I think for me:
1. the stress of living under such destructive leadership
2. my workplace is melting down, due to financial constraints that weren't guaranteed otherwise, but are probably worse
3. Similar with local politics, except the funding was a little more guaranteed in the alternate timeline.
Not yet, but my location helps a lot. On the other hand, a good friend had an amazing career as a USAID contractor, and had worked his way up to where he was regularly chief of party. Trump not only blew up his job but his whole entire economic sector. (His most recent project was also like 85% finished, but it was in software so it couldn't be used until completely done. Total loss now.)
My primary client got defunded and now I'm scrambling to rebuild my business.
My doctor, beloved by me and a whole lot of other trans people in the East Bay, is moving to Canada.
Good news if you're working in drug development - pharma companies are bullish on the demand for measles treatments. https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/measles-treatment-vaccine-infection-numbers-c8327637?st=U4LzFx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
"Saravir Biopharma, which was launched in July in collaboration with Columbia University to develop a measles monoclonal antibody, is banking on a continuing decline in vaccination rates to further fuel a need for measles treatments--and in turn, more investor interest."
My 13-year-old is (understandably!) freaked out about ICE - in particular after Rümeysa Öztürk was snatched up, since that was two blocks from our house, but he also knows that he has classmates with undocumented relatives nearby. I think it's precipitating a more general anxiety disorder.
Now we're wondering what to do about seasonal vaccines (flu + COVID) and being bitter at the apparent absence of Novavax this season (my wife in particular has really intense reactions to the mRNA vaccines, which she'd much rather avoid).
The fear and chaos and doomscrolling is definitely taking a psychic toll. I'm unclear when that crosses the line into being a material problem.
Stress of my employer and possibly my whole subprofessions being at existential risk - and another 18 months of this at least until the work requirements kick in, waiting to see if it pans out.
Compatriots in a friend-ish group, naturalized citizens born in Mexico, who reasonably don't want to go out of the country.
I have a doctor you wouldn't know. She's in Canada.
The vast majority of my workplace insanity (of which there's kind of a lot) is driven by state-level Republicans and local leadership, so really only indirectly connected to Trump. There has been a lot of chaos caused by delays in grants, but most of it hasn't directly impacted me yet, and most of them the money did come through eventually (in some cases well after it was spent).
The biggest direct impact on me is that I was running graduate admissions and there was just huge amounts of problems caused by the budgeting uncertainty. We had a hard cap on how many students we could enroll, no clear instructions on how that interacts with the April 15 agreement, and huge uncertainty in what the yield would be since many other universities were cutting class sizes or even rescinding admissions they'd already given. In the end it all worked out fine, but I was extremely stressed about it.
My grant proposal got recommended, though with a 30% cut. It's hard to say how much of that cut is directly attributable to Trump, but probably some of it. That's a clear direct material hit, I'll make around $15k less two years from now and also my grad students will have to teach more. Of course, recommended is not technically the same thing as approved, so there's still some change of a much bigger hit.
The dollar is down around 10% since Trump's inauguration against both the Euro and the Pound, so the month that I just spent in Europe was 10% more expensive than it would be without the tariffs. Tariffs have also caused some annoyances with shopping (e.g Spier & Mackay not being usable for several months).
There's been several things that would hugely impact my job (big cuts to science funding, elimination of indirect costs for grants, big changes to student visas, the university getting the ban hammer because it had (brutally suppressed) Palestine protests) but none of them have actually happened yet.
Oh, the startup my brother was going to start working for is frozen in utero. He has a lot of job uncertainty as a biological researcher.
Didn't Barry or someone recount a Lebanese person saying "Trump's fine with the Lebanese" with the expectation that they would be handled with kid gloves? About that.
11: I'm sure the lefty protesters will find some way to blame this on Biden.
At any rate, that's the price you pay for having a president who was willing to push for a ceasefire in Gaza!
I have plenty of job uncertainty, but no damage yet. We've delayed or avoided several large purchases because of fears of unemployment, but made others because of fears of tariffs.
MPOW laid off hundreds of people last week. I had planned to be on the job market this summer and now I'm not likely to risk or leave my job anytime soon, and I'm pretty depressed about it. I had a two-year plan to prepare for a career change, which is the only reason I didn't go on the job market two years ago, and now I'm not sure I made the right choice. On the other hand, almost anything else I could have gotten in the past few years would have been more precarious.
