jfabula1 said:

lordjohnwhorfin said:

I still can’t believe people voted for this moron. It’s sad to see the pathetic joke this once great country has become.

So what do you want to do w the $36T debt? This guy has the balls to do something about it. We been ripped off for a long time. Americans are just buying & consuming cheap imports. Just look at your closets, your house, probably 99% are all imported by greedy importers. TEMU anyone?? Probably 90% are not utilized. 

 

Most of the current U.S. debt was created by the Republican party.

In Bill Clinton's final term the U.S. was running a tax surplus and the $$ was being used to pay down the debt (as part of a bipartisan agreement). When George W. Bush took office, his administration declared that the surplus represented overtaxation, VP Cheney infamously declared that deficits "don't matter" and they started up deficit spending again. The most significant parts of that deficit spending were the Bush Tax Cuts and the invasion/occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

When Barack Obama took office after Bush, the vast majority of the debt was driven by those tax cuts and the trillions in costs from the Afghanistan/Iraq wars. Republicans returned to claiming the deficit mattered with a Democrat in the White House and used the last six years of Obama's presidency to enforce austerity measures, like insisting that every new dollar of spending required a dollar in cuts.

When Trump took office for his first term, Republicans again abandoned concerns about the deficit and passed a $2 trillion stimulus in the form of a tax cut. For comparison, they limited the stimulus for the Great Recession in Obama's 1st term to less than $900 billion. Now for Trump's 2nd term they want to make the $2 trillion tax cut permanent and add trillions more in new tax cuts. They believed that allowing DOGE to run wild firing federal workers and eliminating agencies would provide cover for the massive amount of new debt they were going to add through the tax cuts but DOGE has already been exposed as a scam that adds to the debt rather than cutting it. For example, the DOGE firings at the IRS are projected to cost the United States $500 billion in revenue. That's because every IRS agent that is employed brings in multiple times more revenue than their own salary.

22july2013 said:

"in making you upgrade at Apple's ludicrously expensive rates."

Are you comparing Apple's upgrade rates for M-Series RAM (on-die memory) to other platforms (eg, Intel) where the RAM is on separate packages/chips (eg, DDR5?) If so, that's not a fair comparison, because the performance isn't the same. On-die memory has lower latency, higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, reduced complexity and increased reliability. But if you don't value those things, then Apple RAM upgrades are expensive, yes.

Yep. Unified Memory allows the CPU and GPU to access RAM at the same time. DDR systems require the RAM to be split up between the CPU/GPU. That's why people say that, in general, the amount of RAM in an M series system is the approximate equivalent of double the amount of DDR RAM. So the price for 32GB of Unified Memory should really be compared to the price of 64GB of DDR. 

dominikhoffmann said: Let’s not bitch about a 10% tariff, when the last four years brought us > 25% inflation on groceries, which make for a much larger proportion of a family’s budget than an iPhone or two a year.

See the chart below...your theory isn't off to a good start. It appears the business world views the Trump administration as a green light for more predatory practices. 

9secondkox2 said:

foregoneconclusion said:

9secondkox2 said:

netrox said:

Expect to see this happen here in USA with SCOTUS being right wing and having expressed doubts about the right to privacy, starting with abortion and saying the same for sexual acts. They will likely use that reasoning to force Apple to provide a "backdoor".

The right to privacy simply does not exist with conservatives where they believe in imposing structure and control over people and their behaviors to their whims. 

Similar things were already happening under Obama. Hence Snowden. Barking up the wrong tree. 

LOL...the wrong tree? All the files that Snowden provided to Glen Greenwald for the articles he wrote were pre-2006 Patriot Act era. In other words, the era before Congress got rid of the worst abuses of the Patriot Act like warrantless wiretapping. George W. Bush was president at the time, not Obama. The Snowden stuff was really just a repackaging of the complaints that came out about the Patriot Act at the time it was passed + a layer of conspiracy theorizing on top. And the Patriot Act was primarily driven by the GOP.

Plus you now have the Laken Riley Act, which takes the loss of due process for anyone charged with terrorism (i.e., indefinite detainment) and applies it to undocumented immigrants charged with crimes as minor as shoplifting. The problem there is that the loss of due process for people charged with terrorism was based on the idea that they were a national security threat. Undocumented immigrants are not a national security threat. 

From 2015

“New Snowden Documents Reveal Obama Administration Expanded NSA Spying”

https://time.com/3909293/edward-snowden-obama-nsa-spying/

You appear to be confused about warrantless wiretapping. George W. Bush authorized warrantless wiretapping DOMESTICALLY. Meaning they were targeting people inside the borders of the United States, either citizens or non-citizens. That practice was ended in January of 2007. The article that you posted is in regards to INTERNATIONAL warrantless wiretaps where the target is outside the borders of the United States. 

The difference is that DOMESTIC wiretapping always required warrants prior to what George W. Bush did. That's not the case with INTERNATIONAL wiretaps. 

"FISA distinguishes between U.S. persons and foreigners, between communications inside and outside the U.S., and between wired and wireless communications. Wired communications within the United States are protected, since intercepting them requires a warrant,[47] but there is no regulation of US wiretapping elsewhere."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiretapping#Pakistan

This is an example of what was so stupid about most of the Snowden coverage. Snowden claimed he was concerned about Constitutional rights violations but the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply outside of U.S. territory. There's nothing scandalous about the United States doing warrantless wiretaps of foreign targets. 

9secondkox2 said:

netrox said:

Expect to see this happen here in USA with SCOTUS being right wing and having expressed doubts about the right to privacy, starting with abortion and saying the same for sexual acts. They will likely use that reasoning to force Apple to provide a "backdoor".

The right to privacy simply does not exist with conservatives where they believe in imposing structure and control over people and their behaviors to their whims. 

Similar things were already happening under Obama. Hence Snowden. Barking up the wrong tree. 

LOL...the wrong tree? All the files that Snowden provided to Glen Greenwald for the articles he wrote were pre-2006 Patriot Act era. In other words, the era before Congress got rid of the worst abuses of the Patriot Act like warrantless wiretapping. George W. Bush was president at the time, not Obama. The Snowden stuff was really just a repackaging of the complaints that came out about the Patriot Act at the time it was passed + a layer of conspiracy theorizing on top. And the Patriot Act was primarily driven by the GOP.

Plus you now have the Laken Riley Act, which takes the loss of due process for anyone charged with terrorism (i.e., indefinite detainment) and applies it to undocumented immigrants charged with crimes as minor as shoplifting. The problem there is that the loss of due process for people charged with terrorism was based on the idea that they were a national security threat. Undocumented immigrants are not a national security threat.