Economy

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I was told the line go up?

Endeavorance

Endeavorance

— 8 min read
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Scheduling Note

Hello, dear reader! This will be the last issue of Stuff Keeps Happening until May 5th. I will be posting stuff throughout the first half of April but will be taking a long-awaited vacation in the second half. Stuff Keeps Happening will resume its usual schedule starting in May. Thanks for reading! Now, about that stuff…

We've Been Liberated

So uh, whoops, eh? Looks like we accidentally had a country where a lifelong conman who bankrupted four casinos can somehow become president for a second term after committing a ton of fraud because somehow a critical mass of people thought he would actually be able to make the economy better despite the absolute mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Weird how the blanket tariffs were a bad idea. I wonder if anyone ever said that it was going to be bad? Who knows.

This past week, Trump announced his blanket tariffs that he's been so loud about in a day he dubbed "Liberation Day" in America. The tariffs seem to have been calculated either randomly or via a completely busted formula, but so far it just seems like chaos. The markets thought so at least, wiping out over a year of gains in two days.

Wait— that's not—

Thankfully, the tariffs also accomplish nothing. Wait; that's not thankfully. Whatever. They do essentially fuck all for the average American aside from increasing the cost of living dramatically. Some estimates put the increased annual expenditures for the average family in the thousands of dollars.

Kinda wild how quickly we went from the right thinking that The Administration was going to cut a check to every citizen for thousands of dollars to The Administration costing every citizen thousands of additional dollars in taxes.

But again, there was no way to possibly avoid this. It was an absolute given that we would be here. There was no alternative: we had to elect the man who looked into the sun during a solar eclipse back into the highest office in the land while he spent his entire campaign saying he would do exactly this, as well as talking about how he wants "generals like Hitler had." But gosh, it was just impossible to predict we would find ourselves in dire straits.

Ya Did Gud

On Saturday, an unprecedented number of United States residents took to the streets at over 1,300 locations across the country to protest the Trump/Musk Administration, including their attacks on queer and marginalized people, chaotic firing of tens of thousands of American federal workers, and generally just being gross weirdos.

We don't have the full attendance tally yet, but the numbers are in the millions. According to organizers, there were about 500,000 RSVPs to protest events in total, with virtually every event exceeding their RSVPs by at least an order of magnitude.

The protests remained peaceful with no real major stories of violence breaking out from either counter-protestors or cops. Also of note, while we don't have any real metrics, anecdotally it seems that the vast majority of those who went to these protests were white people aged 30+.

This is not particularly shocking considering there was a lot of online discussion in Black communities about this one being on the white people to handle, given the increased danger faced by minorities protesting under this admin, as well as the whole, "white people voted Trump into office" thing.

The Roof of Revolution

I was rightfully asked why this was not included in last week's SKH given the topic of "holy shit so many protests," and the honest answer is I had half-drafted an entry on this a few weeks back before getting distracted by… who can remember.

ANYWAY, uh, Serbia is going hard right now.

In November of 2024, the roof of a Serbian rail station collapsed, killing 15 people. The station had just finished a long, messy renovation, causing public outcry against the government's mismanagement of the project. Though, it was not just this one project. This broken roof was a catalyst—a single moment that perfectly encapsulated the failures of the Serbian administration over the years.

The protests began with students blocking access to their school campuses, but quickly escalated into nation-wide demonstrations that would go on to sustain through today. Just last month, Serbia saw the largest protest in the history of the country, with far beyond 300,000 people taking to the streets.

Protests are ongoing across the nation still today, with the people and the government in a bit of a stalemate just sorta waiting to see what happens next.

Gaming Stuff

Switch 2

Nintendo finally gave us a look at the details of the Switch 2, creating their signature mix of hype, hate, and befuddlement.

It console

Here's a breakdown of the three:

Hype

  • Larger 1080p screen in handheld mode
  • Up to 120fps in handheld mode
  • Joycons are larger, connect magnetically, and have nicer joysticks
  • When docked, it can do 4k 60fps TV output ("In compatible games")
  • Backwards compatible with most Switch games
  • Essentially brought back "DS Download Play" so people can join you in playing games if only one of you has a copy of it, including over the internet, and with support for Switch 1 players to join

Hate

  • Handheld mode screen is LCD, not OLED
  • Games are pricier, up to $90 in some cases, and cost more for physical versions

Befuddling

  • The gimmick this time around is that you can hold the JoyCons like a computer mouse and slide them on a surface to control games
  • They made a hardware tutorial game that costs money and is not included with the console
  • There's a video chat feature which supports streaming gameplay content to friends, but the demo showed it running at like 2 frames per second, but despite this they were so proud of it

Preorders in the US were supposed to begin April 9th, but Nintendo has since announced that they'll be pushing that back in light of the tariffs.

First they game for the Gamers, and I said nothing, for I was a Scrub.

A Terrifying Moment in Gaming History

We narrowly avoided catastrophe after fans of the upcoming Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4 remake noticed that the songs revealed so far for the game's soundtrack aren't quite the exact same as the original games.

As concern grew, Sir Anthony Hawk himself stepped in to clarify that he had a hand in picking the soundtrack for the game, and that he wanted to include new music from artists that he thinks people will love, citing that exploring new music is, in fact, good. He then promised more of the original songs will be included, avoiding tragedy of a scale we'd never recover from.

Technology Stuff

Talky Brain Chip Goes Fast

Researchers have developed a brain-implanted chip capable of turning thought into words nearly instantly.

Brain-reading computer chips have existed for a bit now, though the technology is still fledgling. While you may have heard of Elon Musk's Neuralink and how it killed a boatload of monkeys during testing, there have been many other research firms building "Brain computer Interfaces" for a while with extremely promising results.

This advancement in particular allows the chip to read what the patient intends to say, turning it into generated speech with just a 3-second delay. These chips have usually required much more time before now, often requiring complete sentences before synthesizing into speech. What we're seeing here is the next step towards helping people with total paralysis regain their ability to communicate freely in realtime. And, of course, the next step towards the ability to just directly beam shitty memes into your friend's head.

Twitter Troubles

Twitter may be facing somewhere in the range of $1 Billion in fines from the EU after they were found to have been violating the EU's Digital Services Act.

Remember how the blue checkmark used to mean you were a verified profile, and likely meant you were at least kinda important? Then when Elon took over, he made it so it was just "this person is paying for Twitter?" Well that was destructive enough to piss off the EU, who actually has laws in place to push back against rampant disinformation, especially for profit. So here comes Twitter selling "official account" badges to accounts that exclusively post wild conspiracy theories, and the EU ain't aight with that.

The fine could be so high because of a stipulation in EU law where they can use the fact that Musk privately owns Twitter along with several other massive companies, so the value of all those companies can be considered when tailoring a punishment.

Oh, also as a little kicker, Twitter suffered a massive security breach in January of this year, and seemingly had no idea. A hacker has since posted 200 Million users' data online, including emails, locations, and more.

Here's the Weather

Source: VentuSky

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