My current job is stable enough that a person could basically hold it until retirement (barring a more serious economic collapse), and I guess I shouldn't grumble about it too much. But the idea of doing it for another couple decades is kind of depressing. What I'd like to do is make one more attempt to do a job where original research is valued. The country savaging the funding for that type of work, plus my advancing age, doesn't make me too optimistic about it. Sometimes I wonder if I should just have a single-minded focus on getting rich enough to retire "young" (in my 50s).
One of the weird things I'm privy to is that because many payments come in at a long delay, my organization, despite facing major cuts in a year or two, is doing pretty decently financially - I may even get a bonus under existing triggers. (It's not in a sustainable way, even without Trump, but still good in certain key outcomes.) Which makes it weird to be projecting huge hits we need to prepare for.
The problem with retiring early is that fucking with Obamacare dramatically increases how much I need to retire.
On a more mundane level, I feel like the gap between making your own coffee and buying coffee has grown substantially. I probably should go back to quitting coffee for the same reason I quit a couple years ago* but earlier this year there was a deal at the supermarket on coffee grounds and I couldn't pass it up.
Speaking of discounts, I've bought some electronics in the past 8-10 months that seemed to be heavily discounted to try to get sales in before the tariffs really hit. I'm a little annoyed that something I bought last December came out in a new model earlier this spring and had not become more expensive during that time. Not sure what it costs today.
*Health problem that cleared up enough for me to gradually start drinking coffee again. But the problem may be returning and coffee doesn't help.
6: Tim's company, which manufactures a lot of vaccines, sent out an Occupational Health e-mail saying that they would offer on-site flu vaccines as well as off-site clinics for family members. They also said that if you were on their health plan, flu vaccines were covered t the pharmacy, and they encouraged us to ask for one of their flu vaccines by name and ensure that the pharmacy had it in stock.
Last year, their off-site clinics offered COVID shots, and that wasn't mentioned. When the first booster was authorized for at-risk people, the criteria were pretty loose. I believe Seasonal Affective disorder qualified, and who doesn't have that in Massachusetts?
I e-mailed the State DPH to ask about access and coverage. The nurse who wrote back was pretty wishy washy. But to my specific question about whether you would need to get a note from a doctor or could self attest, she suggested that self attestation would be sufficient.
19: Have you tried tea? I'm not quitting coffee, but I'm trying to cut back by drinking hot tea in the afternoon.
19: Wow. I just checked the coffee CPI. June 2025 prices were 31% up YOY, and on an upswing since roughly November. (By contrast, during the previous bout of inflation, coffee price growth peaked at 39.6% YOY in July 2022.)
Actually I must be missing something, because I overlaid the same stat for CPI - All Goods and by that metric inflation has not dropped below 7% to this day. I'll take a closer look. But coffee inflation definitely outpacing general.
Okay, I had selected change in index from year ago, when I wanted percent change from year ago.
Same picture, a little less stark. Peak general inflation previously was 9% in June 2022, peak coffee inflation was 20.3% in July. As of June 2025, general inflation remains flat, but coffee inflation has risen to 13.4% and rising.
22 and 24: I need to order some tea from my favorite company before the prices on the skyrocket.
The coffee prices are not just about the tariffs in the US; they've been going up elsewhere due to a couple of years of not great harvests and increased demand from China.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002cf3c
In a pinch if I just want caffeine, like before going on a walk first thing in the morning, I'll just take a low dose jet alert caffeine pill to avoid coffee withdrawal. My old boss used to do that whenever she whitened her teeth.
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
12: Heightening those contradictions, comrade
Someone wants me to pay $25 for a bottle of "Central Valley" wine. I think inflation is getting out of hand.
We switched to getting our coffee at Costco, so we're still paying less than we used to.
Those are some pretty heightened contradictions.
I have a decent stockpile of non-caffeinated teas.
I order from a local roaster which automatically sends me a selection of medium roast coffees. I don't think they've raised their prices that much, so I'm expecting a big increase at some point.
I noticed that even the price of coffee at Aldis has gone up.
36: I didn't notice the first set of grocery inflation, because 1) Tim got a much better job with a really big raise and 2.) we switched from Wegmans to Market Basket. Market Basket's prices are generally lower at baseline, so they were either lower or the same as what we had been paging t Wegmans even with inflation.
Our son went to college and that really cut our food spending. Then Costco.
I saved a lot on food back when I was a breathairian, but I spent it all on fancy designer air.
The Pizza Hut is five minutes from our house and if we decide that the grease is probably not that horrible for us, I can have dinner plus leftovers in thirty minutes for less than $30.
