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!!!

I have an 80" tv in my own basement and I sit about 5 feet away from it.

I have seen maybe three movies on it. Countless video games, though.

If you would have told 8-year-old me this, I would have boggled. "Wow! Are the Star Wars sequels out?!?!?"
"Oh, yeah. Six of them. Three sequels, three prequels."
"Do you watch Star Wars movies in your basement?"
"No."

If I had any money, I might invest it in Ubisoft. It broke under the 10-Euros barrier and there is going to be a stockholder revolt. It's fallen to a 12 year low and Tencent is going to push a hardcore back-to-basics gameplan for the company.

Or, of course, it could tailspin and we should panic because we're all going to die.

(The above is not investment advice.)

Eigen's got a good thread.

He talks about a couple of the headlines at the WaPo: "Trump calls tariff plans 'a very beautiful thing'" and "As the markets dropped, the president putted".

He points out that it's easy to imagine the editor thinking "that'll show him" as this was posted.

He also points out that after several decades of this sort of thing, "from an evolutionary game theoretical standpoint it's also selecting for an opposition that is just completely indifferent to ambient social pressure".

And... yeah. That's one thing that seems to be borne out by looking at the demographics of the voters of 2024. This is what happens when people start being sufficiently indifferent to ambient social pressure.

One of the reviews of Nosferatu I read opened with the John Waters quote "I believe if you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, 'The cinematography was beautiful,' it's a bad movie."

Well, during Nosferatu, my bud and I wouldn't shut up about the cinematography. Oooh! Look at that shot! Wow! Look at *THAT* one!

He also did the sound system up with multiple speakers in the basement and the soundbar up front and... wowsers. I'm not sure how much better it would have been to see it in a theater. I know that it's smaller than the difference between a normal screen and IMAX used to be.

Theaters had best figure out *SOMETHING* because, lemme tell ya, watching something (anything) on the basement television has a lot less mental/emotional overhead than what is required to put on shoes and get in the car and drive to the place and talk to at least one stranger.

And that's without getting into the difference in the price of chicken fingers at both places.

When we got tickets to A Working Man, the theater was mostly sold out. The only rows that had two seats next to each other (with a bro seat on either side) were the front rom and the back row.

We got tickets for the back row.

The other night, I watched Nosferatu on my broski's 85" television in his basement that we were sitting about 8-10 feet away from.

The field of vision real estate taken up by the screens was comparable. And, during Nosferatu, we could pause.

Part of the problem is that the Conservative Party is (usually) the Stupid Party.

There's a point at which "moral agency" kicks in and it's above a certain line and sufficiently stupid people are below it... and, in a group, you tend to get even stupider.

From Variety: Texting, Weed and Sing-Alongs: Four Radical Ideas for Bringing New Audiences to Movie Theaters

While I tend to agree that weed would make a movie better (at least it did back in 1992), I'm not sure how the ingestion would work. Edibles, from what I have heard, take a while to kick in and you can't really titrate the experience like you can with a joint. If it is smoking that they're going to be doing, the movie houses will have to get one of their rooms rebranded as a Cigar Bar (or just have a courtyard, I guess).

If my memory is accurate, it's also the case where the most pleasant buzz to watch a movie would be categorized as "comfortable". And, by "comfortable", I mean "shouldn't drive". So you're going to need a DD.

Which, I suppose, the movie theaters could push for... "bring a friend", I guess. But being the guy who isn't stoned with one (or more) stoned dudes is... well, maybe they could set it up and give a free ticket to the DD. Or a free soft drink.

As for cellphone-friendly viewings... ugh. There are a couple dozen reasons that I don't go to the theater that often and cellphones are among them. But if there's a cellphone showing, maybe it can be in a theater next to a non-surfing showing.

Of course, most of the responses to the tweet of this article were of the form "maybe make good movies?" but, as I look at the landscape, I see that Minecraft broke $150 million over the weekend and so that's probably not on the table either.

Saw Nosferatu last night (I'm just seeing movies this year!) and I loved the first 99% of the movie.

Then I realized that I am not the target audience.

The "Can a MV be 3D?" debate has resulted in many broken hearts and broken bones, but I think that it absolutely can be.

That was one of the big eye-openers for me in the first few hours of Arkham Asylum. The fact that they translated it to 3D is one of the (many) reasons I love the game.

Hollow Knight does not hold your hand. I'm not calling it a "soulslike" or anything like that because, so far, I haven't needed twitch skills as much as mere hand-eye coordination and puzzle-solving abilities.

But it dumps you into the world and tells you "go nuts" without explaining what nuts are.

I'm having a blast and have only had to google "what in the heck do I do now?!?" once (the answer involved using a down attack on the purple mushrooms).

Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer for Meta, announces:

By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.

Made about 4 pounds of pepper bacon. 2 pounds to go.

Do you feel that people who try to use rational thought should be policed and shamed?

Dude. That's awesome! Mr. Blue Sky is one of those that strikes me as a cheat code for "awesome". When Guardians of the Galaxy 2 started with it, I remember thinking "that's, like, unfair".

After I watched The Muppets sing it, I googled whether Floyd and Janis were dating and I'm pleased to say that the general consensus is that they were.