State of the Discussion

I've gone through Hollow Knight a few times now (my first file is at 112% completion with something like 125 hours played) and have various other playthrough at different progress amounts.

Sadly, there is no charm that shows enemy health bars. You just got a upgrade your nail and then keep smacking. Once the Boss falls over panting/immobile you've landed enough hits to stun them and either hit them for actual damage or get in bonus hits. (I'm someone who gets caught up in watching the health bars drain during Boss fights, resulting in taking damage cuz I'm not paying attention. so personally I like the no health bars, but that's me.)

There are ways to further enhance your nail with charms (there are some killer charm combos.) You have a charm that hits harder, one that hits faster, and a few that extend reach/push back. You can also get summons to help out by attacking enemies.

I will say this though, Hollow Knight (IMO) is a bad game to play blind. There are just WAY too many things to get, find, places to explore etc ..
Maybe you enjoy beating your head against a wall trying to figure out where to go next, but for my first playthrough I used a guide after a while.

My question is why she was out in her yard with a gun. If it's that her reaction to a bunch of riff raff running through the neighborhood was to strap up and go out to face them I have to respect it. Don't get me wrong. It's totally crazy and the wrong way to respond to that situation... but if thats what happened? What a woman!

There's no money in journalism. It only survives as a going concern by people working in it for prestige and bragging rights and by people owning it for prestige and bragging rights along with a trickle of revenue from the social media empires that leech off it and appropriated its original revenue streams.

The old model is dead, sustained in a kind of twitching coma state by those factors. No one has a fishing clue what the new model can be.

A flashback from 2016:

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Does anyone else find it infuriating how the media is reporting that the tariffs are paused?

No, the nonsensical calculations are gone, and everything is just at the 10% minimum now.

That is...about four times higher than it was before. So still pretty big.

But on top of that, the tariffs with China were the major harmful ones, and they are still there. Our three largest trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and China. Put together, that's almost half of what we import. And those are the exact same places the Trump administration is putting large tariffs! Right now.

It's really funny to mock how uninhabited islands are being tariffed, but that literally doesn't impact us. Nor does us stupidly tariffing coffee...price will go up, demand will go down, people will live. Whatever. We taxed the EU, 10%, oh no, car prices might go up.

Canada, Mexico, and China are, uh, important. Both to actual consumers, and to companies that rely on them for sourcing for stuff they make.

Over at Substack, Thom Hartmann points out that ordering the DoJ to investigate truth tellers is at the very least unconstitutional. Not that it seems to matter much anymore.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/is-this-the-moment-american-democracy-345?r=v677&utm_medium=ios

Eh, I’m not a fan of tariffs at all. If the other guy is shooting himself in the foot, why join him?

Tariffs shouldn't be used to counter other tariffs, I agree. Where I think they should be used to is to counter unfair trade practices like a government deliberately subsidizing an industry to let it beat an American one, and then later raising prices after America's industry collapses.

But that requires a lot of smart people, and also requires a lot of decisions about what 'subsidizing' is. Are other countries subsidizing workers because of socialized medicine, for example? That's not there as a trade policy, but it could make things cheaper...OTOH, if both corporate and personal taxes are higher because of that, it's _not_ doing that.

Etc, etc.

This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out, and we should use our soft power to work on things, and...well, I'm pretending it's three months ago, aren't I? We pretty much just burned all that down.

As for the whole labor rights/workforce safety standards thing, I get it and wouldn’t want to argue against it but those things are gameable in practice with Potemkin factories and the like and it’d end up being a pain in practice (though I get it in theory).

You'd have to have a pretty competent organization that watched for all that. I will admit, I'm not 100% sure it's possible, or could scale, but it's not crazy to try.

And the entire concept of setting up _someone else_ to do it is that we would not have to deal with it. Some independent group that we just dump some money in and hopefully we don't have to worry about. Maybe part of the WTO or something.

That sounds about right from what I've seen of Hollow Knight (I think I beat the first boss and got slightly into the second area at some point, but only sort of remember the start of the game).

I wonder if there's some perk you get and can spend equip slots on at some point to make the health bar show up.

And, let’s face it, if I wanted to argue for tariffs at all, easy mode would be “reciprocal tariffs against fellow first world nations”

This is already pretty much how it was, though. First world countries occasionally use a tariff to protect an industry that actually exists (Unlike, say, our _coffee_ industry), and other countries then slap a tariff on something to protect something of theirs.

And no one tariffs entire countries, because that fundamentally makes no sense.

The fact that a non-zero number of fellow first world nations reluctantly dropped their own tariffs would be an argument *FOR* reciprocal tariffs in practice even for someone who is a market fundamentalist in theory.

...what are you talking about?

