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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Lmao, two idiots fighting. This seemed kind of inevitable, they’re not compatible personality types to work with each other.

    Elon definitely thinks he has more influence with trump’s crowd than he actually has, but I also think his position at twitter makes him dangerous to trump by undermining his ability to reach a lot of people who haven’t fully crawled down the maga conspiracy pipeline.

    I don’t think he’s going to be able to shift much support to Vance ether. Vance and his ilk are just to weird for most trump supporters.






  • Propaganda, is a craft, it’s a whole world of tricks and manipulations. Not just censorship and positive stories about the leaders. It can get shockingly sophisticated. We usually only take note of the obvious and obtuse propaganda.

    People aren’t dumb for believing it, it’s a whole field of figuring out how to convince people about things. Often if the propaganda doesn’t work on you, that’s because it’s not designed for you, or it has worked but the goal of it wasn’t what you thought it was.


  • One of the rhetorically effective things about his campaign messaging was how broad and vague it was. Pundits, podcasters, influencers, and those manipulating the algorithms of social media, took that messaging, isolated parts of it and recontextualized those parts for specific audiences.

    So while he may have assumed he was being very clear about what he was going to do, the messaging many of his voters got was totally detached from his intentions.

    A good example of this is people who thought that the tariffs would somehow be a tax levied on foreign countries, not a sales tax on imported goods. Or those who thought the tariffs would be targeted at specific goods categories to benefit their particular industry, not a blanket tariff that impacts their upstream supply chain.

    He told his subordinate on the campaign to get voters to vote for him, he assumed that meant convince them he was right, but that was impossible, the only ones that could get him the numbers he liked were the ones who just twisted what he said till people agreed with it.





  • So, thing is USDA guarantees a minimum price for stuff like corn and dairy, paying the difference between the actual market price and the minimum price to farmers. So the market price for them will drop but production won’t, and chances are, most of the stuff will end up getting thrown out or used in utterly absurd way. Closing USAID just removes a potential useful outlet for the surplus. Rather than corn getting used for subsidizing food costs in other countries, it’ll be up getting used to make potting soil, gasoline and dry wall. Not because it makes economic sense to do so, but because the government will pay the economic losses that are inherent in such wasteful use cases.


  • So the issue is, that those are two different categories. USAID tends to be food stuff that the US massively over produces, dairy, corn, soy, ect. These are all categories that are highly automated and don’t require much labor (relative to other categories)

    The places where the most migrant labor is utilized are things like fruits, vegetables, and meat processing. stuff that can’t be mechanized to the same degree as corn or milk. Stuff that doesn’t tend to get exported as part of USAID because it is in demand in the US.