Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic “church” where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I’d probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it’s good to do something like this. Plus I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.

It’s complicated but I used to be essentially atheist but now believe that there is something one might as well call “God” after studying philosophy. Essentially everything has a cause and something must be at the end of that chain, and we might as well call that “God.” I also practice Christianity because I feel that it is good to have the community and structure that a religion can provide but I don’t think that “God” necessarily exists in the way Christianity typically presents it.

Yeah you can see this by the stock market bump from his election to his inauguration that investors largely believed it would be a good thing, and then he actually became president and started doing stuff and it immediately went back to normal, and now he’s just destroying the entire economy doing shit he said he was going to do and business people are all surprised Pikachu about it. No sympathy for them. The only people in America who deserve any sympathy are the ~1/3 of the American people who did literally anything to try to prevent this. Fuck the 1/3 who voted for Trump and fuck the 1/3 that became politically disengaged enough to not do anything even more. This is a corrupt and vile country and we deserve everything we’re getting.

“Man if it’s this bad under Trump imagine how bad it would have been under Kamala!” Or “At least we kept men out of women’s sports!” I think people who think this will impact Trump’s popularity at all with his core base are delusional and haven’t been to a Trump district. These people will never abandon him. Their devotion to Trump is like a religion. Even if Trump said Christianity is a false religion and all the Christians are stupid for voting for him a decent number of these morons would keep supporting him because everyone is a Trump whisperer and everything he says that they like is true and everything he says that they don’t like is a joke or trolling. There is no God but Trump, and Fox is His Prophet.

I think it’s worse than that. I think he legitimately thinks this is a good idea, and the sycophants that surround him are too afraid to oppose him.

I think the reason it’s not 100% is that Trump could say “lol jk guys I’m not actually going to destroy the world economy to own the libs” or Congress could theoretically stop it (lol) but yeah I think it’s probably optimistic because even if the tariffs don’t go into effect the chaos caused by them is already happening. I work in chemical manufacturing and the outlook seems very bleak, but most of my coworkers are Trumpists so they’re just in denial about how bad it’s going to be while management is tiptoeing around the fact that they’re already laying people off because of Trump’s expected antics.

Except in this case the emperor and all of his advisors have been telling people for months all about how he wanted to go around naked insisting that he is wearing clothing, and all of the dumbass peasants truly believe he’s wearing a beautiful new outfit in spite of the obvious fact that he’s running around naked.

If things don’t recover by the time I retire I have bigger things to worry about than retirement.

Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.