hit with the inflation.

there is some possibility of this going zimbabwe-like, but i don't think it's that high. the fear is if the inflation starts feeding back. if that happens, it gets out of control.

these consumption sites reduce the spread of aids and other communicable diseases from needle sharing, which is a net public health benefit and saves the taxpayer untold millions of dollars on unnecessary treatments. to some extent, they also speed the inevitable process of overdose up.

the focus should be spent on prevention. i can't imagine why anybody would choose to take any kind of opiate, given the media around it, but they do.

that said, i would also like to see a national investigation into the conditions in which people become addicted to opiates in hospitals. i've had to push my way out of emergency rooms out of fear of being injected. they are aggressive enough that it opens up a lot of questions about kickbacks. drug companies should not be permitted to pay doctors to prescribe anything, but there needs to be a strong prohibition and crackdown on doctors getting paid to prescribe opiates, and there needs to be much more stringent consent clauses worked into people getting injected with opiates when they're unconscious. apparently, well over half of opiate addicts first got injected when they were unconscious and wake up addicted.

life saving healthcare should not come attached to a life ending addiction.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-2025-day-15-campaign-promises-1.7503265

even if the steel and auto plants only idle temporarily in the long run, there's still a great opportunity to retrain hidden in the layoffs, which have already started.

have you recently been laid off due to the tariffs? get a construction hat. you're needed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/housing-affordability-construction-canada-1.7499260

it's quite the swing in the canadian election polls. why is mark carney polling so well?

canada needed to get past justin trudeau. the country was sick of him. polievre was the guy running, but he was clearly unelectable. a lot of people opined when he was running at 40% that it was a mirage and that would never happen. carney is the escape mechanism people needed.

however, he's also going through his honeymoon phase in the course of an election and that is dangerous. i don't quite understand the movement from the bloc and ndp to carney, other than that..

mark carney is not a politician, so he made the most obvious mistake a rookie politician can make in canada, which is running on hockey. he's not running on his record as a banker or on his ability to fight trump or on what he would do to fix the housing crisis, he's running on hockey. the rookie mistake is actually working.

for now.

it's going to blow up. so, the liberals better hope they do get a majority.

can we get a nice spot in siberia for the gazans?

listen, i actually support this. it's required. what else do you do with these barbarians that won't give up? they think they're going to win, eventually. you have to pack them up and move them out.

as marco rubio would say, and perhaps he ought to, let us dispel once and for all with the fiction that there will ever be a palestinian state in the levant.

the world needs to move on. i want a less insane way, but we've got what we've got.

gaza delenda est.

we all know this is true.

can we say it out loud?

donald trump is a stalinist.

somebody is going to stand up and say,

i think america should make the stuff and buy the stuff. it even kind of makes sense, because you buy the stuff with the money you make selling the stuff. we don't need to do one or the other.

it sounds reasonable. but, it is unfortunately very naive.

in practice, albeit not in theory, that is the system we labeled communism in the 20th century. that was "really existing communism" when it really existed. oversimplified. nobody's expecting that, but it does seem to be what's in the back of don the coyote's sneaky head, and i don't think he fully realizes it.

the president is not supposed to run the economy from the oval office. that's not what "commander in chief" means.

congress would be correct to pare back powers.

the reality is that the president isn't using his authority well, correctly or appropriately.

reciprocal tariffs aren't about reciprocity or even about tariffs, they're about trade deficits. trump is irritated by countries that sell americans more than america sells them, but that's how the system was designed - everything comes to the centre of the empire. trump fundamentally, foundationally doesn't get it, or is at least pretending not to.

if you want to evade the wrath, then, you should sell less items to the united states, and that's what the policy will result in if it suceeds, the united states being removed from the centre of global commerce. i suppose that would most likely return europe to the centre of the global economy, as china's middle class is still far too small to adopt that purpose. trump's attempt to punish europe will re-establish the pre-nixonian status quo. our neo-nixon is going to undo the old one.

this isn't so complicated, really. somebody needs to make the stuff and somebody needs to buy the stuff. for the last 50 years, since the nixon shock, america has bought the stuff and china has made the stuff. before that, america used to make the stuff, and europe bought the stuff (china was cut out). this was supposed to be the postwar order - europe buying the stuff america makes. it did work well for america, but nixon blew it up and there's a narrative in the investor class that americans had become lazy and entitled, which there is some truth to. there was a particular push back on white people, who won reforms in the union era, pushing for civil rights for black people to mirror those reforms; rather than help pull the blacks up, the bankers reacted by pushing the whites back down off the ladder to whence they came. progress was over. go back to the fields, okie; it's feudalism all over again.

