This response is exxagerating and not actually engaging with what the comrade said. Please apologize to the comrade.

That thing weighs 50 lbs so it at least takes a good chunk of welding steel to put it together and it is probably made overseas and shipped. But there are a ton of brands out there that are basically US designers and sellers where the quality of what you get vs. what you pay for it varies a lot. I don't have a cargo bike and haven't really evaluated the different companies there, but I think this trend applies to alll bikes.

Though to put things in perspective a half decent standard bike with similar specs is $500-1000 new in the US. That bike has low end Shimano components and Tektro disc brakes. Those aren't oo-la-la expensive bike nerd parts but they are pretty good parts and a company selling such a bike knows this and is pricing according to what others charge for such things. I see a similar REI bike for the same price that has hydraulic brakes and would probably go on sale this year.

But it is a very silly market that wants to charge more for new hype because that delivers more profit. With some exceptions I recommend buying used instead. Kind of like with cars, half the value is lost moments after sale. Cargo bikes with that design are a fairly new trend, and so are disc brakes on anything other than a mountain bike, so it might take a little while to find a used one. But if you wanted a 2000s mountain bike or road bike with rim brakes man you could get one free from a dumpster or buy one for $75. And then throw on $200 of racks to hold stuff.

PS there's a Walmart one (Mongoose) for $600 new.

That sounds lovely

It's a close competition between which is worse. Thr grass lawn is usually accompanied by a ton of inputs that drain off and mess with the water aupply and native plants. The plastic disintegrates and also ends up in water and animals.

I've heard that there are a variety of grass alternatives that are appropriate for different climatic regions. If it were me and I wanted an open space to mesd around in I'd look into that.

The big players benefit from the business cycle. They build up big war chests when they think there will be a downturn abd then buy up all the smaller companies that fail. Overall everything gets worse but they don't really care about that.

I do think they are flirting with a massive crash that hasn't been seen in ages. Quantitative easing remains at full blast. There aren't many tools they would actually want to use to stabilize "the economy" when there is a crash. So it could just be a Great Depression 2.0. Tariffs destroy demand and the country is propped up by imperialist consumption + IP so I think this disaster has legs.

Of course Trump could reverse course on the tariffs and call them a negotiating tactic instead of a failure at any moment. Who knows.

Index funds are down around 5-10%. Currently things are quite uncertain. Some policies could be reversed and you'd see a rally. Demand might skyrocket for a month and then crash, making it a 20-30% loss. Is this the dip to buy? In generally individuals cannot reliably make that judgment. Uncertainty means you should ideally move away from volatility, at least just a little. If you're 80% index funds and 20% bonds or CDs or similar, consider 70-30 as a hedge. This could go either way, the point is that it is more conservative, it protects against large losses at the expense of average potential for gaining because the market seems particularly risky/volatile.

If you have cash to throw at a retirement fund and want to gamble (buy low sell high etc etc), I would personally wait a month or so. It is now more likely than ever that shortages and accompanying price hikes will hit. Commerce has small warehouses now. "Just in time" logic. That would cause an actual profitability crisis.

Ignore it. Maybe transfer a slightly higher amount to more stable bonds or something similar. Attempts to individually manage investments are usually over-tinkering.

I think it's not a bad idea to have some gold (in hand) if you can afford it. Not as an investment but as an inflation hedge and a way to buy a plane ticket in an emergency. Kind of like wearing a chain to afford bail but for the entire country.

"AI" is just pattern recognition and reproduction models. They routinely fail at basic tasks. It is like having an incompetent junior dev that you have to watch like a hawk because not only do they write bad code, they routinely steal it from copyrighted sources. It helps bad coders pretend to be good ones because their code follows a popular pattern but it is often the wrong pattern for solving the problem - a problem they didn't actually think about because they thought "AI" would solve it.

The real business case for LLMs in tech is as a propaganda tool for disciplining labor. Tech labor is in demand and therefore expensive. Executives and managers would like to decrease those wages and "AI" provides a rhetorical means by which to do so, including justifying rounds of firings. Productivity will crash because they are literally just layoffs to make higher profits, not because tasks have been automated.

This aligns with the general expectation of a market crash, which has been brewing for years and is now being more or less intentionally created. The big companies are building up "war chests" so that they can scoop up companies that fail and increase their monopolies during the later bailout period.

All lizards want to be a snake. But only a select few are chosen for greatness.

Republicans already set this precedent decades ago. Democrats retconned the power of the parliamentarian.

"Next time around, there's no going back now"

Republicans have repeatedly overruled or fired the parliamentarian for years and years. Democrats later tried to pretend they were an absolute roadblock for campaign promises.

They will "go back" immediately.

It will mean that sellers might as well warehouse stateside. So either there will be a bunch of new warehousing middlemen nonsense or it will all get folded into Amazon and Walmart with faster shipping times and 20-50% highet prices.

Many Chinese brands already do this. If you buy directly from their website they will ship it to you from a warehouse in Colorado or something and the price is better than Amazon.

I would also not be surprised if they just start using loopholes or trying to hide packages' value.