First world countries tend to average about 2.5% tariffs with us, which is about what we charge them. China is 3%, Japan is 1.9%, the EU is 2.7%, Australia is 2.5%, Singapore is 0% somehow.

Which are close to ours tares. It's hard to find details, but our average incoming tariff is (was?) 1.9%. But we, rather obviously, apply higher rates to things from wealthier countries. I'm not going to bother to track down and average the exact numbers, but we're within 20% or so. If someone wants to argue tariffs should be slightly higher, hell, you can join my club.(1)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/trumps-tariff-rates-for-other-countries-larger-than-word-trade-data.html

I have no idea if you'd include India in 'first world countries', but there is one notable outlier, as India charges stuff from us at at 12%. I am not sure why.

Incredibly oddly, our top exports and imports from India _are mostly the same things_: Pearls and semi precious stones, electrical machinery and equipment, nuclear reactors, and mineral fuels and oils. Why we've decided to trade those things back and forth is unknown. Seriously, not making a joke here, I don't understand that. The only difference is they also get 'lenses, microscopes, medical instruments' from us, and we also get 'pharmaceutical products' from them, which makes it sound like we're supplying their pharmaceutical labs to make drugs for us! (Which at least makes sense, unlike trading nuclear reactors back and forth. WTH?)

1) My pro-tariff club says (Or said, this is nonsense now since Trump destroyed the world order) that we should tie tariffs to labor rights and workplace safety standards, and we should set up some sort of independent monitoring agency, maybe not even run by the US, but internationally, and say: The tariff are currently 4% on textiles from China (Or whatever they are), and next year they will be moving _up_ to 4.1% on that, _unless_ your company voluntarily complies and allows spot checks from these monitoring agency, at which point they will be 3.9%. And they will keep going up and down 0.1% points a year until they hit 5% and 3%, respectively.

On further reading it looked like the market turmoil got so bad that even Trump got nervous. Specifically the bond markets for Federal debt and the dollar started to get wobbly. Trump, evidently, isn't worried about a recession but a full on financial crisis makes him nervous.

Relatedly, man, conspiracy theorizers are so keen on finding evidence of a conspiracy that they’ll latch onto literally anything. Though Slade already said that better than I.

Yeah, the thing I was pointing out is that the idea that Covid was active in Wuhan in October (Which actually, as a conspiracy theory, is not too unbelievable.) completely undermined one of the big claims about a lab leak, in that a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick _after that_, which is, itself, claimed to be the lab leak.

Ad yet this article seems to think it _helps_ that theory. Because that's how conspiracy theories work. Anything that they can even vaguely paint as supportive is listed, even when it's directly contradicting other parts of the theory.

It's like how 9/11 Truthers will seize on the fact that the leaseholder of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, got an insurance policy a few months in advance that 'covered terrorism'. When in reality almost no insurance excluded terrorism at the time, and also the tower _had been the site of a previous terrorist attack_ (Which also was covered!), so, duh, probably should make sure any new insurance covers that...although taht would be easy because you'd have to deliberately find a policy that didn't. Also, he got that insurance two months before because _that is when he was required to insure the place because he had just become the leaseholder_. But this 'He got insurance right before that covered it!' allows conspiracy theorists to claim he was warned or knew about the attack.

Hey, weird idea: If the government came to me and said 'The thing you literally just signed a lease on and are now legally required to buy insurance for...might want to make sure that insurance covers terrorism', I'd be WTF are you talking about?! Do you know something? And I certainly wouldn't stay quiet when a terrorist attack happened two months later!

He lost a boatload of money there. He did manage to sue under the grounds it was two incidents instead of one so the damage-per-incident cap should be twice (Which feels like clever lawyering, but I can't object.) and got like 1.3 the damage cap, but he did not make out well on that entire thing at all. (Not that I feel sorry for billionaires, but objective it was pretty bad for him.) Trying to bring him into the conspiracy significantly weakens it, but conspiracy theorists do not actually care about logic.

I'm not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration's chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.

JFC, the Dow was up 3,000 today! If only we had advance warning of that knucklehead's tariff meanderings. We'd be able to buy and sell Elon.

I don’t plan to wait until 7/1 - now seems like a good opportunity to get out of the pool for a bit with minimal injury, while they figure out how toxic the contaminant is.

A pretty good insight from a since-deleted tweet. (It wasn't mine but since the guy deleted it immediately after posting it, I'm guessing he doesn't want to be associated with its authorship.)

Trump is going to play with market for the next year. One tweet it goes down and another it goes up. He will be like the master of the world.

and then one day, the market won't go up with his tweet.

There's a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can't lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, "Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad." And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don't end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It's been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don't help workers!).

Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say "Some tariffs are good" to keep on the auto unions good side.