They were required by law to release the report in 2022. The report, for some reason, was not released until this year.

"Did they try?"

Perhaps they were inept. Perhaps they forgot. Perhaps the person who was supposed to do it was a Trumpist who refused to get the shot and then died of Covid.

"Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?"

No, I have not. Perhaps those other reports were supposed to have been released but weren't for one reason or another.

I have not made any assumptions about the report, just the whole "this was supposed to have been released but wasn't" assumption.

I don't have a conclusion yet, but I am looking forward for the day that new evidence comes out that doesn't inspire "you're just looking for evidence that confirms your biases!" defenses.

Maybe an intelligence agency will come out and say "our intelligence indicated the marketplace but our report was squashed".

Then you can see who points out that intelligence agencies are not scientific agencies.

Yeah, it makes sense that the government would try to keep this hidden, given all of the people looking for evidence of a conspiracy.

One minor rule that Hollow Knight seems to be bending is the boss fight. You should have to hit a boss three times. Maybe the vulnerability point is hidden behind an unbreakable shield for 20 seconds and so you have to dodge for a bit... but then the shield gets lowered, you hit the point, the boss yells. If you don't want to do it like that, GIVE A HEALTH BAR.

I find myself asking "HOW MANY HIT POINTS DOES THIS GUY HAVE?!?" every time I fight one of the bosses and he keeps not freakin' dying.

If you don't like the article, don't read the article. It is no skin off of my nose.

Just read the Report. There's a link to that too.

Huh, the Free Beacon got their hands on the 2022 report that says that seven U.S. servicemembers contracted COVID-19-like symptoms in Wuhan in October 2019.

They've got a link to the report itself.

This seems to be evidence that the virus was circulating prior to December 2019. Huh.

I'd like to point out that music and movies have really fallen off in the last decade or so.

AI is surprisingly good at microcode and it hasn't shown indications that it's stopped getting better at it.

Pizza technology advancements have slowed (but not stopped). The small-batch artisanal stuff is surprisingly good while, at the same time, Costco's $9.99 16" Pepperoni pie's only rival in value is the $1.50 hot dog.

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Most of the tariffs are unpopular. The ones for my industry have a lot of local support.

It's those other ones that we don't need.

Oh, yeah. Fracking. Yeah, you'd think that more people would give her credit on that.

I don't remember her walking back from her 2020 positions. I *DO* remember her defenders arguing "she didn't run on that!" instead of "she reversed herself!"

I don't think that the language is how we got Trump as much as I think that the failure to compromise on stuff is how we got him.

I also think that there was quite a cultural backlash against the Mostly Peaceful Summer and covid-lockdowns continuing into 2022... and that's without getting into the immigration debacle and the crime numbers (that ended up actually going up instead of down after all of the smoke cleared).

Biden was the compromise. And Harris said that she wouldn't have changed anything.

I'd say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!

The problem is that he didn't govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden's doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that's fine.

But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then... well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.

As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!

And that's without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like "but she didn't *RUN* on that!"

And so you're stuck with the Harris attacks being "here's what she said on camera" which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.

Why doesn't the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?

Yeah, you'd think that they would.

Oh, I wouldn't suggest that DeSantis is a compromise candidate.

I would, however, suggest that he is not as bad as Trump.

I would not, for example, call DeSantis "God's Punishment".

As for what I might expect from others, I's expect fewer to compare DeSantis to Hitler or compare DeSantis supporters to Nazis.

Or maybe that's just where we are now. Anybody who disagrees with me is Ontologically Evil.

It might explain how we got Trump, now that I think about it.

I don't think that those same voters will talk about wringing out the rot. If I thought that even one out of twenty of them knew who von Mises was, I'd feel better about things.

But there's the "what those same voters think" and there's the "what I think" and there isn't a whole lot of overlap there.

There are a handful of goals that overlap, though. That's probably incidental.

Well, this goes back to the whole NAFTA thing. Was NAFTA supposed to make their lives better?

They don't seem to agree that their lives are better.

Maybe you could point out the GDP again. Point out how much better off you are.

The question, as always, is "what are you willing to compromise on?"

And if the answer is that all of your beliefs are too precious to compromise on, then... here we are. With a group of people who also are unwilling to compromise.

Maybe you can throw together a list of reasons that it's morally incumbent on two groups of people who disagree with each other to compromise and work together.

If you think that if someone believes a set of right things and a set of wrong things gives you an out against agreeing with them where they are right because of how offensive you find their wrongness, you're effectively putting a tariff on truth.

And the person who is getting the short end of the stick in that is "everybody".

I don't think that "bordering on autistic" is an insult when you're actually talking to people who are "bordering on autistic".

It certainly not an argument for those people to change.

Of course it's worth mentioning.

But I also don't know that their perceptions will shift to "I will vote for whomever promises cheaper imported electronics".

I don't know that it won't... but I don't know that it will.

As for a recession, I go back to my von Mises. We need to wring out the rot. It's going to hurt. It's going to *SUCK*. But we need to wring out the rot. Not wringing out the rot got us here. Kicking the can down the road will make the eventual wringing even worse.

Well, I suppose that denial that a large number of American producer types got the short end of the stick during the global outsourcing thing over the last few decades is a good play.

Worked well so far.

Maybe it will continue to work as well as it has so far.

It took approximately 3 seconds for people to start calling DeSantis worse than Trump during the 4 seconds that DeSantis was ahead of Trump during the 2023-2024 primary season.

I'm not quite sure that we've escaped the hyperreality of the moment.

But maybe a trade war will bring us back down to reality...

That strikes me as a lot more likely to normalize Naziism than to crush it.

But I'm one of those people who sees the American ex-Producers as not particularly Naziish and conflating what they are with what happened in the 30s and 40s is not going to work out in the favor of the people who keep nominating Clintons and Kamalas.

Oh, I'm not trying to excuse Trump as much as I see him as God's Punishment.

(Of course I agree that we should have bilateral 0 industrial tariffs with Europe.)

"There’s a (IMO good) case to be made for a correction and tariffs may well be part of it."

It looks like a substantial portion of the American ex-Producer market feels like it was defected against and is now part of defecting back.

I have a handful of suggestions for putting things right again... but the first step is acknowledging that something bad happened and the something bad involved defecting against the American ex-Producers.

But doing that involves, among other things, agreeing with Trump.

One thing that I've seen over and over again is some variant of this argument:
"It's possible to have done the tariffs correctly but this isn't how to do them! They should have done them like this..." and then they rattle off a handful of ways that the tariffs should have been done instead.

Trump's biggest weapon is that he appears to be directionally correct to huge numbers of his critics, just inept at execution.

The market fundamentalists have been singing their same song as since the 90's, of course. Tariffs are bad, they're always bad, you're costing yourself money, so on and so forth. Anyone who has argued with Libertarians over the last 30 years has these arguments memorized.

The whole "libertarian" thing is played out, though. Low-status. The new hotness is arguing "other industries than the one I'm in should not have tariffs... Trump should have *SOME* tariffs but he shouldn't be doing them the way that he is doing them! He should do them like this..."

86 inches. $800 dollars.

That's less than ten bucks an inch!!!