Back in 2017 there was also the framework of an agreement to have the US help develop and profit from gold and rare-earths in Afghanistan.

I’ll leave you to speculate how that turned out.

This place was skeevy as fuck (even by strip club standards) when I was there about 10 years back. One of the girls legit seemed to be having a mental episode and wasn’t making sense, claimed she knew me, and kept trying to talk to me. I left the club entirely after about 25 minutes.

That and there are second-order effects. If your business ordered a bunch of shit prior to all of this, and it’s now coming into port you may say “fuck it, send it back” or you may decide to accept it, eat the tariff, and preemptively increase your pricing on your future finished landed goods because you are now having to factor in pricing instability of the input components/materials.

Likewise, during the several months period of fluctuation, many businesses likely made a reasoned decision to stop ordering for the future because they don’t know if the market will tolerate them having to increase their prices by that much and they can’t afford to sit on inventory they will never sell. So even if the government declares “ha just kidding” and completely abandons tariffs today, there could be a period of 2-5 months where many products aren’t available because industries paused proactive ordering based on projected demand.

This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: “But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends”.

If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they’d finally decouple themselves from FB.

Russia isn’t negotiating in good faith. They find reasons to start/stop negotiations, they propose ceasefires while continuing to attack, etc. Basically they feel that time is on their side and they won’t have much to lose unless they are presented with real stakes. Difficult to do since neither the US or Europe wants a direct “hot” war with Russia, and meanwhile Putin doesn’t value human life. If he has to throw a couple hundred thousand more conscripts into the meatgrinder, that doesn’t bother him in the slightest.