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Cake day: October 6th, 2024

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  • It got the ‘trendy buzzword treatment’. There was a time when people were using it pretty heavily to describe professionals with specific skillsets and expertise sent to foreign (usually emerging) markets where hiring locals might be spotty. There was a time when, if an expat asked a local where expats hung out, the locals would interpret it as them asking where the foreign professionals would hang out, and usually they’d all talk shop/share experiences, that kind of thing.

    There are of course multiple definitions but the corporate world started flinging it around like such. If you were chosen to be an expat you were basically ‘A team’ material - smart, reliable, trusted with a generous amount of autonomy, that kind of thing.

    But it conveyed some sort of prestige, like ‘entrepreneur’. Now lots of people use it loosely as a colloquialism to describe anyone from a dyed-in-the-wool immigrant to someone who took a 6 month sabbatical to have an extended vacation on a sunny beach









  • Insiders and will let you use AI to “rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content,”

    There was a specific and well-defined period of time, akin to an era, in which students were compelled to manually increase the word counts of their yet-to-be-submitted works. This led to many thrilling things, perhaps most pertinent of all was the rash of rather ebulliant essays that served less as an actual critique of course content and more as an interpretive thesaurus. One might yearn for the bygone days of yore, when word counts were artificially augmented with the human hand


  • It’s baked into the US Constitution and the framers intentionally made it difficult to ratify amendments to prevent it from being changed frequently on whims (the Constitution should ideally be able to weather any change in the breeze). He could but he’d need 2/3rds of both House and Senate to vote in favor in order to proceed, so he’d need those to be in session to vote, and then ratification is even messier, I think 2/3 or 3/4 of state legislatures need to vote in favor of ratification. Bunch of hurdles that require not only getting all these groups in a room, but also to have well over a majority vote in favor.

    And we all know Marlie Tator Greene would be screaming the whole damn time, so snowball’s chance in hell basically



  • I’m hoping. Last trade war, Trump basically rolled out of bed one morning and decided to try it on China as some temporary transient thing in order to convey that the US has a lot of leverage (and it blew up in our faces), which is an entirely different beast than unilateral tariffs as part of fiscal policy. I have no clue how much it’d cost to just subsidize everything in perpetuity but I hope it isn’t some ridiculous sum.

    He’ll probably do something like allowing us to sell semiconductors to foreign nations in exchange for dropping tariffs on agricultural exports which is also really fucking boneheaded. The art of the deal, giving away the only shit that has lots of value for us. China outpacing the US in tech is something Europe wouldn’t want, but if we cut ties with Europe they’d probably warm up to China and we’d become a really big insular nation that can’t even sustain its economy as is


  • We’re already net exporter of petroleum but they’re intending to carve up our parks and stuff, even though we won’t be able to sell it for more than the cost of producing it. Everyone will slam us with tariffs and go to other countries for their fix, and it’ll be cheaper than bottled water for us.

    The idiots who don’t understand what a pronoun is and are terrified of their kids learning about them in English class will have cheap gas, but their kids will endure a literal hell for it.

    And they’ll think Trump’s doing a good job for all of it, blame some totally unrelated shit for our interest rate being at 25%


  • Tariffs will not only erase the middle class but also erase our topsoil like it’s 1924 all over again if farmers aren’t subsidized and everything is left to go fallow. In terms of dollars we’re pretty even in terms of agricultural imports and exports, but in terms of acreage… We push a shitload of soy, corn, and wheat. We’re more than a little fucked in lots of ways if we’re hit with retaliatory tariffs, but the biggest one is if farmers don’t have any reason to plant crops and don’t have any money to do it, we’re doomed for dustbowl days.

    Don’t even get me started on water, fluoride is one thing but if they start removing a lot of other stuff like phosphate and permanganate the entire country’s municipal water supply will be as bad as Flint MI.

    I’m hoping Trump doesn’t pull off 95% of the stuff he talked about due to unbridled incompetence because if he still manages to pull off 80% of it we’re gonna be fucked