CarmB

What would be helpful is if Apple offered to bundle let's say any three services of the user's choice at a discount. There would be many takers. Maybe tier it, as in, one price for a three-service bundle, a bit more for a four-service bundle and so on. If you could get what you wanted at a discount, what's not to like. Instead we are faced with paying for services we might not need in order to receive a discount on ones we want. If I could bundle Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple Fitness, I would give that consideration. 

9secondkox2 said:

JonG said:

jesusfreak said:

Perfectly safe in jolly ol England.  No one is allowed to have firearms there.

Oh yeah, car thieves are so well known for obeying the law.

One reason why banning guns never works. It ensures only the criminals have them. 

Unfortunately, people who are not criminals in the sense that they do not regularly engage in criminal activity have been known to kill others with guns. You can be free of any criminal activity, hence not be regarded as a criminal, and yet proceed to break the law.

If one didn't know better, it would seem that Donald Trump is not knowledgable regarding anything. He doesn't know how stuff works and so he posts nonsense. In his first term his silliness was tempered but in his second term, we're getting the uncensured, unfettered Trump. There were moments in that first term when we kind of got a glimpse - bleach could maybe cure COVID, right?  - yet there was this false narrative that Trump is much smarter than he looks. I suspect that it's less that Trump is incapable of gaining insight into how everything works and more that he can't be bothered to find out. Reality can be bent to his will, it seems, so why bother figuring stuff out. Just declare what you want reality to be and make it so through sheer force of will. So we ge the Ukraine conflict resolved in 24 hours. Gaza is transformed into a resort. Canada becomes the 51st state. Threats of tariffs causes those wanting to do business in the US to obey Trump's commands. Taxes are slashed with no impact on services and the deficit is miraculously wiped out, all while dramatically increasing military spending. Utter nonsense, all of it. And it just keeps on coming. How did we get here? 

Trump governs the way he campaigns, as if the two are indistinguishable. You can say whatever you like when you're not governing and it will matter not. You can claim that you can use tariffs to get US companies to build stuff in the US. In a very superficial way, it sounds like it could work. Yet in reality, the cost difference in building stuff in the US compared to certain other countries is enormous. The amount of tariff needed to wipe out the difference is such that imposing it would be catastrophic. We have products being sold in the US that are viable at that price point because of lower production costs abroad. Mess with that and the impact on the economy is seismic. If Trump had figured out a way to significantly lower the cost of making stuff in the US then combined it with tariffs to get production to shift to the US, that would be one thing. This isn't that. He's basically trying to end the days of making stuff at a cost that allows for products to be sold at an attractive price point. He might not be aware that that is what he's doing but it is what his approach would cause to happen. It's as if Trump hadn't worked out what the impact of his actions would be and instead conjured up what he wishes his actions would cause to happen, as if wishing it would make it so. It's hard to believe that Trump's grasp of such things is as disconnected from reality as it seems to be. Sometimes I think that this is all just an incredibly vivid dream and at some point I'll just wake up to find the past decade never really happened. 

In the first place, you can't just impose a special tariff on one specific company. In the second place, even with such a tariff, it would still be cheaper to assemble iPhones abroad. This is more silliness from Trump but what matters here is that this silliness is no joke. Do it long enough, and Trump seems intent on doing it for a while, and it will have a negative impact on the economy. There has never been a more anti-business president than Trump 2.0. He's acting as if companies like Apple and Walmart are to do his bidding. That's not how it has worked and nor should it. Really, though, it's not that Trump can force Walmart to set prices to Trump's liking or just slap a tax on Apple because he doesn't like where they're making their product. It's that Trump is doing everything possible to disrupt economic activity. He wants headlines and says or posts  whatever he thinks will generate media attention. When that's the norm, doing business is turned into an ordeal. That will have real consequences and with Trump being as overbearing as he is being, trying to blame it on the Democrats just isn't going to work. Trump now gets everything he wants from the Republican Party and, often it seems, the Supreme Court. If the economy stumbles, he'll own it. Period. Honestly, I don't see how the US economy can do anything but stumble the way Trump is operating. It may take a few more months for many Americans to start feeling the impact of his incompetence but feel it they will.