Dividing groceries into the major BLS categories and annualizing their CPI growth since December:
- Cereals and bakery products: +0.4%
- Meats, poultry, fish, eggs: +5.3%
- Dairy and related products: -0.5%
- Fruits and vegetables: -1.4%
- Other food at home (frozen foods, soups, snacks, sugar, candy, fats, etc.): +2.2%
- Nonalcoholic beverages and beverage materials (coffee, soft drinks, juice, etc.): +7.7%
- Alcoholic beverages at home: -0.4%
So overall grocery inflation is pretty flat, but the picture varies.
People on the internet are complaining about the cost of soda. I don't drink soda though. Our splurge is five eggs a day, all the good kind from chickens with access to parks and libraries.
My mom's greatest complaint in life is that she has to eat an egg every day. They tell her she needs the protein, but she hates it.
I have much less to complain about than many other feds. But the anger and disgust I felt from having to report to Elon Musk, even indirectly, is not going to go away for a long time.
Cassandra has lost all telework ability, so I have less company during the day. She's also very stressed by and unable to keep from dwelling on the news.
There's been a messy reorganization and general upheaval at my job, but I'm not sure it's directly caused by the current administration.
Our plans to renovate our house are on hold indefinitely. I'm not sure work would have started this year if Harris had been elected, but it definitely wouldn't with Trump. Don't want to take out a second mortgage when literally everything is more unstable.
All in all, not all that much, really. I wish Cassandane was coping better, though.
People say there is inflation but for $50 I just bought a quarter ounce of weed at a dispensary, which is the same price you would pay in the parking lot of a Phish show in 1995.
time for another nighttime MRI! whatta summer.
Remember to leave your gun in the car or the lobby.
It's been only six and a half months.
But it's the eighth month that is messed up.
3: That sucks so bad, Spike. I'm sorry.
(1) My trans kid's anxiety is through the roof, feeding his depression.
(2) My trans kid's trans husband is equally anxious and depressed.
(3) Medicare is great, but it's getting hard to get specific things without jumping through dozens of hoops. (Example: Dr Skull needs a continuous glucose monitor to help with his cellulitis, and none of the pharmacies in our area can run those through Medicare; we have to get them from a diabetes supply warehouse, which means submitting a letter of pre-authorization to the warehouse which will then call us and interrogate us about why we need the monitors -- we still haven't gotten this call -- and then submit the request somewhere else, and then I don't fucking know, but he's been out of the hospital since July 23 and we still don't have the monitor. We can buy our own, but that's $185/month.)
(4) Dr Skull's new CPAP required equal hoop-jumping, including having to drive to the next town north to talk in person to a CPAP tech who had to be convinced Dr Skull needed one and was using one. This is after the old CPAP broke in the middle of the night, and he was without one for two nights.
(5) I have retired so I don't teach anymore but watching my colleagues, via FB, try to dance around the no-DEI rules is just awesome, and by awesome I mean I am so glad I retired before this shit came down.
So far, mostly just having parts of my family I will never see or speak to again except at funerals.
"Dr. Skull" is the new pseud I've heard in a while, unless it's not new and I'm getting forgetful.
64: Just curious, does this situation differ from his first time, and if so how?
65: Dr. Skull has been around as a side character for a long time, but I don't think he's ever actually commented here.
My kid's field has been decimated by R policy, so there's roughly speaking no work for new hires in the field. He got his Masters last year, moved back in spring after getting 3 offers followed in short order by messages informing him that the position had been cut/withdrawn. I live near DC so the local job market for plan B jobs also did not work, saturated with ex-feds. He's pretty pissed, but has now found something in a smaller city a few hours away, a role he's not happy about at a growing company. Fingers crossed.
Yeah, I've got a kid trying to get work the DC job market, and it's rough. Another kid got an internship with the FAA -- and then the internship got canceled - but picked up a better one involving NASA. So it's an ill wind that blows no good.
We're going through some personal upheavals that I can't talk about yet - but that are pretty directly related to the current environment. (Similar stuff has been discussed above.)
If there's one thing Trump definitely loves it's gold. Nevertheless.
To answer the OP there is no merit pay raise this year for anyone at my institution. That would have been a nice chunk of money.
Dr Skull is the name my spouse's poetry workshop gave him when they were all giving themselves punk names. Now I use it as his online name.
Good news for most (though not for my Nigeria predictions).
I'm going to Costco in a bit, so I may stock up.
