Yeah, generally of a feature is vaguely expensive, they will not mandate it.

Where airbags hit the scene, they said that would work, but since it is so expensive you can do automatic seatbelts instead.

We are talking about a few dollars on a 30,000 dollar purchase…

I appreciate the online update/kill switch/repaiarability, lock out concerns, but these systems are surprisingly good for safety

On an early outing with my kid driving, we were going on a freeway next to a long line of cars waiting at an exit. Well suddenly someone pulls right in front of us, in a way that even if it happened to me I think I would have hit it, and certainly the car couldn’t brake in time and my kid swerved instead, a good call but one I’m sure would have left us running into the ditch at the speed we were going and no experience with that maneuver. However it was like a professional driver, managing to dramatically yank the car around the sudden slow car and neatly back in the lane after avoiding.

I was shocked my kid pulled that off with only 10 hours of driving experience, turns out the car had an evasive steering assist. Saved our asses.

Tons of videos about the emergency braking tests that should easily convince anyone of their value to safety.

In my car I haven’t figured out what sets it off, it happens all the the with nothing in the backseat.

I appreciate the intent, but at least in my car the false positive rate is so high I could imagine ignoring it

It is easy for them to have 0 income, and we should fix that. The means by which they can access ‘value’ of their wealth to pay for stuff without actually incurring a taxable event need to get closed. Primarily this seems to be about borrowing against wealth, which should be a taxable event, with an option to eventually get credit for loan repayment to assuage the ‘but but double taxation!’ crowd.

Upvoting for recognizing the double taxation but saying that is addressable.

Sure, you can get a credit later for repayment, suggesting that you paid the tax on other income. In the mean time, it’s effectively a 0% loan to the government between borrowing against the wealth and getting a credit for loan payment.

I think the wealth tax would be hard to get satisfactorily right. Either too little to feel like ‘justice’ or too much and you have people losing controlling interest in a company despite never really wanting it to get valued that much and never wanting to sell it.

Also, I think if you are head of a private company, you have a lot more ‘invisible wealth’ than the head of a public company, so there’s opportunity for a tax dodge through making your company private.

I like the idea of treating leveraging assets to actually have something spendable as income.

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.

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.

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.

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’…

This assumes this is an annual thing and not a one-time stunt.

I think this is a potential component in a ‘2025 sucks to make 2026 look better’.

Imagine that they use part of the tariff revenue over 18 months to issue a check roughly that size right smack dab in the middle of midterm campaign season. Maybe also implementing one of those random tariff pauses, say, 90 days covering the tail end of election season to get prices to maybe come down. If there’s one thing they should have learned is that the average person sincerely loves getting their own money back without interest and views it as a ‘nice bonus’, like they do every April.

So they drive prices up in 2025, then use some of that to ‘stimulus’ the voters as they implement pricing relief…

I think everything is coming together for them to win the midterms. People have already forgotten about USAID and similar, and maybe associate that more with Musk than Trump. People are pissed about the inflation but this would likely erase that concern particularly if they ease up for election season. They endangered people by taking away SNAP, but democrats caved and the Republicans have a chance to make short term healthcare extension and vindicate their ‘democrats caused this by being stubborn’ narrative. Further, since open enrollment closed and it’s “too late”, one thing I heard floated was implementing the subsidy as a cash rebate to those that would have benefited, and just like this refund here, that goes even further than reducing the costs in the minds of the voters. If they want a little boost they can also do things like throw RFK Jr. under the bus and install a vaguely credible person in his position, to illustrate they can improve things.

Well this is pretty much exactly what Republicans needed.

They pitched that they were perfectly willing to be reasonable and the democrats were the crazy ones.

Now they pass an extension, specifying to block the non-existent illegal immigrant gap and say “see, we were ready to take care of the people, but the democrats forced things to be bad, and these few democrats reluctantly came over which just proves they were in the wrong”

Another chunk of what I assume is their strategy: Make 2025 bad in ways to make it easier to make 2026 feel great by comparison.

They believe the “proper” stewards of society are the wealthy. In order for the wealthy to make the best of things, they need that money, so low taxes.

But the wealthy need something else, a desperate working class that will do anything the wealthy says just so they can eat and have some chance at things like decent healthcare. One of their favorite refrains is “nobody wants to work anymore”, and in part they blame government assistance for this perceived lack of workers or workers that are so uppity as to demand a living wage.

Of course desperate people can do something other than nicely do the things the wealthy tell them to. So that’s where “law and order” principles come in. Make a big authoritarian police force to discourage the more dangerous path that mass desperation can cause.

Well I’m not exactly happy about him so not the greatest example of who I would vote for.

To the extent that people are in his cult, he was a national celebrity heralded as the leader of multinational business concerns. That distinction should have carried huge burden of those concerns being crap, but the apprentice made him out to be smart supreme businessman.

As compelling as AOC might be. Her track record even in theory is a single congressional district.

I feel it’s premature to assume JD would be the GOP candidate. No one particularly likes him, even as some people like trump for whatever reason.

By winning they make MAGA folks go away? Sounds like double winning to me…

Yeah, I knew someone who voted that way, he voted for Trump and we see how that worked out…

I think the argument would be that the voter strategy changes and they vote their preference more confidently instead of going all prisoner’s dilemma and trying to vote the person that other people will vote for that is most acceptable. So a large volume of people vote for their second choice and never express their true preference in a FPTP system.

However, I do think he would have carried a FPTP system as well, the other candidates were all pretty terrible, and everyone 100% knew the Republican candidate was never going to matter so they didn’t even have to sweat the ‘who can pull the center’ thinking.