But the two were all smiles throughout, with Trump even siding with the soon-to-be first Muslim mayor of New York over one of his GOP allies, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who’d called Mamdani a “jihadist.”
“She’s out there campaigning and you say things sometimes in a campaign,” Trump said of Stefanik, who’s running for governor of New York. “I met with a man who’s a very rational person. I met with a man who wants to see New York be great again.”
Well that’s not what I expected…
Keep in mind that the critical affordability issue as it landed in the news as we recovered from COVID and also supply chain impacts from Ukraine war. During his first term, inflation was pretty much the same as it had been since 1990. Then during Biden’s term, there was 7% then a further 6.5% on top of that and then another 3.4% on top of that and then 2.9% on top of that. So there’s a correlation that things are now even more rapidly unaffordable and in such cases the president inevitably gets the blame whether it makes sense or not.
His first term was pretty incompetent and corrupt, but got nowhere near as maliciously and successfully corrupt as this go around. On the matter of deaths, while the USA by the data was among the worst, almost in the 10 worst nations for per-capita death, the subjective coverage was “globally lots of people are dying”, it’s not Trump’s fault specifically in that perception of “no one has it good”.
Generally speaking, in these circumstances people are just voting against the state of the way things are with less high minded ideals. Trump lost because people hated things under COVID. Harris lost because the economic reaction to recovery was all messed up and so a change was demanded.
I share the shock that people actually went for it, but I’m not surprised that this seemingly nonsensical situation could happen.
Yes, also, their excuse for why “they’re eating the pets” was worth hearing out even as it was demonstrably false. Because even if it didn’t exactly happen, it is a reasonable perspective on what “those people” would do…
Someone is going to rationalize it by saying "while it was false, it was “directionally true”, just what the leftists would do so it’s worth thinking about.
Also assuming it became prolific enough to appear in output, would that mean it is “correct”?
I would assume that a screen reader will pronounce it properly. If it doesn’t, then that reader needs an update. Still think it’s a pointless thing to try to resurrect that character from the past and kind of annoying, but at least screen readers should in principle be able to pronounce it.
To be fair, it says “bubba” and the Clinton link is speculative.
The republicans have started trying to blame Obama for this years hikes…
It’s quite a leap, but they are trying to say ACA blew it all up, but it just took almost 20 years for the pain to hit.
It’s a narrative that really only works for the ride or die republicans, but it’s all they have to try, since they have no actual answer they want to propose…
I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”
There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.
I continue to think at least his administration, maybe not him specifically, drove prices up in 2025 on purpose.
Imagine midterm campaign ads, bragging about how prices have decreased, and citing annual percentage decrease. Damn near impossible when you are always trying your best to manage affordability but perhaps actually doable if you blow things up the year prior.
If they did somehow cut a partial rebate check from the tariffs right smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, they brag about lower prices and people feel the weight of that bonus in their pocket, even if it was their own money in the first place. Lots of people act like tax refund is some sort of spring bonus instead of repayment of a 0% loan they have to the government.
In short, they are going to win midterms by botching the off year.
That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.
Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.
I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.
I wouldn’t be sure the mini is a loss leader…
I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.
However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.
Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.
OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.
Probably true, but there is a chance they might convert some console gamers…
But not enough to bet on it with a loss leader probably.
I have been predicting that the tariffs will be dropped as we go into midterms. They are going to have so many campaign ads about bringing pruces so far down year over year…
So much easier to make a metric good if you screw it up first.
"This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls,
That’s not ‘barely legal’…
Frankly, the Xbox One and the PS4 marked those vendors transition to ‘tiny prebuilts’, by the standards one might call this a ‘tiny prebuilt’.
One could fairly argue that Switch is “just a gaming tablet/phone”
I doubt this one. It would require that Trump ever would care about the pleasure of anyone other than himself.
There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.
Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.
On the flip side, folks have repeatedly shown Trump to be susceptible to being manipulated. Famously flipping back and forth on issues based on who had the most recent pleasant conversation with him.
It’s distasteful, but an opportunity that shouldn’t be skipped. Otherwise only the worst people get their turn at manipulating him.