Terrarium

That also happens in the US of course. Big companies are very patent-happy because they can harass smaller companies with bogus patent lawsuits using them.

Trotskyists call themselves Marxists all the time. Ultras love to take that title for whatever reason.

As a rule, Germans are terrible.

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.

Yes exactly. One item that I use that wears down every few years is $35 with a coupon on AliExpress right now. It's $120 on Amazon. With tariffs and the removal of de minimis, it would become $100 on AliExpress and probably $170 on Amazon. I can justify $35 every few years but $100+ is not my kind of spending habit.

Costco is the latter but it's a grocery store so their mechanisms are limited. Here's a Costco union busting just a few days ago: https://dailyiowan.com/2025/03/30/workers-accuse-coralville-costco-of-union-busting/

Also you should accept that every company with a union wants it gone and is trying to find ways to kill it. Hire more staff to non-union positions, shrink union positions, delay contract negotiations, close unionized shops preferentially, buy off union leadership with perks/collaborationism. Many a petite bourgeoisie has shuttered their union shop citing financial problems only to reopen a few months later, suddenly union-free. And of course, slowly whittling away union sentiment and pushing a decert.

I've been buying a little more because I expect prices to skyrocket soon. Things I was planning to get anyways eventually but was in no rush to buy. Then I'll be in ascetic mode if this goes on for a long time.

"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.

The EU doesn't know how to do anything else.