Good luck getting the Trumpettes to understand that…

It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.

In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.

(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)

I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.

I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.

I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.

I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.

I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.

This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.

They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.

Those specific propaganda elements are widespread in the West and widelly repeated in the mass media even outside the US, so it’s useful to deconstruct all that for others when I am in a position to do so since that deconstruction of it will also alter their perception of other instances they saw which at the time they did not really spotted for what it really is.

Hopefully the pointing out the mechanisms used here to construct a highly biased image will even make the readers of the deconstructions of it such as mine be more resilient to other instances of the same techniques being used.

Further, how can we be sure that this poster is a propagandist sock-puppet and not just a normal person who got deceived by the modern (that relies on framing, qualifying and implying) style of propaganda and hence repeated it?

I think that all in all, it’s better to have these things and then just deconstructing them for all to see, than silencing them. Also on principle I’m very wary of Censorship.

I went to all the trouble of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy and propaganda not for “these people” but for everybody else.

That shit starts by straight out quoting Zionist propaganda.

First the double standard:

Either they’re both Terrorist organisations for “attacking and murdering civilians” or one is a Resistance Movement and the other a Nation State. Claiming that the murdering of civilians to terrify the rest into complying with one’s political and economical goals is only Terrorism if some do it but not if others do it is absolutely taking a side and doing it quite extremely since “Terrorist” is a heavily loaded word.

Second:

The ever repeated Zionist propaganda that being against Israel is being against Jews hence it’s antisemitism. Is Hamas anti-semite (I.e. against Jews for being Jews) or is it against an occupier oppressor nation that takes their land and murders their children and is controlled by a subset of Jews? So far all indications are that it’s mainly the latter.

Also the double standard raises its face once again here as the Israelis aren’t being said to be anti-Islamic, which is funny give that even the Israeli press is extremely racist nowadays - curious that the alleged Racism of one side just had to be mentioned but not of the other side.

Third point:

That Israel responded as if there had been nothing else before. This is pure Zionist framing of this stage of a long ongoing conflict between a colonialist occupier and the native resistance. Israel started this shit, way back when the Zionist colonialists started stealing the land of Palestinians and expelling them or murdering the (the first peak of it being the Nakba).

If Israel was given the exact same treatment as Hamas in that text, it would have been described as “the Terrorist anti-Islamic colonialist invader”

Now, I’d like to think you’re just naively repeating the Zionist framing and propaganda that they so carefully spread in the West, in which case you might want to actually think about what you read before repeating it, as you’re parroting outright propaganda.

For over a decade I’ve been watching TV Series and Movies from a Media Box connected via Ethernet to my home NAS (which is generally an old notebook or even my router - once I got myself a decent router - with some external hardisks), which is actually a pretty simple network to set up using Ethernet Over Powerlinr adaptors (which were already good enough for it back when they only did 20 Mb/second and now that they’re 1000Mb/s will handle even the huge resolution lightly compressed stuff that one can now find as booty out there).

The setup has been recently upgraded to a Mini-PC with Lubuntu and Kodi, which is in my living room (right next to my Internet router to which it is connect with Gigabit Ethernet) and is also my home NAS and Bittorrent server over always on VPN, with a wireless remote for using in my living room to control Kodi (so it works the same as a TV Box for watching media) whilst the background stuff I control from my main PC remotely using a mix of web interfaces and ssh command line.

I had never had this good an environment for TV entertainment and I’m not even using any of the *arr suite or Usenet to source content so a lot of it is really just doing the same stuff as a decade ago but with better hardware and a more modern UI for media playing and (most importing) a way faster Internet connection.

Anyways, the point I’m making is that nowadays one can actually upgrade a little bit from your setup (which, by the way, is superior to what I had before my Mini-PC upgrade) cheaply and even get themselves very close to the same experience as the corporate stuff (media box with remote and a nice UI to play stuff from a media library) whilst maintaining maximum control and getting no shit from enshittification.

PS: I couldn’t recommend more getting a wireless remote if you want to just be able to sit down on your sofa and have a no hassle media box experienced (even whilst behind sits a far more complex home infrastructure that what people who outsource that side of things to the likes of Hulu have). It real helps with having a shit-free under your total control entertainment experience without sacrificing the part of that experience that comes from having a modern interface for media selection.

Ah, right - I misunderstood that point you were making.

So, as it turns out, we’ve been in agreement all along.

Not living in the US, I’m not up to date with US salaries.

That said, even for administrative personnel paid $25/h, $25 will pay 1h of somebody’s work which is way beyond what is needed to close a retail customer account in any modern administrative system were such thing is a common operation which should take less than a minute to do, because people who design the kind of company administrative computer systems (such as yours truly, at least during part of my career) will make the most common business operations be the fastest to do in that system.

It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn’t changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it’s customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

Those $25 bucks for “account closure” pays at worst for a few minutes of somebody’s seeking the account from user information on a computer, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says “Close accout” and then “Ok” on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.

As somebody who works in designing software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because main business operations such as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

The stuff that uses “lots” (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

You’ve been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.

“Perceived value”

Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketing other than pure Brand Awareness promotion working (and McDonalds is definitely beyond needing more Brand Awareness, at least in the Developed World)

Even then, it doesn’t explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do things like create associations between brand and specific feelings on people’s subconscious - you know, the way cars are “freedom” and perfumes are “sex”).

And don’t get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled Homo Economicus that underpins so much of Free Market Theory)

Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a “slow boiling” effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.

Meanwhile the NYC Police will be opening an emergency phone line exclusive for CEOs who feel threatened or harassed.

That’s definitely going to convince people in general that the Police “works for the community” and that they should “trust the Police”.

Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.

Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.

Studies have shown that something as simple as being tall makes people be more likely to be looked towards as leaders.