Spyke

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US dollar sinks to its lowest level in four years

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It encourages foreign divestment which is good if you are in the crowd that thinks that trade is bad.

It also leads directly to rapid inflation as those dollars once used for trade are now sitting idle in the money pool. Rapid inflation is good if you own monopolies on essential goods like housing, fuel, groceries, and medical care as it provides cover for you to raise prices and decrease quality.

Also, with rapid inflation it becomes easier to hide graft and extortion in the government and maybe go after people like Powell for cost overruns on projects that could never have predicted that you would tank the economy.

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one bright second

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Stuff only burns for so long. We might learn more about the geometry of space and that there is more out there at greater distances where maybe even other Big bangs are possible but there is a certain maximum amount of time that a star can exist.

Over the time scales of the life of a proton the maximum variability in the amount of time a star can burn is a rounding error against the scale of numbers needed to express the amount of time it takes for hawking radiation to reduce black holes to ultra long wavelengths of infrared radiation.

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Get bent, Brenda

One of the best bosses I ever had was a Korean man who was very religious and yet very kind. He made a similar comment to me once. I was on my lunch break and he came to me to talk about work stuff, I was watching the clock and when my lunch break was up I went to punch in. When I sat back down he commented about how it looked like I was only there for the money.

It was a good job but I don't feel comfortable speaking other than the truth even for niceties so I leveled with him.

"This is a good job, and I am here for the money. I do respect you and I respect your time but I have bills to pay and I have already been warned about going over 40hrs on the time clock to complete rush cases on Fridays. If we are going to be a team and we're going to work together then you need to understand that I share a two bedroom apartment with three people and none of us can afford a car. You came to me on my lunch break to talk about CNC equipment and I was about to run out of time on my lunch break so I clocked back in. This is a work conversation so I don't feel out of line and doing that. Is this not a work conversation?"

He was a little shocked but respected it. It opened up a line of dialogue and a relationship that I felt was quite meaningful. In the following years he and I had a lot of awesome conversations. I miss that dude. I stayed with the company until just after they fired him and then the company went to shit.

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Not impressed

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Silimar, I had a teacher ask us to write down the first animal that came to mind and I wrote, "wolf spider" because to an 8 year old, there are few more bad ass sounding animals.

She said "really? That's the First animal you think of?" Eye roll

Me: looks down at doodles of giant spiders battling tanks that shoot lightning, "it's the only animal I'm thinking of right now..."

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conditional soap

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I'm a long haired freaky people and have been for almost 40 years but I found my hair is healthier if I rinse it regularly, wash it once or twice a month and condition it at the same time.

I use Nizoral AD (some almost medicated antindandruff thing) and Head and shoulders conditioner twice a month at most.

I still have my long luxurious hippy hair and I'm told there is no recession yet so I got that going for me.

mop

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right-wing nazis

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I said almost this exact same thing to my dad, a 72-year-old man with a political science degree, and I saw genuine surprise wash across his face before he said to me, "huh. That's a good point." We just sat there with it for a minute.

He's generally a pretty thoughtful guy but something about that generation doesn't lend itself to independent reasoning especially if that contradicts conventional wisdom or popular ideology.

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AOC is plotting a run for president in 2028: report

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We should let the Democratic party choose a person through a primary to run for president and then allow that person to run for president.

If a woman makes it through that process on her own merits then the party will probably vote for her.

If on the other hand a woman is selected because she's a woman who will cooperate with the donors and they decide to skip that process or subvert it in some way then you probably won't win.

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Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, according to leaked documents

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They will cater more and more to each other until they turn inward and start hoarding and rearranging resources into their compartmentalized cocoons while they attempt to transform their empires into launch pads that will let them escape the planet like some sort of fungal spore to infect and consume another world.
They will fail to develop a way to sustain humans off world and will leave behind a polluted hellscape of toxic nonsense and dysfunction.

I hope someone still has the resources to pour concrete over the entrances of these billionaire fallout shelters when the front finally falls off the whole yacht.

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One of the few good outcomes of this situation

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I imagine it as a mod for RimWorld.

There are so many more options there and it's already a war crime simulator. I have whole prisons of captured raiders that couldn't be described accurately if Harlan Ellison and Upton Sinclair collaborated with Lovecraft to invent the most terrible grinder of misery while they freebased paranoia from the hollowed out skull of Caligula.

The creator (Tynan) already inserts his own character among many Kickstarter donors to face the barely imaginable horrors I cook up in my misery science research facility, I can probably be more creative for people that actually deserve it.