literature.cafe

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15 users here now
(and anyone else, really)

This is a general special interest lemmy instance focusing on lovers of all things pertaining to reading and writing and all of the people that enjoy it as well as fandoms and niches that exist within reading circles. We federate with other instances, with our local communities being focused primarily on the above.

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We also have alternative lemmy UIs to use for those who want them.

A familiar UI - old.literature.cafe

Photon - ph.literature.cafe

Tesseract (photon fork with more multimedia focused features) - t.literature.cafe


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founded 2 years ago
ADMINS
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Trade Review Act would require greater checks on tariffs in further sign of congressional disquiet over president’s plans

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As President Trump finally unveils his global tariff plan — setting a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods, with additional hikes apparently based on individual countries’ trade balances with the United States — economists like our guest Richard Wolff warn it will have grave economic effects on American consumers and lead to a recession.

Wolff says the Trump administration’s tariff strategy is borne out of an ahistorical “notion of the United States as a victim” despite the fact that “we have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top.”

In response to the growing economic fortunes of the rest of the world and the associated decline in U.S. hegemony, Trump and his allies are “striking out at other people” in desperation and denial of an end to U.S. imperial dominance. “[It’s] not going to work,” says Wolff.

AMY GOODMAN: ...Professor Wolff, it’s great to have you with us again. Well, start off by responding to, and were you surprised, shocked, or did you guess that, well, about 185 countries were going to see increased tariffs?

RICHARD WOLFF: On the one hand, we knew something like this was coming. On the other hand, the sweep and the scope of it does make you stop. Mr. Trump is right: It is a changing moment in American history and world history. But I think his representation of what’s going on is completely fantastical and has only to do with the self-promotion that he has engaged in most of the time. It was never foreigners who did it to us, this notion of the United States as a victim. We have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top, just like him. It has nothing to do with foreigners taking advantage of us. This attempt to make himself strong and powerful relative to others, to blame the foreigner, these are cheap shots that a real president wouldn’t do.

And there’s the most important point. The American economy is in trouble. The American empire is in decline. We don’t want to discuss it in this country. We engage in denial. And instead, we are striking out at other people — a sad way of handling a decline. The British Empire declined before. So did all the others. We are now at that point. We had a great 20th century. The 21st century is different. You have to face those problems. That’s not being done. What’s being done is to say we have difficulties, but they’re all somebody else’s fault, and we’re going to solve it by punishing them.

I would like to point out, as you suggest, quite rightly, Amy, that the rest of the world is not going to sit by. The United States does not have the power it had in the 20th century. It is not in the position it seems to imagine itself. When the secretary of the Treasury added to Mr. Trump’s comments that he warned the rest of the world not to retaliate, that would imply that if they do, there would be escalation. Yes, he said, there will be escalation. Well, nothing will guarantee more escalation than if they do nothing, because then it’s an invitation for Mr. Trump to keep doing it as each of these efforts doesn’t work.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can put this in a bigger picture? Talk about the tax cuts and how they fit into the tariffs, the — what is it? — something like $4 trillion in tax cuts, and who benefits. And then talk about the other issues that President Trump keeps saying that they’re not going to touch, even though what many call his co-president, Elon Musk, whether he steps back from being — you know, giving speeches or not, going after Social Security, issues like Medicaid.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me start with the tax issue. The biggest single thing that Trump did in his first presidency was the tax cut of December 2017. And when that tax cut was written into law, it had a sunset. It expires this year, 2025. If that expiration is allowed to happen, corporations and the rich, who were the big beneficiaries back then, will face a big tax [increase]. He doesn’t want to do that, because that’s his base, that’s his donor support. He doesn’t want to have those taxes go back up.

Well, then, what is he going to have to do? If he keeps on spending and he doesn’t let those taxes go back up, he’s going to have to borrow trillions, as we have been doing. He doesn’t want to be the president who keeps borrowing trillions, in part because the rest of the world is a major creditor of the United States, and they’re not going to continue to do it the way they have. So he’s in a jam. He has to do something.

