Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.

This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.

I may legitimately lose my supposedly magical and highly important American manufacturing job because of this shit and these dumbasses think that this is all a genius move that will finally Make America Great Again. Everyone else I know who works in manufacturing is feeling the same way. One of my coworkers is mildly Trumpy and was talking about how he thinks it’s a negotiation tactic and was shocked when I said I think the people in charge are just legit stupid and think tariffs will magically make things better in their own right. He didn’t have anything to offer as a rebuttal he just seemed surprised that anyone would think Trump isn’t a turbo genius who is secretly making 5000 IQ negotiation moves.

There are no truly successful talks with Trump. Even if you make a deal he’ll decide he doesn’t like it next week.

I feel like using terms like “vaccine skeptic” for these morons is a major PR win for them. It makes it sound way more legitimate than it is. Fuck corporate media sanewashing everything going on politically right now.

The historical Arians were a pretty diverse group, much like the early Christian church in general. Arius, the person whose teachings the Arians were named after, was North African, and there were Arians throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

Morbidly obese people have giant greasy shits and evi friendly toilets are designed for normal sized shits that contain some amount of fiber. If you weigh 300 lbs and only eat cheesburgers (like a certain president) it’s possible that you need multiple flushes per shit.

FYI “Aryan” is the word you’re looking for. “Arian” is an early Christian sect decried as heretical in the later Roman Empire

I specifically chose a fee that was higher than the actual cost so dumbasses wouldn’t nitpick about greed and profits and yet you still somehow did it, so I’ll take the bait- please explain to me how a business can operate selling an item at $10 when they have $100 in guaranteed costs? Do you understand that this means they lose at least $90 on every transaction at that price? I get that companies are greedy and skim more off the top but this is pure idiocy to make this argument in this hypothetical.

The dumb thing is that it doesn’t matter who pays the tariff, it still will get passed to the consumer. Consider a scenario where the government starts taxing Amazon $100 per order no matter what’s in it. If you buy a $10 item on Amazon, how are they going to pay the $100 tax on that? Amazon will just add a $100 tax fee to your order because they can’t keep running a business if that cost isn’t baked into the final price. It doesn’t matter who actually delivers money to the government, the tax gets paid by all parties involved.

FYI, sales tax is already done this way. Sales tax is collected from businesses, not customers, but customers still pay sales tax because that’s just how economics works.