63: CPAP non compliance is so common that a lot of commercial insurances are pretty strict about it. Also some Durable Medical Equipment companies are scammy. I know I had CPAP for a while, and they were pushing replacement tubes faster than necessary, because the insurance company pushed them. There's been specific DME fraud where people stole Medicare bendficoaries' numbers to run up bills with DME companies.
This was a big enough problem that it was affecting the performance of a number of
ACOs, and Medicare decided to hold them harmless for that prtion of cost trend.
If wearing a mask in public while awake triggers a third of the county, I don't understand how there's enough people willing to wear a CPAP while sleeping to support a market.
When I got a CPAP recently (with pretty high-quality Kaiser commercial coverage), they sold me the machine, so I don't have to worry about losing it. Maybe about losing coverage for supply refills.
My understanding is that if I go below 70% of nights with 4 or more hours on CPAP then my insurance company is going to send me a bill. They've got the wireless tracking to report on my usage. It really sucks to be lying awake at night with 3 hours and 54 minutes of use and then having to wait six agonizing minutes before you can get rid of the damn thing and go to sleep.
It's like how if you had diabetes, you'd have to use all your insulin even if that meant you needed to eat a bag of circus peanuts to stay alive after.
I might have submitted a guest post request about this, but it's on topic in this thread: what do people think about Trump's alleged crackdown on crime/homelessness/general life in DC? NPR article, one of many Reddit threads, and there's going to be some kind of press conference this morning.
I figure there's a 25 percent chance that this is a nothingburger tantrum distraction because someone was mean to DOGE, a 25 percent chance that it's a key part of a plan for federal takeover of law enforcement or martial law in general, a 90 percent chance it'll result in more harassment of homeless and poor people for no good reason, and an at most 5 percent chance it actually helps with any real problems. (The chances are independent.)
84: I have no concrete thoughts. But I do think that there are real concerns about the rights of people with disabilities, most especially those with various levels of "serious" mental illness.
They were calling on states to institutionalize the homeless mentally ill. And at the same time a lot of the MAHA stuff is implicitly devaluing the luves of people with disabilities. So, everyone witn autism is incapable of any kind of normal life. Or an overemphasis on how children who die of covid have underlying conditions (not true if they're completely unvaccinated). The pro measles stance is also saying basically that it's ok for vilnerable people to get measles, etc.
84: looks not good to me based on his press conference.
84: Did I miss something?! If so, I'm sorry.
Also DC seems like such a prime target for Trump, mostly because there are a lot of not-white people.
84 was mentioned on our work call this morning.
86 was me.
87: He nationalized the DC police (which he is entitled to do during an emergency for 48 hours), threatened to send in the national guard and said that Baltimore was next.
87: Sorry. He did send in the Huard and is threatening to send in the military.
This whole series of created "crisis" after the previous crisis has me convinced that there's a video of an identifiable Trump agency killing Epstein.
He wants his Tiananmen Square moment. Fortunately for us pulling DEA and FBI agents off of organized crime cases and the like to patrol the National Mall isn't winning him any friends there.
Just curious, does this situation differ from his first time, and if so how?
Yeah, I maintained relationships through the first term by just not talking about politics with certain people. Now I don't want them to even know mundane details about my life because authoritarian governments run on informants and I have absolutely zero faith in the judgment or intentions of anybody who voted that way in 2024.
93: Do you know people who voted for him (1) in 2016 and not in 2020 or 2024 (2) in 2016 and 2020 but not in 2024 because of January 11 or (3) people who voted for him in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024?
I'm just wondering if there's anyone who actually grew. But also the people who voted for him after voting for Biden are just so, well I don't have the words.
The people I know who might fit the profiles of 94 are people I strenuously do not discuss politics with. Mostly people I see because of work or kids, or Jammies' family.
95: Even category 2? Maybe those are the people you should be talking to about politics.
"So, how's your light fascism project coming along?"
97: 1 and 2, What got you to change your mind about Trump?
Maybe those are the people you should be talking to about politics.
I think heebie's point is conversing politics to the point that you get their 12-year presidential voting history is extremely perilous. Good chance they turn out to be straight-Trump - or are offended by the interrogation.
101: I mean, I can't know newbie's situation and probably would be careful at work, for example. But I do think we have to figure out how to change some people's minds if we're ever going to get out of this. And that mostly happens through conversations with people we know. And t would be good to understand the people who escaped the cult better.
