While I agree it will happen more to minorities, they will abuse anyone they think they can away with abusing. They don't care about race per se, just power. They want to make other people feel small while puffing up their own ego.

Most of my clients are in a hiring / spending freeze, changing as little as possible.

Most companies are trying to thread the needle. They can't even guess how tariffs are going to work, it changes constantly, so they're all hunkering down. The ones in the best position are trying to stay somewhat static in regards with employees, meaning they're trying to hold onto talent while this plays out. At the same time they're dropping any unnecessary leases, slowing production as necessary, and more, to avoid any long-term commitments. Why? So they don't get caught flat-footed if tariffs are lifted, nor are they on the hook if tariffs are held.

I was thinking it looked more like AMEE from Red Planet.

We lived in a small town, with my grandparents across the street from the main cemetery. You could literally see how much good vaccination did by how many small children's graves there were right up to about 1960.

My mom, and her siblings, were part of the last group with smallpox vaccine scars. She, and her siblings, were also some of the first vaccinated against the scourge that was polio.

I brook no anti-vaxxers.

Simple: They don't want people, as George Carlin noted about his own education, turned into questioners.

Authoritarians, in general, attack education first shredding accessibility to education, and standards being taught by teaching to the minimums. Since a minimally educated populace is easier to control, the last things they want taught are things like philosophy. Any history that isn't "rah rah GO TEAM" is called unpatriotic blah blah.

Cue the right-wing echo chamber: "WHY YOU HATE CAPITALISM?!?! YOU A LIBRUL?"

Cue the right-wing politicians screaming, "WE REFUSE TO SUPPORT EBIL BIG GUBBERMINT OVERREACH OF GLORIOUS JOB CREATORS! CONSUMER CHOICE!"

Meanwhile normal people are treated like slime by large corporations with near zero oversight.

To be completely fair most jacked up trucks are absolutely flipping useless for farm / construction work. You want to ruin a pickup? Jack it up and put all that extra stress on the ball joints, axles, et al., and in general make the truck worse.

As my friend puts, there are trucks you use for work... and most of those are built like the ones from 1970's / 1980's with very little bling. Bling trucks are "sissy trucks" that are useless to get stuff done because you're too afraid to scratch something or it's just not convenient to use because it's jacked up to shoulder height.

Except even when that applies in a parallel manner, e.g. the tax on AvGas / JetA at airports, Republicans then want fees. Why? Because they want to eliminate the federal tax on fuel. The fun part is this is also regressive because the people who pay the most for the ATC system right now (via fuel taxes) use it the most. The little guy zooming around in a Piper Cherokee 6 from 1975 doesn't use much in the way of services, especially not compared to that corporate jet zooming around executive(s) or that private jet carrying a billionaire.

Still, they want to change to a fee to use system that will cut costs for the, .1% and airlines, overall. Ironically enough it will likely result in LESS money for ATC services. Big shock, I know. They proposed getting around that by charging a not insignificant fee to aircraft. Ironically speaking, that fee would be tax deductible for businesses and complex corporations that hold many private jets that lease the aircraft back blah blah blah. The end result being that the guy flying a plane that's 50 years old and costs about what an SUV costs pays a couple thousand in new taxes to fly around locally, while the person with a US$70M private jet flying around the country "pays" the bill only to write it off on the taxes resulting in a decrease to their costs.

As a friend noted:

Art Laffer, with his napkin sketch, has become the penultimate economic terrorist. Republicans, in general, for over 40 yeas now have engaged in economic terrorism against over 90% of Americans. At a time where pay became wildly disconnected with productivity, they have slashed and burned the social safety net, and stolen an untold amount of money to give away as tax cuts that benefitted a tiny number of people. As more people struggled they enabled even more direct wealth transfers directly upward to a tiny number of people by creating ever more loopholes that allowed wealth transfers between generations on a scale that would seem insane outside of a country with a nobility class.

Not that modern Democratic Party leaders are much better, they just apparently know to hide it a little bit. Republicans just went for broke with culture war hysteria and it worked because most people can't think critically when their lizard brain is triggered.

Let me guess: They also have a SWAT team using an MATV or similar military vehicle(s) where the maintenance costs in a year or two could buy a new cruiser, and they also have enough military weaponry to qualify as a military company?

One of my friends lives in a town where the police were all happy to ask for a military vehicle, until he brought up exactly how much the maintenance was for that vehicle and asked the village if they were going to cut police salaries. Considering they have almost nonexistent crime, other than stupid kid stuff like Toilet Paper in the trees. He was able to get enough taxpayers to raise a big enough stink that the department didn't get their big toy which made the police very sad. They still got their automatic weapons, which made them happy.

How many of them were, as one lawyer called it, "ticky tack charges to harass people or get the ability to conduct a search". Most of those searches he noted, turned up nothing.

At the same time don't be afraid to tell them to fark off if you have skills. Most of my friends who do networking / systems / databases get job offers while they're employed. As in people (headhunters) calling them up to see if they can be lured to a new employer.

What you might not get is a job at Meta, Google, Microsoft, or big name tech company. Does it really matter though, if you're getting decent pay and good benefits, if that jobs is at some smaller company? So you don't get to say, "I work for (insert large company name)" but instead have to say some small firm nobody knows.

A lot of what we see in this reporting appears, like RTO reporting, to be near propaganda. Employees, in general but especially knowledge based employees, actually demanding better treatment and pay really angered a lot of people.

That argument kind of falls apart as most of these companies bend over backwards to get access to China.

You think what the EU is asking is rough... don't try to do business in China.

Kind of like it's foolish to believe in a pinky promise from an American corporation regarding data privacy, believing a Chinese corporation on that subject is even less intelligent.

To get manufacturing back to the USA properly, if I recall the graph from an economist, you'd have to slash executive pay to the bone and lower dividends at some companies. That way employees make a decent (not glorious) wage and have benefits. The costs get even better if health insurance is automatic and independent of the employer.

A big chunk of money is shoveled into a few pockets in America. So while it's possible to build cars cheaper in China (or Mexico) due to lower labor costs much of that vanishes if you stop shoveling money into the hands of a tiny number of people.