Are those figures mean wages? Or median wages?

Because the difference between those is a vast gulf.

Median. BLS barely tracks mean wages at all because it's extremely hard to do.

The problem with that last is that if the Democrats do nothing, there's a very real chance that Trump deploys the military to either prevent the midterms from happening, or to force their outcome to be what he wants.

(Of course, if they do something there's still a chance he does that—they have to do the right thing and they have to do it well to reduce the chances by much!)

There's also that pesky matter of, y'know, their constituents. Who are getting bled dry by the stagflation that's happening.

The US has no VAT.

So that makes it even worse then because Sales Tax has no input credits to offset against.

While in the abstract and academic sense this is true, in practice there are two big problems that make it an utter non-starter*:

1) Due to the absolutely massive supply chains that have been built up in East Asia (not just China, but many other countries around there), and lack of same in the US, even for products where it's physically possible to produce it all domestically, from the raw materials on up, it would take decades of sustained investment without return before actual consumer products could be made on anything other than a one-off basis. Any step that can't be done in-country gets the tariffs slapped on again. And there are a fair number of raw materials we just don't have, at least not in the kinds of amounts that, um, the entire rest of the world does, that are required for mass production.

2) Trump isn't applying tariffs in a strategic manner to get domestic manufacturing to come back. He's applying tariffs as his personal punishment stick, and to all appearances that's the best he's actually capable of doing with them. In order for any of what I described in #1 to happen, ever, the tariffs need to be applied consistently, predictably, and for a long time.

Trump doesn't want to do any of that. He's just found a magic stick that makes people kowtow to him, and he's going to use it however he pleases.

* Not that I think you're unaware of these, based on your post; to a large extent I'm just expanding upon your second paragraph here.

> China currently dominates the production of rare earths and the US doesn't have sufficient reserves, but Australia does, so higher tariffs on China than Australia create an incentive to move mining operations to Australia which breaks China's lock

There are "sufficient reserves" (known rare earths in the ground) across the globe and the US absolutely has large reserves.

> to move mining operations to Australia which breaks China's lock

There are already mining operations in Australia delivering raw concentrates in bulk to China. Again, not a shortage of mining operations or a shortage of reserves in the ground.

It's the concentrate processing that China invested time and capital in decades past - every other country about the globe (save for Malaysia, to their regret) figured they'd leave the acres of acid ponds and low level radioactive waste to the Chinese.

Now the US wants Australia to take that on, and that's a deal with the devil for Oz while the current POTUS cannot be trusted to hold up any deal.

Statistically speaking, I'd take the worst of any hundred government bureaucrats over any single billionaire as far as "terrible humans" go.

For now, it is, yes; but we must both plan for a future when that might not be the case, and advocate for effective regulations regardless.

I've been cooking eggs on induction cooktops for something like a decade now; while it's true that you can't tilt the pan (the induction won't work, and the cooktop is likely to just say "nope, not operating without a pan on me"), I've had no trouble with getting either scrambled eggs or omelettes to be softly and evenly cooked.

Perhaps it helps that I had never had that particular advice for cooking on gas/electric!

> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.

I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)

I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)

The combination of

- a programmer's text editor

- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)

- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files

- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top

- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)

- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP

- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)

...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.

So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.

Have you tried Geany? It's what I use often. IDK about privilege escalation, you may need some sort of fumbling around with xhost.

SFTP is an interesting one, I am not sure how the interaction with filezilla goes. I tend to just use scp or edit files in nano over ssh.

So..."try this" that ignores multiple of my requirements.

I think you're describing emacs, or vim. :)

OK; you got me. I was insufficiently prepared for pedantry. Let's add another couple of critical points:

- Must be a GUI application.

- Must integrate at least somewhat reasonably with the platform's keyboard shortcuts and similar, not have its own entire way of doing things that needs 6 years to learn.

Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.

BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.

You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.

You're awfully condescending for someone who started out claiming to be genuine.

That sucks. Good luck out there.

(responding to your edits, for the possible benefit of any readers who are genuinely interested...)

Both emacs and vim can do side panels, and remote editing.

Just as an additional anecdata point:

I run a small, niche browser game (~125 weekly unique users, down from around 1500 at its peak 15 years ago), and until I put its Wiki behind a login wall a few months ago, we were getting absolutely hammered by the bots. Not open source, not anything of particular interest to anyone beyond those already playing the game and the very select group of people who, if they found it, might actually enjoy it. (It's all text, almost-entirely-player-driven, and can be very slow at times, so people used to modern mobile games and similar dopamine factories tend to bounce off of it very quickly.)

Some of the UAs we saw included Claude and OpenAI, but there were a lot of obviously-bot requests to the Wiki that were using generic UAs and residential IPs.

If there's a concerted effort to swamp open-source projects, it's not the only thing going on. I think it's much more likely that the primary cause of this flood is people who a) think they have the right to absolutely everything on the internet, b) expect everyone they scrape from to be actively trying to hide the data from them (so, for instance, they will ignore any exposed API), and c) don't care either how many resources they use, or how much damage they do.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Whether or not they had malice in their hearts when they implemented the scraper bots, their impact is still very much malicious.