we can pinpoint where this whole progress thing broke to a few months in 1971 and it's been falling apart into smaller pieces ever since.

does trump want to bring that back? i don't think his intent is to go back to 1970, but he seems to want to immediately undo nixon first and foremost, and, i mean, that's what american workers would indeed want. this being in the centre of the empire thing benefits the banks, not the workers. the workers want to make the stuff and sell it. 

what's unclear is whether this is a quixotic journey by an individual named donald trump to save the world economy or if the system is desiring this outcome, potentially as it gears up for a world war. if it has already been decided that there will be a war, america needs to reshore. this seems feeble and wrongheaded, but is it a function of incompetence or irrelevance?

we're not used to seeing america or americans act like this. they're supposed to know what they're doing, or convincingly bullshit it. anybody can see that trump has no clue and that nobody around trump has a clue, either. i don't think there's a precedent for this outside of the worst roman emperors.

if america seriously wants to make the stuff again and re-establish other countries - canada, europe south america, the midde east - as export markets rather than suppliers of raw goods and finished products, it is going to need to do more than this to get to that end point. massive government investment to rebuild industry would be a start. they will need to make some kind of deal with east asia to get wages up or get cut out again. if they had an excuse 50 years ago, they don't anymore.

if it is merely trying to create a revenue generating import tax to offset other revenue streams (like income taxes), that, however, might work quite well. after all, americans are reliant on imports.

what i'm saying is that i've trekked through endless skyscrapers for hours in vancouver and toronto and montreal, but detroit's not a concrete jungle like that.

you get over a few highways surrounding the core and it's just sprawls of residential houses for miles in every direction. there's no sea of concrete in detroit. it's actually relatively lush.

this didn't take long and there's more coming. they're building a giant battery plant on the edge of town that might never open.

this factory wasn't created by nafta; it opened in 1928. a lot of the history of the ford era, including the original home of the detroit red wings, was actually in windsor, not detroit.

detroit is a sprawling mess, but it's actually a pretty small city. so is windsor. in recent decades they've been pointed right across from each other.

i think they should convert the ambassador bridge into a pedestrian walkway. this isn't helping.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/this-is-just-as-devastating-as-a-military-attack-windsor-assembly-shutdown-tied-to-trump-tariffs-union-says/

besides steel and aluminum, you could look at nickel, zinc, aluminum, uranium and rare earth metal to hike export taxes on.

it would generate an inflationary revenue stream to offset the damages being done by trump while minimally altering supply chains.

i find heavy metal to be taxing.

however, rush records are not a proper target for export taxes into the united states.

this is what pierre polievre is trying to say when he talks about "biological clocks".

and while he seems to have assigned intellect to the parties in backwards order, he is correct in his thinking.

i don't care about this stupid planet and hope it crashes into the sun. i've got a few years to live and want to spend it having fun. i don't care about children and family and houses and wealth.

if i did, i would have waited to breed and would have bred selectively and with minimal offspring.

how do we react to these stupid import taxes the american president is putting on his own people?

i've been clear that we shouldn't tax our own people but should focus more on export taxes, instead. however, i'm really suggesting we wait it out, and it might not take too long. republicans have voters to face in a year and a half.

out of all of the taxes, the ones that make sense are the ones that are about protecting american industry that does or could exist, probably for national security reasons. that's why we have import taxes. that would actually arguably apply to both steel and aluminum, in the united states.

is it a problem that the americans import so much aluminum? it could become one. fair enough. but, these tactics are usually reserved for developed industries and not raw industries. either the united states has aluminum or it doesn't; if it does, it will find it where it needs it. 

like through recycling?

are they on the brink of starting a war? they're acting like it.

so, what industries does canada need to protect? fish. water. lumber. you put tariffs on that to protect your own.

however, i think that the insistence on holding to these metals tariff also requires a direct response in the form of an export tax on two specific metallic exports that america is reliant on canada for and cannot replace. it's become necessary.

the other thing is the auto tax. we had an auto pact going back to the 60s - this is before free trade. it kickstarted free trade. i think that if they're doing this, you mirror it, just to undo it. you want to relevel the playing field so that costs go up on both sides and not just entering the united states. you have to do that. and what else can you do?