So his hope is to savage the expenditures in this country. Look what he’s doing. Mr. Musk stands there with a chainsaw to give us the clear implication, “I’m going to solve the problem on the backs of the working class. I’m firing them all. I don’t care what the rest of the working class suffers. I’m going to fire all these people, without notice, without a plan.” Calling this efficient is a silly joke. An efficient process takes time, takes experts. You’re not doing that. You’re just wholesale firing. Calling that efficiency is an attempt to fool people, that shouldn’t make any difference.

Mr. Trump is now in a jam. He can’t get out of this without in some way solving the problem that has been built up. And there is no way other than the one he’s doing, because it’s the last gasp of how to take away from the mass of the people the ability to borrow. I mean, let’s be honest. If you put a tariff, you make everything coming in from abroad more expensive. That means people will buy less of it. They’ll shrink their standard of living. If American companies take advantage of the tariff, which they always do, by raising their prices, that will also hurt the working class. You are immiserating your workers in order to try to solve the problem you haven’t solved before.

But here’s the irony that may in the end come back to haunt us. Europe has been unable to unify under the umbrella of American alliances. The enmity of the United States is bringing Europe together better than the alliance was able to do. And as you pointed out, very important, China, Japan and South Korea, with long histories of animosity and tension, are getting together to cope with this. Wow! We are unifying the whole world.

If you want the big picture in my judgment, after World War II, George Kennan taught us about containment: “We’re going to contain the Soviet Union.” The irony, which the philosopher Hegel would enjoy, we are becoming contained. We are isolating ourselves — the votes in the U.N. of the United States alone or the United States and Israel and two or three other countries, the isolation politically, the isolation now economically. We are the rogue nation for the rest of the world. We may not want it. We may not agree. But it doesn’t really matter, if that’s how they perceive us. And that’s what’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty seconds, as you often talk about, are you seeing this as the beginning of the end of American empire?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I think we are already in 10 or 12 years of that decline. It can’t — here’s the single best statistic. If you add up the GDP, you know, the total output of goods and services in a year for a country, of the United States and its major allies, the G7, it’s about 28% of global output. If you do the same thing for China and the BRICS, it’s about 35%. They are already a bigger bloc of economic power than we are. Every country in the world thinking about building a railroad or expanding its health program, they used to send their people to Washington or London to get help. They still do. But when they’re done, they send the same team to Beijing, New Delhi, São Paulo, and they often get a better deal. The world is changing. And the United States could cope. But as with alcoholism, you have to admit you have a problem, before you’re in a position to solve it. We have a nation that does not yet want to face what this all adds up to.

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Use this thread for general daily football discussion.

This thread can also be used to discuss Transfer rumours and to post Tier 4 sources.

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Imagine mourning and having concern specifically for the very metastatic cancer that's killing you.

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Russia’s disinformation machine didn’t just meddle in Germany’s 2025 elections — it built an entire fake media ecosystem to do it. Through a network of over 100 bogus news sites and psychological operations like Storm-1516, the Kremlin sowed chaos, amplified far-right narratives, and targeted key political figures with fabricated scandals. This article explains the different online campaigns and their methods.

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submitted 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) by Grapho@lemmy.ml to c/memes@lemmy.ml
 
 
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Cross-post

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It's a 1989 Singer(?) Sonata Sew-Ease 6621.

I'm sure it's not the finest piece of machinery out there, but for $10 it came with a pedal, several bobbins, some thread, a few needles, and everything on it appears to be in working order.

After a video chat with my mom, I was able to run a test stitch:

I'm not sure if this is gonna take off as a hobby for me, but I'm gonna give it a go with what time I can spare! I even have a crappy projector I might try to use 😬

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US stock markets tumbled on Thursday as investors parsed the sweeping change in global trading following Donald Trump’s announcement of a barrage of tariffs on the country’s trading partners.

All three major US stock markets closed down in their worst day since June 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, had lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.

Meanwhile, the US dollar hit a six-month low, going down at least 2.2% on Thursday morning compared with other major currencies and oil prices sank on fears of a global slowdown.

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Five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border.

A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.

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Source: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/596

Alt-Text:

If you love stinging and irony enough, it all adds up. Plus it's a pretty funny way to die, so you've got that going for you.

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Doggo (sh.itjust.works)
 
 
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Just my type. (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) by Lisk91@sh.itjust.works to c/opossums@lemmy.world
 
 
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