I don't hang with any Trump voters who are open about it. Before the election, there was one person at work who told me she was apolitical and didn't care for Harris's mannerisms. I try not to talk to her about anything at all.
People can decide to behave like decent and worthwhile human beings for their own reasons. I don't care how they eventually come around to rationalizing the former vote or the new one, but 2024 was the proving ground and I am finished pretending they are anything other than shitty, degenerate people. I don't want them in my life ever again. [shrug]
102. They feel the same way and they have acted (voted) to encourage us to change our minds. Even among well-informed and reasonable people, an interest in listening to anyone else is pretty unusual, usually selectively applied. There are lots of guides about how to talk to ill-informed or actively Trumpist people, all these guides start with treating them respectfully. How do you respectfully tell someone that they're keeping themselves willfully ignorant, that their nostalgia or religion or whichever is the load bearing part of their worldview is a big part the problem? You can't argue or inform someone out of a position they feel, similarly can'y make people who are too lazy or unreasoning to maintain a minimum baseline of knowledge suddenly develop capacity for perception of events outside their personal experience.
We just had a thread about an insightful column explaining that for many Rs, it's basiclaly an article of faith that it doesn't really matter who is in power-- what is the respectful response? I see none.
Now I don't want them to even know mundane details about my life because authoritarian governments run on informants
There are people in my family with whom I do not communicate for exactly this reason. I am related to some scary fucks, and I am blessed that I was able to persuade them to give up on me.
How do you respectfully tell someone that they're keeping themselves willfully ignorant,
I've had some interesting results starting out with basic epistemology. How do we separate true things from false things? And I listen.
I can't claim to have changed anyone's mind about anything, but I think that cuts to the heart of the problem of Trumpism. What makes RFK Jr. a Trumpist? What makes evangelical Christians Trumpist? A certain view of the methods and utility of determining facts.
104: Which is why I think it would be interesting to talk to the group that figured out that voting for Trump over Hillary was a mistake, felt bad about it and voted for Biden and Harris.
94: I don't know of anyone I'm sure is in any is those categories. My aunt's significant other might be in one of them but I'm not sure. A former college friend of mine probably voted for Trump 3 times, but we haven't been all that close in 20 years and I cut ties with him when he was all "can't we all just get along" about January 6. I probably have some Trump-voting in-laws, but i couldn't pick them out of a lineup.
My bubble, let me show you it.
what is the respectful response?
I don't see one either and, honestly, any respectful response would be wholly insincere. I don't respect them, don't trust them, and don't see any possible future where either of those might change just because they come to regret Trump. I am entirely confident they will just support something worse next.
I figure the best I can do with acquaintances is just demonstrate that I'm a generally reasonable person who is clearly leftwing, and if they want to start a political conversation with me, then I can shift into detached socratic/math teacher mode.
I think where I potentially move the needle is with the local politics blog, because I know I have some conservative readers who don't seem to ever get angry reading my recaps. I think that could vaguely make them less reactionary in conversation (or it's selection bias). For whatever reason, I've gotten basically zero conservative pushback thus far.
111: These are people who have known me as a generally reasonable person who has cheerfully debated politics with them for most of our lives. If Trump is where they ended up in 2024 after the eight years that preceded it, then I'm not wasting another second of my life on them. Those few that aren't lost causes may find their own way out one day, but some fractures aren't reparable. I'm okay with being enemies.
Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them they're full of shit and to shut the hell up.
112: That's different group from what I was thinking about, and that's a totally reasonable perspective to take for your own self oreeervation.
Jesse Helms was a terrible man, and I know you loathed him, but Trump is,a whole different level of disaster.
||
The French fossil fuel giant has said it hopes to re-ignite the $20bn gas project this summer.|>
Everyone is trying to make coal happen again and they are only re-igniting gas. But, locally, it's probably easier to blame losing your job on a distant environmentalist than the guy down the street making dividends on fracking.
We're not doing "phrasing" anymore?
116: didn't they decide to subsidize coal mining in the ugly monstrosity?
120: I think so. Notorious liberal Bill Kristal said there might be an argy,ent that it didn't make sense to subsidize clean energy, but there was no good argument, conservative or otherwise, for subsidizing coal. It was all just tribalism and owning the libs.
1. "Extremely unlikely to be MS" - woohoo!
2. but I still have to get a 3rd MRI to be sure - boo!
3. unless I prefer a lumbar puncture? - no, no thank you, MRI sounds great.
If you get MS, then you have to update to Windows 11 by October.