is there some equivalent industry on the border that canada wants to protect?

let the senate pass the bill first, and see what the house does. export taxes are unilateral - easy to generate and remove.

i haven't heard such limp prose in eons.

ugh.

who is at mark carney's typewriter?

michael ignatieff?

an article like this relies on the tentative concept of an informed electorate.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/tax-protest-donald-trump-elon-musk-news.html

if trump has truly just talked the tea party into supporting a massive tax hike, which it seems he has, he deserves some twisted credit for that, even if he doesn't even understand it himself.

we've all seen weird twists and turns in american politics.

this is breathtaking.

ok, i'm awake and the headache is finally receding.

i didn't have time to deal with that right now. ugh.

i have been repeatedly drugged recently and it has at times been difficult to tell if i'm having a migraine or need to pass something through.

this is complete migraine, going on 23 hours. i've got these tylenol+caffeine tablets and they just knock me out anyways. 

i'll stick with the caffeine. i would never take any sort of opiate, including codeine, on purpose.

i don't think there's a headache scale, like the richter scale, but these are the worst of the worst, and they make me sometime feel like the guy from pi, but i don't take drugs when the headaches get bad, they don't even really work, i just sleep it off.

there's a bill to block the tariffs that looks likely to pass in the us senate.

there are ways to force it to the floor of the house:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/31/politics/luna-johnson-freedom-caucus-proxy-voting/index.html

i've been getting hemiplegic migraines for years and the one that hit this morning around 9:00 lasted almost 15 hours, making it one of the most brutal headaches i've ever had.

it's still lingering. 

well, it's april 2nd. 

if you're a poor american that was dumb enough to vote for donald trump, here's your reward: a massive consumption tax hike on imported goods.

yes, he's laughing at you. 

because you're stupid.

next step: once the import taxes are in place, they can pass giant tax cuts for elon musk.

this is correct. we want solidarity - solidarity helps us. competition is stupid and harmful and wasteful and should be against the law.

however, we also have to respond in a way that makes sense, and putting import taxes on canadians doesn't actually make any sense.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/hands-across-the-border-1.7497491

canada needs a three party system to keep the liberals somewhere close to the centre and stop them from veering off to the far right like the democrats, but singh's consistent policy failures, which include things like trying to force the federal government to adopt provincial responsibilities, abolishing carbon rebates, removing consumption taxes on unhealthy food and taking away tax credits for low income housing corporations, cannot be singularly assigned to him. the ndp have always been a weird party. they don't come from industrial era workers movements, but from a western canadian conservative christian uprising against the amoral godlessness of the liberal banking elite. the ndp is a conservative party - more conservative than the conservatives - and it always has been.

let the ndp die.

the new left should be the green party, as the greens are what the new left actually is. 

as carney is a conservative anyways, and polievre is obviously not one, it's increasingly irrelevant which party wins. the truth is that trudeau and harper were identical, policy wise, as reagan and clinton were in the united states. historians will talk about the mulroney-chretien-martin years, and then the harper-trudeau years. it doesn't matter anymore.

carney is winning because people prefer his personality. it's not about policy; the policies are indistinguishable. right now, people like the less flamboyant hair and the more tightly knotted tie of the liberal over the goofy fruitiness of the conservative. they think carney looks like he has a harder ass to fight off trump.

it's bullshit. nonsense.

the ndp offer nothing in response, but the same neo-liberal policies under a phony veneer of populism misbranded as vulgar socialism.

vote green, instead.

pro-tip: if you ever accidentally dump your entire pepper shaker on your eggs, don't just shrug it off and eat it anyways.

i slept all day and woke up with a fever and a migraine. my subsequent shit looked like it got basted in a turkey. 

i didn't even got covid at all (unless i got it in 2019). i haven't been this sick in years.

who benefits from washington putting tariffs on canadian oil?

not american consumers or producers.

the major beneficiary is the saudis.

who is directing ukraine-russia talks? the saudis,

who is fighting yemen? the saudis.

in fact, usually the first trip is to canada. trump broke that tradition in 2017.

saudi arabia is preferable to donald trump than canada and, if you're paying attention, has been playing a key role in trump's foreign policy decisions.

the reason is obvious: who has more money than elon musk?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-visit-saudi-arabia-first-overseas-trip/?intcid=CNR-02-0623