This article from the Financial Times explains the problem.

In a nutshell this isn’t about VAT, it’s about “Customs Duty” which are apparently two separate things in the EU.

I’m in the United States and we’re struggling with this same issue. The flood of cheap goods being imported via TEMU / SHEIN that intentionally stay below the value required to pay import duty is large and growing problem.

It’s also bad for the environment in every way imaginable.

Unfortunately and sadly doesn’t surprise me anymore.

It shouldn’t surprise you at all. Any notion of “Free Speech” on Internet Platforms was shot in the head during the Trump Presidency and then the corpse was burned at the stake during the Pandemic. There were vast quantities of myopic morons making the arguments “These are private companies, they can do what they want!” along with “You have no right to speech on someone else’s platform!” simply because they approved of what was being done.

Now the arguments being used by 2017-2022 MAGAtards are being shouted by 2023-2024 Liberals / Progressives.

It’s pretty obvious that social media as a whole is just a corrupt mess.

It’s pretty obvious that people are perfectly happy with restrictions on the other person but never themselves.

People forget that the restrictions they hammer the other person with today are going to be used against them tomorrow. Plan accordingly.

and don’t understand why we’re plowing ahead with two candidates no one really wants as president.

That’s easy to understand; it’s because the two primary political parties run the show from bottom to top and they both managed to make serious political miscalculations at the same time.

Democrats screwed up by repressing all their younger members for the past 15-20 years in favor of their established power brokers; now their cupboard is bare right when they need it most. The Republicans miscalculated by assembling behind Trump in the first place and then they did it again by re-assembling behind Trump.

If this country’s politics weren’t being totally controlled by Ds and Rs now is when a 3rd Party Candidate (Libertarian, Green, etc) could gain some serious traction.

There isn’t the political power to do it.

That’s the entire problem, full stop. This wouldn’t even have gotten to SCOTUS if Congress would have held POTUS accountable via impeachment. The reason Congress didn’t is partially due to political pressure from voters but mostly because the HoR is far too small to adequately represent 300,000,000 people.

They’re not giving him immunity for everything he did as president, they just aren’t interested in being the authority that decides what is or isn’t an “official act”. They are letting lower courts decide that.

That’s pretty much what they did but that’s not how it’s being presented by the media so you’ve got 30,000,000 people all riled up and ready to riot. I would have preferred if SCOTUS found a way to definitively settle this without the Remands but I understand why they did it.

The lower court will take about an hour to decide that this stuff was “unofficial” and write the legal narrative supporting that. Hell I’d be shocked if it wasn’t already done. This isn’t even close to over.

You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.

A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called “Blue Collar” jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There’s 100,000 MBA’s out there looking for a job and there’s 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.

“World War III started 3 years ago” is the stuff of a conspiracist’s fever dream and is not based in any objective reality

I would have said that too…until I watched the Ryan McBeth video about it. I’m still not sure he’s correct but he does make a convincing argument that were not only in it but that it started in 2014.

Banks lend money based on your assets. And when you have very large asset holdings, those loans can have very favorable terms.

Yes and there’s two problems with this scheme; one is large and the other could be an apocalypse.

The first problem, the large one, is that the wealthy aren’t paying taxes on the money they receive from those loans. This starves the Government of the funding that it needs which causes endlessly escalating deficit spending as the rest of the population cannot provide enough tax revenue to cover everything the Government needs to do.

The apocalyptic problem is that their scheme only works when those assets appreciate in value. If they decline in value, or even just hold steady, it collapses. Right now the wealthy take out another loan, either on a different asset or on the same assets appreciated value, in order to repay the original loan. However if assets decline in value, or even hold steady, they’re unable to keep “flipping” loans like this and they’ll need to come up with the cash to actually repay them. Which means that they’ll have to actually sell some of their assets, as this spreads to more and more of the wealthy the marketplace will enter a value reduction spiral (too many sellers and not enough buyers) and as that happens the Lenders, the banks, will be left holding assets that have increasingly less value. This will quickly lead to an unstoppable chain of Bank failures.

