It’s not the suppression of wages as much as it is an effective tax break for the poor achieved through hiring undocumented immigrants and paying cash. By not withholding taxes, the workers are effectively being paid 30%+ more for their labor.

The solution, once again, it to tax the wealthy more to provide relief to everyone else.

Undocumented people who are paid cash don’t pay income tax, social security, or Medicare. That allows them to be paid considerably less money, which keeps food costs down nationwide.

And cheap, plentiful food is absolutely essential to the US. Its political stability has always been tied to the economics of farming.

The Civil War was absolutely about slavery, but it was also about economics and food security. The South depended on slavery to keep prices low. There were millions in the South who didn’t own slaves and knew slavery was wrong, but were so afraid that the economic impact from losing the free labor would prevent them from putting food on the table that they were willing to kill to keep the evil institution alive.

Look at all the most politically turbulent periods in American history (turbulent as in people were at or near to mass violent revolt), and you’ll find food insecurity.

A hungry crowd is an angry mob.

So the US has worked HARD to keep food cheap. While there are people in the US who struggle with proper nutrition and may not know where their next meal will come from, you don’t have many people literally starving to death. Food can always be found somewhere. For now.

Now we have an incoming administration that’s threatening the food supply. And unlike 1861, there’s no “greater good” to justify it. Trump just wants to deport the cheap labor specifically to hurt immigrants because he’s fucking evil.

If he goes through with this insanity, crops will rot in the field and grocery prices will quadruple while the prices of imports also skyrocket from tarrifs. We have some really hard days ahead.

She very heavily implied it was for bioweapons. Why else would having laboratories be justification for war?

She 100% supports letting Russia bulldoze Ukraine.

She’s only anti-war where war is against Russia’s interests.

In 2017, she visited with Assad, and then she started saying the US was behind terrorist attacks in Syria. In 2022, she accused the US of helping Ukraine develop bioweapons, and that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was justified.

She has parroted Russian propaganda for years now, and Russia plays clips of her doing so as “evidence” they were accurate.

And there’s the little detail that in the last few years she’s changed from Democratic Presidential primary contender to far-right Kremlin-backing MAGA troll.

At this point her not being compromised by Russia would be a shock.

Having to carry dongles and hubs to connect to devices severely impacts the convenience of a laptop.

That’s great for a docking station setup. But if all you need is docking stations at home and the office, just get a mini PC/ machine mini.

Laptops are supposed to be useful without a docking station, and if all you have is USB-C you can’t even read most thumb drives.

Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.

You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.

Failing to preserve evidence is sacntionable, even if it isn’t willful destruction. The penalties generally aren’t as stiff, but if the judges accepted “Oopsie, we accidentally destroyed evidence we were required to preserve” as a defense, there would be an incentive to destroy evidence and claim it was an accident.

The fact that most companies still turn over evidence that’s damning to their own cases is the proof that it’s generally a bad idea to accidentally destroy evidence.

Look at it another way: If you’re speeding and get pulled over, would a judge let you off if you tell him you were only doing 70 in a 35 because you weren’t paying attention to the road?

Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?

Incompetence has a price.