We’re arguably already in the spiral with Commercial Real Estate values continuing to decline and CRE Mortgage default rates are climbing. We’ll likely reach the tipping between late 2024 and mid 2025, then the bank failures will really start to ramp up.

Somewhere in there the stock market will start to deflate as the wealthy seek liquidity to stave off foreclosures. Once it deflates enough it too will collapse.

If you’re not familiar with the pending CRE crisis this Business Insider article explains it pretty well.

It’s quite possible that we’re standing on the edge of another “Great Depression” event.

Since the study was from Europe I’m going to assume that the primary thing holding people back from plugging in is that they can’t. Many, if not most, of them will live in multi-tenant dwellings and most of those dwellings likely don’t have the infrastructure to make it possible.

It’s the same problem that apartment dwellers here in the US have, there’s nowhere convenient to recharge.

At this point, I honestly don’t care if the Arab world stomps them flat.

You would likely end up caring a whole helluva lot when Israel hammers their red funni button and turns the capital cities of the attacking nations into glass.

People can claim that they wouldn’t do it but THE use case for nukes is existential threat…and that’s exactly what you’re describing. Its in those exact situations that Atomic Fire comes out to play.

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

That was the answer right there. Stuff the assholes in your ignore list and forget that they exist. Too many people on the internet are wanna-be cops out to police everyone else’s ideas, language, or tone. The other person in a dispute is always a Commie or a Fascist and needs to be silenced as quickly and brutally as possible.

The internet wasn’t for normies and making it easy for them to participate was a serious mistake.

The law was written by gun controllers some 90 years ago.

So literally no 1A violations can possibly exist, and nothing is being censored.

You need to check closer. The DoD has a contract with them; which means that NG has a financial interest in doing what the DoD tells them. An arm of the Federal Government interfering in private media, and yes that includes fact checking, absolutely has the possibility of creating 1A violations.

This echoes generic fear mongering of regulation from the conservative side.

No it acknowledges that changes that can be made from one administration to the next.

What are some bad things the EPA has done in your mind?

This took nearly 30 years.

Saying the government shouldn’t have the power to regulate emissions that are destroying the biosphere is absurd.

I haven’t said that nor would I but $GovernmentAgency isn’t a synonym for “The Government”. What’s being discussed are the limits of an Agency attached to the Executive Branch relative to the power of the Legislative Branch.

What does “but will it always” do good things even mean?

This, this right here is what it means.

The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules.

That’s what can happen when an Agency of the Executive “does things” on its own authority.

If the EPA ever start doing truly asinine things, then we elect leaders to change the laws dictating their mandate.

How’s that been working out for the last 20 years?

This one got at least Airbus and Spirit as well and it’s quite possible that it’s related to the CFM / AOG Technics debacle out of the UK last year.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/engine-maker-cfm-says-up-96-planes-affected-by-fake-parts-probe-2023-09-20/

It’s not that the titanium metal is fake, it’s probably real. By “fake” what they mean is that the part made with the titanium isn’t what the documentation for it claims. It may have been made by a different company than what the documentation says or it may not have been tested in the way that the documentation says.

Every last piece, down to the tiniest screw, in a commercial airplane has a paper trail and for these parts someone is saying that the paper trail has been falsified. That’s the “fake” part.

it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

Wow, that’s a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I’m currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.

When I opened the page in FireFox I was prompted to manage cookies. I clicked on that and then clicked the “site vendor” tab.

I got the latest version to work on Linux Mint but don’t ask me how because I can’t tell you.

What would you even do with a PC that never has internet access?

The idea that computers should always be online is less than 20 years old. Even in the early 2000s it wasn’t uncommon for most employees in a company to NOT have Internet access. Companies, and people, bought or wrote software and then ran it to accomplish the task. No internet needed.

I’d argue that many employees in regular non-technical positions STILL don’t require Internet access to do their job unless they have to sign into some kind of cloud portal